Buddhist Studies: lists of lists, definitions defined and translations translated…

img_2116If there’s anything more annoying, as a Buddhist Studies MA student, than having to memorize lists of lists after lists full of lists from the annals of the ancients, it’s having to plow through the re-definitions of all those terms from the mouths of the moderns (is ‘anals’ a word?). This is not high scholarship. This is the business of busy-work, the intellectual equivalent of keeping that shovel moving to justify your union job, or to keep your position as the arbiter of privilege in the fan-boy chat-pages of Facebook…

Yet that’s what they all do, in the Western Lands, at least, and even in the temples, too, as if only one new definition ‘changes everything’, so that the Pali/Sanskrit word ‘dukkha‘ is no longer merely ‘suffering’ but ‘stress’, ‘anguish, ‘dissatisfaction’, or maybe even just ‘a spot of unpleasantness’ so easily resolved by following that Yellow Brick Road known as the 8FP, Eight-fold Path, when the reality is not so easy at all…

And the Asians do it, too, both then and now, one of the most prominent current Thai Forest monks, (and one of the few fluent English speakers of the Thai lot BTW) teaching that ‘mindfulness’ is nothing other than ‘the ability to stop your thinking’, which it may or may not be, given the total lack, or confusion, of many definitions, perhaps explaining why the redefining of them is so common, and perhaps even so necessary. After all, how do we know what a word that is 2-3000 years old really meant back in the day long gone by?

And therein lies the conundrum, that redefining the language involves re-interpreting the past, and the world. But a word like ‘mindfulness’, of course, is nothing other than a modern English ‘woo-woo’ word, probably best defined literally as the opposite of ‘mindlessness’, so what we really want is the correct definition of sati, which is the original Pali/Sanskrit form which we are dealing with…

My theory is that if any modern language has had the same word in common everyday use since time immemorial, then that is the best clue to the original meaning. Ironically sati in modern standard Thai, the above-mentioned Thai senior monk’s native language, means nothing like ‘to stop thinking’, but more like to ‘be conscious’ (as if having lost consciousness) or have a ‘mind’ (that is maybe ‘not so good’, to quote a popular song by Carabao, the Beatles of Thailand)…

Enter the ‘woo-woo’ factor, in which words take on meaning just for the purpose of religious symbolism, or intent, or (drum-roll here): mahketing, dahling. Wonder what dukkha means in that same modern language? Take a wild guess: right, suffering. And this happens all the time, even way back when, such that Pali/Sanskrit words like samsara over time came to mean ‘cyclic existence’ for the ‘re-birthing’ purposes of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism…

…even though originally it meant ‘the world’ (as it still means in modern standard Nepali/Gorkhali, the language most directly descended from Pali/Sanskrit), from an aboriginal meaning that apparently referred to ‘wandering’, all of which makes sense, as most religions are fond of renouncing the ‘world’, but in this sense converted to a world of time as more appropriate than space…

But I don’t blame the ancients, as they had no science, and language was nascent. The fact that Indians had logical deduction equal to the Greeks is notable (even if their induction was minimal, and they violated the ‘law of excluded middle’ systematically with their tetralemmas/catuskotis. And their feats of doctrine and dhyana were enough to impress the Chinese many times over, even if they were far more negligent with dates and the act of actually writing words down…

But in math the Indians wowed while others bowed, their invention of the zero—shunya—one of the greatest feats of invention our civilization has ever accomplished, and something it took the others centuries to accomplish, even though all they had to do at that point was to copy the Indians! (Just like the rest of Europe taking over 100 years to warm up to the Brits’ Industrial Revolution) I guess it wasn’t so obvious then as it seems now. Actually creating history is much harder than simply reconstructing it…

And what about those lists of lists I was talking about? How’s this for starters? 2 selves, 3 jewels, 3 criteria of a correct sign, 3 marks of existence, 3 realms of cyclic existence, 3 ‘naturelessnesses’, 3 doors of liberation, 3 progressive levels, 4 noble truths, 4 ‘immeasurables’, 4 faults, 4 conditions, 4 Maras, 4 elements, 4 meditative absorptions, 4 dark + 4 light practices, 5 skandhas, 5 paths, 5 super-knowledges, 5 obstructions, 5 hindrances (to meditation), 6 perfections (prajna-paramita)…

…6 consciousnesses, 6 elements, 6 recollections. 6 ornaments of the world, 8 anecdotes, 8 errors, the 8-fold path, 8 worldly concerns, 8 similes of illusoriness, 9 mental states, 9 levels, 9 external uglinesses, 11 kinds of living beings, 12 links of Dependent Oorigination, 12 sources (6 consciousnesses + 6 objects of consciousness), 12 branches (of writings), 16 aspects, 20 secondary afflictions, and that’s just the short list!!! Whew! Who knew that Buddhism was so thorough?

It’s largely illusory, though, of course. When confronted with the fact of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian ‘book’, i.e. the Bible, Torah, or Qur’an, Buddhists like to comment that they have thousands of books, as if that is preferable, but I’m not so sure. It seems as if the ancient Indian lack of specificity is enduring, which is maybe not so surprising given that the Aryan y-DNA genome is closer to the modern Slavic one more than any other…

But that’s a different subject altogether—except that ‘Arya’ is another of those shape-shifting words, which once described the light-skinned ‘conquerors’ before it came to mean ‘noble’, through a process not well-defined or articulated, though it certainly consolidated the decline of the previous and highly developed Indus Valley Civilization, and possibly set into motion a chain of events which culminated with the simultaneous establishment of three new religions—and the permanent subjugation of that previous civilization…