Re: Question on Sabhiya sutta commentary

Just to save you any bother...  If this is right, then I didn’t need to
look very far for an answer to my question.  In the comm. to DN 2 (PTS D I
153-155), which reports the doctrine of Makkhali Gosāla, who preached a
kind of deterministic ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ (niyati) without free
will/agency, the commentator sums up the doctrine with:



yena hi yathā bhavitabbaṃ, so tatheva bhavati. yena na bhavitabbaṃ, so na
bhavatīti dasseti.



My two parallel readings of this, to underline how this surely would have
to be an example of the ‘logical necessity’ sense of bhavitabbaṃ:



(1) He points out: “In whatever way it must be, just that way it
is/becomes/happens.  In whatever way it must not (cannot) be, that is
not/does not become/does not happen.”


(2) He points out:  “Whatever must (necessarily) be the case, just that is
the case; whatever necessarily cannot be the case, that is not the case.”

I think that can suffice for me as evidence of what I needed to see.
Thanks, Bryan, for helping me to clarify the point to myself.

Metta, Kh.


On 8 May 2012 13:11, Khristos Nizamis <nizamisk@...> wrote:

> 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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