Do these epithets represent the cessation of dependent origination, which is all about conditionality, birth and death? The cessation of conditioned existence?
Yeah Mata is the past perfect passive of the root mar meaning to die. Which means Mata means dead
Thank you bhante!
If nibbana was not a discernible dhamma such conversations between noble individuals as the following would be impossible.
Well, Reverend Anuruddha, when you say:
(“Yaṃ kho te, āvuso anuruddha, evaṃ hoti:)‘With clairvoyance that is purified and surpasses the human, I survey the entire galaxy,’ that’s your conceit.
(‘ahaṃ dibbena cakkhunā visuddhena atikkantamānusakena sahassaṃ lokaṃ volokemī’ti, idaṃ te mānasmiṃ.)And when you say:
(Yampi te, āvuso anuruddha, evaṃ hoti:)‘My energy is roused up and unflagging, my mindfulness is established and lucid, my body is tranquil and undisturbed, and my mind is immersed in samādhi,’ that’s your restlessness.
(‘āraddhaṃ kho pana me vīriyaṃ asallīnaṃ, upaṭṭhitā sati asammuṭṭhā, passaddho kāyo asāraddho, samāhitaṃ cittaṃ ekaggan’ti, idaṃ te uddhaccasmiṃ.)And when you say:
(Yampi te, āvuso anuruddha, evaṃ hoti:)‘But my mind is not freed from the defilements by not grasping,’ that’s your remorse.
(‘atha ca pana me nānupādāya āsavehi cittaṃ vimuccatī’ti, idaṃ te kukkuccasmiṃ.)It would be good to give up these three things. Instead of focusing on them, apply your mind to the deathless.”
(Sādhu vatāyasmā anuruddho ime tayo dhamme pahāya, ime tayo dhamme amanasikaritvā amatāya dhātuyā cittaṃ upasaṃharatū”ti.)After some time Anuruddha gave up these three things. Instead of focusing on them, he applied his mind to the deathless.
(Atha kho āyasmā anuruddho aparena samayena ime tayo dhamme pahāya, ime tayo dhamme amanasikaritvā amatāya dhātuyā cittaṃ upasaṃhari.)Then Anuruddha, living alone, withdrawn, diligent, keen, and resolute, soon realized the supreme culmination of the spiritual path in this very life. He lived having achieved with his own insight the goal for which gentlemen rightly go forth from the lay life to homelessness.
AN3.130
Zero is most definitely a number and Nibbana must be a Dhamma discernible to Ariyas.
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An interesting comment on quora
Oh woops 0 is not a number.
I guess x*2-2x+1=0 will never be what it used to be…
-Doruk Aksoy
Interestingly, that’s exactly how Joseph Goldstein described his first major awakening experience during an interview, “the experience of zero”.
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Also relevant is this great post by Bhante Brahmāli:
“Deathless”, for instance, is supposed to be a translation of amata . Mata means dead and the a is a negative prefix. A common use of such prefixes is as a privative, that is, to show the absence of the term they are associated with. Amata should therefore be translated a “freedom from death”. That this is correct can be seen from it’s usage in MN26, where it is clear from the context that the Buddha is searching for the freedom from death, not some sort of deathless state.
I don’t even know what the Pali word behind “realm” is supposed to be, and I am not sure if there even is one. But the Pali word behind “element” is dhātu , and “element” is not really a satisfactory rendering, at least not in this context. For instance, in the suttas you have the nirodha-dhātu , which would then be the “element of cessation”. This is fine, but only if we expand our normal understanding of “element”. A better translation might be “the property of cessation”. In the same way, amatadhātu can best be rendered as “the property of freedom from death”.
If you look for eternal bliss, that’s what you will find, except you will be disappointed. Your view will decide how you interpret your experience. If you get it wrong, you will get stuck. So yes, have an open mind, but remember that nibbāna means extinguishment, not eternal bliss.
The danger in reification of nibbāna is, I think - if one keeps practicing with the hope of arriving at an eternally happy state, one will never fully give up craving for existence, and that may prevent the practitioner from the break through to stream entry.
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I don’t really see the difference in meaning between the expressions “deathless” and “freedom from death.” One is an adjective and other is a noun phrase, I guess, but they both mean the absence of death. It sounds like Brahmali is describing the difference in negation that Chinese would discern with 非 and 無, where the first creates an opposite and the second indicates an absence of something. So, you could translate amata as “without death” or “having no death” as well, if that’s the case. There’s another term 離 that would mean “freedom from” or “separation from” something.
The term amata, as I understand it, is used for ironic effect because it refers to the immortality of gods. Usually, the Chinese translates it not as deathless but as a synonym of ambrosia, the drink of the gods. This is important, I think, because it seems as though Pali studies can become divorced from idiomatic usage and obsess over etymological interpretations. Chinese translations indicate actual living language readings (well, ancient living-language readings). But, and it’s a big “but,” they aren’t Pali readings.
