Thinking of the mutual dependence of vinnana and nama-rupa in some suttas, how about “experience” as a translation of nama-rupa? Everything that one is conscious of.
DN15:20.6: “Suppose there were none of the features, attributes, signs, and details by which the categories of mental or physical phenomena are found. Would either linguistic contact or impingement contact still be found?”
When we recognize an old friend in the street just passing by, there is a moment of contact between various sensory inputs. A blur sharpens into focus. A gait snaps into familiarity. At some point a name floats vaguely onto the tip of the tongue then clicks into place. Without these contacts, there would be no greeting.
These contacts are a cascade of perception, an aggregation of awareness. And perhaps we can agree that the difference between mental and physical is simply the degree of contact. Physical phenomena engage multiple senses. However, mental phenomena are experienced internally and must be manifested physically to others. And so the mental feeling of “my friend” is expressed physically as “hello”.
MN44:14.1: “But ma’am, what is the physical process? What’s the verbal process? What’s the mental process?”
MN44:14.2: “Breathing is a physical process. Placing the mind and keeping it connected are verbal processes. Perception and feeling are mental processes.”
Name is a “handle” for a form. A “name” is a mental place, so “mentality” also works here. A form is materially an aggregate of shareable perceptions over multiple senses. The features that we recognize as our friend comprise the form associated with the friends name. Interestingly, names themselves are forms that can be spoken, heard, etc. And that oddity of endless aggregation (e.g., a sentence is a form of names) is indeed circular–it circulates into consciousness:
DN15:2.17: When asked, ‘Is there a specific condition for consciousness?’ you should answer, ‘There is.’
DN15:2.18: If they say, ‘What is a condition for consciousness?’ you should answer, ‘Name and form are conditions for consciousness.’
We can call this namarupa, name/form or mentality/materialism. We can call it whatever. What is certain is that grasping and clinging to that leads to suffering.
DN15:3.1: So: name and form are conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is a condition for name and form. Name and form are conditions for contact. Contact is a condition for feeling. Feeling is a condition for craving. Craving is a condition for grasping. Grasping is a condition for continued existence. Continued existence is a condition for rebirth. Rebirth is a condition for old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness, and distress to come to be.
DN15:3.2: That is how this entire mass of suffering originates.
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It seems “a friend” is at least a form of “upadana”; some would say a form of “bhava”; some may even argue it is a “category of beings” thus “jati”.
“Contact” with a friend seems to arise after nama-rupa; rather than is nama-rupa.
- “A gait” is a sense contact of an object.
- “Familiarity” is memory of something previously experienced as sense contact.
- “Familiarity” does not seem to cause “sense contact”.
You seem saying there is a “memory bank” of data in nama-rupa leaping out creating contacts it wants to reunite with; similar to flying to Europe or the USA to meet up with old long lost friends.
Yes, without these contacts, there would be no greeting. The greeting & naming arise after the sense contact rather than before it.
Perception arises after contacts; not before them.
DN 15’s narrative of features, attributes, signs, and details by which the categories of physical phenomena are found seems easy to understand.
You mean expressed “verbally” as “hello”. Regardless, the “hello” is occurring after contact and not before contact. The “hello” is not a cause of contact.
OK… (even though this seems to occur after contact).
OK… so you are saying what DN 15 describes as features, attributes, signs, and details by which the categories of mental phenomena are found is what MN 18 describes as “papanca”, which in MN 18 occurs after contact; but which DN 15 says occurs before contact. 
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In the circle of aggregation, “before” and “after” chase each other. So I prefer to avoid linear interpretations in favor of the spiral. I joke to myself that thinking too much “screws us up”. As you have noticed, with this perspective, is indeed an emoji of suffering.
Tangentially: In computer science, this circle of cognition even has names such as “Recurrent Neural Network”, where the “contacts” can be understood as the input/output transition of each layer in the network. One might say that AI automates the five aggregates. And that thought is sobering.
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Greetings, Ven.:
I am in the middle of the Olalde article and loving it! Thank you. But, perhaps because I lack the background, the entire first section on the Saussurean model and then the Ogden and Richards model (especially how it maps onto Buddhist scholars’ interpretations) is completely opaque to me.
