Just A Little Dust

(As in all my posts involving Pali you are quite welcome to skim the parts about the process of translation if it bores you; it’s there so that it’s available to those who may be interested in the difficulty of translating from the original texts, or who may care about the variety of ways in which texts can be spun. In general my posts are less about translation than about the dhamma, and it’s conversation about the way we see the dhamma in our lives that interests me most; the details of translation are toward the back of the field of horses in the race for my attention.)

If the previous encounters with suttas and Pali had convinced me but not quite motivated me to learn that ancient language, watching the antic dicing and slicing of certain prolific posters on the amazon.com Buddhism forum finally did succeed in kicking my butt into gear. I started working my way painfully slowly through Rune E.A. Johansson’s “Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar” in mid-December and only today have managed to get to the end of the first puny chunk of a sutta, in this case from the Majjhima Nikaya (I 265 “Experience is the Only Criterion”) but, ah, the reward at the end was worth the effort, even if it made me want to cry.

In this piece the Buddha has apparently just finished discussing Dependent Origination with the monks, and he asks them whether they would in the future base their talk of the dhamma on respect for their teacher, to which they say they would not. He asks if they would speak about that which other recluses had told them? Certain not! He asks if (once having understood Dependent Origination) they would go off and seek a different teacher, or might they return to observing the old rites and ceremonies of ordinary recluses and Brahmins; they would not do either.

In the penultimate line spoken by the Buddha, he asks if the monks would speak only of the things they had found out for themselves, having seen and known it personally. The author’s translation leaves out the word “only”. His translation is:

“Monks, do you not speak that which is known by yourselves, seen by yourselves, found by yourselves?”

Yet the vocabulary for this bit includes “only” – I assume he left it out because he felt that “by yourselves” carried that meaning but I think that leaving that word out – it is repeated twice in the Pali – caused a loss of the force of what the Buddha was actually saying.

The word translated as “only” is “eva” and the whole sentence in Pali looks like this:

Nanu bhikkhave yad-eva tumhākam sāmam ñātam, sāmam dittham sāmam viditam tad-eva tumhe vadethāti.

Using his vocabulary we have:

Nanu: Is it not?
bhikkhave: monks
yad: which
eva: only
tumhākam: you
sāmam: self
nātam: known
dittham: seen
viditam: found
tad: it
eva: only
tumhe: you
vadethati: do speak (with the “ti” at the end of the word being a sort of question-mark)

So we have something like: “Is it not, monks, only that which you(r)self have known, self seen, self found, it only you do speak?”

The active verb in Pali usually comes at the end of the sentence (as it does in modern Hindi). The ending verbal phrase with its subject and object is “tad-eva tumhe vadethāti” (it only you do speak) which then comes out as “you do speak (about) it only?” — smoothing it out a little more we have: “Do you speak about only that?”

But what is it he’s asking that they only speak about? It is that which “ tumhākam sāmam ñātam sāmam dittham sāmam viditam” or “you self know, self see, self found” — the “you” going with “self” in the first is understood as part of “self” (sāmam) in each part of that phrase, so we might say, “you yourself know, yourself see, yourself found”.

Now we have “Do you speak about only that which you yourself know, yourself see, yourself found?”

But we are still missing the front of the sentence. Let’s start by including yad-eva (which only). We already have a “which only” (tad-eva) which relates to the verbal clause about “speaking” at the end. So this “which only” (yad-eva) coming from the middle, before the phrase about knowing, seeing, finding – relates to that phrase: “which only yourself know, yourself see, yourself found”. Almost done, we have (roughly):

“Do you speak about only that which only yourself know, yourself see, yourself found?”

That seems a bit ambiguous. “Which only yourself know” could mean that they should only speak about things for which they have the only bit of knowledge in the whole wide world. That does not seem likely to be what the Buddha is trying to say, so perhaps we need to look at the context of this thought: the Buddha started by asking the group if they would base what they say on what their respected teacher says, or on what other teachers said, and they said they would not. Why would the Buddha get them to say they would not base what they say on what he said? The answer lies here: He is asking them to speak from what they know by themselves only, have seen by themselves only, have found out for themselves only. He’s talking about direct experience. With the context provided, we can now understand that the other “only” refers to their individual actions of coming to know, see, and find out. The “only” does not relate to exclusive knowledge. We can now make the sentence flow the way it should in English:

“Do you speak only about that which you came to know yourself, saw yourself, found yourself?”

Working back to the front of the sentence where we have “monks” and “is it not?” the Buddha might have put it this way in our times:

“Is it not so, monks, that you speak only about that which you came to know yourself, saw yourself, found yourself?”

That’s pretty good but it still loses the force of the double “only” in the sentence. To put that back in I’d revise again:

“Is it not so, monks, that you speak only about that which you came to know through your own efforts only, saw for yourself, found out by direct experience?”

What the Buddha said at the start of this piece – and his monks agreed – was that we should not be speaking about what our teachers say is so, however venerated they may be, even if our teacher is the Buddha himself. We should limit ourselves to discussing that which we have personally found out, seen, and that we know from our own experience. This point is reinforced by the final line (as translated by Mr. Johansson):

“Good, monks! You, monks, have been instructed by me through this timeless doctrine which can be realized and verified, leads to the goal, and can be understood individually by the intelligent.”

We can verify it for ourselves by realizing it in our own lives. The verification is as important as the realization, really, and we should only be talking about that which we have personally verified.

But, you may ask, what is it that makes me want to cry? It’s this:

I spend more time than I perhaps ought to perusing Buddhist forums on the internet where followers of the Buddha’s path spend a great deal of time discussing what they have been told or read. Debates are held over practices and tenets passed on out of respect for a very long and ancient lineage. Within these traditions some members are reputed to have verified — through their own direct experience — that karma and rebirth* represent the true workings of the cosmos and so are a valid and important part of the Buddha’s path. I cannot, of course, say whether they experienced these things or not – it was their experience, not mine, and it is not my place to make judgments; nor is it my place to defend their views — as the Buddha points out in the above snippet, we should stick to discussing what we know from our own experience, not from someone else’s.

Just for a foolish moment, I imagined a history in which the Buddha’s disciples had put at the forefront of their vows that they would do as the Buddha had asked and “speak only about that which they came to know through their individual efforts only, saw for themselves, found out by direct experience” and that they had never spent time on parts of what they were taught that they had not personally experienced. I saw a dhamma passed through the ages with a strong inoculation against all speculative views, and it was that view of some alternate reality in which the uncluttered heart of the Buddha’s teaching had remained easily visible and understandable that made me want to weep.

* among many other things