In his comments on the Dona Sutta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu supports the contention that Dona’s questions to the Buddha, though grammatically in a future tense, have the intention of asking, in a wondering tone, about the present (“Would you be a deva, then?” being the sense of it) with the statement that:
His earlier statement — “These are not the footprints of a human being” — is also phrased in the future tense, and the mood of wonder extends throughout his conversation with the Buddha.
This would be a fine explanation, if what Dona said in wonderment as he followed those footprints, and when he questioned the Buddha, were as simple as the translations make it appear. The Pali and translations are:
“… na vatimāni manussabhūtassa padāni bhavissantī”ti!
“… These are not the footprints of a human being!”
“… devo no bhavaṃ bhavissatī”ti?
“…are you a deva?”
The problem with these translations is that both of the Pali questions have two words derived from “bhu” in them. The first has “bhūtassa” and “bhavissantī” and the second has “bhavaṃ” and “bhavissatī” and Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation doesn’t account for these. Both are about becoming.
To take a quick look at the first sentence, there is a becoming for the footprints (“What will I discover when I get to the end of them?”) and a becoming of a man.
In my rough word-for-word translation
“Surely these will not turn out to be the footprints of the becoming of a human being”
we can see that Dona is not only concerned with what the footprints will lead to (“become”), but whether they were left by someone who will “become” a human. If he were simply concerned with whether those were a human’s footprints, there would be no need for the “bhūtassa” (becoming) in the “manussabhūtassa” (human-becoming).
This is made even clearer in the following phrases, where there is a “bhu” noun representing a “state of existence”.
I cannot work out a way in which a question framed as
“Will you not come to be a deva?”
can have the wondering lilt provided by the future tense, but meaning the present, that Thanissaro Bhikkhu says it does. “Would you not be a deva?” might have worked, but “Will you not come to be a deva?” is pretty clear.
To understand the importance of those double “bhu”-words we just need to know that, in the Brahminical understanding of the times, at the breakup of the body after death, one moved into one of those famous “other worlds” and (with hard work in this life) became a deity of some sort, also known as living in the deva’s world, the “deva state of existence”. Our Dona could not believe the man who left those perfect footprints would be someone who would return again to be a man, but was certain that after death he would “become” or “come into being” in one of the higher worlds.
The final point is, as I mentioned in the comments to the original post, that the Buddha answers with a future tense also.
Grammar gives a lot away without our even being aware that it does. Scholars like Steven Pinker (see his TED.com talk below) have pointed out that we have an understanding of physics that we reveal unconsciously in our language, and that it applies not just to physical objects but, metaphorically, to concepts and ideas. I believe this is the sort of situation that is being given voice in the exchange between Dona and the Buddha.
If, somehow, despite the double “bhu”s, Dona were to speak with an Irish accent, as Jayarava playfully suggested in the comments to the original post, and ask the Buddha incredulously, “Would you be a deva, then?” and the Buddha recognized that this was a question about his present state, not his future state, he would answer, without thinking, in the present: “No, brahmin, I am not a deva.” If he recognized the question as being about the future, he would reflect that with, “No, brahmin, I will not be a deva.”
There is a remote possibility that this particular culture had a different pattern in this case, despite the indications in Pali grammar that all the “physics of ideas” were in use as much then as now* but to accept that possibility as likely, we’d need to find clear evidence of the pattern elsewhere in the canon.
* also known as “Why grammar is such a chore” — because we apply the rules after the fact to figure out how and why people speak as they do, and paying attention to those rules doesn’t come naturally to most of us, we learn them intuitively quite young.
Linda.
√bhū (to be); becoming, yes, but often, very often in fact, just “to be”. To insist on becoming is to do violence to the language.
In your rough word-for-word rendering you translate bhavissanti twice.
na vatimāni manussabhūtassa padāni bhavissantīti
not/indeed/these/of a human-being/feet/will be/quote
These won’t be the feet[prints] of a human being [he said] {expressing amazement}.
vatimāni = vata (indeed); indecl. + imāni (these); neuter nom. plural.
manussa-bhūta – karmadhāraya compound = human-being; genitive plural [there are other ways of reading the compound but they all amount to the same thing “human being”]
padāni – feet; neuter nom. plural
bhavissanti; [they] will not be; future 3rd person plural.