Can you put it into layman’s terms? There are aspects of the second half of the article which are predicated on these models, and which I can’t fully appreciate without first understanding the latter. So, if you’re able…
Oh, that makes me feel less stupid, knotty. 
Becuase I didn’t understand that part either! 
But I felt it doesn’t much matter because their conclusion was that this all didn’t apply to the common nāmarūpa in Buddhism, anyway, where it refers to the individual. I also got the strong sense that they were skeptical whether it applied even to Brahmanism, when they say “may I say, actually [nāma doesn’t mean ‘designation’]”.
I understood there to be three ideas presented:
- nāmarūpa means some sort of designation/recognition process (which they explain with these models that we don’t understand)
- nāmarūpa means external objects with intrinsic “names and forms”
- nāmarūpa means the "internal"being with its intrinsic “name and form”
I felt Olalde disregarded the first in general for both Brahmanism and Buddhism, and the second for the common factor of nāmarūpa of Buddhism also. Which leaves us with the third for 99% of instances of the word in the Pali canon.
I may oversimplify it or misunderstant the nuances. Either way, this is my own personal conclusion, whether it was Olalde’s or not. Because it aligns with what I’ve read elsewhere. For example, Olivelle’s introduction to his translations of the Early Upanishads (recommended) touch upon it too, saying: "The essence of a thing [or person] was expressed in its name and its visible appearance (nāmarūpa)”. He doesn’t speak about recognation at all, if I remember correctly. Neither do other scholars of those texts I’ve read, like Keith.
I think Olalde is siding with those more “traditional” interpretations like that of Olivelle (nr 2 & 3) and arguing against the interpretation they say arose in “the last decades” (nr 1).
In the last decades, however, nāmarūpa has attracted the attention of scholars of Buddhism who turn back to the “older” usage in order to elaborate alternative interpretations that aim to grasp the “original” meaning of the Buddhist term. […] They understand “name” as “designation” and neglect the fact that italso (or may I say actually) means “proper name;” in this manner they understand name as “naming” and assume that it always encompasses conceptualisation.
Now, it’s a bit scholarleze, but the quote marks around “original” and the “may I say actually” to me indicate that they don’t think this idea is actually more original and correct.
It also should be noted that the Buddha did not fully adopt the cultural concept of nāmarūpa. People thought their names were part of their selves, but the Buddha didn’t agree with that idea of course. Still, he used nāmarūpa pragmatically in most his teachings on dependent origination, where it refers to the being. This much is quite clear from passages where nāmarūpa is conceived in the womb. But at times he also criticized the idea that the name is a part of the self. Partly this is reflected in him redefining nāma to be feelings, perception, contact, and so forth. That is, he’s saying it’s not really what people thought it to be. Part of this is perhaps also the cryptic passage on nāmakāya and “designation contact” in DN15.
But some people have gone too far with these critiques of ideas of nāma, imo, and fall into this “designation” idea. (Like in the other thread where we met.) Others, like the Abhidhamma, miss the cultural idea entirely and partly therefore redifined nāma to be the four non-consciousness aggregates.
So you see, there’s multiple layers culturally and historically, and that makes nāmarūpa such a tricky term, and why it is difficult to translate. For example, if you translate “mind and body”, like some do, then it is pretty self-explanatory for the standard way it is used in Dependent Arising, but then you totally miss out on the critique of the concept of one’s name being part of one’s self.
So translators choose what to highlight. Or, out of desperation resort to literalism. 
And then there’s more tangentially connected ideas with speech and the divine power of sounds in Brahmanism. This is not my area of knowledge to explain. Olivelle I mentioned earlier is a good read. Not too much details, explains the gist.
Most important conclusion for Dependent Arisng, though, is Olalde’s note that it refers to the being with its name and body (or shape).
That is how I understand it. Let me know if you interpret the paper differently.
PS. Let’s not get started on rūpa 
Because that also has various nuances. If you imagine a color, for example, it is also called a rūpa, even if it exists only in the mind. This all has to do with the concept of material being different back then too, not being limited to atoms which were only discovered recently, in the scope of time. (Which, of course, also is challenged by more modern science.)
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Sorry, Ven., not going to let you get away with that: now we absolutely have to get into rūpa!
