@Jayarava thanks for your comments, I will have to read them later as a bit busy just now… but I noticed on the forum people mentioning problems with the new site and the Pāli. There was mention of missing diacritic marks… Did this Pāli look ok? Dangerous for my research if the Pāli is messed up, so, hoping it is ok on my system!
It seemed fine to me.
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In early Theravada, prior to Vism. Abhidhamma period, kāya in the context of jhāna, 16 APS (anapana), means the physical body. As the Theravada commentary says, “skin, flesh, and blood”, obviously is the physical body, not the person.
In other EBT schools, such as the Sarvastivada preserved in the Agamas, and the Sarvastivada Abhidharma, kāya also means the physical body in the context of jhana.
In Vism., you’ll notice Buddhaghosa deliberately avoids mentioning these famous 4 jhana similes. The Theravada subcommentary (composed later than the commentary), contradicts the Theravada commentary, redefining kāya as a body of mental aggregates.
So if you want to side with the EBT, all the evidence we have points to a straightforward meaning of kāya in the jhāna meditative context. see MN 119, and the EA and MA parallels for the satipatthana (MN 10) sutta, for kāya to make sense in those jhāna and meditative contexts, it must be the physical body, as this Theravada commentary authoratitively states.
Theravada aṭṭhakathā (commentaries)
AN 5.28, DN 2, MN 39, jhāna simile commentary – physical!
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AN-a 5, 1. paṭhamapaṇṇāsakaṃ, 3. pañcaṅgikavaggo, 8. pañcaṅgikasuttavaṇṇanā, para. 1 ⇒ |
(geoff shatz trans.) |
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imameva kāyan-ti imaṃ karajakāyaṃ. |
“This very body:” this body born of action [i.e. born of kamma]. |
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Abhisandetī-ti temeti sneheti, |
“He drenches:” he moistens, |
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sabbattha pavatta-pīti-sukhaṃ karoti. |
he extends joy and pleasure everywhere. |
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Parisandetī-ti samantato sandeti. |
“Steeps:” to flow all over. |
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Paripūretī-ti vāyunā bhastaṃ viya pūreti. |
“Fills:” like filling a bellows with air. |
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Parippharatī-ti samantato phusati. |
“Permeates:” to touch all over. |
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sabbāvato kāyassāti assa bhikkhuno |
“His whole body:” in this monk’s body, |
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sabbakoṭṭhāsavato kāyassa kiñci upādinnakasantatipavattiṭṭhāne |
with all its parts, in the place where acquired [material] continuity occurs there is not even the smallest part consisting of |
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Chavi-maṃsa-lohit-ānugataṃ |
skin, flesh, and blood |
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aṇumattampi ṭhānaṃ paṭhamaj-jhāna-sukhena a-phuṭaṃ nāma na hoti. |
that is not-permeated with the pleasure of the first-jhāna. |
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Did you perhaps mean to say the “auxillary verbs”? The governing “verbs” in these examples (save for the last) are the participles that precede the auxillary verbs in the periphrasis.
I agree that the silent copula in the final example is a main verb.
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I agree that in this context, the concept of “direct” does not work. But the point about directness was made by Bhante @Brahmali regarding the instrumental kāyena. If we take up Wijesekara’s point about such instrumentals largely functioning as adverbs, rather than adnominally, it seems difficult to square the kāyena actions as meaning “done with the corpus”, when what is being experienced are the nine attainments (AN 9.43) or the highest truth (kāyena paramasaccaṃ sacchikaroti : AN 4.113). See another adverbial usage of kāyena in SN 48.53.
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There is a helpful resource on kāya here -
Some findings -
- While DN 9 uses attapaṭilābha, its parallel DA28 consistently uses 身 (body). This reading corroborates the idiomatic usage of kāya in other Pali suttas as being either -
(a) rūpī cātumahābhūtiko; or
(b) of the manomaya variety being merely rūpin.
Thankfully, DA28 preserves for us the formless kāya s (eg 有想無想處天身 at the end of the standard listing of 4 formless attainments) corresponding to DN 9’s arūpa attapaṭilābha.
