Meaning of rūpa and its implications

I agree and see different conceptualizations at work in the suttas: a) rupa as a cognitive element vs. b) rupa as a material one. Actually b) in its explicit form is quite rare (i.e. rupa = mahabhuta). Under the influence of abhidhamma and commentaries this became the dominant one.

Rightly so as I show in my essay on ayatana

And again old habits of wrong conceptualizations are hard to eradicate… Olivelle in the introduction to his translation of the Upanishads writes (p.22):

“In dealing with sight and hearing, and to some extent also in the case of the other faculties, these documents clearly distinguish the power or the act of seeing and hearing from the respective external organs, the eyes and the ears. Indeed, they consistently use different Sanskrit terms for the two — cakṣus and śrotra for sight and hearing, and akṣan and karṇa for eye and ear, respectively.”

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Hi cd
The sixth object appears to be not of first khanda category .
Isnt the sequence should be feeling perception volition rises after consciousness in each duo case ?

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Yeah. Well, to me, it would depend on whether the first khandha is only what’s external to the mind or whether it’s all the sense objects that give rise to these others things (feeling to consciousness).

As to the sequence, I wouldn’t think of the five khandhas as a literal sequence of events. They are categories, though it does have a vague logical sequence if we think of the rupa as a sense object rather than material form.

Anyway, there’s wisdom in not pursuing logic too much. It turns into a tangle of possibilities that can’t be resolved. Then we get caught in the tangle and fall down, flustered. The main idea is that rupa didn’t originally mean material things but the imagery the eye sees. At some point, philosophical advances in the ancient world caused it become a shorthand for what’s material. Words drift in meaning like that over the centuries.

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That is certainly the basis for the Ābhidharmika position, but in contrast to that one line we have tons of suttas (you are more of an expert in the Chinese canon here) which make the distinction between physical form and rūpa and indeed, in certain meditative states, still treat rūpa as an “image”. In conjunction with this we have the etymology of the word and how it was used in the Vedic literature. Further still I think rūpa as “image” is more in line with the Buddha’s epistemology, which I touched upon prior. If we look at a sutta like DN1 and its parallels we can see that the basis for views that the Buddha knows and rejects, but other ascetics so willingly embrace, are a mixture of inductive reasoning and synthetic a priori (bar the sceptics). These two forms of reasoning form the basis of metaphysics. Think Descartes for the synthetic a priori and St Thomas Aquinas’ teleological argument from design for induction. The Buddha rejected them because they are not knowledge, do not lead to knowledge yet lead people to claim knowledge, to claim to “know and see”, when they do not. The Buddha instead preferred direct experience and analytic a priori reasoning, which we see in dependent origination. In other words, knowledge. Seeing as how the Buddha rejected these two forms of reasoning as unsound, it becomes difficult to see how he would suddenly launch into a theory of matter (I also doubt the Buddha accepted causality, but that is a different topic). To establish a theory of matter you either have to rely upon synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori. You can’t get there via direct experience or analytic a priori. Synthetic a priori would be pure reason, metaphysics. This is not knowledge, since the predicate is not contained within the subject. To establish it via the synthetic a posteriori you would need induction or deduction, with a deductive approach being the domain of science. As DN 1 has shown, the Buddha rejected the synthetic a priori and synthetic a posteriori based on inductive reasoning (which, as Hume would later point out, is an irrational line of reasoning). This leaves the synthetic a posteriori based on deduction, but this doesn’t lead to knowledge either. It merely tells you what is probable, which is why in my own field (science) we never actually claim to have proven anything. We merely have the best theory at the time. As the Buddha was concerned with knowledge, and seems to have been aware of the epistemological pitfalls of these types of reasoning, is it credible to then claim that he adopted a theory of matter, framed in terms of the mahābhūta and taught in the shorthand via a redefinition of rūpa? I would have to submit that it is not. It is, however, in line with his epistemology if we treat the mahābhūta as simple fundamental qualities of direct experience (bar the formless realms). For example, if we look here:

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Rajagaha on Vulture’s Peak Mountain. Then early in the morning, Ven. Sariputta put on his robes and, carrying his bowl and outer robe, was coming down from Vulture’s Peak Mountain with a large group of monks when he saw a large wood pile off to one side. Seeing it, he said to the monks, “Friends, do you see that large wood pile over there?”

