Just A Little Dust

Notes toward a translation of the opening lines of AN 10.208 (PTS vol 5 p 299)

Encounter and Various Translations

The first few lines were what caught my attention because they were so muddy that I couldn’t understand what was being said:

Monks, I declare that of intentional deeds done and accumulated there can be no wiping out without experiencing the result thereof, and that too whenever arising, either in this same visible state or in some other state hereafter.

I declare, monks, that there is no ending of Ill as regards intentional deeds done and accumulated without experiencing the results thereof.

The first sentence left me hanging, waiting on completion, and while I understood the sense of the first half of the first sentence and its reiteration in the next sentence — that when we perform karmic acts, acts derived from intention, nothing is going to save us from experiencing the results; we will experience it; no short cuts — I couldn’t sort out what was “arising”, and had no sense of what the “visible state” was or what “state” came in what “hereafter”.

In the hope that our modern translators had it all figured out, I turned first to Thanissaro Bhikkhu, whose translation appears on accesstoinsight.org’s website. He translated the muddled opening thus:

“Monks, I don’t speak of the wiping out of intentional acts that have been done & accumulated without [their results] having been experienced, either in the here & now or in a further state hereafter. Nor do I speak of the act of putting an end to suffering and stress without having experienced [the results of] intentional acts that have been done & accumulated.”

So Woodward’s “whenever arising, either in this same visible state or in some other state hereafter” has here become “having experienced [the results of] intentional acts that have been done & accumulated.” Also, the two framing thoughts have been changed from positive “I declare…” to negations “I don’t speak of…”

Since the two were not in agreement, I went for a third, and turned to my copy of Bhikkhu Bodhi and Nyanaponika Thera’s version in their Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, which has this:

“I declare, monks, that actions willed, performed and accumulated will not become extinct as long as their results have not been experienced, be it in this life, in the next life or in subsequent future lives. As long as these results of actions willed, performed and accumulated have not been experienced, there will be no making an end to suffering, I declare.

This has three time periods mentioned (in this life, the next, or subsequent future lives) whereas Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s had two (either in the here and now or in a further state hereafter), and we’re back to the positive statement, “I declare…”

 

First Phrase Sorted Out

So, naturally, I turned to the Pali, which has the first sentence as: nāhaṃ, bhikkhave, sañcetanikānaṃ kammānaṃ katānaṃ upacitānaṃ appaṭisaṃ veditvā byantībhāvaṃ vadāmi,

nāhaṃ — “I” (ahaṃ) preceded by a negation (na)

bhikkhave – monks

sañcetanikānaṃ – intentions’

kammānaṃ – actions

katānaṃ – fulfilled (resolved)

upacitānaṃ – accumulated

appaṭisaṃ – without

veditvā – experiencing (enduring)

byantībhāvaṃ – destruction (ends)

vadāmi – I say

The verb at the end matches up to the “I” at the beginning, so we hear the Buddha denying that he said something: “I do not say” and this is then followed by a positively stated view of things, the view he does not support: that there is some way to wipe out kamma without having experienced it. Who would have said that this *was* possible, I wonder?

So my version of the first sentence became:

I do not say, monks, that intentions’ actions are resolved without enduring its accumulated ends.

I took a little liberty with that last word, making it serve two functions: to use up (end) the banked merit of kamma, and to serve as the results (ends) of the kamma as well. At any rate, all four of these translations agree that we’re not going to get away from the consequences of our intentional actions without experiencing them. Two out of four of us preserved the sense that the Buddha was taking a stand against some other view (“I do not say”), which is really the only way the negation in the sentence makes sense, since the nāhaṃ clearly attaches the “not” to the “I” (as Thanissaro Bhikkhu and I have it) rather than to the “wiping out” as Woodward has it or their “extinction” as Bhikkhu Bodhi has it.

 

Second Half of First Phrase: The Pali

The next bit is where the translators and I really differ, and where it gets interesting (and following up on leads here, it gets even more interesting, but those are for subsequent posts):

tañca kho diṭṭheva dhamme upapajje vā apare vā pariyāye.

tañca – and that (those)

kho – indeed

diṭṭheva* – seen; found; understood, viewed (past participle passive: if M then loc Sing or acc. Pl.; if N then acc Pl)

dhamme – doctrine; nature; truth; the Norm; morality; good conduct. (M. noun; loc Singular or acc Plural)

upapajje – himself/herself/itself arises (verb: present or imperative, reflective, 1st person Singular)

vā – or

apare – another, other (adj. if M then nom or acc Plu.; if F then voc Sing.)

pariyāye – order; course; quality; method; figurative language; a synonym; a turn (M noun; loc Sing. OR acc Plu.)

