Re: Article on the Uraga verses (Sn 1 –17)

Dear Dhivan,

Thank you for your reply. I found the publication data about your interesting paper on the Uraga verses at the foot of the electronic version you sent on this discussion board. It was there all along. This was similar to the way my mother used to say, when I could not find my baseball glove: “Just open your big beautiful eyes.” I would look around the room again, and there it was thrown carelessly on a chair or lying forlorn in the closet. So in this case, I opened my eyes, and there was the information I needed.

Perhaps a year ago I already found your paper on the term "khaggavisāna" and cited it in my “Guide to the Suttas” of the Suttanipāta volume. Between the two interpretations, I came out in favor of khaggavisāna as meaning “the horn of the rhinoceros” rather than the rhinoceros itself. My first reason was that a text as old as the Cūḷaniddesa explains it in that way, and thus I think there must have been an ancient exegesis on the compound that was passed down to the authors of the Niddesa. My second reason was that other texts, Buddhist and from other traditions, use the word khagga to mean a rhinoceros, but apparently no texts from an equally archaic period show khaggavisāna being used to denote the animal.

Thus the Jātakas several times mention khagga as a kind of animal, presumably the rhinoceros. This occurs at Ja V 416,20, V 538,2, VI 497,12, and VI 578,24. At Ja VI 277,27, we find the gloss, palāsādā ti khaggamigā, which assumes that the reader was familiar with khagga as the name of an animal. The Milindapañha (at Mil 23,20–31) describes King Milinda, on encountering Nāgasena and his entourage, as “frightened, terrified, and agitated … like an elephant surrounded by rhinoceroses” (Milindo rājā khaggaparivārito viya gajo … bhīto ubbiggo utrasto saṃviggo lomahaṭṭhajāto vimano dummano bhantacitto vipariṇatamānaso). The Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (Macdonell and Keith, 1:214) states: “Khaḍga is the reading in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā of the name of an animal which, in the text of the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā, variously appears as Khaṅga and Khaḍga. The rhinoceros seems clearly to be meant.” Thus if khagga is the rhinoceros, then khaggavisāṇa is the horn of that animal. I see no particular problem with the verb care, “to live, to move, to wander,” for the point of the simile is not that one should live solitary as a rhinoceros horn lives solitary but that, just as a rhinoceros horn is solitary, so one should live solitary. Pāli verse can allow such oblique similes.

In texts of a later period, like the Apadāna Commentary, khaggavisāṇa is explained as both the animal and its horn. Thus Ap-a I 133,32 and Ap-a I 153,4–5 echo the Niddesa, taking the expression to refer to the horn. But Ap-a I 203,6–7 proposes the alternative derivation: Khagga­visāṇa­kappo ti khaggena rukkhādayo chindanto viya sakasiṅgena pabbatādayo cuṇṇavicuṇṇaṃ kurumāno vicaratīti khaggavisāṇo…. Khaggaṃ viyāti khaggaṃ. Khaggaṃ visāṇaṃ yassa migassa so ’yaṃ migo khaggavisāṇo (“Khaggavisāṇa: It roams around pulverizing mountains, etc., as if cutting trees, etc., with a sword…. ‘Sword’ means like a sword. The animal whose horn is [like] a sword is a rhinoceros.”) But this is a pretty late commentary. I have not found any canonical text, or ancient Skt text, that unambiguously uses khaggavisāṇa (or a corresponding form) to designate the animal. I would be curious if you know of such a passage—though it’s too late to change the introduction to the Suttanipāta, which is already in the page proofs stage.

I do think the refrain of the Uraga verses refers to a bhikkhu who has become an arahant. This is the typical pattern of the Buddha’s teachings, also in verse: to set up arahantship as the ideal and to show in the preceding lines or passage what must be accomplished to achieve it. If we follow your interpretation, then the monk who dispels anger, eliminates lust, etc., would become one like the monk in the Dārukkhandha Sutta, who avoids the two shores (the two sets of āyatanas) during his process of training in order to reach the ocean of nibbāna. That would mean the verse culminates in the sekha rather than in the asekha. I take the verses to be saying that the monk who accomplishes the feat described in the first couplet has become an arahant and therefore on passing away attains the nibbāna element without residue. This I see to be indicated in the refrain, which means (on alternative interpretations) that he fully abandons the internal and external āyatanas (not just trains to avoid them) and abandons this world and any world beyond. The latter echoes the line n’ev’idha na huraṃ na ubhayamantarena, or the stick that does not fall on either its tip or its bottom. They both amount to the same thing, the utter and ultimate bhavanirodha through attainment of the anupādisesa nibbānadhātu.