“Yes, friend,” the monks replied.

“Friends, if he wanted to, a monk with psychic power, having attained mastery of his mind, could will that wood pile to be nothing but earth. Why is that? There is earth-property in that wood pile, in dependence on which he could will that wood pile to be nothing but earth.

“If he wanted to, a monk with psychic power, having attained mastery of his mind, could will that wood pile to be nothing but water… fire… wind… beautiful… unattractive. Why is that? There is the property of the unattractive in that wood pile, in dependence on which he could will that wood pile to be nothing but unattractive.”

AN 6.41: Dārukkhandhasutta—Thanissaro Bhikkhu (suttacentral.net)

The Buddha is not giving us a speculative metaphysics or scientific theory of the wood pile. He is directing us to what qualities it has rather than what it actually is. The Abhidhamma does go into what an object is, but this is moving in a direction away from what the Buddha was interested in in my opinion. To get an Abhidhamma you need the synthetic a priori or induction, but that brings it closer to the ascetics of DN 1 than the Buddha.

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Great essay and thanks for the quote too!

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Prior to this discussion, I would not disagree with the statement that “body is rūpa.” I would comprehend that the physical body is a constituent of human being which belongs to the rūpa-khandha category for its materiality. As you point this out and thank you very much for doing so, I find that the interpretation of rūpa as material form, where form being an abstract object or image, makes even more sense to me in line with the doctrine of impermanence. There is no such concrete thing that we can point to and call it the body, as it is in constant flux. There is only a common form of body that is perceived through the six āyatanas of contact and composed of the four elements. Such forms are what rūpa-khandha points at, rather than sense objects per se.

I notice the SN 22.56-57 and their Chinese parallels SA 41-42 not only provide definition of the five khandas but also explain their origin, cessation and path towards cessation. They are the content of suffering. It would only make sense if rūpa is a cognitive element that can be extinguished via practice, rather than an elimination of bodily matter.

Hence, the mind/body duality @paul1 suggests is an emphasis of the power of mind that is incomparable and separated from the five faculties of eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body. It is mind that endows the physical organs with cognitive powers of seeing, hearing, and etc. and formed the sphere of senses - the āyatanas.

Thus understood, bodily matter seems to be entirely translated into cognitive phenomena, while bodily experience correspond to cognitive processes. Is that correct?

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Yes.

“Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.”—Anguttara Nikaya 4.45.

The implications of this are that cause and effect are not only mechanical and physical, but thoughts produce physical consequences.

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Yes, the context does change the exact meaning of the word…

In the context of senses, we have sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactiles & spirits. We can quiet down each of these discern them in succession.

Quiet down sights, and you are attuned to sounds…
Quiet down sounds, and you are attuned to smells…
Quiet down smells, and you are attuned to tastes…
Quiet down tastes, and you are attuned to tactiles…
Quiet down tactiles, and you are attuned to spirits…

Become unpassionate then and there…

I’ve come very to this late, but I want to comment on and reinforce a trend in the thread, which is that we understand rūpa as reflecting sensory experience rather than substance. I’m in the middle of trying to articulate this so what I’m writing here is entirely provision and subject to revision.

I don’t think rūpa was ever intended to convey ideas like “body” and “matter”, that said, it is an historical fact that Buddhists ourselves have attributed this meaning to the word. Indeed I routinely see academics translating rūpa as “matter” (e.g. Prof. Jonathan Silk). Still, we can in fact understand rūpa entirely in epistemic/phenomenological terms without doing any violence to Buddhavacana.