And note well that though bhūta is a past-participle from √bhū, literally become, it is usual to read it as being in this context. Indeed the usage in still current in Hindi where bhūt means a ghost (i.e. a non-human being).
devo no bhavaṃ bhavissatīti?
god/interrogative particle/good sir/will be?
Look at the cases here carefully. Devo is *nominative*. Therefore it can’t be the patient of bhavissati – a verb in the *third* person. Therefore the one thing this sentence can’t say is: will you be/become a god? Which must be ko devaṃ bhavissasi or some such.
Devo is the *agent* here. And bhavaṃ is bhavant in the nom. singular as well and goes with devo (the god who is honourable). Literally the sentence can only say: an honourable god will he be? This feels very awkward in English, (but not if you are Irish). Since it cannot possibly be the question that you suggest it is, by the very fact of the grammar, then you must consider other possibilities! This is clearly an idiomatic use of the future tense to express amazement.
Is he a god?! {that he has footprints like that?}
Likewise when the Buddha answers with: Na kho ahaṃ brāhmaṇa devo bhavissāmīti – ahaṃ and devo are nominative. The one thing his reply can’t mean is: I will not become a god.
Na kho ahaṃ brāhmaṇa devo bhavissāmīti
/not/indeed/ I (nom!)/Brahmin (voc)/god (nom!!)/I will be/quote.
If you want a literal translation of this then it is this: I [who am] god, O Brahmin, will not be in the future. But the context makes this an unlikely reading since we know that the Buddha never refers to himself as a god (though kings are often referred to as deva). And question forces us to read the answer as – I’m not a god – echoing the amazement of the questioner.
Though the grammar conclusively shows that the text cannot possibly mean what you say we could further observe that if the question was about what the Buddha would become after death, then an entirely different and well established idiom would have been used. One doesn’t _become a god_ in Pāli, one is reborn (upapanna) as a deva, or in the devaloka; or one arises (upanna/sampanna) or goes to (gacchati) the devaloka. Though you could easily disprove this by showing that this idiom is in fact unequivocally used somewhere else in the way that you suggest.
“Grammar gives a lot away”… well it can do, Linda, but you have to be pretty well versed in it, and not treat it as English grammar. In this case what is given away is that you don’t know Pāli grammar that well, and you don’t have a grasp of Pāli idiom. This stuff is all dealt with in the first 10 chapters of Warder – that is to say it is very basic grammar. Why not spend some time learning the language and reading widely before becoming an expert? I presume you want to be taken seriously?
Hey Jayarava,
It’s wonderful to have someone to talk Pali with!
I perhaps should have made the links to my worksheets a little clearer. For the first sentence, there’s this one:
http://justalittledust.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/i-am-not-a-man-addendum.jpg
and through that you can see I’m not translating “bhavissatī” twice: it’s actually the “bhūtassa” that is being translated as the “becoming”. It may well often mean “to be” (and the “bhu” variant “bhavissatī” does end up as “to be” in my final but as “turn out to be”) but if translating “bhūtassa” as “becoming” might be “doing violence” to the meaning as you say, then why is its root “bhūta” defined as “become; existed” (in CPED) and “grown, become; born, produced” (in PED)? There isn’t even a “to be” suggested there.
The dictionary I am working with actually defines “manussabhūta” as “one who has become a man” so I’m not so sure I’m doing anything unusual here.
Meanwhile, you have “manussa-bhūta” as “human-being” which might make sense in translations where it is the present tense of “bhūta” in use, but is problematic when it’s the future tense, don’t you think? “being a human” is present, whereas “will become human” is future. I imagine we’d both agree that “bhu”-words are very difficult for us to be sure of in translation. I suspect this is because they represent a sort of “cusp” condition, where one is on the edge between one state and another, and that’s not a mode we Westerners are used to working with, so our verb forms don’t really support it, and we don’t have the “instinct” for it (if you will).
That said, I do find “manussabhūta” in SN 11.11:
“sakkassa, bhikkhave, devānamindassa pubbe manussabhūtassa satta vatapadāni samattāni samādinnāni ahesuṃ…”
which Bhikkhu Bodhi gives as:
“Bhikkhus, in the past, when Sakka, lord of the devas, was a human being, he adopted and undertook seven vows…”
Being faithful to the tenses, I would have understood it as:
“…when Sakka, who would be lord of the devas, would become a human being, he adopted…”
That’s a tense usage still quite familiar to us when telling stories set in the past, “When he wanted to visit his kinfolk, the Buddha would walk from where he was staying to Savatthi.” Conditional, I think that is?
