Is saññā related to sañjānāti? (AN6.63)

Venerable Sir @sujato ,

in MN1 sañjānāti seems to be linked to the worlding while abhijānāti is linked with a noble person. Do the terms sañjānāti, abhijānāti and maybe even parijānāti imply a different degree of insight or wisdom in the EBTs?

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Thanks for the good points and discussion of my admittedly half-baked theorizing!

What I was trying to get at, clumsily enough, is the the idea of “knowing about knowing”, i.e. self-reflective awareness. It’s one thing to “know”, or even to be “wise”, and quite another to be aware of the fact that one is knowing. It is in India that we find the almost obsessive focus on the pure subject of awareness; a depth and clarity in introspection that still surpasses western theorizing about consciousness. In Europe, especially Greece, we didn’t have such a focus on subjective awareness, but nevertheless, there is something similar in the reflective pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

So my point wasn’t that the PIE cultures were themselves engaged in sophisticated philosophy, but that something in their culture paved the way or lit a spark that somehow prompted the emergence of reflective awareness. Of course it’s not necessarily the only way this happens, or the only time it happens in history. Still, I don’t see the same kind of reflective awareness in ancient Semitic cultures. Perhaps in China, though, although I am not familiar enough to say.

In general, yes.

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So nice to see a fellow fan of Julian Jaynes! :anjal: Yes, reflective awareness could in fact be something that started among the Indo-European people, but I think this hypothesis as well as the entire bi-cameral theory has even less chances to be refuted or proven in the next couple of centuries than the string theory.

Julian Jaynes himself placed the emergence of self-awareness in the Bronze Age Near East. Interestingly enough, quite a number of nomadic people that triggered the Bronze Age crisis are at least hypothesized to be Indo-European. It only shows that this intriguing and elegant theory can be formulated in a rather large variety of ways, and both the neuropsychological, as well as archeological and culturological evidence is not exactly huge. Maybe, reasearch of the Pre-Columbian AMerica as well as isolated cultures in Amazonia and other remote areas can help. Anyway, I like this theory a lot, even though it may not necessarily be true.

And I really loved the fact that the Ancient Semitic root for ‘know’ is so similar in form to the Indo-European u̯(e)id-. This fact doesn’t tell is much on its own, it is just an interesting thing to research :grinning:

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Oh, very much so!

And also nice to meet a fellow string theory skeptic!

Indeed.

One of the weaknesses in his theory was the scanty attention paid to the Indian sphere, obviously since he knew little about it. I don’t think it would change the foundations of the theory, but India surely deserves more than a few lines!

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I think Samma ditti, possibly pajānāti (from satipatthana- Samma sati) and yathabhutanāna (Samma nana?) shows a similar deepening.

Does anyone know if triad of sutamaya panna (textual knowledge), cintamaya panna (reflective knowledge) and bhavanamaya panna (meditative knowledge -vipassana) is found in the suttas or commentaries? I find these three quite helpful, when discussing the Dhamma.

with metta

There is a mere mention of them in the DN’s Saṅgītisutta, but they are not expounded in any detail until the Paṭisambhidāmagga.

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My point, put more precisely, was that the root came into the English language family via the Germanic language family.

(from various sources)
“More important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language, though, was the succession of invasions [of Germanic tribes] from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal. (430 Jutes … 470 Saxons).’

“It is impossible to say just when English became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, by around 600AD.”

Of course, via the Latin. How is it documented that noscere emerged independently of the Greek gignoskein ? The earliest Old Latin scripts used a Greek alphabet, so the influence was in place prior to any other record of the word, or?

Of course my nerdish ramblings were just a form of nitpicking, but still:

Fair enough, I totally agree, but your particular statement about the German wissen being the ancestral form of the English word wise is just false, that’s it. We are both on the same page about the Germanic family, though.

First, because of how different the word forms are. The Greek word is reduplicated in the presence, the Latin word isn’t. So, the Italic folks had to borrow the noun and make it to a verb, which somehow doesn’t really appear to be feasible, the Indo/European languages do not behave that way. Second, the Latin word has the perfect form nōvī which is unproductive and is likelz to have never been productive in Latin. A common and basic word borrowed from other language while changing the part of speech it belongs to and assinging to it an unproductive conjugation paradigm? Rather unlikely, I am afraid.