But, first…
Okay, I think I’m wrapping my head around this–to some extent. Neither of the two meanings of nāmarūpa we’ve been discussing are actually very difficult to grasp, it’s the middle, the overlap, how it can be that they overlap: that’s where the good stuff is. I think that’s why I’m so stuck on finding a translation that captures both meanings (and what I love about untranslated compounds).
But the real reason I was asking about the models (primarily, the triangular ones) was because I was wondering if we might find a way to squeeze the viññāṇa from DN 15 in there along with nāma and rūpa. It seems that Olalde wouldn’t, since she seems to reject the idea that nāma and rūpa have any place at all in that scheme, in any configuration. But, first, I have to finish reading the article (and re-reading that section). Maybe I’ll look up the original sources of the schemes and see if they offer up any more clarity.
Now, regarding rūpa, should I begin with some questions? or would you like to just go ahead and kick things off?
I finished the article, and I’m a little clearer now on what the author was saying in the beginning .
She sort of reversed her stance (in limited contexts), but didn’t fully explain why. Whereas she denies at the outset (by way of those triangles which I’m still not grasping) that the Saussurean concept of sign is at all compatible with the Buddhist nāmarūpa, and spends the bulk of the article citing Vedic texts which demonstrate that it doesn’t fit there either, she says in the penultimate paragraph that it can applied only to cases where “we are interested on [sic] processes of conceptualisation that take place in the subject[.]” But I don’t remember her giving any examples (Buddhist or Vedic) of it being used to describe subjectivity: everything was about the object, or relating to essential core principles of the individual.
But I’m wondering about DN 15: that’s certainly subjective.
Greetings knotty!
Yeah, the author does not dive into much detail, but you’re right.
First, the Saussurean concept of signs is essential to understanding what this paper is about, what it is for, and the scope and subsequent limitations of the study itself. If someone skips over all of that and then tries to decide what the conclusion is, they simply have not comprehended what the paper is trying to examine (very briefly at that), because it is specifically trying to see how that linguistic concept relates to particular understandings of nāmarūpa.
The passage in DN 15 covers the subjective aspect of conceptualization and signifying rūpa, literally called “designation contact” (adhivacana samphassa; I’m not sure why this word ‘designation’ is being dismissed at times? It’s mentioned in the sutta and throughout the canon). An object, such as phone for instance, is made known via a series of perceptions, feelings, its intentionality, the attention to a particular aspect of contact with it, etc. I cannot “see” pure matter, I must perceive a percetion and feel feelings in regards to it. But likewise, those perceptions, feelings, intentions, etc. correspond to particular rūpa—they are inseparable.
The paper also discusses how nāma did not mean ‘mind,’ and if anything rūpa had been used to mean that in one particular case. Nāma is, however, closely related with the aspect of a person that one recognizes. This could be a plain formal name, or carry more mystical connotations as some Upanisads used it. It was connected to ‘speech,’ though, as the author points out, rather than mind. Here again the term “adhivacana” comes up, using a verbal metaphor to refer to the perceptions and characteristics of objects (rūpa). The Buddha says that perception (a nāma factor, has language as its goal and purpose, to say we perceive X or Y and communicate; he also uses the verb sañjānāti to refer to perceiving linguistic objects and dialectal differences). [I can come back later and edit these sutta references in when I have more time]
The author is trying to make a distinction between nāmarūpa in the linguistic context and nāmarūpa elsewhere in order to evaluate how certainly one can say nāmarūpa is exclusive to the linguistic context, not to say that it is not relevant to that context. The point, to me, is to say that people cannot claim that nāmarūpa originally only meant “things designated,” but rather that that is one usage of the word that is relevant to early Buddhism, but that may oversimplify its historical usage as a Brahminical concept.
The connection between a being and its personal name is also relevant to the history of the term—both usages appear. And thus the author distinguishes between these two usages of nāma for the sake of clarity. I personally think the Buddha found a way to unite the two usages into one, as we see in DN 15 where nāmarūpa refers to the being that is conscious, but also refers to the objects that one makes contact with. As I wrote in my posts, based on some other suttas and the Brahminical goals of being freed from the entire world of nāmarūpa including one’s individual form/identity as well as the phenomenal world of distinguished objects, it seems to me that the Buddha was using that broad sense of the word where every person and every thing has its rūpa as well as nāma aspects (minus potentially formless realms which have only nāma aspects).