On the question of nondualism and ontology, while I don’t think the early teachings deliberately set out to posit an ontology (which would run counter to the pragmatic purpose of the Dhamma), they do operate with a polarity between the conditioned and the unconditioned, a polarity that (in my view) has ontological overtones. In support I could cite the familiar Udāna passages, ‘‘Atthi, bhikkhave, tadāyatanaṃ …” (§71) and “Atthi, bhikkhave, ajātaṃ abhūtaṃ akataṃ asaṅkhataṃ” (§73). If the ontological implications of these passages is in question, consider too the contrast drawn at AN 3:47 (I 152) between the conditioned and the unconditioned: the conditioned is marked by arising, passing away, and change through persistence (uppādo paññāyati, vayo paññāyati, ṭhitassa aññathattaṃ paññāyati); the unconditioned by no arising, no passing away, and no change through persistence (na uppādo paññāyati, na vayo paññāyati, na ṭhitassa aññathattaṃ paññāyati). Interestingly, the use of the verb paññāyati seems to push the passage away from a positional ontology toward a more phenomenological stance. As to what is subject to arising, passing away, and change, the answer is given by SN 22:37: Rūpassa kho, āvuso, uppādo paññāyati, vayo paññāyati, ṭhitassa aññathattaṃ paññāyati. Vedanāya… saññāya… saṅkhārānaṃ… viññāṇassa uppādo paññāyati, vayo paññāyati, ṭhitassa aññathattaṃ paññāyati. That which does not share these characteristics must be something outside the five aggregates, and that would be nibbāna.

 I do not see that SN 22:81 removes the distinction between the conditioned and the unconditioned (if that was your point). As I understand it, this sutta (like many others) shows simply that the practitioner who eradicates clinging attains arahantship. The arahant, of course, continues to live on and to experience the world of phenomena as long as the body lasts, but he/she does not conceive things through the filters of “I,” “mine,” and “my self.” During the course of life, the arahant retains the six sense faculties, which in ordinary experience engage with the phenomenal world of forms, sounds, odors, and so forth. But the arahant (and perhaps an ariyan at a more elementary stage) also has access to a unique meditative attainment where all sensory experience drops away and even the objective realms of the jhānas and arūpa attainments are transcended. This is a samādhi that takes nibbāna itself as its objective sphere. Then, with the breakup of the arahant’s body, the entire world of phenomenal experience comes to an irreversible end, superseded by the nibbāna element without residue.  

With metta,

Bhikkhu Bodhi

P.S. I will have very little internet access over the next two months, so my ability to continue this conversation will be curtailed perhaps until the middle of March.

 

Dear Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bryan Levman,

Many thanks to both Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bryan for your astute and helpful comments on my Uraga verses article. I did not suppose I had totally solved the problems of interpretation presented by the pada, so bhikkhu jahāti orapāraṃ, but it is good to read both your positive approval and some constructive further ideas. Ven Bodhi, the reference for my article is:

Dhivan Thomas Jones (2016), ‘That bhikkhu lets go both the near and far shores’: meaning and metaphor in the refrain from the uraga verses’, Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 11: 71–107.

I did not know that you have been working on a translation of the Sutta-nipāta and its commentary. This is very good news. May I just mention in this context another article by me:

Dhivan Thomas Jones (2015), 'Like the Rhinoceros, or Like Its Horn? The Problem of Khaggavisāṇa Revisited’, Buddhist Studies Review, 31.2:175–78.

I expect you can guess what this article is about! I would be happy to send a copy if it would be of interest. 

In relation to Ven Bodhi’s comments, I was positively drawn by the thought that the pada so bhikkhu jahāti orapāraṃ is more equivocal than I had allowed, i.e., perhaps meaning both that the bhikkhu lets go the internal and external sense bases and also that the bhikkhu gives us this world and the next. In fact, as you yourself suggest, it is possible to explicitly link these two interpretations, in that the bhikkhu who has in this life given up the internal and external sense bases can, at the break up of the body, give up this world and the next.

