SuttaCentral
in the line from the Heart Sutra
(Harvard-Kyoto transcription)
viharaty acittAvaraNaH
which Conze translates
“dwells without thought coverings”
isn’t viharaty the sandhi of the verb viharati
which means “keep separate” &c. (Monier-Williams p. 1003, col. 2) ?
Deep thanks to anyone who can confirm or correct this!
I would avoid the Conze translation. There’s a running joke about his “Heart” problems:
Thanks for this. I am familiar with Huifeng’s and Jayarava’s work, which is of considerable interest for the Chinese textual tradition. But my problem here is just the one word: viharati
am I correctly reading it as the word meaning “keep separate” on Monier-Williams p. 1003?
I’m not sure what you mean… viharati and harati are different words…and the vi- definitely belongs to -harati not to āśritya
Sorry, my bad typing. Yes, my question is about viharati. I corrected it in my posts so as not to promote confusion. Thanks for pointing it out!
I see. Yes, that’s the right entry, but usually we’d take it in the sense listed near the bottom: “to spend or pass (time)… to roam, wander…”
Along the same lines as described by @Khemarato.bhikkhu, the place where you spend time is usually called a vihara. Many southeast asian countries call their temples or monasteries, vihara. Its still in use; people name their homes “xyz vihara” routinely in India.
Thanks! You have made me wildly happy!
Ah, that must be where Conze got the idea he could translate it as “dwells”!
Viharati is a normal word used in meditation to indicate that one “remains” or “dwells” for a period of time. It’s an auxilliary verb indicating duration.
It’s worth noting that in Pali/Sanskrit it is commonly used and has long lost its metaphorical force. To viharati is just “to dwell”, rather than “to dwell (like one dwells in a building)”.
Āvaraṇa is a synonym for nīvaraṇa, i.e. the “hindrances”. The phrase means “to meditate with mind free of hindrances”. If it’s used outside of meditation context (for example, of a Buddha) then it could mean “lives with mind free of hindrances”.
Thank you for that richly detailed clarification! Your drawing in the traditional associations and use of both words meaningfully deepens my understanding of a key passage!
I agree with Sujato, here viharati simply means “he dwells”, as it almost always does in Buddhist texts. It is intended to convey that a meditator attains a particular state of nonattachment due to the cessation of sensory experience.
In order to understand what the passage is getting at, it is worth noting that the Sanskrit translation is full of mistakes and none more egregious than this one. The original Chinese was:
菩提薩埵依般若波羅蜜多故心無罣礙，無罣礙故無有恐怖遠離顛倒夢想究竟涅槃。
Since the bodhisatva relies on perfect paragnosis their mind is not attached anywhere; being detached they are not afraid, transcend illusions and delusions, and attain final extinction.
The phrase “their mind is not attached anywhere” translates xīn wú guà ài 心無罣礙. Huifeng (2014) showed that in Kumārajīva’s translations wú guà ài 無罣礙 often corresponds to Sanskrit na kvacit sajjati “his mind is not attached anywhere”. Note that sajjati is a Pāli-like Prakritism.
It seems that whoever forged the Sanskrit text had a working knowledge of Sanskrit grammar but poor vocabulary and they ended up translating this as:
bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya viharaty acittāvaraṇaś "
the bodhisatva who is without mental hindrance dwells having relied on perfect insight
This is legible but it’s inelegant and the choice of words is misleading. Note that translators all seem to want to have many hindrances, but acittāvaraṇaḥ is the nominative singular “a mental hindrance”.
What follows is supposed to be the consequence of being in this state of nonattachment, reflected in the use of gù 故 following the word. In Chinese: Wú guà ài gù 無罣礙故 “Since, [his mind] is not attached…”
In the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, this becomes cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād “because of the non-existence of a mental hindrance” one of the weirdest phrases in the text and in all Buddhist literature. I might have expected: acittāvaraṇāt “since [he is] without a mental hindrance”; or just tena “by this” or tasmāt “because of that”. But this kind of sentence in a Buddhist text begs for an absolutive.
My revised edition will be out soon (I was expecting it some weeks ago). In it, I retranslate from Chinese into Sanskrit, attempting to use Buddhist idioms. I came up with:
yato prajñāpāramitām niśrayati tato bodhisatvacittam na kvacit sajjati asaktva atrasto viparyāsamāyāvivikito nirvāṇaparyavasānañca prāpṇoti
Since he has relied on perfect insight, the mind of the bodhisatva is not attached to anything; being detached he is unafraid, isolated from delusions and illusions, and he attains final extinction.