- Even within the Pali texts, traces of the older (and probably pre-Buddhist) idiom of the kāya as a form of Being can be found in the DN 1 passages on the Annihilationists’ proposition regarding kāyassa bhedā of someone who’s being born into the Formless Attainments, eg -
Tamañño evamāha: ‘atthi kho, bho, eso attā, yaṃ tvaṃ vadesi, neso natthīti vadāmi; no ca kho, bho, ayaṃ attā ettāvatā sammā samucchinno hoti. Atthi kho, bho, añño attā sabbaso ākiñcaññāyatanaṃ samatikkamma “santametaṃ paṇītametan”ti nevasaññānāsaññāyatanūpago. Taṃ tvaṃ na jānāsi na passasi. Tamahaṃ jānāmi passāmi. So kho, bho, attā yato kāyassa bhedā ucchijjati vinassati, na hoti paraṃ maraṇā, ettāvatā kho, bho, ayaṃ attā sammā samucchinno hotī’ti. Ittheke sato sattassa ucchedaṃ vināsaṃ vibhavaṃ paññapenti.
- Which leads to SN 12.2 which uses khandhānaṃ bheda
in lieu of kāyassa bheda.
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I am happy with most of this, but I have never been convinced of the usefulness of etymology. The etymology of words and their meaning in actual usage often varies significantly. For this reason I try to tease out the meaning from context, if at all possible. This is largely the approach used by the CPD. Of course, this takes a lot of Pali reading, in addition to research of individual words. But it is really worth it, since etymology often can leads us seriously astray. In cases where we have little or no context for a particular word, etymology may be used as a fall-back position.
As for kāya, the word is used in contexts where it can only refer to the mind, thus my attempt to bridge the physical and the mental by using “person”.
It could well mean “person” in this sentence. Whatever is still present of the five aggregates is what is pervaded. As for “direct” or “immediate”, I would reserve this for the instrumental case of kāya, kāyena, and even then not in all contexts.
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This body makes sense if there was no ‘self’ or ownership in the worldview of the narrator. It then just becomes an objective description of the body. Otherwise this translation seems fine.
See AN3.101 dirtwasher sutta- purity can take place in stages or this being a ‘gradual path’, progressively. ‘Black or white thinking’ is cognitive distortion ie. doesn’t represent how reality is organised and the Buddha’s training is a practical one. Alternatively in ancient India purity was viewed differently?
A skilled meditator, one who has developed a very refined second jhana, without any disturbances of initial thought and sustained thought, can if she wishes, use his or her mindfulness to ‘spread’ the rapture and bliss throughout the physical body (by physical it is the ‘fine material’ body) just like ‘spreading’ metta when practicing meditation on the divine abodes… Then the body feel ‘suffused’ and ‘glowing’ as a purified mind is inherently seen in the mind’s eye as glowing white.
Ajhan Brahmali is correct in the fact that the body, when experienced, is experienced with all of the aggregates ie. there is a nama overlay on the experience of the physical. The mistake is to project the mental portion to the physical portion, and assume it is entirely the physical that is being experienced, when a larger chunk of the experience is mentally fabricated. This is how it is possible to permeate etc the body without actually doing anything to it!
The word kāyena seems pretty broad and therefore flexible, especially if the listeners were illiterate, yet wise. I suspect the main usage was for the physical body but had other uses as well, as mentioned above. In terms of purely the meaning, its easy to see how it could have been used in the way it is used now in a broader sense : ‘body of text’, ‘the faculty body’ and ‘body of water’.
I also agree that we shouldn’t get too bogged down in the etymology- the next level of clarifying meanings can only come from directly experiencing what is being said.
with metta
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Likewise. I think it’s about time studies in Buddhist philology should get past its fascination with nirukta (etymology) and recognise that Buddhists texts were never clients or pawns in the nirukta v grammar debate; that was a Vedic project.
I’m not sure it is even necessary to reserve any space for the “physical” at all.
