Re: Sn 1055 panujja viññāṇaṃ bhave na tiṭṭhe

I have just come back from a visit to Northern Ireland with no email;
so I enjoyed reading this interesting discussion as a whole.

Here are some points:

1. I don't think Nidd II intends to interpret panujja as an imperative.
Rather it is giving an explanation:
having dispelled implies a prior instruction to dispel:
"whatever you understand thoroughly, <you should dispel>. Having
dispelled it, . . ."

2. Pj II and Nidd-a do see these as alternative explanations, probably
because Nidd II in its list of synonyms gives panujja as an imperative.
Perhaps also because they saw it as a wordplay in verse. As a possible
form I don't see any major problem with this. The author(s) of Nidd
probably knew a great deal more Pali literature than we do. We can
either interpret it as Bryan does i.e. as coming from a Sanskrit verbal
form or view it as a Middle Indic use of active forms with a passive stem.

3. The commentators sometimes miss rare forms such as tiṭṭhe as a
possible 2nd singular. That will be part of why Norman takes the view he
does. Still it doesn't seem the natural reading of the line.

4. I take the reference in Nidd to abhisaṅkhāraviññāṇa as a way of
saying that what is meant here is not abyākatacitta i.e. active
meditation is what is referred to.

5. In older Pali verse the sixth syllable of a tuṭṭhubha pāda is
sometimes long; so I don't think there is a metrical problem.

6. I do not believe the syntactical problem is crucial. Sometimes, if
rarely, we do get an absolutive whose subject is different to the main
verb. Here however, the implied subject of the absolutive is 'you' but
of course 'you' are in a sense your consciousness. So the logical
subject remains the same. And in meditative terms as has been pointed
out, a shift to a more impersonal mode is appropriate here.

7. Overall, I would see Bhikkhu Bodhi's interpretation where viññāṇa is
the subject of the main verb as the most natural way of taking the last
pāda.

Lance Cousins