When we look at rūpa amongst the āyatana/dhātu schema we see this relation:

rūpa is to the eye as sound is to the ear.

That is to say, just as sound emanates from an object, crosses the space between us, hits the ear, and causes an aural sensation; so also with rūpa and the eye.

If rūpa meant “substance”, “body”, or “matter”, then seeing would be caused by matter entering the eye. Ouch. In modern terms, entirely anachronistic in a Pāli context but nonetheless our own framework, rūpa must simply be “reflected light”. In this context, I think “form” tends to make English-speakers think in terms of substance which is misleading. To avoid this misinterpretation, I translate rūpa as “appearance”.

There really is no discussion of objects or the nature of objects in Pāḷi. What we see is more like discussion of sensory experience in terms of the arising and ceasing of sensory experiences, with a view to ending them all (nibbāṇa). Although all Buddhists trade in metaphysics, in these discourses the topic is experience rather than reality. An objective reality is entirely consistent with Buddhist doctrines, but Buddhists themselves didn’t have anything much to say about it because they were obsessed with the cessation of sensory experience in meditation and the subsequent state of absence of sensory experience.

Moreover, we can extend this usage. As some of the previous posters argued, we can see rūpakkhandha as a generalisation of rūpa qua visual appearance, to a general sense of “sensory appearance”. In other words, rūpa stands as a metonym for the arising of sensory experience across the sensory modes. With this shift in emphasis, all of the khanhas now refer directly to aspects of sensory experience, which makes the set more coherent. Having appeared in our sensorium the sensory experience creates a valence of positive or negative affect (vedanā); we recognise and name the experience we are having (saññā), we have an occasion to commit kamma (saṇkhārā), and then we discriminate the object we are experiencing (viññāṇa).

So we can talk about khandhas from an entirely epistemic point of view without invoking substance or matter. Note also that from discrimination of the object, comes papañca.

Again, we can extend this reading to nāmarūpa and in doing so we see why the Mahānidāna Sutta begins with viññāna and nāmarūpa conditioning each other.

If rūpa is appearance, then in the context of nāmarūpa, rūpa can be seen as the basis on which one attaches a label (nāma). For a person, their rūpa is how the look (facial features, habitual expressions, haircut, etc), how they sound, and so on. Rūpa is again “appearance” in a general sense. The appearance depends on an object and that gives it a set of distinctive qualities that are recognisable.

If viññāna-skandha is the discrimination (or identification) of the object behind the sensory experience, then we can see that this might entail first recognising the attributes of it, and then giving it a name. Or in other words viññāna consists of recognising an object from its characteristics: nāma on the basis of rūpa. In this view, viññāna and nāmarūpa amount to different ways of looking at the same process. And from this emerges papañca.

So rūpa means “appearance”: more specifically “visual appearance”, but figuratively speaking any kind of “sensory appearance”.

Now. It may or may not be the case that anyone in the ancient world thought this way. I think this way and it appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, I have one (flexible) definition of rūpa and it serves all the functions I need it to: the basic definition “appearance” doesn’t radically change with the context. Secondly, I can discuss the idea entirely in epistemic or phenomenological terms without invoking metaphysics (i.e. existence, reality, truth and their negations). Thirdly it unexpectedly helps to make sense of an odd bits and pieces like the weird nidānas in the Mahānidāna Sutta: not an inconsequential text. Lastly it is broadly consistent with my attempts to read all Buddhist texts as concerned with the arising and, especially, the ceasing of sensory experience (following on from Sue Hamilton’s epistemic account of the khandhas).

The avoidance of metaphysical commitments based on the texts in which this concept is described is important because it side-steps interminable discussions about the existence or non-existence of this or that. Do dharmas exist? The question is ayukta (unconnected, irrelevant). Do dharmas not exist? Ayukta. Any discussion of the metaphysics of dhammas or self or whatever misses the point. The point is that we can, through concerted and systematic efforts, make all dhammas cease and then dwell in a state in which no dhammas arise aka suññatāvihāra.