One of the main goals the author is trying to accomplish here is, again, relating nāmarūpa to the idea of internal conceptualization of objects, or the relationship between sign, signifier, and referent. Here, she goes on to demonstrate that the world of nāmarūpa in the Upanisads refers to all the differentiated things in that phenomenal world (including the people). It seems some authors take nāma to be a more active force whereby it was related to naming and creating concepts, and thus they connect that to the internal conceptualization about things. But what the author points out is that things in the phenomenal world already come with their nāma and rūpa, it’s not necessarily an active force of the creator or referent.
When we see an apple, that already has a color (saññā), evokes a feeling (vedanā), has particular intentionality / purpose (cetanā), and so forth. We do not create these things. And it seems the world of nāmarūpa in the Upanisads is talking about that: an apple is a nāmarūpa, for instance. This fits well into the Buddha’s usage of it imo. While I think he also talked about the conceptualization part, that’s where he would frequently connect papañca to nāmarūpa, as we thoroughly discussed in the other thread.
The Buddha did not equate papañca to nāmarūpa. Rather, nāmarūpa was said to be the source of vitakka and papañca. So the nāma of an apple (in Buddhist terms, how we recognize, designate, perceive, etc. it) is already a given. But how we conceptualize and proliferate that into more things to turn it into my apple, to make it something to crave after, etc etc. is all papañca and secondary. Just as the other concludes:
This all fits perfectly well into the Buddhist understanding of nāmarūpa both as the being and as the objects around that being. That is, all things in the differentiated phenomenal world that are used to create papañcasaññāsankhā and which the world holds dear, returning again and again.
The other way this creationist model of nāmarūpa connects to the Buddhist one in paticcasamuppāda is that, as several scholars have pointed out, the Buddha’s 12 links seem to have a bit of symmetry to certain Brahmanical and Vedic creation stories. I think it’s much more likely, personally, that it would relate to these Upanisadic ones than older Vedic ones, because those were the types of views that were prevalent among ascetics and whatnot in the time of the Buddha and to which he tended to react.
I agree that the DN 15 section is subjective. The Buddha’s teaching is phenomenological — it’s concerned with our personal conscious experience within the senses, not of ontological or metaphysical claims about the creation of the world. In a way, it’s a parody, because DO is equated with the arising of the world, but he defines the world phenomenologically. Our experience of nāmarūpa is subjective, both internally and externally, and his mention of designation-contact and resistance-contact show that interrelation I think.
Just some ideas regarding the topic. 
The paper is not an informed overview of what nāmarūpa means in Buddhism. It is an observation of the connection between this term and certain specific conceptualizations of it from certain scholars based on the Saussurean sign model. It does certainly cover ideas from the Pāli canon, but it’s much more interested in the original Brahminic precedents for making such comparisons, which it sees both for.
Let me know your thoughts! Be well!
Much mettā
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Hello helllo again
The gist is in what I said before. As for nāmarūpa, rūpa mainly refers to the physical body. This is also the most relevant meaning in the aggregate of rūpa, though not the only one, it depends a bit on context. The wider meaning of rūpa is ‘appearance’, and appearances can be things that are not material. This is why the “object” of the sense of sight (or “the eye”) is also called rūpa. Here it can be merely a color or something, not a body or even physical object. And the rūpadhātu (form realm) is not what we would call ‘physical’ either. Included in ‘appearances’ are also things that appear not to the eye but to the mind, as is rūpa in the jhāna meditations. This is why the non-returner is said to no longer have sensual desires (i.e. attachment to the body) but still has the fetter of “desire for form”, which is desire for the jhāna experiences.
I will refrain from further details for now, for two reasons:
- Together with Ajahn Brahmali I will give a class on samādhi later this year where the term rūpa will be discussed. I’ll wait for further discussion with Ajahn and also some more sutta study I hope to do at some point. I mean, it won’t make any pragmatic difference to samādhi or totally flip my understanding, but I might find some better ways to explain it than I have atm. Therefore, even the above summary is subject to revision!
