“A fool is known by three things. What three? They ask a question irrationally. They answer a question irrationally. And when someone else answers a question rationally—with well-rounded, coherent, and relevant words and phrases—they disagree with it. These are the three things by which a fool is known.
An astute person is known by three things. What three? They ask a question rationally. They answer a question rationally. And when someone else answers a question rationally—with well-rounded, coherent, and relevant words and phrases—they agree with it. These are the three things by which an astute person is known.
Oh, this this reminds me why I went for rational over reasonable: because reasonable often means “okay, not too bad”, so it raises disambiguation problems. This is another of the subtleties that bedevil translation choices!
I’m sure you have the various connotations you have to cover in mind, but don’t you think that the one with yoniso manasikara is someone who has, how to put it, a developed spiritual skill, a wise understanding? ‘rational’ is in the worst case also an unsympathetic brainiac.
No, it doesn’t have that kind of exalted sense. Look at this sutta: it’s just talking about people who are able to hold a rational conversation.
This is where we have to be careful to avoid overloading words with meaning: words aren’t profound, sayings are. “To be or not to be” is one of the most profound sayings in the English language!
Any word can have a negative connotation, wise guy!
I think this is a very pertinent question as yoniso goes to heart of Buddha’s Dhamma.
Considering the range of settings yoniso has been used, I would suggest lowering the bar a bit!
It is used for example when contemplating one’s food, before eating it. I think it simply means to reflect/think about something, before doing it. Carrying out rites and rituals (Silabbataparamasa) would be an example of when this doesn’t happen.
Thinking, asking the difficult question ‘why’ may not have been common before the Buddha appeared on the scene. It does go to the root, the reason for one’s intentions and taps in the (wrong) view as the case may be. It then becomes the cause (along with the voice of another- paratogoso) for the formation of Right view (samma ditti).
My thoughts for ayoniso: practice which is not reflected upon. Practice which is unconsidered.
I had thoughts about two other words in MN126:
Āsañca anāsañcepi - I got ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ -whether they like or dislike the holy life… from the Sinhalese translation.
Again, this would work sometimes, but not always, and there are more specific words for this; in fact in the reflection on food, the word for “reflection” is “patisankha”.
That’s not really what it means here. The sense is close to the English “hope”, but here it refers to making a specific wish or aspiration.[quote=“Mat, post:16, topic:5193”]
Adhigamāya- Is attainment -not just a vague result or fruit
[/quote]
It has a range of meanings, as evidenced in this very sutta: it refers to “extracting” oil, “getting” milk, “producing” butter, and so on. Normally I translate as “achieve”, but that doesn’t quite work here.
I have tried grounded, actually, and it works well, sometimes!
Reasoned, maybe could work. But it’s instrumental, so do we say, “in a reasoned manner”? Idiomatically, we want to say “reasonable”, but as noted before, that often means “just okay”. There might be a way to make it work, but I haven’t found it.
To me this has echoes of bare awareness, choiceless awareness etc. and doesn’t reflect the intellectual function, whereas the negative (groundless) works better in this regard.
It does, although that sense becomes more prominent later on. In the EBTs it more commonly has a general sense of “commitment, attachment”. There’s a number of terms that come close to the sense of “wish, aspiration”: ākaṅkhati is commonly used in this sense, saṇkhāra occasionally.
This hadn’t actually occurred to me, though that may be because I’ve been away from England for thirty-two years and am perhaps a bit out of touch with contemporary colloquial idiom. The modern demotic sense of grounded as I understand it would be something like ‘well-balanced’, which would indeed fail to reflect the intellectual function. Interestingly the Oxford Dictionary’s earliest attestation of this meaning is a 1976 quotation from Allen Ginsberg about Chögyam Trungpa:
Trungpa’s position is that ‘psychedelics’ are too trippy, whereas people need to be grounded; everything is uncertain enough as it is.
However, the sense that I have in mind is:
Deeply or strongly founded; firmly fixed or established; resting upon a good basis.
1548 Gest Pr. Masse in H. G. Dugdale Life (1840) App. i. 98 It is a grounded proufe of falshode.
1553 Brende Q. Curtius A iij, A stable and grounded wysedome.
1605 Lond. Prodigal v. i, To shake my grounded resolution.
1612 Bacon Ess., Empire (Arb.) 298 Solide and grounded courses to keep them [dangers] aloofe.
1653 R. Sanders Physiogn. b iij, So have I fortified this building with grounded pillars.
1783 Burke Affairs India Wks. 1842 II. 9 A grounded apprehension of the ill effect … of all strong marks of influence and favour.
1817 Coleridge Biog. Lit. I. x. 203 A grounded knowledge of the German language and literature.
1871 Morley Voltaire (1886) 5 The temperament which mistakes … violent phrase for grounded conviction.
I suppose that for clarity’s sake one might substitute well-grounded and ill-grounded.
I’m feeling rather muddle headed right now…and so 'am hesitant to say this…but feel if I don’t, that I’ll forget to and somehow it feels important to say…
So…I’ve always loved the phrase that Ajahn Brahm uses, “the work of the mind that goes back to the source”. Somehow it links in with that other lovely phrase: “inviting one to come and see” (is that indeed what opanayiko means?)
Using the word “source” has been like a signpost pointing inwards, pointing home, to Truth.
So, I just wanted to share that really.
With much metta and respect for what you’re doing Bhante
I was doing nights as a junior doctor and I was asked to assess this woman in Accident and Emergency. She was having emerging symptoms of mental ill health (beginning to hear voices and have delusional thoughts). She had been meditating and it had made it worse (she had insight into it). I suggested she do something more physical. She said, ‘yes, something more grounding’, as in more stabilising. It’s interesting how meanings of words change with time - anicca.
Since the Comy treats yoniso as an instrumental of manner, plus the fact that the major expositions analysing DO work backwards from suffering back to birth, and then back to existence etc, I would like to render yoniso as -
Is it possible to translate it in a more idiomatic way, like “in a way that makes sense”?
“A fool is known by three things. What three? They ask a question in a way that doesn’t make sense. They answer a question in a way that doesn’t make sense. And when someone else answers a question in a way that does make sense—with well-rounded, coherent, and relevant words and phrases—they disagree with it. These are the three things by which a fool is known.
Or maybe even something like “according to reason”.
I think it would be okay to use a phrase in order to capture a juicy meaning like the “causes are in line with the effects”
Ven. Analayo has done a thorough overview of yoniso manasikara in his book, From Grasping to Emptiness, which I highly recommend. At least the second half is free on his university website. His overview might help us understand things better. Here’s the first paragraph:
Yoniso manasikara indicates a form of “attention” that is
“thorough” and “penetrative”, and therefore “wise”. To explore
the connotations of yoniso manasikara, I will begin by examining
the terms yoniso and manasikara individually, followed by
surveying passages that are of relevance to the implications of
the expression yoniso manasikara, and to its importance in the
thought-world of the Pali discourses.
Ha! Leave it to a man to translate a phrase that literally means “wombish attention” as “penetrative”!
A womb holds and protects what is obscure and not yet formed. I think an important aspect of yoniso manasikara is a patient nurturing openness to what is developing in experience. Some of the passages that Bhikkhu Analayo uses to illustrate the “wise” and “thorough” aspects of yoniso manasikara really profit from being seen in this way.
Gotta say, I really don’t think any one English word is going to do that well in all places that yoniso occurs - it is very rich.