I suspect that everyone in Indian knew this, but they all came to different conclusions about it. For Brahmins the state of emptiness was interpreted as brāhmana (or Brahmā); for Saṃkhyā it was puruṣa manifesting when prakṛti became quiescent. And for Buddhists it was nibbāna: suññatā is like death - we have a text to help us tell the difference between one in that state and a dead man, i.e. MN 43 (PTS MN I 296).

Incidentally, this way of thinking has been mainly inspired by studying the Heart Sutra (in which rūpa plays a prominent role). And one of the really neat things about this is that the same explanation for rūpa in early Buddhist texts works equally well in the Prajñāpāramitā context. I’m coming around to thinking of Prajñāpāramitā as an ancient (largely oral: guru to śiṣya) lineage within Buddhism that found a new literary voice under the Kushan kings in Gandhāra; not as a new or breakaway lineage. Once we repair the persistent errors in the Heart Sutra, it is very much consistent with the Pāḷi discourses on cessation of sensory experience in samādhi.

Summing up

As a technical term:

  • rūpa is to the eye as sound is to the ear (and tangibles are to the body).
  • rūpa is “appearance”; in the narrow sense of the appearance of a visual sensory experience.
  • rūpa can also stand as metonym for all the senses in general (sight often stands in this relation to the other senses).
  • The rūpa of an object is how we recognise or discriminate (viññāna) the object and thus give is a name (nāma).

This does not obviate the conventional, non-technical use of rūpa in Pāḷi. It’s an attempt to make sense of doctrine, not language more generally.

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Please forgive me if I am guilty of any of the following: a) stating the obvious, b) stating something already contained in a previous response, or c) stating something completely off-base. But could it not just be that these people, when conceiving of matter or form, considered its apparitional aspects as primary, where we consider it more from a tactile or substantial perspective?

Greetings, @Jayarava. I have enjoyed your blog on-and-off for years. You obviously don’t know me, but I am obsessed with all thing DN 15 (or any of its parallels). So, I’m going have to insist that you unpack this tantalizingly pregnant statement.

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As you know the nidānas in the DN 15 are unusual because at the beginning of the sequence we don’t have avijjā or saṅkhārā, rather we start with viññāna and nāmarūpa conditioning each other.

nāmarūpapaccayā viññāṇaṁ, viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpaṁ, nāmarūpapaccayā phasso, phassapaccayā vedanā,

Conventionally this is translated as

Name and form are conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is a condition for name and form.

But this doesn’t really make any sense. For a start viññāṇa isn’t and cannot be “consciousness”, especially in this context. No such thing exists in the Pāli account of experience. Rather viññāna in this context refers to the discrimination of objects via sensory experience. Just as it does in the khandhas. The sense of viññāṇa as providing continuity for rebirth seems to be the odd one out, in that we are also instructed not to think of viññāna as providing continuity for rebirth.

If I’m right about rūpa meaning “appearance” [of sensory experience] in all contexts (which remains to be seen) then nāmarūpa has to mean something like “label” and “appearance”. How do we recognise an object through experience? We recognise the rūpa of it, how it looks, how it sounds, etc. So nāmarūpa would means something like: that by which we recognise an object and what we call it.

This partly emerges from thinking about these stories as being concerned with epistemics rather than metaphysics. Here I’m applying the insights of (the late) Sue Hamilton about the concerns of the stories being about how things work rather than what something is or whether it exists (or not).

In which case, it seems to me that viññāna and nāmarūpa in the Māhanidāna Sutta would have to be in precisely the relation specified: one experiences discrimination when one experiences the appearance of the object and gives it a name; or we could say that having recognised the appearance of the object and named it, we have discriminated it. So of course they condition each other.

