Dear Venerable sir, and friends,

>> Why the assumption that it is a only a Mahayana concept ? I think
> that
>> several of the 18 Schools also held this opinion.

Sure, of course... I was only thinking about modern day, when
Buddhists still do hold this opinion - and to be fair, the average
Thai person holds there to be an antarabhava. They call it "vinyaan"
or "sambhavesi"... what I don't get is how this "antarabhava" is
different from a "bhava". In fact, it is a bhava... there is no
difference, because the five aggregates exist for such a being. This
is why I think it is important to clear up the idea that the Buddha
taught about an antarabhava... it seems silly... please explain.

> In this kind of case, where we are clearly dealing with a very old
> term, the etymology or the history of the word must be traced
> through the texts older than the Nikayas, primarily the Vedas: this
> tells us where the word is coming from (and as i mentioned, in this
> case this is an exceedingly interesting story). Here the connection
> is obviously with Vedic gandharva, and any etymology based on gam-,
> etc., is spurious. The commentarial explanations tell us only where
> the word is going. That has its interest, in that it shows us how
> the schools fitted Vedic, pre-rational, mythic concepts into a
> rationalist Buddhist understanding of rebirth.

Sorry, I don't understand why an etymology based on gam+tabba or
ganth+tabba is spurious... The point I was trying to make is that we
may not be dealing with the word "gandhabba" at all, no matter where
it came from, but actually the root gam or gantha... if the passage
had said "gamaniiyo paccupatthito hoti" would that have not made
sense? That the Visuddhimagga commentatator explains gamaniiyo as
gandhabbo suggests to me that this was an accepted grammatical form of
"gam", and it may be that the idea of an antarabhava came as a result
of confusing a simple grammatical structure with, as you say, a very
old mythic concept of a creature waiting to be reborn... or please
explain to me why this is not feasible.

Thank you for your time in responding to my post. Respectfully,

Yuttadhammo