Thanks a lot, venerable @Brahmali, for your generous reply.
At first please let me clarify that I have done a lot of reading on this issue, I mean really a lot. I just don’t go about posting links and making references to favour my position and negate the other view out of existence; that would defeat the very point of debating and having a discussion forum. And so I appreciate that you present your own arguments and understanding rather than argue from authority. However I must say that I find this “culture” of stating that one’s arguments are supported by, or drawn from some “EBT” to be very troubling, and not only because we haven’t the slightest agreement about what is EBT and what is not, but even if we agreed, the fact that something is stated in a certain way in the text is simply not enough to give authority to one interpretation over another, and especially in the case of Pali literature and language. Let me give an example in order to avoid misunderstanding:
Now the very notion that a “specific” meaning exists for “sankhara”, as well as many other key, vital Pali expressions, is itself merely a “belief”, and one which I have contested in a recent paper I wrote on the problems of Pali literature and language. Here is a quote from the paper (forgive me for the length):
For ancient Indian psychology and philosophy of mind (along with the ―expression thereof) -and even if, or particularly if, we exclude from the comparison the cosmological dimensions altogether!- are fundamentally different from those which are rooted in Western scientific traditions and methods. Adding to that the dynamic and complex linguistic situation that had prevailed (and to some extent still does) in that curious part of the world in north India, and which gave birth to Pāli in its final, written form, possibly as a literary language following a diglossic path of historical development, hence also following a manner of language-usage that is also unfamiliar or even discordant with Western writing. The Western educated reader, researcher, or translator, is therefore encountering something that he cannot immediately or readily understand by taking recourse to his own Western education, culture, or even intuitive reasoning; and this being the case on two most important and intimately connected levels: those of the very ideas and their verbal expression. But in his attempt to understand and interpret such ancient Indian ideas and their expression, he ever continues to rely precisely on his own Western education and culture! If he does not abandon his standpoint and truly embrace that which he seeks to understand, at best by experiencing it in its fullest reality, and at least by being able to imagine such reality with a sound intuition – it will be very difficult for him to truly understand it; and not just that, but it is likely that he will fill the gaps (which may be quite giant!) by unfounded presumptions and speculations about those very ideas and their expression. […]
Words like dhamma, dukkha, and sankhāra, to name just a few, carry within and around themselves a whole spectrum, an aura or halo of effective and potential meaning – and though upon hearing any one of them they will evoke in the experienced intuition of an experienced listener a recognition of something specific and exact, depending on the context in which they are uttered – nevertheless, as words in and of themselves they have no such exact and fixed semantic meanings as those we intuit in any of their fixed European equivalents. What the translator has done here, and most probably unconsciously, is to reduce that entire spectrum of meaning, and the existence of which he himself may be unaware, to a single exactly defined and fixed part of it; often resorting in the process to etymological references which may even be semantically-irrelevant. […]
The kind of habit which drives a translator to relate in this way to such hardly definable, but vital Pāli words, comes from the translator‘s culture and education which regard such exactness and precision of speech as a necessary characteristic and requirement of serious knowledge and wisdom, or of science (in the Latin sense of the word) – all of which conditions the translator to not only seek, but excel in seeking, the most exact equivalent in the target language. And more over, they condition him further to presume that the same condition of exactness applies even to the Pāli itself, which prevents him further from being able to envisage the subtleties of these Pāli words, and of how, in their natural cultural context and original tongue, they impress and appeal to the intuition of the listener in a significantly different way than do the same words, or words in general, in the translator‘s own culture and language.
K. R. Norman noted this as well:
We are inclined, in western philology, to believe that there is only one correct answer to a question of etymology. In India, however, there was a custom of seeing more than one meaning in any word or phrase - the so-called śleșa. So, instead of saying the meaning is either this or that, as we would do, commentators very often say that the meaning is this and that.
Furthermore, supposing that any such original specific meaning was intended in the speech of the Buddha, I have argued that investigating its purport should not be a mere conceptual or intellectual exercise, but rather one that is based on progress in the experience and practice of Dhamma. I gave “nibbida” as an example of a word that cannot be really understood simply by reading and analysing the text in general and that word in particular (say through etymological analysis), only practice will reveal to the practitioner its intended meaning. But here, practitioners will still disagree among themselves about what it is!!! Even when the Pali word corresponds to an “experience” that manifests experientially through the consciousness or citta and self-awareness of practitioners, they are still unable to pin it down in words or through verbal descriptions.
If this applies to nibbida, then why not to sankhara?! The later being more of a concept, an abstraction of something real, rather than a lived experience, makes it even harder for us to pin it down. Further, there is ample evidence that, unlike nibbida, sankhara refers to a rather wide [vast I’d say] scope of possible meanings, and where in the one context “kamma” my only possibly seem as a suitable equivalent, in another “things”, or even “stuff” (“made-up stuff” that’s how I often read in the original Pali), seems far more successful in representing the presumed “intended” meaning, which we can reach to only through an effort of interpretation. And why? Because as much as we are lucky to have any Pali texts at all, we are also so unlucky in the manner with which this language was used to record and preserve these vital teachings.
Having generously supplied the original Pali in your reply above, in a short time I found myself unable to ignore the fact that, indeed, our issue is complicated further by looking at the word “kamma” itself; another word which has a vast scope of meaning. Venerable Sir, you regard it as “intentional action”, the Venerable @sujato regards it as “ethical action”, I regard it as “habitual action” (the opposite of “intentional” it seems!), others have argued that it does not refer to any genre of action in particular but only to the variety of “temperaments” out of which all action conditionally emerge, etc. etc. The word had obviously come down to us from Vedic sources (apparently unlike “sankhara”), but is its meaning in a Buddhist context identical to that of the Brahmana?! Why do we act as if this indeed is the case, especially when we know that words like “nibbida” and “āsava”, just to name a few examples, where already in use before the rising of Lord Buddha in the samana culture and pool of vocabulary in the midst of which Buddhism emerged, but were later used in a slightly or significantly different sense in the Buddhist context? Is it because what is believed to be the “EBT” suggests that such and such is indeed the meaning of “kamma” in the intention of Buddha, or are these simply our own comfortable interpretations of it? And whether there was any way to tell!!
This leads us to the question of whether the selection of “choices” negates, or at least downplays the significance of “intentional”, “habitual”, “temperamental”, and other dimensions of behaviour which are not morally (or “ethically”) significant, as if these don’t play a significant role in the renewal of bhava, and as if their cessation is not necessary for the realisation of bhavanirodha, and as if a certain form of ethical action is alone responsible and sufficient for the attainment of salvation or vimutti, and realisation of gnosis or ñāna.
There is a lot that has happened in the translation of sankhara as choices, and we have to acknowledge that:
- A presumption or belief that the Pali “sankhara” does have a single specifically defined meaning,
- that an interpretation of what is believed to be “EBT” or the original speech and teaching of Buddha on “sankhara” makes it identical with “kamma”,
- another presumption or belief that “kamma” has a single specifically defined meaning,
- the meaning of “kamma” has been interpreted in line with Vedic teachings to denoted moral action or “choices”.
This is the rationale behind this translation, and I respect that and will still think about it more, although obviously for now I find (sankhara = “moral agency”) to be quite “reductionist” to such a surprising extent.
Many thanks, venerable Brahmali, for your participation.