I think, at the very least, that this epistemic reading is a valid reading even if it doesn’t fit with traditional interpretations. We can choose to understand the texts this way without doing any violence to the Pāḷi. The question of whether this is a better reading is moot. We may never know exactly how early Buddhists interpreted their texts, except to say that in every single Buddhist sect they radically changed the core teachings to suit their needs.

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Great answer. What stands out most for me is when you said,

and

I love your use of the word “discriminate” to translate viññāna, as it takes into account the vi- prefix in a way which I haven’t found any other translations do: that is to say, it actually takes it into account.

(I’d be interested in how you deal with the saṁ- viz. saññā.)

I was already pretty much in agreement of most of the rest of your post.

I don’t know if you’re aware, but @Vaddha and I have been following a similar line of dialogue as it pertains to DN 15 on the Best Namarupa Translation thread (here). That thread has paused, but we are poised to continue with it. (In fact, I will be posting there shortly after this.) Please, you are invited to join in. As I remember, you subscribe to Gombrich’s and Jurewicz’s views on the continuities between DO and Vedic theories of cognition. Your contributions would be most welcome, I think, especially regarding nāmarūpa.

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This is my own general opinion, too, based on broadly reading texts from various Buddhist traditions (which become accessible when one learns classical Chinese rather than an Indic language). I think Buddhists were explaining experience rather than existence and didn’t really think in terms of existents in the abstract way we are familiar with today. Then, there was an encounter with Western ideas (i.e., Greek and Near East civilizations) early on by Buddhists who settled in the Gandhara region. The Greeks were more advanced than the locals, so there would’ve been a natural inclination to adopt their ideas and methods. Which included writing, rhetoric, and principles of philosophical argument.

Sarvastivadins were among those early Buddhists, and they began writing reasoned arguments and making ontological claims (like the past and future exist to explain karmic fruition, etc.) in their Abhidharma tradition. These developments then filtered into the sutras, which I think continued to be composed and developed for many centuries to keep up with new ideas and literary developments after writing was adopted.

These changes apparently provoked a reaction among traditional Buddhists, and many dissenting groups arose who criticized them. Some rejected the entire Abhidharma project (e.g., Mahasamghikas, Prajnaparamita writers, Sautrantikas, etc). Some attempted to correct it (e.g., the works of Vasubandhu and Asanga). And some tried to keep their Abhidharma as traditional as possible (e.g., Dharmaguptakas and Theravadins).

The “big picture” of Buddhist history in India looks to me like a conflict over this change in perspective by Sarvastivadins and the success they enjoyed as they developed it. Eventually, the traditionalists (Theravada) and rejectionists (Mahayana) were the survivors after Buddhism disappeared in India, but they had both been shaped and influenced by Sarvastivadin ideas, making discerning what original Buddhism looked like difficult. New and old ideas had mixed together to an extent that it’s difficult to sort out now.

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I am not sure that this is right, are you referring to MN38 ? If so my sense is that Sati’s position is more like this present discernment is the only or essential substance that transmigrates; i.e something like vinanna as a unique perspectival identifier, so when you die all your shit gets faded back to one point and then rolled out agin from there. Its actually a very attractive position philosophically if your looking for a way to think about rebirth for example;

However the early Buddhists seem to reject a priviliging of a “point like” perspectival “unique identifier” as a means to underwrite continuity of existence, and have vinanna rising and falling just the same way as the rest of the phenomena.

However its not clear, to me at least, that vinanna in a more general sense isn’t pivitol in ensuring continuity, just not this present vinanna - so there is still a “discerning” that “uncovers” our new situation in the next life, and that discernment has the shape and dispositional features it has because of ones past, its just not a substantial unit that remains the same across moments or lives, rather it is conditioned, like everything else.

So with the caveat that it not be confused with some stable, enduring thing, i think vinanna as feature of experience that is tied up with continuity is fine too.

Anyway, am on my phone but lovimg this thread, especially some of what you have been saying @Ceisiwr , and am hoping to get toy laptop later to engage more fully with some of the thoughts here.

