SuttaCentral
I have come across the three most recent articles by @jayarava on the topic of the grasping aggregates - link here
I am impressed to see he argues for the Khajjanīyasutta (SN22.79) not being a reliable resource for understanding of these things.
Does anyone have a bit more info about what would make this EBT not a good reference for studying and understanding the five grasping aggregates?
Wow, there’s a lot going on here.
This sutta is squarely within the system of the EBTs. Every section of the sutta has parallels in other discourses, so the general claim that this is a one-off, weird sutta is simply wrong.
Some of his contention with the other scholars is correct, in that Early Buddhism is more concerned with phenomenological than noumenal philosophy and so, while a bit overblown, he is correct to nitpick e.g. the use of the word “existence” here, which they are (erroneously) reading in to the Pāli.
I’m also sympathetic to his digression about the colors. The past is a strange place and we know that the ancient ideas about e.g. colors were different than ours. But he doesn’t provide an alternative reading, and I’m extremely sceptical of his contention that “conceptualisation is transparent to the person and would not have been obvious to early Buddhists.” The very same early Buddhists that were routinely attaining high jhanas? They would be less aware of the workings of their subconscious mind than us “enlightened” moderns?! Yeah. Right. 
SN22.79 corresponds very well with SA46 also. So attested in multiple transmissions.
Somewhat related, an interesting talk by David Graeber and David Wengrow called "The Myth of the Stupid Savage: Rousseau’s Ghost and the Future of Political Anthropology. "
They basically challenge the idea that ancient peoples were politically naive, and the idea of a linear progression from simple to complex political systems over time (hunter gatherer → agricultural societies → modern states).
I think the same principle applies to psychology / philosophy of the mind regarding the EBTs.
E.g. in my PhD research I am above averagely interested in what is called causal inference, and my opinion is that the EBTs treatment of causality is higher in quality than much of the published research I read.
The four noble truths is a much stronger theory in scientific terms than say the big five personality traits.
Edit: My point being that I don’t see any evidence of the EBTs lacking sophistication.
The basic structure is the same, though a couple definitions of the skandhas differ. Form is defined as being obstructive and divisible, and the definition of perception doesn’t involve colors but rather numbers and extent (few, many, measureless, nothingness). When I read it, I see some Abhidharma influences taking place, especially with the standard Sarvâstivāda definition of form as “obstructive” (i.e., occupying space) and divisible. Overall, I’d say it lends a bit of support to his argument about colors leading modern people to different interpretations. Recognizing things as few or many is more abstract than the direct perception of colors.
So maybe it is the case that SN22.79 is then a quasi-abhidhamma text, not necessarily pure buddha-vacana?
And hence relying on it to form one’s understanding of the five aggregates would be biased, partial?
True, the specific definitions are slightly different for perception.
In the whole sweep of SN vs. SA comparison, this is I think one of the more closely parallel sutta / sutra. In terms of definitions for example, this SN22.79/SA46 is quite a bit closer than say SN12.2/SA298 on the definitions of different terms of dependent origination.
For the five aggregates, I think the most authoritative analysis is probably SN 22.57/SA42, though as with most “analysis” suttas, it does give a feeling of abhidhamma.
I think the treatment of causality is still a weak point in modern philosophy - they probably can learn much from the Indian traditional, as Karl Potter has argued more than half a century ago.
I think it’s an alternative point of view that’s been preserved, and it’s probably pretty old, originally. As @pamirs points out, SA 46 is very close to the Pali, with just a few key definition words that are different. So, I’d read it with the other sutras that define the five skandhas and see how it looks letting them overlap. It seems like early Buddhists tried to not get stuck with just one definition of things to avoid too much dogmatism. At least, that’s how it feels to me when I read at these types of alternative definitions.
To me, causality seems so ingrained into our cognition that there’s no viewpoint from outside causality from which it can be explained. Pearl’s argument that we basically get causality from imagination makes sense to me; we just have the capability of imagining how things could have been different.
Like, if I miss the bus to work, I am just able to imagine that if I had not missed the bus, I would probably have been on time today.
This just seems like such a basic notion to me, I’m inclined to just accept it as a primitive of human reasoning.
