Re: Question on Sabhiya sutta commentary

On 8 May 2012 10:36, Bryan Levman <bryan.levman@...> wrote:

**
>   Following up on evarūpena attanā bhavitabban, I looked up von Hinuber's
> reference to Renou in the latter's Grammaire Sanscrite. He calls it the
> instrumental prédicatif and gives the meaning as "en tant que" (as much
> as), en qualité de (in the quality of), et à l'instar de ("following the
> example of," "like,").
>
>
> That would then give a translation of "The self must be like such a form"
> or "The self follows the example of such a form" or "The self must be as
> much as that form (is)".
>
Thanks very much for taking the trouble to look this up Bryan: it is very
interesting and helpful.  I think what Renou is describing here as the
"predicative inst." is what Wijesekera calls "the inst. of attendant
circumstances" or better still "the inst. of description" (which, he says,
can be categorised broadly into designations of manner and quality,
parallel to Latin abl, modi et qualitatis).

But does the Hinuber/Renou reference concern just this predicative use of
the instrumental as such - or does it also specifically refer to its
collocation with bhavitabba.m?  And if the latter, then is bhavitabba.m
understood to be functioning 'copulatively' for the inst. predicate?  And
do they say anything about the possible senses of an fpp 'copula'?

Because this was the point that was slightly bugging me; but I *think* that
I.m clear on it now.

In the Nikaaya examples cited earlier, instr. + bhavitabba.m clearly had
the common fpp sense of 'obligation/necessity': "it is necessary that/one
is obliged to/one should".  We could call this the sense of "ethical
necessity".  But as we've discussed, in our proposition, "evarūpena attanā
bhavitabban", that sense doesn't make much sense.  (E.g., * "Of such a form
the self should be/is obliged to be".)

But the sense that we all seem to be thinking, here, is rather: "it must be
the case thatiIt is necessarily the case that", which we could call the
sense of "logical necessity".  (I.e., "It is necessarily the case that/It
must be the case that the self is of such a form".)  What I was curious
about was whether bhavitabba.m can be (and is) used in Paali with this
sense of "logical necessity".  One way to find out is to do a digital
search of the canon - which I've done, but it's going to take some time to
sift through all the hundreds of instances!  If there were even one more
independent example, it would be nice.  Probably someone already can point
to one.


> I did not take na attapaccakkhāni the way you did, Lance, with atta in a
> positive sense ("they are not a direct experience of a Self"), but in a
> negative sense as dependencies
> on [conventional designation and inverted perception],
> which are "not evident to the self." i.e. the person creates a self
> without mindfulness, by false perception and previous bad habits, and
> therefore has no control over it; in other words a self is created out of
> ignorance. I think the compound would support both interpretations,
> although I favour treating atta the same way in both phrases
>
>
I thought Lance was reading attapaccakkhāni in the 'conventional',
'idiomatic' sense, " they are not one's own direct knowledge/ direct
experience (of a Self)", which is why I parenthesised "(of a Self)" when I
quoted him.  But maybe you're right, Bryan; in which case, I think I'd
personally prefer just the ordinary idiomatic reading here.  (But maybe the
writer was making a bit of a pun!)

With metta,
Khristos


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