- I’ve done too much typing here lately
So let’s keep our focus on nāmarūpa rather than rūpa in isolation.
You quoted Olalde:
we are interested on [sic] processes of conceptualisation that take place in the subject
Well, to me “if we are interested”, seems to be a polite way of saying, “people can interpret it this way if they want, but I don’t”. I may be biased to read it this way. But sometimes scholars write in this noncommittal, nondivisive way and you have to read between the lines a bit.
Of course, Buddhism is all concerned about what is subjective. Dependent Arising is subjectively understood and experienced. But becuase the passage as a whole refers to subjective experience, doesn’t mean the term nāmarūpa itself can not refer to the being “having” the experience.
In DN15 the passage mentions “designation-contact” and “impingement-contact”, but the terms nāma and rūpa themselves still don’t mean these things. They are not equated, is what I’m saying. It just says, if there is the nāmakāya and there is the rūpakāya then you have these contacts. I understand it to mean, if there is the being with its immaterial aspects (nāma, or litterally the name) and body (rūpa), then there are recognition of things, and (bodily) feelings. This is how Venerable Bodhi explains it in his introduction to the translation of this sutta, saying, “it is clear that they [nāmakāya and rūpakāya] are intended in the narrower sense, as two sides of the sentient organism” (‘narrower sense’ meaning “internal” nāmarūpa in the being, not that of external objects). Venerable Bodhi’s explanation is a bit technical in language, but it is quite good reading. He’s obviously thought about it a lot.
Still, even Venerable calls the terms “designation-” and “impingement-contact” ‘peculiar’. The passage is also dense, very unique, is never explained further, and does not directly relate to any other passage that is longer then perhaps a phrase or two. The commentary is also relatively quiet, according to Bodhi. The whole direct dependency of contact on nāmarūpa is virtually unique to this passage as well. So it clearly wasn’t a very central idea to Dependent Arising, which is why for my practice I don’t worry too much about it. Pragmatically its all encapsulated in the normal six sense–contact–feeling links already, which is explained elsewhere in detail various times. But the unique and non-explanatory nature of the passage goes a long way to explaining why various interpretations have arisen over time.
Either way, Bodhi’s explanation fits the ordinary use of nāmarūpa in Dependent Arising, and surely that is the way it should be, because apart from the unique dependency of contact on nāmarūpa, the rest of the Dependent Arising chain is still quite normal and connected. In other words, the nāmarūpa in the womb is not something differerent from nāmarūpa in this designation passage.
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Hi Bhante,
Will the upcoming class on samadhi be accessible via Zoom, (for those of us on far off continents 
)?
No, I don’t think so. But it’ll be streamed on the BSWA’s youtube for sure.
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Sorry for the delay in response @Vaddha : there is a lot to digest here.
You discuss only half of the dynamic here. What really drives me in this sutta is the mutual conditioning (referred to only implicitly) of nāma and rūpa by way of the two types of phassa which occurs simultaneously alongside the (expressly stated) mutual conditioning of nāmarūpa and viññāṇa. And that’s what I wanted to squeeze, if possible, into one of those triangles.
At risk of being overly cautious, let me say that I am not one of those who sees uniformity in the suttapiṭaka, and so I am not so ready to adopt the standard definition of nāma (perceptions, feelings, intentionality, etc.) as the content of mentation which is only vaguely alluded to in DN 15. DN 15 is an outlier text on enough different topics that I can’t assume that’s what the author’s/authors’ vision was.
All very good points! [And coming back with sutta references would be much appreciated!] As well, in the very same DN 15, the connections drawn between the mutual conditioning of nāmarūpa and viññāṇa and the capacity for naming, verbal designation, and “wisdom” (which I take in this context as a catch-phrase for cognition, epistemic knowledge, and so on).
Yes, but, aahhh!, what a very philosophically rich (albeit rare) usage.