It’s a great book! Totally changed my perception of people “from the past”. They actually thought about stuff and were just as capable of critical thought as we are! They had ideas about how society should be, revolutions, failed and successful social experiments, etc. 
To be fair @Khemarato.bhikkhu does in fact elaborate with:
@Jayarava in the blog post eventually gives;
“We seem to come back to recognition as the principle idea associated with the word”
In favour of “perception”, which is my prefered translation too,
But this seems to me to spend an awful lot of verbage to choose one synonym over another.
c. 1300, perceiven, “become aware of, gain knowledge of,” especially “to come to know by direct experience,” via Anglo-French parceif, Old North French *perceivre (Old French perçoivre) “perceive, notice, see; recognize, understand,” from Latin percipere “obtain, gather, seize entirely, take possession of,” also, figuratively, “to grasp with the mind, learn, comprehend,” literally “to take entirely,” from per “thoroughly”
What exactly is the distinction being made from;
early 15c., recognisen, “resume possession of land,” a back-formation from recognizance, or else from Old French reconoiss-, present-participle stem of reconoistre “to know again, identify, recognize,” from Latin recognoscere “acknowledge, recall to mind, know again; examine; certify,” from re- “again”
Percieving something and recognising something are more or less synonyms in plain english, and distinctions between the terms shade of either into special sciences like psychology or pedantic nonsense that seems to me to be very unlikely to bear much on the EBT context.
I think @Jayarava is a wonderful scholar of Buddhism but I am really not at all clear what all this amounts to, maybe i just don’t perceive/recognise/see/grok the issue.
I think there is no good reason to think this sutta is not authentic. But to interpret it properly, it is good to keep in mind that, as @cdpatton pointed out, “early Buddhists tried to not get stuck with just one definition of things to avoid too much dogmatism.” In other words, don’t read this passage as strict definitions. Let me explain.
(Sorry, @Jayarava, for talking about you in the third person below. It felt easier to phrase things this way, being a response to external essays, not posts on this forum. I hope you don’t mind. Also, I hope you can take some criticism. 
)
While the word rūpa in its most general usage does not refer just to the body, it does certainly include it. Rūpa is detailed as the four elements, and in MN28 the internal four elements are exactly the parts of the body: “head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone-marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, …”, “bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, …” and so forth. When the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN22.79) says rūpa is ‘harmed’ or ‘hurt’ (ruppati) by cold, heat, hunger, thirst, and so forth, surely it refers to these “internal elements”. So in this text rūpa does refer to the body. (Though Jayarava is right that this doesn’t mean that rūpa therefore always means the body.)
Rūpa and ruppati are not etymologically related, but this isn’t problematic, because there is clearly a pun here, as Venerable Bodhi notes. This does not make the sutta inauthentic or otherwise untrustworthy. It just means we shouldn’t take this as a literal definition. That’s not something unique: word plays are all over the canon. As Jayarava acknowledges, Buddhism isn’t metaphysics, and this means the Buddha wasn’t that concerned about giving exact definitions. His first and foremost desire was to teach things that are practical, and sometimes he did so by being very non-literal. I would suggest that when he says rūpa gets hurt (ruppati), he is primarily reminding us of the suffering of the body.
I think the explanations of some of the other khandhas in the Khajjanīya Sutta are also not meant as literal definitions, including vedanā and particularly saṅkhāra, which elsewhere is more standardly defined as cetana ‘intention’ (SN22.56). The questions such as “why do you call it form?” are not how definitions are phrased elsewhere, suggesting that something different is going on here. The questions seem aimed more towards answering “why do we use this word?” rather than “what does this word exactly mean?”
Jayarava, expecting literalism, demands that in order for the “definition” of rūpa to make sense it must use a denominative verb rūpayati/rūpeti instead of ruppati, but at the same time he also acknowledges that such a verb doesn’t occur in the Nikāyas. It is very plausible there simply was no such verb in use at the Buddha’s time, which would explain why he chose to creatively use ruppati instead. You can’t expect someone to use a verb if that verb didn’t exist in the ordinary language. That would be akin to demanding someone to use the word ‘wood’ or ‘money’ as a verb.
