When I started translating the Khaggavisāṇasutta (see recent post) I vowed to not spend time working out exactly what khaggavisāṇa meant. “Just accept whatever Bhikkhu Bodhi concluded. It’s not worth time to get into it all.” Alas, here we are.
So I’m not going to recap all the arguments, but basically the term could mean either “the horn of a rhinoceros” or “that which has a sword for a horn (i.e. a rhinocerous)”. The English word, as it happens, is similar, having the etymology “that with a horn on its nose”.
Ven Bodhi and Norman accept “the horn of a rhino”. And I have too, but never with 100% confidence. It is odd to me that the exactly parallel lines says “wander alone like an elephant”. It just feels … unsatisfactory.
So I did some background research, and I turned up something interesting. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) It seems that the habits of the adult male Indian rhino are similar to that of the elephant. That is, he will sometimes hang with the herd, but is often found alone. Now, the Pali for the elephant version makes it clear it refers to a bull: eko care mātaṅgaraññeva nāgo. (Mātaṅga incidentally is a rare dialectical form for elephant.) So we should translate, “wander alone like an tusker”.
So I wonder is there is something to the maleness of this image. The whole idea is quite blokey: just leave everyone behind and go off. Now, in English we refer to a bull elephant as a “tusker” because of the prominent tusks, even though females have tusks too.
Could it be that khaggavisāṇa means “a tusker rhino”, i.e. a bull rhino? It seems poetically better. It is the rhino that wanders, not the horn; and it chimes better with the masculine imagery of the tusker, and of the Khaggavisāṇasutta as a whole.
I wondered whether female Indian rhinos have tusks. And it turned out that the females do in fact enjoy quite a nice tusk.
Looking good!
But if we can’t really distinguish male from female rhinos by their tusk, it would seem my theory dies there.
Months went by.
And then! I discovered that in the past there was a second species of rhino in India. It was in the 1920s that the last living Indian Java Rhino died. This was a subspecies of the critically-endangered Javan rhino.
And it says it right there:
Only adult bulls have horns; cows lack them altogether.
Does this mean I was right? Well, it’s not so simple. From what I can gather, the historical range of the Javan Rhino was always limited to the east. That means that it is very likely that the rhino known to the Buddha was the standard Indian Rhino.
I am left with questions.