If anyone knows why Thanissaro Bhikkhu moved from “fermentations” to “effluents” in his translations of āsava, I’d love to hear from them. And also if anyone has thoughts on the following…
In Pāli, āsava is a verbal abstract from √su/√sru (“to ooze, flow, run”), and the commentaries also use the image of a “fermented/aged brew”. Both elements point to a process that works over time. In Danish, “gæring” (fermentation) is therefore a natural solution, since it preserves the processual, self-reinforcing dimension that MN2 emphasizes with verbs like uppajjati, pavaḍḍhati, and pahīyati.
As I understand it, Thanissaro used “fermentation” for many years (e.g. his translation of MN2), before switching to “effluent”. I haven’t been able to find a stated reason for the change. Does anyone here know the background, or has seen him comment on it somewhere? And would anyone advise against using the term for āsava?
That’s was his old translation (circa 2017). I don’t know if he writes about his translation choices though. Maybe he has came back to it again.
In pre-buddhistic traditions, asavas (or asrava) generally refer to something like taints that seep into the soul and pollute it. Even though “corrupted soul” image can only work poetically with Buddhistic ideas, the gist of it still stands.
It can mean both inflow and outflow. Since there’s no real something to be polluted, I think Bhante has gone with effluents as in, something impure that’s discharged.
Oh, also found his series of talks on Effluents on DhammaTalks:
The third knowledge on the night of the Buddha’s awakening, the knowledge that led to his awakening to nibbana, he called knowledge of the ending of the effluents. Effluents, *asava, *are things that flow out of the mind. They could also be translated as fermentations, things that bubble up in the mind and keep flowing back in a flood into samsara, engaging the mind in the process of wandering on, wandering on.
It’s less about the specific translation choice, but can still be useful to understand his reasoning.
I can’t speak to his reasoning, but the translation “fermentations” is a mistake: Pali āsava represents two distinct words, which are homonyms in Pali but differentiated in Sanskrit. The word here is Sanskrit āsrava (or āśrava), whereas Sanskrit āsava means “intoxicant”, a sense found elsewhere in Pali (pli-tv-bu-vb-pc51:2.1.4).
On the other hand, “effluent” is a genuine sense in Pali, attested as the discharge from a sore at an3.27:2.4. However, as noted by Dogen, the likely sense here is derived from pre-Buddhist (Jain) usage where it refers to the stains or corruptions of the soul.
Thank you both, Bhante Sujato and Dogen, for these clarifications — the āsrava/āsava homonym distinction and the Jain background are genuinely helpful, and I take the philological point seriously. I don’t want to argue against it; my worry is more narrowly about how to render the underlying phenomenon in Danish once the etymology is set aside.
What draws me to “gæring” (fermentation) is not the etymology itself, but the fact that it mirrors the process described by MN2’s own verbs — uppajjati, pavaḍḍhati, pahīyati (arises, increases, is abandoned). These describe a self-contained, self-intensifying process rather than a directional flow, which is what a fermentation vat also is: something that arises, builds up, and can be stopped from within, without needing an external “from where / to where.”
This is partly why “effluent” is difficult for me to use in Danish: it inevitably carries associations of sewage or drainage, and it raises questions (where from, where to?) that MN2’s own phrasing doesn’t seem to answer. I don’t say this to defend “fermentation” as etymologically correct — only to explain why I’m hesitant to adopt “effluent” as its replacement.
If you still think “fermentation”/“gæring” should be abandoned, I would very much welcome suggestions for an image or term that better captures this arising-increasing-abandoned dynamic — something I could responsibly carry into Danish without either the homonym problem or the directional/sewage associations. I’m grateful for your patience with what is probably a well-worn question by now.
Edit: One small addition to the above, in case it’s useful context: part of my hesitation with near-synonymous pairs like “taints” (āsava) and “defilements” (kilesa) in English is that the words themselves don’t signal a distinction — a reader has to already know, from a footnote or glossary, that these are separate technical categories. The terms don’t carry their own boundary.
This is part of why I’m drawn to keeping “gæring” (fermentation) for āsava and a separate word like “urenhed” (impurity/defilement) for kilesa in Danish: the two belong to different image-fields (process vs. state), so the distinction is audible in the words themselves, without requiring the reader to hold external notes in mind. Not an argument against your philological point, just an additional practical consideration on the target-language side.
I may be wrong but is this not an essential condition for the asavas? As I understand it, Contact with samsara via the senses (inflow) is a necessary condition for the arising of asavas which then cause cascading processual errors in the mind, eventually flowing out again towards samsara as volitional acts (DN 15).
The term ‘fermentation’, IMO is also correct in that it points to the cyclic nature of proliferation within the mind by which the asavas, once generated increase the vexation within the mind.