I know the obvious conclusion to draw from the very last factor analysis–nāmarūpapaccayā viññāṇaṃ–is that it’s just a repetition of the previous factor analysis–viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpaṃ–told in reverse: that is, that it’s pointing to rebirth. I have a theory (which I do not grasp too tightly) that it may be describing the establishment of viññāṇa in nāmarūpa as found in discourses on the four foods–or even in related discourses such as those containing some iteration of the nāmarūpassa avakkanti formula though the discourse may or may be explicitly connected to the four foods. In these contexts, the formulas do not always draw such a clear distinction between the descent of nāmarūpa (or viññāṇa, or the gabbha) as the moment of concept or as the arising of perception. This is fully in-line with the four foods teaching, which I happen to believe is the underpinning of DN 15.
So, then, if I’m understanding you, the cessation of nāmarūpa (or, either one) we read about so often in connection with the cessation of viññāṇa refers to some sort of eradication of the individual (i.e., the meditator), in addition to pointing to the cessation of external forms and their designations?
I haven’t yet checked out the other thread in depth at all, but is this the conclusion you all reached over there? Did you guys give sutta references? Because, off the top of my head, the only source that comes to mind for papañca is saññā (Snp 4.11 Kalahavivāda Sutta). But, in that sutta, if I remember correctly, saññā seemed to be in a mutually conditioning relationship with nāmarūpa, much like viññāṇa in DN 15.
You know, now that I think about, I might have to disagree with this–or at least nuance it. For, although the context is somewhat different (DN 15 describes an ontology, not a cosmogony), DN 15 says precisely that nāmarūpa (working in tandem with viññāṇa) is responsible for the sabba or the loka, as per the Buddhist definitions of those terms, for the individual:
ettāvatā vaṭṭaṃ vattati itthattaṃ paññāpanāya yadidaṃ nāmarūpaṃ saha viññāṇena aññamaññapaccayatā pavattati
I guess that’s probably why,
And, presumably, that’s what you mean when you say,
But I don’t understand why you appear to distinguish adhivacana samphassa and paṭigha samphassa along internal and external lines:
Maybe you could expound?
Thank you. They stimulated some of the deepest thought I’ve had on DN 15 in a while.
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Greetings @knotty36 ! No worris
Just happened to see this haha, looks like you’ve just recently sent it.
This what I was referring to actually!
There is a mutual conditioning of nāma and rūpa on one end (the “tangle without” in SN 1.23) and nāmarūpa and viññāna on the other (the “tangle within” SN 1.23). All nāmarūpa, mutually conditioned by their two respective halves of contact (adhivacana/paṭigha), simultaneously require viññāna in order to be experienced, and viññāna requires nāmarūpa otherwise it couldn’t exist.
You and me both!
I argued quite extensively in the other post about avakkanti that nāmarūpa cannot just be understood as mind-and-body and that it in fact is referring to all “chunks” of nāmarūpa in the phenomenal world, one of which is us. My body is just as much a nāmarūpa as my bed. Viññāna ‘plants’ itself into a ‘piece’ of this world of nāmarūpa in order to inhabit it. I’ll discuss this more in response to another quote of yours.
It actually isn’t that rare! There are many many suttas that use it this way that I’ve linked to in the other post. You might enjoy them.
Yes, I think you have a point and that’s one of the ways I understand it as well. Like I said, consciousness, in order to experience nāmarūpa, needs to ‘plant’ itself into a new chunk of nāmarūpa (a body, for instance) in order to be able to continue at the death of the current body. (Note: I am personifying ‘consciousness’ but it is of course not just a single thing transmigrating).
Because it is ‘attached’ to nāmarūpa as in the entire world of nāmarūpa, it just goes on to continue planting itself in new nāmarūpa according to that attachment. In regards to the nutriment of consciousness, it is said that by fully comprehending it one would comprehend all nāmarūpa. This is of course because by fully comprehending cognizance, one thereby fully comprehends every thing that can be cognized. This is the same with the nutriment of contact where it says one fully understands all feeling. Being attached to the nutriment of consciousness is really being attached to being conscious of things, i.e. nāmarūpa. We of course don’t only cognize our own ‘organism.’
And I’d agree with you that this makes sense as the reading of their mutual conditionality between one another. viññānapaccayā nāmarūpam: Viññāna must plant itself in the world of nāmarūpa in a body / being in order for it to continue and appear; nāmarūpapaccayā viññānam: nāmarūpa must be there for consciousness to stick to and get attached to in the world in order for it to be conscious and in order for it to then plant itself in a new body for more nāmarūpa. If it isn’t attached, there will be no rebirth. In the other post I argue that avakkanti in SN 12.64 is not referring to rebirth because of the ordering of the words and the parallel and some other reasons, but this is not something one can say 100%.