 

Diṭṭheva Dhamma

* The -eva ending seemed problematic at first, since neither likely stem word had such an ending. The Digital Pali Reader suggests that it may be interpreted as diṭṭha with a form of eva (an emphatic word that often gets translated as “only”) tacked onto it. Since eva is repeated again in the final sentence of the opening (“na tvevāhaṃ, bhikkhave, sañcetanikānaṃ…” where the tvevāhaṃ has its eva inside it) it seems the Buddha was being quite emphatic about what he doesn’t say.

As it turns out, “diṭṭheva dhamme” (sometimes just “diṭṭhe dhamme“) was a popular phrase. It gets translated as “here and now” or “immediately” or “in this very life” rather more often than it deserves, when it actually seems to have more to do with “witnessing” as in “having seen into the truth of it for ourselves”. (I plan to do a separate post on “diṭṭheva dhamme” in the future.)

A few rounds of grammatical matchup, before we proceed. Everything that has gender is Masculine, including dhamme (which is locative Singular or accusative Plural), and its partner, diṭṭheva will therefore be the same. In its sense as “having seen into the truth” locative seems most logical (and anyway we generally talk about one truth at a time, rather than many truths).

Apare Matches Pariyāye

In the next block of words, apare is an adjective, and the nearest noun is pariyāye which is masculine, so since pariyāye‘s adjective must agree with it — making apare masculine — this makes apare nominative or accusative plural, and looking back at pariyāye, if it’s plural it, too must be accusative, so the pair are accusative plural, which is good, since they should agree with each other.

Upapajje and What Is Arising?

Upapajje is the only verb in the sentence, and it is first person singular but we have no nominative noun nor any pronouns that stand out to drive its action. Where are we going to find the subject of upapajje, then? Fortunately, it supplies its own, by being reflective: “itself arises”. Nice, but that “itself” has to refer to something or we’ll be lost — and the only thing left is to attach it back to the first phrase or something in it. The phrase describes the view that the Buddha is denying:

that intentions’ actions are resolved without enduring its accumulated ends

So the “itself” that arises is either the (mistaken) view of how the consequences of kamma can be escaped, or the actions themselves or the ends themselves. Since the actions (kammānaṃ) is dative or genitive plural and our noun is singular and looking for a nominative, that rules that out. More or less the same goes for the ends (byantībhāvaṃ a form of vyantībhāva) which, though singular, is still not nominative. So our verb “arises” is talking about the whole phrase before, the view that arises.

The verb and its subject are singular, so the reflective would use “itself” rather than “themselves” (“that view itself”).

Word Choices:

Then there’s the significant matter of word-choices. Because some of my word choices differ from those of existing translators, I did a little extra research on those. This includes “diṭṭheva dhamme” which they have as “in this same visible state” (Woodward), or as ” the here & now” (Thanissaro B.) and “in this life” (B. Bodhi) and I have as “a truth that has been seen”. This one will get a blog post of its own a little later.

Apare Again

Then there’s “apare” which, in that exact form in the Sutta Pitaka, I find 76 occurences, 19 in our phrase, 12 in phrases I don’t have access to, 8 in the phrase “apare ca maggaṃ” (but still inside sources I have no access to translations of) and the remaining 37 are all in association with numbers, mostly in poetry or notes that I also don’t have in translations, but they seem to be in the category of “two apare people” (or two somethings) and “three apare” or “ten apare” — so “other” would seem a fairly likely translation. I looked at “apara” and “aparaṃ” as well (it’s not as common a word as we might expect for a word that means “other, another” in either compounds or, really, in any form) and found it meaning more or less the same. Its most common appearance is in 171 occurences of the phrase “aparena samayena” (that last word means “time; congregation; season; occasion; religion”):

• DN 2.35 “And before long he does so.
• DN 23.6 “Eventually they become ill, suffering, diseased.”
• MN 101.7 “Then on a later occasion…”
• SN 17.11 “Yet some time later I see him…”

All of these carry a variant on “in some other time” so the sense of the word “apare” is definitely “some other…” and the “what?” (some other “what”?) is supplied by the word with it… people or time or path (magga) being things it is associated with. It is consistent, then, to assume apare means “other”.

Since apare is an adjective and its noun is plural, it’s got to be “other” not “another”.

Word Choices (And Problems): Vā vs. Va

The penultimate word problem we’re left with is what those “vā“s are all about. If they are, truly, “or”, well, chains of “ors” usually tie together like forms (all verbs, all nouns, etc) so I suspect we’re working, instead (and again) with the emphatic va, here, rather than the long-a vā‘s “or”. This is made more likely by the -eva smooshed onto diṭṭheva, as well as an -eva- embedded in the middle of the following sentence — so it seems the Buddha may have been quite, quite emphatic. In that case we can leave out the “va” and just assume they are there for emphasis (keeping an open mind that it could be “or”), or use emphasizing words as needed (“only” or “certainly” or “definitely” sorts of words).