In other words, in keeping with other Prajñāpāramitā texts, this passage is emphasising the attainment of cessation of sense experience by someone on the bodhisatva path. It is in (or following) that state, in which all sensory experience has ceased, that we gain insight and end rebirth. This must be in part because following cessation the sense of self is suppressed and one’s actions are no longer governed by conscious volition (cetanā). Thus there are no longer karmic consequences and one is bound to be liberated once one’s old karma runs out.
In Huifeng (2014), this mistranslation becomes part of the argument for an epistemic reading of the Heart Sutra. I’ve taken that suggestion and expanded on it, though I prefer to think of it as a phenomenological reading. Here I draw heavily on the work of (the late) Sue Hamilton and her phenomenological reading of the Pāli suttas.
This is not a reference to Nāgārjuna’s metaphysics of emptiness. This is an phenomenological absence which many living meditors (not least everyone’s favourite Theravādin scholar-monk, Anālayo) can attest is a real state that one can be in.
Mahāyānists tend to find my references to Early Buddhism to explain Prajñāpāramitā confusing. But note that Anālayo has recently argued that this form of practice aimed at cessation – epitomised by the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121) – may actually predate Buddhism. I agree with this. I think prajñāpāramitā is less a late reaction to mainstream Buddhists taking up Abhidharma methods, and more a conservative “back to basics” restatement of the importance of cessation and the subsequent absence of sensory experience (aka nirvāṇa). Keep in mind that the oldest Prajñāpāramitā manuscript (1st century CE) is about 400-500 years older than the oldest Pāli manuscript (5th-6th century CE). Prajñāpāramitā was also clearly based on an existing, probably oral, tradition.
I always love your contributions here @Jayarava but must take issue with this. What preciciely is keeping this fact in mind supposed to accomplish?
Why can’t it be both?
I have some ideas about the pre-nikayas meditation “scene” viz the athakkavagga and parayanavagga that i am trying to put together that might lend weight to the idea that the meditation praxis of early buddhism was not as regimented is in the nikayas. It could support your thesis?
Metta
Thanks. People taking issue with things I write is not a new experience, eh? I mostly try to ignore it these days, but you have been polite about it, so here goes. I hope you are not too disappointed by my response.
For me, the fact that the oldest Pāli manuscript is from the 5th century at the earliest, calls into question the whole idea that Pāli is old. The “old Pāli” hypothesis is based on interpreting scripture, not on physical evidence. Having read, translated, and studied a fair bit of scripture myself, I don’t put much store in other people’s interpretations. It’s a subjective business that is extremely prone to bias most especially when carried out by people who have a vested interest in certain answers over others (e.g. bhikkhus).
Probably what made me think of it is that I’m in the middle of reviewing the entirely inconclusive arguments over what language the Buddha spoke (focussing on Karpik’s recent articles). Here is an example of an unanswerable question that many scholars seem to feel compelled to answer anyway. I’ve been thinking about both the answers (such as they are) and the idea that such answers have value.
Why can’t it be both?
No reason. Unless Prajñāpāramitā predates the emergence of Abhidharma… which I cannot prove but find plausible and interesting enough to spend time contemplating.
I have some ideas about the pre-nikayas meditation “scene”…
I am extremely sceptical of the “Buddhism before Buddhism” or “original Buddhism” tropes. Is “pre-nikāya” not simply a variant of these?
The idea that we have a good handle on the relative internal chronology of the suttas is certainly popular, but I can think of many reasons to doubt the methods used to arrive at the conclusions. Mind you, the last time I mentioned my doubts in this regard, Sujato wrote a long post denouncing me for not understanding the first thing about this issue (i.e. I didn’t read his book).
You can of course argue that your small sample–“athakkavagga and parayanavagga”-- is “less regimented” if you like. That strikes me as plausible. But it’s a very small sample and what does it being “less regimented” really connote? Maybe this is the remnant document of a bunch of anarchist monks who rejected regimentation and then died out because they failed to attract a following, but not before writing down the Suttanipāta as it was later canonised. Who knows?
Anyway, this all seems a long way from the topic of how to understand viharati in a Buddhist text.