The second page is here:
http://justalittledust.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/i-am-not-a-man-addendum-pg-2.jpg
and yes, you are right, I had matched “devo” to “bhavaṃ” and, without thinking about it, turned it into an adjective modifying the state of existence, “bhavaṃ”. But your translation, “an honourable god will he be?” has a similarly bad effect: you’ve moved the devo away from being the subject of the verb, and put “he” (presumably the Buddha) as its subject, so we still have a problem here.
My rough would be something like:
will the deva not become state of existence
Whereas yours might be more like:
will the deva not become honorable
I don’t think we’ve quite found the answer to this part yet. You said, “This is clearly an idiomatic use of the future tense to express amazement.” I’m not sure how you can see it as “idiomatic” (given your apparent definition of something one can “prove” or “easily disprove … by showing that this idiom is in fact unequivocally used somewhere else in the way that you suggest.”) when it’s not commonly found in the canon, but it’s certainly not the usual form. I have no problem with Dona being amazed, but I still have doubts that it is using a future tense to address the present.
As for the Buddha’s answer, the “not” modifies the whole sentence, and the “ahaṃ” (nominative, I) is the same person who is the subject of the verb (I will become) and the deva is nominative also, so is the same, so it seems to me the situation we have here is one where we have equivalencies. I am the dog. The dog is me. I am not the dog. The dog is not me.
This means that if we were to put this all in simple present tense (ignoring the future tense for the moment):
“na kho ahaṃ, brāhmaṇa, devo bhavissāmī”ti.
We would have:
“not surely I brahmin a god am”
In other words:
“I surely am not a god, brahmin.”
But since it’s future tense that makes it:
“I surely will not become a god, brahmin.”
We can use that sense to back up and look at the equivalencies in the earlier sentence, also clarifying by using present instead of future tense for a first look:
“Is he not a state of existence deva?”
Which is about the same as saying “Is this not a Cocker Spaniel dog?” Which makes it:
“Will he not come to the state of existence of a deva?”
In the final analysis, though, I think we have to go with the Buddha’s own words as quoted in the original post, a quote I will now take liberties with to make it a general statement instead of the specific one I quoted earlier:
“Whatever [phenomenon] has not been born, has not become manifest: the term, label, and description ‘will be’ applies to it, not the term ‘is’ or the term ‘was’.
and (a third variant not quoted in the original post):
“Whatever [phenomenon] has been born, has become manifest: the term, label, and description ‘is’ applies to it, not the term ‘was’ or the term ‘will be’.
The Buddha was being very clear about how we should use and interpret language. When talking about a deva state and using “will be” this is something that has not become manifest. When we talk about something that is manifest, we use the term “is”. By your reasoning, the Buddha is breaking his own rule here. I am convinced he is clearer about the use of language than that.
You said “that if the question was about what the Buddha would become after death, then an entirely different and well established idiom would have been used” and that I “could easily disprove this by showing that this idiom is in fact unequivocally used somewhere else in the way that you suggest.” Which is true, if I wanted to prove or disprove your assertion that it is or is not another idiom for what one becomes after death. However, I never said (and don’t think) that this conversation represented a discussion using “common idiom”. This seems to me another instance of wanderers and brahmins talking about things they usually don’t talk about openly (like Vacchagotta’s rare question “Is there a self?” in SN 44.10) though what one becomes after death (and whether there is a self) is clearly of concern in the number of questions that circle around these issues throughout the canon.
It’s funny, Jayarava, I awakened this morning thinking about your earlier statement that I “still seem to be arguing tendentiously about the evidence from the point of view of [my] conclusions” and wondering if we don’t all do that. You hammer out meaning tenaciously from the perspective of your understanding of the possibilities of what might be said: to you it is reasonable and consistent that the Buddha is saying he is not a man, and so you are working from that perspective. Perhaps this is the basis of your certainty that “Though the grammar conclusively shows that the text cannot possibly mean what you say” even though your reasoning includes a little fallacious logic, in assigning a “na” (“not”) to just modify the verb in the sentence (“not in the future”) instead of the whole sentence so you have it reading:
I [who am] god, O Brahmin, will not be in the future.
and then you have to justify why the Buddha would say he was a god (not even mentioning that he then has to go on to say he is also a yakka, a gandhaba, and a human, but won’t be in the future). That’s a little awkward, don’t you think?