So all in all it is a very weak basis for questioning this sutta, which @Khemarato.bhikkhu already pointed out contains no significant other indications of being inauthentic. I feel the puns actually make this sutta more likely to be authentic (or this section at least) because later additions trend towards systematic standardization and classification, not creative use of words such as this. That ruppati also isn’t simply a scribal mistake for rupeti is clear from the way the sutta explains it. “Rūpa is harmed by hunger/mosquitos” makes no sense if read as “rūpa ‘appears’ by hunger/mosquitos”. Yet the essay basically suggests the latter reading and blames others for misreading.
The word rūpa indeed has lots of connotations, one of which is indeed ‘appearance’. Shapes or colors you see with the eyes come under rūpa, for example. It also includes appearances which are perceived with the mind. MN28 for instance says that mind-contact can lead to rūpa, and DN33 says that there is rūpa that is visible and “resistant” (i.e. tangible matter) but also rūpa that is invisible [to the eye] and intangible. This might seem strange to us, but that’s because of our modern worldview which separates the mind from matter. Many ancients didn’t think like that. For example, some of the Greek stoics who lived around the time of the Buddha thought the soul lived on in the fire element. The four elements are not just external things but also their properties, and these properties extend into the mental realm as well. And therefore so too does rūpa.
But more generally rūpa definitely includes physical things as well, such as the water in the ocean or the air in the sky (MN28) or indeed the body. Because included within things that have an appearance are our bodies. To illustrate, in SN22.100 a painter draws the form (rūpa) of a person. And when you draw a person, you draw their body, not their mind or other internal aspects of their experience. The Bhrdaranyaka Upanishad has the line: “He is so-and-so by name [nāma] and has such-and-such an appearance [rūpa].” Here rūpa also effectively refers to the person’s body. In DN15 nāmarūpa is said to take shape in the mother’s womb, forming the embryo, where again rūpa refers (primarily) to the body.
To conclude, the term rūpa is impossible to strictly define, because it is used in different ways, and because concepts of “matter” were different back then. Many suttas have broader uses of rūpa, but in some the physical aspects are emphasized. Rūpa is not exactly identical to the body, but in certain contexts the connection with the body is so strong that to translate it as ‘body’ would not be completely unwarranted. This is also the case for the aggregate of rūpa in various suttas, although you couldn’t get away with that in the canon as a whole, which is why most translators stick to ‘form’.
The essay on vedanā has me baffled, particularly its attempted derivation of vedayati/vedeti. The verb is not a causative derivation. It’s simply a seventh conjugation from the root vid. So it just means ‘to experience/feel’, not ‘to cause to experience/feel’. Therefore the noun vedanā is also not derived from a causative.
Ved- is also not a “causative form of the root”. It’s a vuddhi (lengthening) of the root, which by itself does not make for a causative. The causative is determined by the suffixes added to the root. The Sanskritic form vediyati has no such suffixes and therefore has nothing to do with the causative. Vetter is right in noting that it is just a variant of vedayati. It is an alternative manuscript spelling not just in this sutta but throughout the canon.
I don’t know how these mistakes happened. Any serious Pali student should know what constitutes a causative, and should definitely know about the 7th conjugation. It’s in lesson three of Warder’s Introduction to Pali, for example. And Warder even specifically lists a vedeti as a 7th conjugation, as does Duroiselle. That these things are missed, plus other grammatical mistakes later on, strongly puts into question the credibility of this essay.
Now, probably what confused Jayarava is that the causative conjugation can sometimes result in the same stem as the 7th conjugation, when the causative suffix is -e. In such cases we have to consider the contexts the verb is used in order to tell whether it is a causative or not. And if we do, we’ll see that vedeti is (generally) not used as a causative in the Pali Canon. The PTS Pali-English Dictionary says it knows of “only one caus[ative]” application of vedeti. (emphasis in the original) It’s the aorist avedi in Jataka 444, where it has the same meaning as pavedeti ‘to inform’, which is semantically unrelated to vedanā. There may be some other instances which the dictionary missed, but they certainly would be outliers. In any of the common uses, those that relate directly to aggregate of vedanā, vedeti is not a causative.