This doesn’t directly relate to the Pali sources, but the Chinese texts have some interesting phrasing around Nirvana sometimes. For example, when used for the death of an arhat, we sometimes get the expression “entered into Nirvana” literally in the Chinese, which suggests a state of being or a location, grammatically. At some point, I plan to study the Agamas more to see if there are any interesting insights/differences and if I can find parallel passages to compare. I’m sure other scholars have done the same, but it’s always interesting to go through the readings personally.
It feels like we’re focusing on semantics, but not getting to the practical meaning.
So what does amata mean, practically speaking? What does “deathless” or “freedom from death” mean, practically speaking?
And what does ajatam mean, practically speaking? What does “unborn” or “freedom from birth” mean, practically speaking?
Are these terms referring to liberation from the cycle of birth and death, and if so, what does that mean, practically speaking? Or is it referring to the result of liberation from identity-view, the realisation that there is no self which is born and dies? Or liberation from the fear of extinction? Or something else?
I suspect the OP epithets refer directly to the cessation of DO, the difficulty is a lack of consensus about how the cessation of DO should be interpreted. Is there a progressive “winding down” of DO, or is it a sudden collapse?
An intriguing verse in AN11.9
‘Homage to you, O thoroughbred man.
Homage to you, O superlative man—
you of whom we don’t know even what it is
dependent on which
you’re absorbed.
‘Namo te purisājañña,
namo te purisuttama;
Yassa te nābhijānāma,
yampi nissāya jhāyasī’”ti.
I think Amatabhani explained it fairly well, and I’m coming to the same conclusion. It’s basically the principle that rebirth can end, stated as a basic principle of the world. So, sages can realize it, and someone who has become an arhat or buddha can enter it upon death. It does seem to me that there is a dual understanding, but my judgement is still suspended. It’s definitely a principle, the second reading might just be a manner of speaking that I’ve seen in different passages here and there.
I have thought that the conditions for DO wind down, but only ‘cease’ upon Pari-Nibbana. It’s like something can’t be finished, until it’s finished - so only when there is no remainder, all conditions and all fuel gone, for which one has to have finished with the body as well.
Welcome to the Forum @Lordvectivus. I hope you find your time here fruitful for your path. If you have any queries, just ask a question in the Q&A category and somebody will help you.
I recently realized that ‘deathless’ is a fancy term for immortality. Obviously ‘immortality’ is a problematic term in the context of Buddhism, but should we therefore make the problem go away by choosing a fancy term with less associations?
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I do not understand Pali, and can’t even judge if “there is”, is found in the original language, and so I have to ask: Would it be possible to substitute “there is” with “you can become”? So the passage would read:
Monks, you may become unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks you could not become unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because you can become unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned.”
?
The deathless means not being subject to death, or rebirth. It is not something that one becomes, it is not a state of being (or unbeing) it is cessation, no longer being. See the quote that I’ve copied from above
I, personally, also found this point very confusing as there is much contradictory discussion about it. It is hard to know who to ‘believe’, and whose interpretations to follow. Especially with regard to the emphasis that Nibbana is the highest bliss etc, which would imply that it is a ‘state of being’.
Rather than becomming something else, or going to another location/realm etc etc, the bottom line is that it is the ending of the rounds of rebirth and death, freedom from Samsara. It is a very subtle point. What helped me was keeping an open mind - disengaging any prior fixed views, and to continue practice 
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The words of the Buddha are the bedrock. Non sutta based dhamma talks are an expression of how individuals have understood the teachings, and are based on their own practice. No matter how much respect we have for individual teachers, or the acclaim they have, in the end the only reliable thing we have are the actual words of the Buddha. I remember being quite shocked when I finally understood the gravity of this position… (note this is absent of all judgement).
If I may make a suggestion - be aware of trying to make the translation fit with your current understanding and views 
This is a great area to focus on in practice.
For anything further, I defer to the teaching Ajahns, to direct your attention in a skillful manner
Wishing you all the best on this fabulous Dhamma Journey 
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With the proviso that grammar is never a reliable guide to translation, neither of these is grammatically plausible. The real issue with this passage is that it plonks a great big atthi right at the start of the sentence. This is not a particularly unusual construction, but it is a definite and emphatic one: “There is”. It’s this, in conjunction with the negated epithets of Nibbana, that conveys a positivist feeling to the sentence.
I’ve recently translated this passage in the Itivuttaka, and keenly felt all the difficulties of it! We have two main options on the table.
- Embrace the positivist implications: “There is the Unborn …”
- Even if one believes (as I do) that a positivist reading of Nibbana contradicts the bulk of early Suttas, such a translation is not necessarily incorrect, if this is understood as a later passage. That is to say, it could be a correct representation of an incorrect view.