If, friends, internally the mind is intact but no external mind-objects come into its range, and there is no corresponding conscious engagement, then there is no manifestation of the corresponding section of consciousness. If internally the mind is intact and external mind-objects come into its range, but there is no corresponding conscious engagement, then there is no manifestation of the corresponding section of consciousness. But when internally the mind is intact and external mind-objects come into its range and there is the corresponding conscious engagement, then there is the manifestation of the corresponding section of consciousness.
The rūpa in what has thus come to be is included in the form aggregate affected by clinging.
MN 28
It’s one of the great tragedies in Buddhist studies that we are still using dictionaries guided by the Abhidhammic description of derived form as pertaining to the 5 senses and their external bases…
Presuming that I can get over my abhorrence of signing away copyright and all publishing rights forever to Routledge, I will have an article out very soon in which I make a case against the primacy of semantics in Buddhism Studies, especially in arguments over how to translate technical terms.
The focus of the article is the word vedanā, which cannot be understood semantically. Etymologically it is something that “makes known”; in Sanskrit usage a vedana is “an announcement”. The Buddhist usage is defined by virtue of a performative speech act - we say “vedanā means dukkha, sukha, adukkhaṃasukha” and so it does. For no other reason than we said so. This sense cannot be guessed at from etymology/morphology.
Hence semantic arguments for “feeling” vs. “sensation” (or some other more elaborate phrase like “hedonic tone” cannot be resolved. There are arguments for and against all of the choices on semantic grounds, but no decisive factor.
And this is true for much of our technical vocab.
In order to settle such questions, I argue, we have to turn to other ways of looking at language, such as speech act theory (J.L. Austin, John Searle) or to cognitive linguistics (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson) to understand how the words came to take the meaning they have in our technical jargon.
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Buddhaghosa uses sound symbolic etymologies extensively. E.g.
bhagī bhajī bhāgī vibhattavā iti
Akāsi bhaggan ti garu bhāgyavā
Bahūhi ñayehi subhāvitattano
Bhagavantago so bhagavā ti vuccati
The weighty one (garu) has blessings (bhagī), is a frequenter (bhajī), a partaker (bhāgī) a possessor of what has been analysed (vibhattavā). He has caused abolishing (bhagga), he is fortunate (bhāgyavā). He has fully developed himself (subhāvitattano) in many ways. He has gone to the end of becoming (Bhagavantago) thus he is called “Blessed”
(bhagavā) Vism VII.56
But he is not using these in the way that Yāska specified. One of my Sanskrit teachers, Eivind Kahrs, wrote a book about the Nirukta: Indian Semantic Analysis: The Nirvacana Tradition (1998). This is quite hardcore, but back in 2008 I wrote a short essay about Yāska’s book for a more general readership.
Yāska elucidated three situations:
Firstly there are obvious examples like √budh where the root and it’s transformations are known.
Secondly there are examples where the meaning is not obvious but one can use grammatical paradigms to work out what sense of it is - such as √gam.
Thirdly there are very obscure examples which defy logical analysis.
And it is only in the third case, the last resort, that one attempts to guess the meaning using sound symbolism. It is a fact that monomorphemic words (e.g. the dhātus) that start with the same sound are far more likely to share meanings than words that start with different sounds. See the work of Margo Magnus who did her PhD on this phenomenon. As a last resort this is not a bad heuristic when combined with attention to the context.
So really what Buddhaghosa is doing is not based on the Nirukta heuristic. He’s just playing around with sound symbolism. The idea that this is part of a “Vedic project” seems implausible to me. Vedic has almost no meaning in the 5th Century (the middle of the Gupta Empire). The Vedic period pretty much ended with Pānini in 4th Century BCE, who ushered in the classical phase of Brahmanical culture by codifying the Brahmanical vernacular of his day as saṃskṛtabhāsa and producing the Dhātupada which is still the basis of most Sanskrit dictionaries.
I’m not aware of the “nirukta v grammar debate”. Could you post some references? Thanks.
