Re: sati meditation

Dear Ole,

> Now, it happens that Panini records the adverb
> parimukha.m "around the face" in order to explain the derivative
> "paarimukhika" i.e. an attendant or servant who is constantly
watching his masters face (watching his face around the clock so to
speak in orsder to react to his wishes (cf. the term mukhullokika). My
solution to this passage is that it has to be seen in the context of a
servant who is made to attend his master assiduously (parimukha.m). In
fact, I think that the passage means "he lets (his) sati attend upon
(him) assiduously". This is important because upa.t.thaa generally
means to attend upon and upa.t.thap is a causative. This means that we
do not have to make dubious assumptions about te meaning of upa.t.thap
in this particular passage, meaning that are not attested elsewhere.
>>

I had a look at S.C. Vasu's translation and interpretation of Panini's
sutra (4.4.29 parimukha.m ca.) that you speak of. In addition to the
above interpretation of 'paarimukhika', there is another one given
that is quite the opposite: "a servant who always avoids the face of
his master". It depends on whether one interprets the prefix 'pari' as
avoidance or all around. 'parimukha.m' is said to be an indeclinable
(avyayiihhaava) compound. Because both 'pari' and 'mukha' each have a
number of possible meanings by themselves, putting the two together
significantly increases the number of possible interpretations and it
would be up to the well-informed reader to sift and sort it out. In
addition to 'face' and 'mouth' for 'mukha', there is also 'head' which
can be taken metaphorically as the meditation-subject and we can come
up with: "having established mindfulness around the
meditation-subject" (one of the 21) or "having caused mindfulness to
attend to the meditation-subject". This seems to agree with the
commentarial "kamma.t.thaanaabhimukha.m sati.m .thapayitvaa" (having
caused sati to stand in the presence of the meditation-subject).

Best wishes,
Jim

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