Just A Little Dust

another “importance of how we translate” post

 

DN 15 is one of the classic locations providing both an overview and detail on dependent arising (DA). It seems to be a middle-years formulation. That it’s not one of the oldest suttas on the subject is indicated by its crisply linear structure, so it’s likely later than “Quarrels and Disputes”¹ which has two tracks running parallel to each other. DN 15 only has nine of twelve links that appear in the full version, though, so it is likely earlier than many others. The fact that in one of DN 15’s rounds of this-begets-that the Buddha heads it in the direction of real-world examples – and even mentions “quarrels” and “disputes” – suggests it is, yet, close in time to what’s possibly the oldest version we have of DA.

In various papers, posts, and my book, I’ve been trying to convey my understanding that the Buddha’s teaching of DA uses a structure meant to take the shape of a discussion of the Vedic world’s view of rebirth, but that it uses that shape to convey a different lesson entirely.

The Vedic structure is referring to forming and perfecting one’s eternal self, one’s ātman in a way that, ideally, will lead to a good life after death (whether that’s in heaven, a rebirth, or union with Brahman isn’t important). But the Buddha’s point in the teaching of DA is to describe the way we, instead, shape what’s not ātman (but can be mistaken for it). As with the shaping of ātman, we shape not-ātman (anatta in Pali) because we want good results in the future, either the future of the next life, or just this one. But — the Buddha says — instead of leading us to a happy future as we wish, it leads to bad outcomes instead, because we’re not clear on what it is we’re doing.

With his lesson on DA he is trying to show us what we’re actually doing, using something like a very large metaphor to provide the action, the force, and the underlying reasons we do things, while simultaneously pointing out to people in his time something specific to his time.²

One of the questions I get asked, when chatting with other Buddhists about what I see as DA’s structure goes roughly like this: “If the Buddha is using a metaphor, why doesn’t he say so?”

 

Does the Buddha Ever Say Dependent Arising is Metaphorical?

The answer to that question “in full” is longer than I’m going to put into this post, but today I have a new answer to add to my growing collection of evidence, having just noticed one of my “high on the hit list” words tucked into DN 15: pariyāya. Before I talk about why it’s important, let me provide a few examples from various translators. First, the one that caused me to stop and check the Pali, then a few more.

‘Birth conditions ageing-and-death’, and this is the way that should be understood. — Walshe, in Wisdom Publication’s “Long Discourses”

‘With name-&-matter as condition, contact’, so it was said: how it is, Ānanda, that with name-&-matter as condition there is contact should be seen in this manner. — Nanavira

‘From birth as a requisite condition comes aging-&-death.’ Thus it has been said. And this is the way to understand how from birth as a requisite condition come aging & death. If there were no birth at all … — Thanissaro

‘With name-and-form as condition there is contact.’ How that is so, Ānanda, should be understood in this way. If those qualities, traits, signs … — Bodhi (link goes directly to a pdf)

‘Rebirth is a condition for old age and death’—that’s what I said. And this is a way to understand how this is so. — Sujato

In four out of five of these pariyāya is translated as “way”. In the other, it’s covered by “in this manner”.

As an aside I’ll note that the last of the five is a terrific example of conveying one’s firm belief that what’s being talked about in DN 15 is rebirth, damnit! — an example of “the importance of how we translate”. I’m not objecting to it, not really. Why not? Because, as I’m pointing out, the structure the Buddha uses is, indeed, talking about rebirth (and other forms of life after death, as described above). But the Buddha is trying to get us to see something else entirely. Insisting it’s about rebirth and only rebirth — as it seems Sujato is implying above — and trying to use warped translations to make that clear can obscure the deeper point being made by DA. Not everyone in the Buddha’s time believed in rebirth, and the Buddha was speaking to those folks, too³. So clearly when the Buddha used jāti for birth he was not limiting his discussion to rebirth.

All five translations are, I expect, intended to be excellent and honest translations, and they are fair enough. But only barely fair. Fair in the sense of a grade: failure, fair, good, excellent. Not fair in the sense of giving a full, fair, accurate representation of what the Buddha said. He used the word pariyāya (in its form as pariyāyena — instrumental singular) over and over in the sutta, and while it may, in other suttas, occasionally be meant to mean, simply, “a way”, in most cases it very clearly means “a figure of speech”. In other words it is specifically used to say, “Don’t take this literally.”