The comparison of the five verbs in the Khajjanīya Sutta’s questionnaire on the khandhas also seems a strange way to determine meaning to me, and I don’t understand the conclusion at all. It translates a second person verb as a third person and a supposed denominative seemingly as a causative. It’s all rather senseless to me, so I agree, although for other reasons, that “all this etymological work […] is ultimately futile”. Regardless, if we do allow this strange route of argumentation, none of the other four verbs are a causative, so that would tell us that vedayati is not a causative either. (By the way, the reason only abhisaṅkharonti is plural and not the other four verbs, is simply that saṅkhāra is the only aggregate that is set in the plural.)
Vedanā is not the “positive (sukha), negative (dukkha), or neutral (asukham-adukkha) feelings that we have in response to sense experience”. It is the intrinsic pleasantness or unpleasantness of those experiences themselves. For example, sick people are said to have dukkha vedanā on account of their sickness, even if they were enlightened, as was the case for Maha Kassapa in SN46.14. The Buddha also had painful bodily feelings when he cut his foot in SN1.38.
So the critiques raised in these essays are unfounded. They’re based at least in part on bad understanding of Pali and on a failure to appreciate the non-technical use of language that’s quite common in the suttas. It blames Vetter and Hamiton of fixating on a single sutta, and that may be a rightful observation (I haven’t read those works) but itself overly fixates on etymology, which is even more problematic, especially if this etymology is incorrect.
I hope I didn’t word any of that too strongly. I do appreciate the inquiries Jayarava made. He does raise some very good points as well, especially some in the essay on saññā.
Oh, what did I misrepresent then? If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine. I may simply have been mislead by some of the incorrect grammar.
(No it has nothing to do with that. 
What, you think I spend I don’t know how long to write all this just out of spite? 
Come on. I have no such feelings at all. That I asked you to do some proofreading on something you suggested me to publish, should actually show that I respect you. But apparently I did word things too strongly, despite me taking care. Oh well, it’s the nature of communicating on the internet, apparently, that my intentions get misunderstood. I hope you at least understood my technical points. You’re not the first to get my intentions wrong so it must be me, sorry. 
I just thought it good to correct some mistakes for the sake of others.)
This is an interesting thread. I think it is an exercise in futility to try to get into the head of people who lived in such a different time and place. I think it is hard enough to do it with members of my own family now. Throw in Pali words that are translated to English words that are ambiguous and vague and I am ready to throw up my hands and quit sometimes. That said, I do not think that liberation requires a lot of this.
I find myself drawn to statements about liberation that even if I don’t get them completely now, I will when I get there. There is one in particular that is the North Star that I try to navigate by
I may not know what this state of mind feels like exactly beforehand, but I don’t think I will be wondering if I am in it if I get there. Liberation here is visceral, not intellectual. I don’t doubt there will be a profound flash of insight when attained, but I believe this state is attained through jhana mediation more so than anything else. We have a whole thread here somewhere about the Satipatthana sutta being secondary.
The canon has so many different conflicting strata of tradition heaped one on top of another, that, like quantum mechanics, if you think you understand it, you don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I try, but it is primarily for the purpose of understanding enough to practice which I don’t think is that much.
Hi @Jayarava , no, sorry, my expression is poor, I am actually agreeing with you that recognition is a better gloss than perception, my main point is not about Pali, its about English, where, outside of the special sciences or the ranks of pedants there is really almost no difference between perception, recognition and consciousness in most non-technical contexts.
“I percieved the candle flame”
“I recognised a candle flame”
“I was conscious of a candle flame”
Even “I sensed the candle flame” overlaps to quite an extent.
All mean roughly the same thing in common english.
Any slicing up of these terms into parts that stress different aspects of an overall process of cognition immediatly imply a theoretical frame that gives a “special sciences” flavour to the discussion.
This is true in the Pali too, although I suspect it is a regrettable defect of a growing scholasticism that more or less ossifies Buddhism by the time the aggregates come into favour (in my opinion SN is a text intermediate between earlier narrative based suttas where the agreggates are absent or interpolated and later abhidhamma where buddhism devolves into a rather silly and complex mechanical metaphysics)
MN43 gives a nice explination of the impossibility of the five aggregates being analysable into seperate and distinct cognative units;
“Feeling, perception, and consciousness—
“Yā cāvuso, vedanā yā ca saññā yañca viññāṇaṁ—
these things are mixed, not separate.
ime dhammā saṁsaṭṭhā, no visaṁsaṭṭhā.
