How much negative karma have I accrued?

I did something terrible to a wonderful work.

Neither stopping, nor starting, nor ending.
Neither endless, nor single, nor many.
I salute he who taught, the Buddha Full-wrought,
of dependent origination.

No thing is it’s own condition.
Conditioned by other? It isn’t.
Neither in combination nor eschewing causation
No thing has ever arisen.

How many Hail Maya’s do I need to say?

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That depends on your intentions. What’s the source? :smile:

Hi Coemgenu

:grin: :joy: :laughing:

So I know you’re kidding around here… :wink: And I applaud your humour :clap:t6: :clap:t6: :clap:t6: and also thank you for it. :sunglasses: And I’m also taking my hat off to your translation because I wouldn’t really know where to even begin with such an endeavour!

But I hope you don’t mind if I take your translation, and your question, as inspiration. I would like to link to another topic here and attempt to answer your question as if it were serious! You have got me reflecting on something that I normally process implicitly and I want to give you credit for being the one to stimulate a more explicit verbal response! Also, I think, even though you have asked in jest, this is a question asked by many and so perhaps it might be nice to try to share my current answer to it. :slight_smile:

With many thanks and much metta :heartpulse:

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It’s just a limerick! :sweat_smile: But thank you!

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Mūlamadhyamakakārikā Opening

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Lol! Is it not from a Sutta then? :slight_smile:

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Oh lol again…nevermind that question…just saw your response to Mat!

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anirodham anutpādam anucchedam aśāśvatam
anekārtham anānārtham anāgamam anirgamam
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaṃ prapañcopaśamaṃ śivam
deśayāmāsa saṃbuddhas taṃ vande vadatāṃ varam
[link]

I think it is fine- I’m not well versed in sanskrit but my Sinhalese and Pali helps with this. I can’t see the initial verse which meant ‘Conditioned by other? It isn’t. Could you point it to me, if not was it just you being original? :slight_smile:

with metta

There are TONS of issues with the OP translation. It is, after all, a limerick, more intended to be funny by virtue of it being the MMK in a limerick (my spouse insists that limericks in-and-of-themselves are not innately funny, but I defer!) than to be a serious effort to render the MMK in that metre.

For instance, the ending of the first quatrain should have been something more like

The goodly, I laud, the D.O. he taught,
for the ending of reification.

if it were to follow the original more closely.

Similarly, it is missing the “neither coming nor going” from the beginning.

All in all, the OP is an adaption of

anirodham anutpādam anucchedam aśāśvatam |
anekārtham anānārtham anāgamam anirgamam ||
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaṃ prapañcopaśamaṃ śivam |
deśayāmāsa saṃbuddhas taṃ vande vadatāṃ varam ||
na svato nāpi parato na dvābhyāṃ nāpy ahetutaḥ |
utpannā jātu vidyante bhāvāḥ kva cana ke cana ||

“Conditioned by other? It isn’t” is an idiosyncratic rendering of the Sanskrit “napi parato”, which I think means more properly: “nor from another”.

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No, but, I think that I am not ill-informed to say that the text, in its original form, rather than my limerick-rendering, has something of a good reputation with the EBT crowd? Ven Huifeng published an article concerning Early Buddhism and the coterminous linkage of dependent origination with emptiness (something usually considered “only” a Mahāyāna notion). I am going to made a post asking questions about the paper in a bit.

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10,000 strokes of the cat!

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“Conditioned by other? It isn’t,

…sounded a lot like self-existent, in other words!
lol!

Can’t comment on your poetic rendering- my Sinhalese poetry is horrendous, not to mention Pali or Sanskrit!

with metta

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