Difference between vicara and vicāra

[frankk]

regarding AN 6.52
https://suttacentral.net/an6.52/en/sujato

@sujato

The “ordinary life” context occurs as part of a series of questions where the Buddha is asked to define a range of characteristics of different groups of people: what is their ambition, goal, and so on. One of these things is their upavicāra . For several kinds of persons (brahmins, khattiyas, etc.) their upavicāra is wisdom ( paññā ; perhaps “knowledge” would be better here.) For women, it is adornments; for bandits, a hiding place.

Thus the upavicāra is something that is important for that kind of person, something they are “preoccupied” with. Ven Bodhi has “quest” here, but I don’t think that’s quite right. “Quest” implies a final goal, but that is a separate item. For bandits, for example, a hiding place is not really their goal: wealth is. A hiding place is just somewhere to avoid getting caught. Similarly, Critical Pali Dictionary’s “range, scope, approach” don’t really fit well. I had preciously used “exploration”, but on reflection I have adopted Cone’s suggestion of “preoccupation”.

After studying that sutta carefully, I still think your original choice of “explore” works best. “preoccupation” is serviceable, but I think the case of the thief and woman “exploring for” hiding place and adornments, shows the physical aspect of exploring to accomplish that, whereas the other 4 cases were all pañña-upavicara, exploring for wisdom/knowledge/skill in their profession, which ambiguously covers both mental and physical exploration but we can’t be sure.

I’ve been doing an exhaustive search for “vicar” in all the suttas, and since there are only two unique places really that use upa-vicara, AN 6.52 and MN 137, I can’t really see anything that differentiates upa-vicara from anu-vicara mano. See my notes in the next message, “anu-vicara mano” seem to occupy the same kind of doctrinal mental exploration territory as upa-vicara in MN 137.