Another thing to notice that supports the possibility of those “vā“s originally having been (e)”va“s, is that Pali doesn’t put a break between words, only between sentences, so the phrase may have looked like this:

upapajjevaaparevapariyāye

If we notice that all the words before the “va“s end in “e” it makes some sense that an “e” may have been elided out — even in speaking one would tend to drop one of the two “e”s.

 

Word Choices: Pariyāye

As for pariyāye, the word for that seems to me to be a bit of an unknown quantity. There is a wide variety in the meanings of the words the dictionary offers, and we can’t really know which to choose until we have some sense of what the sentence is about, or unless it has one quite strong meaning in general usage — or hopefully we can use both if they are in agreement: sense in the sentence and sense in other places agreeing makes a strong case for correctness in translation.

Pariyāye (a form of pariyāya) is not a particularly common inflection of its stem word. As exactly the form we have here it appears just 23 times in the Sutta Pitaka, 19 of those times in this same phrase (which means we can’t use those to learn anything new about the word). I only had access to one of the “different phrase” uses (it was in the Therigatha), where “pariyāya” was translated as “arrangements” in the phrase “Running after pretexts, arrangements, stratagems…”. The most common uncompounded forms of the word are pariyāyena (232 times), pariyāyo (99) and pariyāyaṃ (41). Looking at a sample of random suttas containing these I found it translated as

• “exposition” (DN 1)
• “in a way” (in the phrase “presents the dhamma in a way that should command his assent” in DN 25)
• as “a discourse” in the body and the title of MN 9
• as “a presentation” in MN 59 (“I have stated [this] in one presentation, two presentations…”)
• untranslated in MN 84 in a sentence that reads “It is just a saying in the world, great king,” where the missing word would probably be “way” again, as in “the way the world talks”
• as “way” again in SN 35.23 “In this way, friend, it can be understood …”

Its most popular compound is “anekapariyāyena” which means “various ways”. In the random sample I looked at, no version turned up in which it indicated a future existence, state, life, or anything like that.

If, in the three translations of the phrase we’re looking at, it got translated as “a state hereafter” (“some other state hereafter” by Woodward and “in a further state hereafter” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu) or as “future lives” (“or in subsequent future lives” by B.Bodhi) then my only guess is that it got mixed up with “pariyāti” which means “goes around” and so could, by extension, perhaps relate to samsara, or some such. But there would be no need to put pariyāti in pariyāya‘s place, since pariyāya is a well-defined word as it stands, and furthermore it fits perfectly into the discussion (or refutation) of views that the Buddha starts out the sentence with.

So this makes the new “rough”:

… and indeed that truth has been seen, itself arise other discourses.

Now if I put this together with the first sentence:

I do not say, monks, that intentions’ actions are resolved without enduring its accumulated ends, and indeed that truth has been seen, itself to arise other discourses.

then perhaps I can make some sense of it in context. The Buddha is saying that a particular view about how intentional actions can be resolved is NOT his view, so in the next portion the “truth” appears not to be his — it is a “truth” espoused by other groups about how intentions’ actions CAN be escaped without enduring the results. Other groups (and perhaps the “other” in the sentence may be a reference to the discourses of those others) used “dhamma” as the word for what they “knew” about the way things are. When another group’s “truths” disagree with ours we no longer call them “truths”, we call them “beliefs”, so perhaps this is saying:

and indeed that belief has been seen to arise only through others’ discourses.

where:

“belief” = dhamme

“has been seen” = diṭṭheva

“to arise” = upapajje

“only” = va (from vā)

“others'” = apare

“discourses” = pariyāye

As translated above, this takes the dhamme to refer back to the view denied in the opening phrase of the sentence — which may not be a dead-accurate way of going about things (given what I learned later about “diṭṭheva dhamme“) but will serve for now.

 

Suttas As Puzzles

It seems a possibility that this whole phrase was a puzzle to those who studied and copied it in the past. For one thing, the notes suggest that it has been confusing enough to translators to appear cobbled together from a variety of pieces, and for another we have that unlikely series of disparate grammatical forms, joined by “or”s. I can easily imagine an editor looking at the phrase, missing the subtlety of the distinction being made about how one “ends” kamma and looking for a way to understand that “upapajje va apare va pariyāye” that was consistent with his understanding of what was being said. Looked at that way, it is easy to see how the editor might suspect errors in transmission — just a lost diacritical mark to change that short-a to a long-a — and would correct it: now it can be seen as saying what he and his teachers agree that the Buddha says about kamma. (That it has in the distant past caused confusion is revealed in a variation in another sutta — see AN 3.33 “diṭṭhe vā dhamme upapajja vā apare vā pariyāye” — where the “eva” got changed to a “vā” moving the “or” back to split the pop-phrase of diṭṭheva dhamme into something it is not).