However, I was not entirely convinced by the idea that that we should understand the pada so bhikkhu jahāti orapāraṃ to refer to the arahant, nor that we should read the uraga stanzas as a whole to apply only to the arahant. The commentary on them does not do so either. It would seem more likely, I would have thought, to read them as follows (to use the English translation of the first stanza for convenience):

One who controls anger when it has arisen

as if treating with remedies a snake’s spread venom –

that bhikkhu lets go both the near and far shores

like a serpent its worn-out old skin. 

This might be read to mean: ‘The practitioner who controls anger (and so on) (as an active exercise in accordance with the dharma) lets go of the near and far shores’ – by practising in accordance with the dharma there is the resulting possibility of transcending the duality of internal & external sense bases / this world and the next world’. This would surely suggest that the stanzas present exercises to be practised, in the rhetorical mode of (proleptically) invoking aspects of the non-dual experience of the arahant.

Certainly in this sense the Dārukkhandasutta presents the simile of the stream of the dharma for the sekha as you say. However, does it present an ‘injunction’ (‘an authoritative order or warning’)? Doesn’t it rather present a contemplative exercise for the sekha to practise? In this connection, I would agree that, by comparison, the stanza at Dhp 385 is much more like a way of putting the insight of an arahant, and indeed this is also how the commentary presents the intention of the stanza.

Thanks to both Ven Bodhi and Bryan for your reflections on how the uraga stanzas, and other teachings in the Pāli discourses, could be regarded as expressing a ‘non-dual’ perspective. Only after the article was published did I read Ven Bodhi’s notes on S 22:55, in which he interprets the difficult formula no c’assa no ca me siyā na bhavissati na me bhavissati as a contemplative formula inviting the disciple to reflect on how the worldling misconstrues self and world as a duality. Bryan has also pointed out various other cases in which the Buddha’s teaching invites the disciple into seeing how various dualities have been misconstrued. 

It strikes me that this topic is both difficult and important and someone should perhaps write about it more fully. I don’t doubt that it is inappropriate to apply a certain kind of popular non-dualist thinking to early Buddhism. However, just in order to begin the more subtle process of presenting an early Buddhist version of non-dualism in the appropriate context, I would like to present a line of thought again in disagreement with what Ven Bodhi has written. When Ven Bodhi writes of a ‘fundamental ontological distinction between the world of phenomenal experience and ultimate or unconditioned reality’ in his message to me, I am not entirely convinced that this is the only or even the best interpretation of early Buddhism, but is perhaps rather more of an Abhidhamma perspective (for want of a better term). For instance, in S 22:81, the appearance of ‘self’ in experience is described as a saṅkhāra. Similarly, beliefs about this self and clinging to this self are likewise saṅkhārā. It is just by not seeing things in this way that there is a world of phenomenal experience and there is dukkha, and by seeing things like this there is the ending of a world of phenomenal experience and an end of dukkha. If this is a correct interpretation of the situation, there can be no fundamental ontological distinction, in the sense of a distinction between two kinds of being. There is rather just reality, misinterpreted by unawakened people and not misinterpreted by awakened and awakening people. If there were a fundamental ontological distinction between ordinary experience and ultimate reality, it would not be possible to awaken to the true nature of things in the way indicated in S 22:81, that is, by not misinterpreting certain saṅkhārā in terms of a self that can be believed in and clung to. In the light of this kind of discourse I would suggest that the duality of saṃsāra and nibbāna is not ontological but conventional, i.e. it is a fundamental way in which the human situation is represented in the Buddha’s teaching, without which it is impossible to characterise the path, or even to conceive of a path. However, one way in which the end or goal of this path is represented in early Buddhism is in terms of the transcending of certain dualities, as is evident in the uraga verses and elsewhere, though this never includes transcending the duality of saṃsāra and nibbāna itself.

No doubt I am giving away my own leaning towards the Madhyamaka way of putting things. That aside, I am extremely grateful for Bryan’s and Bhikkhu Bodhi’s engagement with the themes of my article – it helps makes the effort seem worthwhile. 

With all good wishes,

Dhivan

-- 
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
Chuang Yen Monastery
2020 Route 301
Carmel NY 10512
U.S.A.

Sabbe sattā averā hontu, abyāpajjā hontu, anighā hontu, sukhī hontu!
願眾生無怨，願眾生無害，願眾生無惱，願眾生快樂！
May all beings be free from enmity, free from affliction, free from distress. May they be happy!