And you can never completely dissect them so as to describe the difference between them.
Na ca labbhā imesaṁ dhammānaṁ vinibbhujitvā vinibbhujitvā nānākaraṇaṁ paññāpetuṁ.
For you perceive what you feel, and you cognize what you perceive.
Yaṁ hāvuso, vedeti taṁ sañjānāti, yaṁ sañjānāti taṁ vijānāti.
Apologies for the grammer nazi comment, i will remove it.
Please dont @Jayarava !! Your right of course, this board has an almost totally Theravadan vibe these days, but if all the differing perspectives end up leaving then that will only be reinforced! I have always found your blog invigorating and interesting, as i am sure many on here, thier Theravada commitments notwithstanding, do too.
I for one really hope you continue to occasionally grace us with your presence and your thoughts, this board would be a plainer place without you…
You’re not the only non-Theravadan here. There are others of us here who are trying to make sense of the Pali canon as a source, not as an authority, of what the Buddha said to better our practice.
I agree with Joseph that you should stay. I hope you change your mind.
Just ignore the people who have a tendency to be overly dramatic, they’re everywhere, not just here.
There’s also people who are interested in the dhamma, and nothing but the dhamma, stick to talking to those people.
Sorry to ressurect an old thread but it seems to me the definitions in SN 22.29 and SA46 are talking about meditation when it comes to the definition of sañña. We see “few, many, measureless and nothingness” in terms of 4 perceptions in AN 10.29
- One person perceives the limited (Parittameko sañjānāti)
- One person perceives the expansive (mahaggatameko sañjānāti)
- One person perceives the limitless (appamāṇameko sañjānāti)
- One person, aware that ‘there is nothing at all’, perceives the dimension of nothingness (natthi kiñcī’ti ākiñcaññāyatanameko sañjānāti)
We also see “the limitless” discussed in terms of the 8 liberations, bases of mastery and kasiṇas. Its also used in the suttas to refer to the mind of an Arahant, or the cognition of nibbāna once again in relation to a meditative state. I think then we can read the defintion of colours in the sutta version as referring to the same thing, with the compliers having the above attainments in mind (liberations, bases of mastery and colour kasiṇas). These 3 practices are usually linked in the early texts.
Aha! Very good! Yes, at the time, I was reading these texts naively. When I look up the four perceptions in the Saṅgītiparyāya, the first three perceptions are interpreted as perceptions of limited, great, and measureless forms. The examples listed were standard objects of contemplative meditation, the four colors being among them.
四想者，一、小想；二、大想；三、無量想；四、無所有想。小想云何？答：作意思惟狹小諸色，謂或思惟青瘀、或思惟膿爛、或思惟破壞、或思惟膖脹、或思惟骸骨、或思惟骨鎖、或思惟地、或思惟水、或思惟火、或思惟風、或思惟青、或思惟黃、或思惟赤、或思惟白、或思惟諸欲過患、或思惟出離功德，與此俱行諸想等想、現前等想、已想當想，是名小想。大想云何？答：作意思惟廣大諸色而非無邊，謂或思惟青瘀，廣說如前，是名大想。無量想云何？答：作意思惟廣大諸色其量無邊，謂或思惟青瘀，廣說如前，是名無量想。無所有想云何？答此即顯示無所有處想。
The objects listed are six of the impurities: blue contusions, pus and rotting (flesh), scattered (body parts), a bloated (corpse), a skeleton, and connected bones. Next is the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Next are four colors: blue, yellow, red, and white. After the colors, a couple example of perceiving principles are given: the trouble of desires and the virtues of escape. The perception of nothingness is the direct appearance of the abode of nothingness.
Still, isn’t this a bit strange as a definition of one of the five skandhas? I guess that’s why I didn’t explore it further (or I was just a bit busy at the time). Still, there it is, plain as can be. It’s a good example of how sutra passages often require exegesis to make any sense. The people who maintained these texts expected they would be read with commentaries (written or in person) to explain them in greater detail.