If we go from the opening section directly into the Brahma Vihara, and other translators have thought that seemed nonsensical, it might be that they mistranslated the middle line studied here, and so never asked, as I did, “Who would believe that there would be some method by which one could remove the effects of kamma to escape having to experience them?” Perhaps the reason the Buddha went straight from the above into pervading the four quarters is because that was what some of those who had (roughly) equivalent practices thought they were doing with it.

Loss of the context makes the sutta a puzzle. So when confronted with a sutta that begins by talking about how the effects of kamma are experienced, and there’s this hard-to-translate series of words:

diṭṭheva dhamme upapajje va apare va pariyāye

in which the “va“s were originally the same as “eva” — either there simply for emphasis or used as an emphatically stated “only” — the puzzle might seem to be solved by changing the “va“s to “vā” (“or”) and trying to push the meanings of the other words to reflect a time or place in which kamma will be experienced. One big problem with this is that the Buddha doesn’t define the results of kamma as coming inevitably in time, so it is a misunderstanding to think of the results of kamma as occuring now or in the future. The other problem is how far the words got bent (forms of the words don’t match up grammatically to the way it has been recently translated). We can perhaps attribute a little of the confusion to the editors somewhere along the line who tried to clarify their understanding by turning eva or va into vā because they had not grasped the distinction the Buddha makes about how one experiences the results of kamma, but this quite likely was not the result of the intention to change the meaning, but is actually sankhara in action — the conviction that we ourselves (as editors) know what should be said, and therefore we are right to make the change.

In that case, the problems encountered by our modern translators with the middle portion of the opening of this sutta is not really of their making, either: the difficulty with the translation is caused by earlier changes. I posit that the original was:

tañca kho diṭṭheva [diṭṭhe-eva] dhamme upapajje eva apare eva pariyāye.

and that the eva-emphasis was there because the Buddha was strongly refuting that his version of the practice of the Brahma Vihara would clear out kamma in a way that avoided having to experience its results.

Here’s a summary of the differently translated words in that middle phrase:

 

	Mine	Woodward	Thanissaro B	B Bodhi
diṭṭheva dhamme	belief seen	in this same visible state	(state) here & now	in this life
vā	(emphatic)/only	either/or	either/or	or (or)
apare	others	other (state)	further (state)	next life
pariyāye	discourses	(state) hereafter	(state) hereafter	subsequent future lives

 

The only words I changed from their common meanings were the “vā“s which I feel were changed from short-a to long-a at some point because the meaning of the whole sutta was misunderstood, and I return “diṭṭheva dhamme” to its original sense of seeing the truth of things — when it takes that sense it still fits in its popular place where it is translated as “here & now”, as we’ll see in a future post, though the return to its origin actually improves the sense of suttas it appears in. It is unnessary to give it the sense of a “state” though we can perhaps understand how it gets translated that way. As a life, though? That seems a reach.

The word “apare” has a clear sense of “other” but it can only pick up the idea of “state” (or “life”) from dhamme. It may have picked up its sense of being “further” or “next” (i.e. “in the future”) from its association with “samayena” which is “time” but note that the idea of time is not inherent in “apare“.

Up to this point it might be reasonable to stretch diṭṭheva dhamme to say that we will be able to see the effects of kamma in our present state, and we could have apare modify dhamme to give us some other state (but both “further” and “next life” are pushing it), but pariyāye just isn’t anything to do with “hereafter” or “subsequent future lives.” It’s not an adjective, it’s a noun, and as a noun it is not about the hereafter.

So the critical difference is in translating pariyāye as anything other than something to do with presentation of ideas (discourses, exposition, or “a way” as in “presents the dhamma in a way…”, “in this way it can be understood…”). I can understand how this happened: it almost makes sense up to this point, and if we assume that pariyāye is some misbegotten form of pariyati then we can maybe make it into something to do with the rounds of rebirth — and if pariyāye did not appear all over the place as talking about the way people present ideas — it is even in the title and throughout the body of a sutta in which the Buddha talks about how people present ideas — if we had nothing else to go on, then maybe that would be acceptable. But both the appearance of the word in other texts and its place in the middle of the Buddha objecting that he doesn’t teach some strange view of kamma makes it clear that it is about the arising of that mistaken view in some talks others give.

Now of course I could be wrong about all of this — I am still a beginner at Pali, after all. The best way to check this understanding will be against other suttas in which it appears, and see if this reading improves the sense in other places where it appears, so I’ll next have a look at the first place I encounter it again, in MN 136.