And also unnecessary, since (to quote Warder) “The.. usual negative ‘not’ placed in front of the word or phrase negated, or at the beginning of a negative sentence…” (p.31) so it’s not necessary to grab that “na”, as you did, and slide it all the way over to modify just the verb, when it should stay where it belongs at the beginning of the sentence, “I am not a god” (“I will not become a god” actually or “Will I become a god? No!”) is quite different from “I am a god, will not be in the future.”
It seems you think I’m making a fool of myself displaying my ignorance in public (“Why not spend some time learning the language and reading widely before becoming an expert? I presume you want to be taken seriously?”) but this is just a difference in attitudes, Jayarava. My belief is that I can’t learn efficiently without having my work be looked at, and engaging in debates like this one; perhaps you would not want to be corrected in public? while it is no big deal to me. If you don’t take someone seriously because they can be wrong, that’s your attitude, and no concern of mine. I don’t present myself as an expert, I present myself as someone who is learning and exploring, and try to make the process visible in the hope that others will want to take on the challenge and join me in learning Pali, and maybe do a better job of it than I do. I don’t see making mistakes while learning as anything that should be judged in a category of “should I take this person seriously or not?” at all, but perhaps I am unique in that attitude. I wonder what other readers think.
OMgoodness! Thanks, Jayarava, for pointing out (along with my misplaced “devo”) that “bhavaṃ” can mean a very respectful “you”, though I do not find that “no” gets placement as a positive interrogative particle (it still is “not” as far as I can see). Those, together with an example of the use of the future tense to express amazement (proving that it can be idiomatic) in SN 11.22 which has “kodhabhakkho yakkho bhavissatī” translated as “That must be the anger-eating yakkha…” which I can easily imagine using the future tense to express wonderment: “That will be the anger-eating yakkha!”
That being the case, the whole thing becomes quite clear, that Dona is, as Jayarava and Thanissaro Bhikkhu suggested, expressing amazement with an idiomatic form of speech. But the Buddha is clearly doing what he says in SN 22.62 that we should do, he is using language honestly and consistently, but in this case it allows him to make a droll joke:
Dona: “You, honored sir, will not be a deva!?!”
Buddha” “You are so right, Dona, I will certainly not be a deva.”
To me, that is definitely an event that was worthy of inclusion in the suttas, even if it were only for its display of the Buddha’s humor and ability to use language with skill.
Linda, I’d like to respond specifically to your question about “displaying ignorance in public.” Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with doing so — if we don’t display our ignorance, how are we to learn? I don’t believe we get very far in life by trying to pass ourselves off as experts. Even if one feels that they’ve learned as much as THEY are able to, that is by no means in my humble opinion, that they have learned all that there is to know. I feel that the word ‘expert’ is a word for something that simply doesn’t exist.
As the writer of a blog that is SPECIFICALLY written with the intent of calling upon fellow beginning Buddhists, specifically written with the intent of airing my questions, uncertainties, and ignorance, I support your “display of ignorance.” I know that like myself, you put yourself out there not ONLY to be taken seriously, but also to expose yourself to others who may have something to offer that will enrich your continued growth in your studies.
I applaud your efforts. I’ve been a beneficiary of your many insights and thought-provoking questions and comments on my blog. You’ve always handled my questions, my questions based in lack of experience (and therefore, ignorance) with great tact and a wonderful ability to correct and prompt, while still encouraging those such as myself to continue to pursue answers to our — and your — questions.
Thank you Linda for all your bring to all of our studies. Please continue to ‘air your ignorance,’ as there are many — beginners and more experienced alike — who look to you for answers, questions and guidance. We take what you say VERY seriously.
Thanks, Miyo. I appreciate your comments (as well as your blog), but do keep in mind that it may be that my fellow beginners taking me seriously may be what Jayarava is afraid of! As long as we keep in mind that (generally speaking) we’re all beginners together, we should be okay though.
:)
Well, if that IS a concern — that beginners would take seriously something that is, in the end, incorrect — wouldn’t our natural inclination to investigate, question, self-correct based on the results of our investigation and continued query, finally lead us to the correct answer? Assuming that The Path is a process, and that following it justly, in the end, leads us to the right place, isn’t it almost a moot point to be SO worried about making mistakes along the way? After all, it’s the process that is important, is it not?