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Hmmm. I think the sentence in question is making a distinction, however implicit, between citta and kāya. I’m sure you know this distinction. And this makes good sense to me as applying in this case.
Let us stipulate that kāya here means “person” and further stipulate that “person” refers to the five khandhas. Conventionally, citta cannot be distinct from the five khandhas. So citta pervading kāyaṃ means what?
In other words, if you argue that kāya means pañcakhandha, that also encompasses citta, by definition (though I’ve never been quite sure how citta fits into the khandhas). So what you are saying, in effect, is that the khandhas pervade the khandhas. But there can be nothing special about this, since it must apply at all times in any case.
So if kāya means “person” here, the sentence as a whole is meaningless. No doubt it can mean “person” sometimes, just as sometimes it literally means “a group”. It just doesn’t mean “person” here.
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I wasn’t even thinking of Buddhaghosa. I’m thinking of those of us who continue in the PTS’ venerable tradition of etymology, versus the contextual approach of the grammarians.
For the nirukta v grammar debate, I take my skepticism from Warder’s opening remarks that “roots and stems, … are mere abstractions devised by grammarians for the analysis of language” (Introduction to Pali, p.4).
It’s been years since I read Howard’s The Philosophy of the Grammarians, Vol V of Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophies, and my copy is in my office. But if memory serve me, his characterisation of Panini’s position versus the etymologists is that context and usage dictates meaning, not roots.
Again, kaya is just the Vedic counterpart of the god Ka. Ka is the self made actual. Ka is Prajapati made selves, like you and me.
That is to say a self to be felt through the fields (ayatanani) of senses (salayatana).
It is just what is called in philosophy “the actualization of a potential”.
It retains the same meaning in Buddhism - with a major difference.
In Vedism, kaya (lit. “what belongs to Ka”) is continuous and blissful (brings happiness).
In Buddhism, it can’t be. (anicca and dukkha).
As far as what are the particularities of" what belongs to Ka" are concerned, it can be summarized as follows, and holds both in Vedism and Buddhism:
Kaya is an organ (like eye, ear,… brain). It has the particular function of “gluing” the other organs together. It is very close to prana (breath), which is the chief of the organs in Vedism.
Kaya is not like a mere mano - that is to say - a mere “orchestrator” of the organs - but the “glue” that holds the all body and its organs together.
Its vital function is also “touching”.
It is therefore the all shebang of the sensuous realm of a personal self.
But it is also Ka as Prajapati, Brahma and Atma. It also deals with the (liberated) citta, out of this (world of senses) - within the different higher spheres.
In Buddhism, this actual form of the Atma>Brahma>Prajapati, as seen by the Vedist, as continuous and blissful, is a wrong view. Even in the higher spheres (like the Brahma world, for instance).
There can’t be continuity and blissfulness in paticcasamuppada.
Sakkāyadiṭṭhi (the Vedic view of a continuous and blissful Ka) is just a wrong view.
All actualisations (sensuous or not), of the organs or the khandhas, are impermanent and dukkha.
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But take a look at Bodhi’s translation:
He sits pervading this body with a pure bright mind, so that there is no part of his whole body that is not pervaded by the pure bright mind.
That seems like bad English to me. If we want to avoid using ‘his’ because of an issue with ownership, then should we not be consistent? And anyway, we are talking about his body! For me, it is better English and with the same meaning, to use ‘his’ throughout the passage.
Oh, how interesting! I really look forward to that - I hope I notice when you post it! (If you would happen to remember and be so kind as to tag me in the post that would be fantastic! I miss so much… although naturally you have far more important things to take up your memory with!)
In the meantime do you happen to have any summary available of what vedana means, and doesn’t mean? I have been wanting to gain a clearer EBT understanding of this.
Regarding the other comments from everyone, thank you very much, I will take time to digest! …
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I think we might distinguish kāya from citta by including rūpakkhandha in kāya, but not in citta. Citta is closely linked to viññāṇa and as such has mostly to do with pure mentality. The distinction is not great, but then I am not sure whether the idea of the five khandhas pervading the five khandhas is unintelligible. The point to me is simply that when you develop your mind it affects your entire being.
