SuttaCentral
I look forward to your essay Bhante!
I take your point on the AN passage, and your analogy is apt, but I don’t see how it applies to the Snp passage, which seems to unambiguously imply a controversy “some say, others say” and an ignorance of who is in the right (although the “claiming to be experts” has a certain tone imv.)
DN 1 links the immaterial attainments with the annihilationists, so perhaps what we are looking at here. Annihilationist Brahmins, and perhaps that’s what the Buddha’s former teachers were. An agama text certainly suggests that Uddaka was one.
Uddaka Rāmaputta had this view and taught like this, “Existence is an illness, a tumour, a thorn. Those who advocate nonperception are foolish. Those who have realized [know]: this is tranquil, this is sublime, namely attaining the sphere of neither-perception-nor-nonperception.”
The Discourse on Uddaka [Rāmaputta] - MĀ 114
I would also note that while DN1 runs though the immaterial attainments up to neither perception nor non perception, and the jhanas up to 4th jhana in the next section on present life extinguishment, it does not list cessation of perception and feeling as a meditative attainment, which in fact does not occur in the whole of the Sīlakkhandhavagga.
Cessation of perception and feeling also does not occur in the first 2 vaggas of MN, including MN8 which gives the jhanas and the attainments up to nothingness.
So in the first 2 lists of meditative states given in the first 2 Nikayas of the canon, DN1 and MN8, saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ is not mentioned, Snp4.11, if it is referring to saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ equivocates with “some say” and AN9.36 refrains from an analysis of either saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ or nevasaññānāsaññāyatana (similar to MN8)
I take @sujato 's point that these attainments, being very subtle and abstruse, are perhaps too refined for “the standard curricula”, but it does seem like at least a possibility that in the case of saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ it is simply a later addition to the meditative arsenal, not attested in the earliest texts.
the suttas don’t mention ātman at all.
and DN doesn’t mention anattā either.
the first 2 vagga of MN don’t either except to say that anatta is wrong view:
When they attend improperly in this way, one of the following six views arises in them and is taken as a genuine fact.
Tassa evaṁ ayoniso manasikaroto channaṁ diṭṭhīnaṁ aññatarā diṭṭhi uppajjati.The view: ‘My self exists in an absolute sense.’
‘Atthi me attā’ti vā assa saccato thetato diṭṭhi uppajjati;The view: ‘My self does not exist in an absolute sense.’ ‘
natthi me attā’ti vā assa saccato thetato diṭṭhi uppajjati;The view: ‘I perceive the self with the self.’
‘attanāva attānaṁ sañjānāmī’ti vā assa saccato thetato diṭṭhi uppajjati;The view: ‘I perceive what is not-self with the self.’
‘attanāva anattānaṁ sañjānāmī’ti vā assa saccato thetato diṭṭhi uppajjati;The view: ‘I perceive the self with what is not-self.’
‘anattanāva attānaṁ sañjānāmī’ti vā assa saccato thetato diṭṭhi uppajjati;Or they have such a view:
atha vā panassa evaṁ diṭṭhi hoti:‘This self of mine is he who speaks and feels and experiences the results of good and bad deeds in all the different realms. This self is permanent, everlasting, eternal, and imperishable, and will last forever and ever.’
‘yo me ayaṁ attā vado vedeyyo tatra tatra kalyāṇapāpakānaṁ kammānaṁ vipākaṁ paṭisaṁvedeti so kho pana me ayaṁ attā nicco dhuvo sassato avipariṇāmadhammo sassatisamaṁ tatheva ṭhassatī’ti.This is called a misconception, the thicket of views, the desert of views, the trick of views, the evasiveness of views, the fetter of views.
Idaṁ vuccati, bhikkhave, diṭṭhigataṁ diṭṭhigahanaṁ diṭṭhikantāraṁ diṭṭhivisūkaṁ diṭṭhivipphanditaṁ diṭṭhisaṁyojanaṁ.
Thank you for the references. Here is what I presume is the mention in the Pārāyanavagga that Bhante @Sujato mentioned above:
“Look upon the world as empty,
“Suññato lokaṁ avekkhassu,
Mogharājā, ever mindful.
Mogharāja sadā sato;
Having uprooted the view of self,
Attānudiṭṭhiṁ ūhacca,
you may thus cross over death.
Evaṁ maccutaro siyā;
That’s how to look upon the world
Evaṁ lokaṁ avekkhantaṁ,
so the King of Death won’t see you.”
Maccurājā na passatī”ti.