- Read a- as privative: “there is freedom from the born …”
- This is grammatically uncontroversial. Negatives in Pali may often be translated in such a way. For example, adosa would be better as “freedom from hate” than “non-hate”.
But I wonder, what if both of these are missing the point? What if the syntactic tension between the emphatic assertion of being, and the negation of said being, is the point of the passage? That is to say, what if the passage is playing with eternalist-sounding phrasing (evoking an almost Upanishadic feel), with the express purpose of setting up the audience and undermining them with the series of negations?
The negations themselves sound almost theological. Maurice Walshe pointed out years ago that theists would attribute to God many of the same characteristics as Nibbana (unborn, undying, etc.) but would go on to also attribute other positive qualities that the Buddha would not accept (creator of the world, etc.). From a Buddhist point of view, you can be unconditioned or a creator, but not both.
So the passage (like comparably controversial passages in the Kevadda Sutta, etc.) sounds kinda eternalist because it was meant to. It was meant to convey that impression, get people intrigued, only for them to realize something else is going on at a deeper level.
This is a common rhetorical strategy in the Suttas. Consider, for example, the first sermon, which the Buddha starts by criticizing sensual indulgence—a view shared by his audience of hard-core ascetics—then pull the rug out from under them by putting self-mortification on the same level.
If this is the case, then we are left with the problem of how to translate it. We face a rather different set of issues than the Buddha did. The Buddha was invoking eternalist phrasings to undermine them; but the undermining has been appropriated to serve the very view that it was supposed to undermine. Not, alas, an uncommon situation in religious history.
So we have to translate it so as not only to capture the original meaning, but to guard against eternalist appropriation. How do we do that? It’s not obvious!
To return to the “freedom from” phrasing, it runs into problems in the second line of the passage. In my current translation:
No cetaṃ, bhikkhave, abhavissa ajātaṃ abhūtaṃ akataṃ asaṅkhataṃ, nayidha jātassa bhūtassa katassa saṅkhatassa nissaraṇaṃ paññāyetha.
If there were no unborn, unproduced, unmade, and unconditioned, then you would find no escape here from the born, produced, made, and conditioned.
But the “freedom from” approach doesn’t sound right, because “freedom from” and “escape from” are pretty much the same.
If there were no freedom from what is born, produced, made, and conditioned, then you would find no escape here from the born, produced, made, and conditioned.
I’m really not sure how best to proceed, but at the moment I’m using a pretty standard rendering, while leaving out the Portentous Use of Capitals.
There is, mendicants, an unborn, unproduced, unmade, and unconditioned.
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Hi Bhante,
I have been thinking the same. The word ajata I belief is found in the Upanishads to describe Brahman, and so of course is amata (which is not found in Iti43). I recall seeing an Upanishad passage which was very similar to “unborn, etc” though don’t ask me where!
Eternalist interpretations aside, I think translations like “unmade” are awkward at other levels too.
I can’t think of a good translation that combines both “Upanishadic” and “Buddhist” doctrine. Lacking that, I think it’s better to have a translation that reflects the latter, i.e. “end to what is born” or “freedom from what’s born” or the like. Your current translation may not have capitals, but is not less confusing.
The fact that for Buddhist ajata means the “end of …” or “freedom from what’s born”, not “unborn”, is also reflected by the verses in Iti43 itself, which refer to it ajata as dukkhadhamma-nirodha (cessation of painful things) and saṅkhārūpasamo (stilling of what’s created). In English this cessation aspect is not at all captured in “unborn” (which, by the way, also means something not yet born, like an unborn baby. So also awkward on that level.)
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Yikes, you’re right. And that is in fact the most common usage of “unborn” in English, so the implication is, “full of potential for life and needing to be delicately protected”!
But do you see the problem with the “privative” renderings? They don’t really work in the passage as a whole. Or at least, not one that I’ve found so far.
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I do see the problem with “freedom from birth”, which, as you said, is effectively a synonym to “escape from birth”. But I don’t think there’s such a big problem with “there is an end to what’s born … so an escape from what’s born can be found”. It’s perhaps slightly less literal, but in my opinion this does work well enough. Hence that’s how I translated it (in draft) for a recent sutta class.
But “freedom from …” also isn’t bad at all. If anything, the usual rendering makes much less sense, if you really look at it. “There is an unborn … so there’s an escape from what’s born.” You really have to make some assumptions for this to work. Or take “unconditioned” (I don’t like ‘conditioned’ but let’s go with it). It means something is not yet conditioned. It doesn’t mean it’s freed from conditions. Not to me, anyway. It’s the same with “unborn”, really. If you set aside all the doctrinal brainwashing we (or I at least) have gone through, it makes no sense to connect “un…” with “escape from”.
Sometimes just reading a certain rendering over and over, makes it seem more right every time, until it becomes truth.
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