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As Vajirā says to Māra (SN I.136)
Kiṃ nu sattoti paccesi, māra diṭṭhigataṃ nu te;
Suddhasaṅkhārapuñjoyaṃ, nayidha sattupalabbhati.Yathā hi aṅgasambhārā, hoti saddo ratho iti;
Evaṃ khandhesu santesu, hoti sattoti sammuti.Dukkhameva hi sambhoti, dukkhaṃ tiṭṭhati veti ca;
Nāññatra dukkhā sambhoti, nāññaṃ dukkhā nirujjhatī’’ti
Yes?
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Body sensation–>Body sense base–>Body consciousness–> [body contact–> feelings, perceptions, fabrications] -the portion in the is nama, the rest is rupa. It is clear that this string of specific causality (idapaccayata) starts with the physical body, though from body contact onwards it becomes very much a mental experience (leaving aside Consciousness, as belonging to neither one). We cannot take out the starting cause of the body here because without it the content of feelings etc will not be about the body, and presumably, and maddeningly, about something else! 
This process is no different when in a jhana either. In a jhana the feelings (vedana) will be blissful so where ever consciousness picks up the subtle skin sensation it will be felt as blissful. Sankhara in jhana will be limited to a certain range, so they will be triggered in specific ways. It will be so different that it will be hardly any body at all, after being used to a gross sensual plane body that has sensual overlay on the initial physical stimuli.
with metta
It’s good to look at the EBT to get a an EBT perspective. SN 36 is an entire samyutta just on this topic.
in particular, SN 36.14 ties vedana, originating from the anatomical body, to the vedana as its experienced in the 4 jhānas
SN 36.14 agāra-suttaṃ
SN 36.14 agāra-suttaṃ |
SN 36.14 guest-house-discourse |
♦ 262. “seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, āgantuk-āgāraṃ. |
"Suppose, monks, (there is a) guest-house. |
tattha puratthimāyapi disāya āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
Over-there (from the) eastern direction (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
pacchimāyapi disāya āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
(from the) western direction (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
uttarāyapi disāya āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
(from the) northern direction (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
dakkhiṇāyapi disāya āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti. |
(from the) southern direction (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
khattiyāpi āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
(the) warriors, (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
brāhmaṇāpi āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
(the) brahmins, (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
vessāpi āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti, |
(the) middle-class, (they) come (for) lodge usage, |
suddāpi āgantvā vāsaṃ kappenti. |
(the) slave-class, (they) come (for) lodge usage. |
(3-fold vedana explicitly said to arise from anatomical body)
evameva kho, bhikkhave, |
just like that, monks, |
imasmiṃ kāyasmiṃ vividhā vedanā uppajjanti. |
(in) this body, various feelings arise. |
sukhāpi vedanā uppajjati, |
pleasant feeling arises, |
dukkhāpi vedanā uppajjati, |
painful feeling arises, |
a-dukkham-a-sukhāpi vedanā uppajjati. |
neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling arises; |
(carnal feelings are tied to 5 cords of sensual pleasure, clearly anatomical body)
sāmisāpi sukhā vedanā uppajjati, |
carnal pleasant feeling arises; |
sāmisāpi dukkhā vedanā uppajjati, |
carnal painful feeling arises; |
sāmisāpi a-dukkham-a-sukhā vedanā uppajjati. |
carnal neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling arises; |
(anatomical body originated spiritual feelings arise in jhāna, see SN 36.31 for explicit tie to jhāna definition)
nirāmisāpi sukhā vedanā uppajjati, |
spiritual pleasant feeling arises; |
nirāmisāpi dukkhā vedanā uppajjati, |
spiritual painful feeling arises; |
nirāmisāpi a-dukkham-a-sukhā vedanā uppajjatī”ti. |
spiritual neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling arises. |
catutthaṃ. |
[end of] fourth [sutta in this section]. |
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