SNP5.16
And just while we are at it, I think that a lot of us moderns take the “atta” to be a kind of identity and that obscures the equally important aspect of atman as power that is the contention wasn’t just that Atman was “who I really am” it was that Atman had the capacity for Brahman, that Atman was that which “animated” life, so that Atman was a substance that could realize freedom, that could exert power over the appearances of things, that is why for example in MN35 the Buddha gives the argument about the king who could chop off someones head, and how the atman cannot in fact make forms be what it wants them to be (permanent, happy etc)
It’s weird that in the case of MN35 it is a Jain who defends the notion of Atman, but there are a lot of weird things about MN35 so whatever.
(btw, if you put to one side MN35 then anattā doesn’t occur in the first 100 suttas of MN. the other places it occurs in MN are MN109 and MN148 btw. MN148 gives a pretty good and sustained critique of the idea of Atman as a kind of permanent substrate in which phenomena have their root)
You are proposing that the Snp was compiled for the purpose of converting brahmans and you assert that there is no material in the Snp that is any older than the bulk of the canon. How do you expect people to evaluate such a claim? One way to evaluate such a claim is to compile a list of what you would expect to find in such a book.
Given the emphasis the canon and Buddhists put on anatta and impermanence, I would expect to find them in the book. They are not there.
Another thing I would expect to find in such a book would be helpful material for debates with experts in Brahmanism. These experts would very likely be the people you say believed in Atman and it would be of paramount importance in their soteriology. . Another reason to expect anatta and the apologetics around it to appear.
You say somewhere in this thread that if you were in a conversation with a physicist and expressed surprise about the fact that he did not mention some bizarre aspect of quantum mechanics that would be ridiculous because they talk about a lot of things. If I met the physicist at a cocktail party I would expect small talk. If I met them at a convention on quantum theory, I would expect talk about the cutting edge of quantum theory.
The absence of material on anatta and impermanence is surprising, in other words, improbable for a book to be used for conversion of brahmans unless the material did not exist, in which case it would be expected.
I honestly don’t understand this insistence on anattā for converting Brahmins. Surely it’s a better strategy to focus on points of agreement (and departure) when trying to convert people, no?
Why would anyone convert if both systems taught the same thing? Ultimately, someone converts because of the differences and the reasons given for thinking one system’s differences are better or correct. Anatta is literally the antithesis of Atman and merging into the Atman was the culmination of the soteriology of many brahmas at the time. What would be a better way to refute or discredit Atman than to provide the arguments that there is no Atman? That is anatta. This is a very important point of departure.
Not very good even after you edited it? I have often wondered why you kept his translation up after your own was published. If there is any book in the canon that deserves to be translated by a qualified translator, the Snp is probably it. Perhaps if there are specific texts that you recommend people not to rely on then those could be removed.
I mean, it’s no worse than lots of other translations. I fixed up some of the most obvious mistakes, but where it clearly expressed Mill’s intention, I left it as-is. It is not my intention to impose my judgement on what makes a good translation, so long as it has integrity. Mills’ work was intended to focus on creating a more elegant and “poetic” form of translation. This is a valuable kind of translation project. But the output of such a work can’t be trivially compared with a different translation project of different aims. How successful he is at his poetic vision, I will leave for others to judge. But if someone wants to understand the specific sense of a controversial line, it is not the version I would recommend.
I think I may have made a mistake on this one. I wonder if anyone knows more about this? The name mahī just means “great one” or perhaps “great mother” so it could easily have been used for multiple rivers.
Mahissati is to the west and a little south. There is a modern river named Mahi there:
I had assumed this was where the Dhaniyasutta was set. But this doesn’t fit with the Mahī described in the Suttas (sn45.96:1.1):
“Mendicants, all the great rivers—that is, the Ganges, Yamunā, Aciravatī, Sarabhū, and Mahī—slant, slope, and incline towards the east.
I just noticed, Ven Bodhi distinguishes the two, in note 1502 to the translation of the Selasutta commentary:
Gaṅgāya pana yā uttarena āpo, tāsaṃ avidūrattā uttarāpo ti pi vuccati. Though Pj II uses the
word gaṅgā, the river intended, as will be seen, is not the Ganges but another of the five great
rivers. This river is also distinct from the Mahī River that originates in Madhya Pradesh and
flows into the Arabian Sea.
Thus the commentary says that Anguttarapana was north of the Mahī, which would mean it must be the modern Kosi:
This would fit with the context of the Dhaniyasutta, where the environs are threatening and dangerous. The Kosi is called “the sorrow of Bihar” for its capricious and dangerous nature.
But the descriptions of these rivers does not seem to be internally consistent? Or am I just floating hapless on a raft, grasping at straws? And mincing metaphors?
