Re: sutta 7: the vaggas

Dear Sarah,

>Citta....This is very interesting. It seems that when
>we use 'citta' we often use it as combining all three
>meanings, i.e. to know, to accumulate and to create a
>picture....it's very complex. Perhaps we could say
>that in the different contexts, there is a different
>emphasis? I'll follow up your refs when I have time.

'Citta' is turning out to be quite complicated word! Maybe it would be
easier to think of 'citta' in the meaning of 'it knows (distinctly)' as the
main one and to think of the other two meanings as supplementary ones to
think about. If it were all in Sanskrit, this would not work so well as we
would have to use the spelling 'citra' for the last two meanings. But Pali
homonymy makes it possible to speak of all three cittas as if they were the
same word when in fact they're derived from 3 separate roots.

I'm really unclear about 'citta' in the third meaning relating to
picture/painting. The problem is with the other meanings such as
'variegated' and Amara's 'intricate'. Which comes earlier? Did the notion of
picture come out of the idea of intricateness or was it the other way
around? I should point out that 'creating/painting a picture' is only one
interpretation of 'cittakara.na'. Another one is 'make/render
variegated/intricate/elaborate'.

Is it citta because of its intricateness or because of its picture-nature?
Is is citta because of its nature of making intricate or because of its
nature of creating a picture?

<snip (for Amara)>

>Jim, thanks also for enclosing the good article from
>the other pali list... well, we both clocked up many
>years of latin at school and I'm wondering how, apart
>from understanding the noun declensions more easily,
>it helps and what Latin and Pali/Sanskrit originally
>had in common? (v.brief is fine...) This is the sort
>of info I hear and forget and ask again 5 or 10yrs
>later!

I took three years of Latin in high-school and that was over 35 years ago!
I've long thought of Greek and Latin as being the Western counterparts of
Sanskrit and Pali. I have studied a bit of classical Greek and notice that
it is more elaborate than Latin with similarities to Sanskrit. One thing
they all have in common is that they are quite old languages not normally
spoken nowadays. How else a knowledge of Latin can help one in learning
Pali is something I haven't thought about before and too a hard one for me
to answer in a short time.

These languages including English all belong to the same family of
Indo-European languages and it is thought that they originally come from one
common ancestral language now extinct (at least on the terrestrial plane).

Best wishes,
Jim