In a sense, because the complete stopping of all viññāna would be the ending of the appearance of any phenomenon whatsoever, i.e. nāmarūpa and whatnot.
What I mean by ‘individuality’ is the diversity of things. So the bed, table, phone, counter, me, the window, etc. These are all different things with their own designated ‘individuality.’ In the time of the Buddha this was seen to be different from the true Brahman or Atman or Pure Consciousness, where everything was non-dual and one (ofc different philosophers had different ideas, but this was a main idea prominent that the Buddha surely knew about and reacted to). So the goal was that everything would unite with this one-ness and the diversity of things and people would stop. But the Buddha of course points out that there is no viññāna without the nāmarūpa: there is no ‘escape’ into oneness and non-dual consciousness; the escape is the cessation of both. Ven. Sāriputta discusses this in SN 12.67 where he says it is like two bundles of reeds leaning up against one another, and if you pull one out, the other falls.
As for the cessation of avijjā, consciousness will no longer be ‘established’ on nāmarūpa or propelled by sankhārās for one to make kamma or for consciousness to be reborn/re-planted. Consciousness simply hangs out until it grows cool, no longer “feeding” the arahant who has gone beyond the 4 nutriments.
I did indeed give lots of references and discussion! Plenty over there 
Ah, I certainly agree that it is responsible for the sabba/loka, but what I mean is that it not an active creator force, in the sense that nāmarūpa is not itself the chopping and splitting up the world into separate objects and people and whatnot, it just is that, and papañca is what is really doing that by means of craving, conceit, and views and whatnot: proliferating and expanding the world of nāmarūpa into reified concepts and identities that hold personal value and people crave or fight over.
What I mean by ‘internal nāmarūpa’ is my own chunk of nāmarūpa that consciousness inhabits, and ‘external nāmarūpa’ I mean the nāmarūpa made available by viññāna but not that it inhabits. This internal/external line is mostly a constructed one related to our sense of self, ofc, but it has some practical usage. The patigha-samphassa and adhivacana-samphassa do not fall into that internal/external distinction because they are simply the features of all nāmarūpa, internal or external. Hope that clarifies things a bit!
Thanks for the discussion! Be well!
Mettā
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Thank you @Vaddha and @knotty36 for some of the best discussion I’ve seen on D&D in years.
Could you elaborate on this?
with metta
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I just want to echo @Adutiya and say that this is a great thread! I have read over it quickly and loved it, now I will have to have some lunch and roll up my sleeves and read over it again slowly and carefully!
Metta!
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@Adutiya and @josephzizys Those are very kind words, but I think it’s more of a testament to the profundity of the subject than anything else. It’s like a bucking bronco at a rodeo; who’s responsible for the show: the man or the horse?
I will say that, precisely because of its depth, DN 15 (and all of its parallels) is my absolute favorite sutta in the world. It’s the first sutta I really ever read in depth more than 12-13 years ago, and any thing I’ve read since is judged against it. Like Mahāyāna sūtras try to be, I feel like it suffices as a complete path in and of itself. It’s inexhaustible, as the Buddha says in the intro. It’s criminal how understudied it is.
@Vaddha was using the standard definition for nāma as a paṭiccasamuppāda link met with in the suttas (vedanā, saññā, cetanā, phassa, manasikāra) as his explanation of the content of the mental half of the two-way exchange (via adhivacanasamphassa and paṭighasamphassa) between nāmakāya and rūpakāya in DN 15. For the record, I would normally agree that that’s what it consists of, but, since we were really going into the nooks and crannies of the sutta, I wanted to remind ourselves that DN 15 itself is silent on the content, and we shouldn’t presume, as the sutta is wholly unique on so many fronts. So, when the mind decodes the forms it has come into contact with, there is a cognitive process, we just can’t be sure that the author(s) of DN 15 believed it to be exactly in-line with that definition. Although, again, in light of their silence, that is probably the very best (if not the only) guess or placeholder available to us.
