Hi,
Yes, the Kayagatasati Sutta I also think is quite clearly a composite text using formulas which are borrowed from elsewhere. You can read Analayo’s or Sujato’s studies of the Satipatthana sutta, the arguments of which largely apply to the Kayagatasati Sutta also.
In fact, in the Majjhima and Digha Nikāya such composite texts seem to be rather frequent; less so in the other Nikayas. This was also recently discussed here under the name “play of formulas”: the idea is that reciters remembered certain standard formulas and created new discourses using them. Later editors of the texts contributed to this process too, which is clear from comparative analysis. Quite clearly such things happened in the Kayagatasati Sutta, where the jhana formulas I suggest were borrowed from AN5.28. All this “play of formulas” usually would not have caused any doctrinal problems, but in the Kayagatasati Sutta the inclusion of the jhanas does not work well for the reasons I described. And I agree with your reasons also, thanks for those.
But in Buddhism there are six senses, not five, so there can be experiences totally devoid of the five senses. I think everybody agrees on that, but there is disagreement on where the line should be drawn. To me, it actually already happens before the jhanas, but in the jhanas it is stabilized. It is that sixth sense of the mind that makes up the jhanas. That is why they are said to be “vivicceva kāmehi”, withdrawn from the five sense experiences. In fact it is the total other-ness of these experiences that allows for insight to arise from them. If they were bodily experiences, there would not be that much difference from everyday life.
As I argued before, to me it’s pretty clear the jhanas were included because of the four similes containing the word ‘kaya’, as the Chinese only has the similes and not the actual jhana formulas themselves. It’s not because of the jhana formulas, which only have “kayena” once (referring to the personal experience, not the body). We could wonder whether the jhanas were included because they were wrongly thought to be bodily experiences by whoever included them, or just because of a play on words (with kāya actually meaning ‘person’ or ‘being’ in the jhana similes, and the editor being aware of that).
The nature of jhanas was already doubted in the early days, but the traditional Theravada position has always been that they were without any bodily feelings, as described various times in the Abhidhamma already. So the fact that the Kayagatasati Sutta made it into the Theravadin Canon might favor the play on words option. The play on words is, after all, already present in the fourth jhana simile, which describes a white cloth covering a whole body (kaya), yet in the actual jhana part of the simile kāya means the whole person or whole experience. One reason is that you just can’t “fill your whole body (kāya) with a pure bright mind”, which just makes no sense if you read it literally. Do you put your mind inside your toes for example? But you can fill your whole experience or being (kāya) with a pure bright mind, meaning your experience is a fully mental one. Then it makes sense when read literally.
The first and second jhana similes further say “fill the whole kāya with pīti”. But pīti is categorically said to be mental. E.g.: “Whenever rapture not-of-the-flesh (nirāmisa) arises, on that occasion the awakening factor of rapture is aroused.” (SN46.3) Even though rapture of-the-flesh also exists, notice that to count towards the awakening factor, and hence towards samadhi (SN46.52), it specifically refers to rapture not-of-the-flesh, i.e. mental rapture. Rapture which leads towards samadhi is also called “mental rapture” (pītimana) in at least 10 suttas, for example AN11.2. So if we would interpret the jhana simile as “fills the whole body with pīti”, that just doesn’t make sense, because you can’t fill the body with mental rapture. So kāya must mean the whole experience or whole being again.
The second jhana simile also compares the rapture to water that fills a lake. This water is said to come from within the lake itself, it does not come from the north, south, east, or west, nor from the sky. This is an analogy to the rapture coming from the mind itself, not from the five senses. To me that is rather clear, and I wonder how else it could reasonably be interpreted.
So that is just more reasons why the jhanas are out of place in the Kayagatasati Sutta.
And the thing is, the meaning ‘person’ or ‘being’ for kāya is very well established and given in all dictionaries. And all translators I know of use this meaning in other contexts. But then some choose to use ‘body’ instead in the jhana similes. In archaic English you could use the word “body” to refer to a person too. For example, Shakespear wrote in “As you like it”: “Ah, sir, a body would think this was well counterfeited.” But nowadays we don’t use the word ‘body’ in that sense anymore, so to translate kāya as ‘body’ in the jhanas will now be misunderstood to mean something it doesn’t.