Metta

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I think that the bolded text above seems to imply a doctrinal split from the Parayanavagga. See bolded text below.

Do you think that viññāṇa here means recognition of sensory objects?

I wonder sometimes if viññāṇa was originally more inline with self-consciousness rather than awareness or discernment since a sense of self is key to being a run of the mill person.

To be fair, the sarva-asti doctrine is not really the result of speculative metaphysics. It is a logical consequence of taking the dependent origination formula literally as requiring the presence of the condition for the effect to manifest. And this is the natural reading of the formula, IMO.

Those who asserted sarva-asti “universal existence” didn’t really make any ontological claim over and above other Buddhists (it is akin to the Everett interpretation of the Schrodinger Equation). If a past mental event is able to achieve the idaṁ hoti part now, then the logical consequence is that the imasmin sati part must also be true now.

If the past condition was truly absent in the present, then imasmin asati, idam na hoti; imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati. A past condition cannot be the condition for an effect in the present unless it still exists.

It is really only logical assert that for conditionality to occur over time, the conditions themselves must universally exist. It’s not that sarvāstivāda invented eternal dharmas out of the blue in defiance of Buddhism and common sense. Rather it is that all other Buddhists tweaked their presentation of dependent arising to avoid allowing this possibility (if you know about Everett and “many worlds” you will recognise this description).

However, for there to be temporality, conditions can only be active at certain times. This limited scope for activity was the sarvāstivāda fudge to avoid an “everything all at once” scenario

This makes as much sense as any other religious metaphysics I’ve come across and is better than most because it doesn’t speculate beyond accepting dependent arising as a literal truth. It doesn’t invent any weird entities like the bhavaṅgacitta or alāyavijñāṇa that look suspiciously like ātmavāda, so by Occam’s razor it starts to look like the best traditional explanation.

NB: I am not a sarvāstivādin.

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not a sarvāstivādin either but it certainly seems possible to argue that it is the Therevada tradition that has come to privilege the present over the past and the future and thus gone beyond the EBT material in a way that the sarvāstivādin does not.

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Oh, I wasn’t disparaging Sarvastivadins, per se. Different points of view are refreshing. But we have this difficulty today in sorting out early and late meanings of words like rupa in the (so-called) EBTs because at some point there appears to have been redefinitions that took place across the board. I see them in all the different canons that still exist while translating Agamas and comparing parallels.

The Sarvastivadins seem like the likely source of it to me because they had become authoritative and were actively engaged in creating a systematic paradigm from the EBTs. There’s a textual record of it at different stages in Chinese. And perhaps the overall conflict was a case of importing foreign innovations, like Greek philosophy as an example, and then rejecting them after a long period of fascination. The endpoint was a hybrid of the foreign ideas and original ones: Ideas like the Alayavijnana was the end result. It reminds me a little of how China ended up with Neo-Confucianism, which kind of mimics late Buddhist metaphysics in order to supplant the foreign religion. The result was a Confucian-Buddhist hybrid of sorts.

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Quite so. In fact Fire sermon, provides ample support for the above.

Can you please clarify this obsevation, regarding AN 6.41? If you read only the Pali translation, perhaps you have a point??. Why would Buddha take pains to clarify the properties of a wood pile? Have you looked at its Chinese translation? SA 494. Interpreting that it seems Buddha is expounding the inconceivability of the mind of a meditator, and encouraging Bhikkhus to meditate. Powers of meditation are inconceivable the teacher tells the students. Between the lines I read, that divine power is not the ability to turn the tree into gold, but the divine power is in the ability to abolish all suffering. To me it looks like the Pali translators left out part of the original sutta. It is not the first time that I detect an omission of this nature by the Pali tradition.
What is abhidhamma got to do with the inconceivability of the mind? According to abhidhamma rupa of Nama-rupa of paticca samuppada is considered materiality. Rupa of Nama-rupa of Paticca samuppada, according to SA/SN is a cognitive feature.