On the one hand, they flow into the ocean:
When the great rivers—the Ganges, the Yamunā, the Aciravatī, the Sarabhū, or the Mahī—reach the ocean, they lose their former names and become known simply as the ocean.
On the other hand, they converge with each other:
Mendicants, there are places where the great rivers—the Ganges, Yamuna, Aciravatī, Sarabhū, and Mahī—come together and converge.
The Yamunā, Sarabhū and Aciravatī do indeed flow into the Ganges, and likely the Mahī too. But how can they both converge with the Ganges and flow into the ocean??? 
Which is…?
Fwiw, Law’s Geography of Early Buddhism says that the Mahi is a tributary of the Gandaka ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Unfortunately the claim isn’t cited, so make of it what you will
Greetings, bhante! 
Do you have any thoughts on Bhikkhu Kaṭukurunde Ñāṇananda/Bhikkhu Anālayo’s reading of this passage as referring to Nibbāna and/or the emptiness-samādhi of the arahants?
The reasoning being that the sutta clearly builds to this referring to the freedom from dukkha and Nibbāna—it would be rather anti-climactic if it built all this way to nevasaññānāsaññā or a transient meditation attainment—especially because it is being proposed as the place where “happines and suffering disappear.”
Then, it seems that the questioner—still not a sotāpanna—misunderstands, and asks if that freedom is the highest purity of the soul/spirit. It seems that they still would have interpreted this either in terms of eternalism/existence, or as some kind of annihilation/destruction. The sutta concludes by saying that the sage does not get stuck into these ideas of eternalism/purity of the soul, nor in annihilation and non-existence. Rather, they know their dependency, and as such, are freed from them. It reads as a kind of comment/correction on the above passage which climaxes as the reference to freedom. It also mentions the cessation of papañcasaññāsaṅkhā, which would again relate to the arahant who is nippapañca.
Similarly, the Aṭṭhakavagga makes a lot of references to fully comprehending and transcending perception, and the relationship of perception to views/disputes/freedom from said views via its transcendence. It would make a lot of sense that perception would feature here again as a major theme in a somewhat cryptic way—the arahant still has perception, and yet they have completely transcended it.
It would make sense that the questioner would mistake this for some other form of high meditation attainment or eternalism because he uses a term about purity of the spirit known at the time that referred to such perception attainments. (For instance, AN 10.29 - Kosala S.) Clearly, the reference went over his head and he had to be corrected about these notions of existence and self. Bhante Ñāṇadīpa rendered the final stanzas as:
(Note: He left this footnote on the existence line:
“This line is problematic, I translate to give a fitting meaning. Sameti and bhavābhavāya could be taken differently”)
This seems to make sense coming from the perspective of the closing lines as well
Would love to hear your opinion 
Much mettā!
O yes. I have quite an extensive discussion of this passage. TBH I struggled with it, even after many years, and it was only when writing my introduction to it a couple of weeks ago that I finally felt like I understood it.
You may be disappointed!
One thing though that became clear to me in the Atthakavagga as a whole. It is for the most part addressed to the “rationalist” philosophers, not to the contemplatives. Obviously there are exceptions, this being one of them. But as a rule, in the Atthakavagga, meditation is only discussed rarely and was not a central practice for the ascetics who the Buddha was engaging with here. It’s in the Parayanavagga that meditation comes to the fore.
I have come across two further details that, I believe, add additional context for the southern origins.
The first is the unusual presence of the gīti (or “old āryā”) style of metre in the Suttanipāta. This is found in only three Jain suttas in Ardhamagadhi and three suttas in the Pali, namely the Mettasutta ([snp1.8]), the Tuvaṭakasutta ([snp4.14]), and the verses of homage in the Upālisutta ([mn56]).
According to Norman, when the Vedic peoples arrived in northern India with their chanted verses some centuries before the Buddha, these melded with the more musical poetic singing of the local Dravidian peoples to give rise to new families of poetic styles. This innovation was ongoing during the period of composition of the Pali canon, and is responsible for the diverse metrical styles in the Suttanipāta (K.R. Norman, “The Origins of the Āryā Metre”, in Buddhist Philosophy and Culture (Essays in honour of N.A. Jayawickrema), Colombo 1987, pp. 203–214). The gīti is the oldest example of this transition. Given that extent examples stem from either Magadha or Mahārāṣṭra, Norman postulates that the style arose somewhere between Magadha and Mahārāṣṭra. And that would locate it in Avantī.
There is a further southern connection hidden in the origins of the “dark hermit” Asita ([snp3.11]). The Pali does not say where he is from, but the parallels in both the Mahāvastu and the Nidānakathā place him in the south. Other “dark hermits” of a similar character are elsewhere said to hail from the south as well.