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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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Yes, you’re quite right. “Unconditioned” could easily mean “ripe for conditioning!”
I guess a justification for the “Capitals of Profound Portent” in translations would be that they signify a specialized usage.
I’m still not really happy with any of the options. But hey, that’s not unusual.
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By the way (and somewhat offtopic), @sujato, another thing to consider is to have translations that are different just for the sake of being different. Just on this passage, I recently heard or read somebody claim that “all credible translators have unborn, therefore that’s what it means, and not ‘freedom from what’s born’”. That’s one of the problems we get when all translators follow one another.
I’ll see if a better translation than “freedom of …” or “end of …” pops up, and will let you all know if it does.
S.
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I agree. This is why I asked the question, as I don’t know Pali and had no way of judging if it would be possible to translate it that way. Thank you for your comments.
Thank you for your careful response.
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This kind of irony seems to be deployed quite often by Buddhists to both speak the language of theists while putting their own spin on things. We see it often when Brahma appears as a character.
The trouble with overthinking translation is that we risk rationalizing away what the original author was saying. Sure, the passage is problematic. Guess what? Alot of things humans say is problematic. Scripture is supposed to be the Truth, however, so there is always the desire to use a rolling pin to flatten out the lumps. When translators refuse to do that, then there is angst. What does it mean? Why does this translator do this and that translator say that? If translators iron it out, then the context, the irony, the allusion to other contemporary uses of language, which aren’t obvious to us in the modern time, are gone, but the target language readers are happier. Everything makes sense to them.
For what it’s worth, there’s a passage in T212, one of the Chinese collections of Dharmapada stories, that seems close to this passage in Udana 8.3. Akata is missing from the list, and bhuta is translated as “real” or “substance.” One thing I notice is that the Chinese treats the three terms as nouns, giving them the descriptors 有 and 無, which mean possessed/existing and absent/not existing.
或有比丘有生有實有為，或有比丘無生無實無為，比丘不為無為者亦不有生，設不有生不有實不有為者，則因生因實因有為而說無為也。設當眾生無此患者，如來終不說滅盡泥洹之樂。
“There is, monk, having birth, having substance, and having condition, or there is, monk, being without birth, being without substance, and being without condition. Monk, what’s unconditioned and without condition doesn’t have birth, either. If it doesn’t have birth, doesn’t have substance, and doesn’t have condition, then caused birth, caused substance, and caused conditioning are [themselves] said to lack condition. If sentient beings lacked these troubles, the Tathagata would never teach cessation and the happiness of Nirvana.”
I have to admit, “condition” is awkward. The Chinese literally means “having making” and “lacking making,” i.e., what’s made and what’s not made.
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Lovely passage, Thanks CD
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Can it be said, that it exists as experience?
I distinguish nibbana in a couple of ways: for example nibbana as fruit as the eradication of greed, hate and delusion. Also nibbana as meditation experience. I interpret the Udana passage as an attempt to describe the bodhi experience when the mind “takes nibbana as object.” This is always clumsy to describe. But it exists.
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I wonder whether this debate is like trying to determine which side of the coin is the right side. If we take the English word extinguishment it can refer to the extingishment of a process(such as fire) and/or the concept of ‘extinguishment’ which is grasped by the mind.
It’s the same debate with ‘Zero’. Some argue its a place holder and some argue its a number. In a sense they are both right I think. In practical arithmetic it’s a place holder in abstract mathematics it a number.
It’s quite possible that depending on context Nibbana could be referring to extinguishment of bhava or the object of samadhi peculiar to the Ariyas (but not created by the mind) .
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