In other words, I was being unnecessarily nitpicky.
This is really good! I’ve long been into this gāthā (because of its relation to DN 15), but I always took the first stanza as just poetic flowery. But, when you put it like that, it’s so obvious. Thanks!
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To Whom It May Concern:
I’m taking a class right now on modern philosophy of mind–specifically, one on the idea of embodied mind. My teacher recommended to me works of the author Evan Thompson who apparently has a strong Buddhist background as well. (Sorry, I might be overdoing things a bit with all this contextualizing.) One article in particular stuck me: it was on embodiment/own-body perception bifurcated into body-as-subject and body-as-object. @Vaddha This seemed to me closely in-line with much of what you said regarding the DN 15-type of nāmarūpa viz. one’s own body vs. external objects. I’m really new to philosophy and so on, but I was just wondering if anyone out there’s ever forayed at all in this sort of direction.
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I am wondering whether “mental and physical individuation” would work for nāmarūpa.
Joanna Jurewicz has shown that dependent origination (DO) may be based on ideas found in the Vedas, of which nāmarūpa is one. According to Jurewicz, in the Vedic context nāmarūpa refers to the individuation of a person:
In Vedic cosmogony, the act of giving a name and a form marks the final formation of the Creator’s ātman. The idea probably goes back to the jātakarman ceremony, in the course of which the father accepted his son and gave him a name. By accepting the son, he confirmed his own identity with him, by giving him a name he took him out of the unnamed, unshaped chaos and finally created him. … As the father lives in his son, so the ātman undertakes cognition in his named and formed self.
In her discussion of this ātman, Jurewicz makes the case that at its core it concerns vijñāṇa, “consciousness”. In this way she establishes a close relationship between Vedic cosmogony and Buddhist DO. This in turn means that we should expect some relationship in the meaning of nāmarūpa between the two corpuses.
So what, then, does nāmarūpa mean in the above quote? It seems fairly straightforward. Prior to the arising of nāmarūpa, the person didn’t really exist, as there was only an “unnamed, unshaped chaos”. Consciousness seems to be considered as some sort of undifferentiated, primal principle, lacking in any features by which one might describe it. The act of creating the person is then equated with “giving them name and form”, nāmarūpa. Once nāmarūpa is in place, the ātman (that is, consciousness) “undertakes cognition in his named and formed self”. This must mean that the self/consciousness experiences the world through nāmarūpa.
I don’t know. I am leaning heavily on Jurewicz here, and perhaps that is unwise. But if she is right, then the Vedic texts seem to equate the arising of nāmarūpa with the creation of personality, that is, the differentiation of the person from the underlying substrate of consciousness, or whatever it is.
Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit dictionary seems to point in a similar direction. Under the entry nāman we find the following definition: “a characteristic mark or sign”. Characteristic marks or signs are precisely those things that differentiate something from everything else.
Given the parallels between the Vedic texts and the DO, I think we have good reason to interpret nāmarūpa in light of this meaning. And I believe it works well. “Consciousness” on its own – although there is no such thing according to the EBTs – is really just an undifferentiated awareness, devoid of personal characteristics. It is nāmarūpa that differentiates and gives personality to consciousness. Rūpa is the physical aspect or the appearance of a being, whereas nāma is the mental component of individuality, quite literally the name of the person, as recognized through their distinct qualities.
This formation of individuality is obviously particularly important during the process of rebirth. If one moves from one realm to another, one’s personality will be shaped by the new realm. One will bring a number of personal qualities from one’s past existence, but one will also be given a new set of boundaries in one’s new abode. This is one reason why the establishing of consciousness in a new life is such an important part of what the conditionality between nāmarūpa and viññāṇa is about. Hence the three-life understanding of DO.
From a doctrinal point of view this is all very interesting. It establishes that all consciousness is tied up with personality, and that there is no such thing as a truly universal consciousness. This, of course, is precisely the Buddhist critique of the Vedic religion. The only way to get out of our entrapment in our identity is to end consciousness itself. And this is precisely why the Buddhist message is so radical.
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If according to the Nidana Samyutta of SN and its corresponding Chinese SA version, what is the best namarupa translation/explanation?