MN 18
Venerables, dependent on the existence of an eye and a visible object.. an ear and a sound… a nose and a fragrance… a tongue and a taste… a body and a tangible object… a mind and a mental object, eye-consciousness..mind-consciousness arises. The combination of the three is sense-contact. Because of sense-contact, there is feeling. What one feels, one identifies;2 what one identifies, one thinks about; what one thinks about, one proliferates about; what one proliferates about, with that as its source, identification and conceptualization based on proliferation beset a man in regard to visible objects cognizable by the eye…mental objects cognizable by the mind in the past, present, and future.
A good question to ask in this regard might be "If there was utterly no contact whatsoever, with any kind of object of the six senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, mental feeling/perception/thought) - could an asava arise?
Thank you, faujidoc1 — that’s a helpful expansion, and I think you’re right that there’s a genuine inflow/outflow structure elsewhere in the canon (MN 18’s proliferation sequence, DN 15’s chain). I don’t want to dispute that pattern.
What I’m less sure about is whether that inflow/outflow structure is what MN 2 itself is describing, as opposed to a different, later stage of the same broader process. MN 2’s own condition for the arising and increase of āsava is ayoniso manasikāra — inappropriate attention — not sense-contact as such. So the sutta seems to locate the immediate cause in how one attends to whatever has already arisen in the mind, rather than in contact with sense-objects per se.
Would it be fair to say, then, that sense-contact (as in MN 18) is a necessary background condition for there to be anything to attend to at all, while MN 2 is describing a further, self-contained process — arising, increasing, abandoning — that takes place once something is already present to be attended to (skillfully or not)? If so, “fermentation” (or in Danish, “gæring”) might still capture that second, more localized process quite well, even if it doesn’t capture the wider inflow/outflow architecture you’re describing from MN 18 and DN 15.
Genuinely curious whether that distinction holds up, or whether I’m drawing a line that the texts themselves don’t support.
Yes. IMO, the focus of MN 2 is to understand the process by which asavas increase or decrease and what should be the skilful steps to be taken in this regard.
Even in MN 2, the mind has to be applied irrationally towards external things for the asava to be generated. So directionality is implied here too.
Thank you, faujidoc1 — that refinement makes sense, and I think we’re largely in agreement on how MN 2 itself frames the process.
This does leave me with a broader methodological question, though, which I’d be curious whether Bhante Sujato (or others) has views on: when a term’s etymology turns out to be uncertain or contested (as with āsava/āsrava), how much latitude does a translator have to choose a target-language image that preserves the functional point of the teaching — here, the arising/increasing/abandoning dynamic — even if that image doesn’t map cleanly onto the philologically correct root? Is there a principled way to weigh “gets the etymology right” against “gets the Buddha’s point across clearly,” or does one always have to yield to the other?
I ask as a translator working into a language (Danish) with no existing tradition of EBT translation to lean on, where I don’t have the luxury of an established convention to fall back on either way.
From a reader’s point of view, this is why I love translators who offer footnotes or as in Ven Sujato’s case, essays about the thought and care that went into choosing a particular word to translate the pali.
For a casual reader, a single word that conveys the majority of the meaning is sufficient. The needs of the serious enquirer are well addressed by offering a detailed explanation in the footnote.
@UpasakaKaruna thank you for undertaking this large project! May your wholesome efforts benefit many Danish people.
It’s not clear to me how the etymology is set aside.
Even the Jain reference in the Mahārāṣṭri Prakit is āsrava which P.S. Jaini translates literally as “influx” (see The Jaina Path of Purification).
Môhan Wijayaratna translates it as “écoulements toxiques” in French – another nod to its etymology.
The translator may decide to soften, through abstraction, the graphic or pictorial nature of something that would otherwise shock or even traumatize an unaware reader. However IMO this is not cause for wholly disregarding the etymology.
Thank you, BethL, and apologies for the imprecise phrasing — you’re right to push on that. I didn’t mean that the etymology is uncertain (it isn’t, and your references to Jaini and Wijayaratna are helpful confirmations of the āsrava/flow root). What I meant was narrower: that the etymology alone might not dictate which image a translator should reach for in the target language, partly because the direction of the flow (in/out) is itself unresolved, and partly because MN 2’s own process verbs (arising/increasing/abandoning) describe something not fully captured by a flow-image either.
I take your point seriously, though, that softening a vivid or unpleasant image for the reader’s comfort is a different kind of decision than setting the etymology aside as if it were unclear or irrelevant — and I don’t want to claim more license than that distinction allows. I’ll think about how to phrase this more carefully going forward. Thank you for the French reference as well; I wouldn’t have come across “écoulements toxiques” otherwise.
