The great danger or even the fallacy of arguing from “silence” or from a lack of available sources showing the contrary is well known in historiography. The trouble in many cases is that sources supporting the very opposite can turn up at any time. And this is precisely what happened here. […] It was wrong to try to wring too much from the available evidence.
If only more historians learned this “well known danger” from their predecessors!
Thank you! That’s helpful, and raises good points.
The Buddha was from an aristocratic, oligarchical family. He certainly grew up learning about / familiar with the other kingdoms around there, even (maybe especially) if they were distant foreign ones that were not well known to people at the time. And the lack of mention of castes, I agree, does not mean that such things were non-existent or absent/unknown. If anything, it just points to their insignificance in the non-Aryan regions, which we were already aware of. Not jumping to further conclusions because of a lack of mention is a good point.
Oh, I just got an article that mentions gandhabba in relation to implantation and formation of consciousness in my mailbox, from academia.edu. Here it is.
In other words, they were trying to relate gandharva (a type of being) with gandha (smell/fragrance) & possibly vra (metathesis of rva). Monier Williams says for the entry vra - according to to some,“that which is confined”.
Folk etymology (or perhaps idiomatic expression).
It also means that a phonetic metathesis which commonly occurs in gandhari words, specially in consonant clusters (gandhari originals may have been the likely source text for the chinese translators) of gandha-rva as gandha-vra – was thereafter being interpreted as if it was a valid sanskrit word and having the probable meaning “confined in gandha” (what you translate as “fragrant intermediate”)
Ṛtu = season (period of time). The mother (ṛtumatī) is here said to be in the childbearing season i.e. fertile and healthy (kalyā), a time when she can conceive.
Update: Apologies, now reading the thread more fully, it seems these interpretations had already been considered earlier.
Thanks for sharing. Just to note, he comments on gandhabba as “that which travels”, which assumes a false etymology gantabba. By not noticing the fact that this is a Brahmanical teaching adopted by the Buddha, he analyzes the whole thing in terms of later Abhidhamma ideas rather than the meaning of the words known at the time.