But here, let me let Professor Gombrich talk about the word:

The preaching recorded in the suttas… is mainly delivered with what Pali calls pariyāya. Literally, this word means ‘way round’ and so ‘indirect route’, but it refers to a ‘way of putting things.’ … Pariyāya refers to metaphor, allegory, parable, any use of speech which is not to be taken literally. A text delivered ‘with pariyāya’ is contrasted with one delivered without, in other words, with a text which is to be taken literally. In the early canons, it is the abhidharma texts that are ‘without pariyāya‘ and thus claim to give us the Buddha’s texts literally.⁴

The Buddha named each link in DA with what I call a “representative term”. You could think of them as a mnemonic: one word that calls something to mind. So, here are the twelve links, which I’ll mostly⁵ translate in traditional terms (literal translations of the Pali/Vedic in parens):

• ignorance
• saṅkhārā (rituals)
• consciousness
• name-and-form
• six senses
• contact
• feeling
• craving (thirst)
• clinging (fuel/grasping)
• becoming
• birth
• aging-and-death

The terms follow a pattern that would have been familiar to the Buddha’s audience, and with the pariyāya explanations he gives for some of them taken literally, it’s easy to understand how it got taken to refer to three lives, or one life, but either way, since it ends in death, one could perceive it is about life, death, and rebirth, and miss the deeper meaning that connects so well to other lessons about dukkha and not-self and impermanence.

It seems quite clear to me that the Buddha uses the word pariyāya in every sentence where he uses representative terms when introducing detailed descriptions of them. I would suggest that with pariyāya he is telling us not to cling too tightly to those terms, or even to their descriptions. He’s using the terms and their literal descriptions — and pariyāya — to tell us that he’s trying to express something deeper. He does this for several reasons, one of which is that there was no language in his time and culture to express “process” which in this case is the action, force, and underlying motivation we have for doing what we do that leads to trouble. Another reason for using those terms is, as I said above, to intentionally call to mind the behavior of many people of his time that was based on the Vedic world view and rituals, so that folks could see where those specific beliefs led.

 

Are You Making This Up, Linda? Or Have Others Seen the Buddha Being Non-Literal?

Long before Prof. Jurewicz pointed out the ways these representative terms reflected Vedic thinking, other students and scholars of Buddhism had recognized that there were such terms used in DA. For example it’s widely realized that the last link, aging-and-death, stands in for dukkha. Even in DN 15, where the Buddha does a momentary extension of DA into the territory of defense of possessions and quarrels and disputes, those are representative examples of dukkha, too, and that’s well-known. The Pali-English Dictionary, published about one hundred years ago, knew that the word we translate as “craving” literally meant “thirst”. So it has been known for a long time that the Buddha was not being literal with these terms. I’m simply saying this is effectively true of every one of the one-word names the Buddha gives to each link. We can see that in DN 15, he’s very clearly pointing this out. The reason it’s gone unnoticed in the past is that pariyāya was given a softened translation that missed the point.

 

Ananda, You Are Missing the Point

In DN 15 the Buddha was speaking to Ananda, who’d just said that DA was quite clear, implying that it was easy to see. The Buddha tells him it’s deep and that because it’s difficult to see, the current generation is all tangled up.

In his attempt to get Ananda to understand that the lesson was deeper than it appeared, he used the word pariyāya before the representative terms to specifically say not to stop with thinking about the literal, but to use the literal as a parallel to come to see something there were no words to express. As explained above, that “something” is a process. In fact, on page 11 of Prof. G’s book, he points out that there was no word in Pali or Sanskrit that “closely corresponds to the idea of ‘process’”. The Buddha was using the methods of his day⁶ to evoke a process that resembled the Vedic process of creating and perfecting ātman: the Buddha points out our process of creating our dogmatic, clinging selves. While there was no word to clearly express “process” to Ananda, there was a word to express the teaching method he was using: pariyāya. And he used it eighteen times⁷ in DN 15 while trying to make his methods clear to Ananda. Eighteen times! Right before using each one of the representative terms in descriptions of chains of events in DA.

In DN 15 there is more evidence that he was using those terms to form a less-than-literal explanation of what DA is about. Near the middle of the sutta, he gives a literal description of conception as consciousness entering the mother’s womb, and name-and-form’s dependence on consciousness. Next he covers how name-and-form (taken as mind-and-body, in other words a living person) depends on consciousness to be able to continue. From this literal interdependence, he moves onto what he’s really trying to express, here in Thanissaro’s translation:

“This is the extent to which there is birth, aging, death, passing away, and re-arising. This is the extent to which there are means of designation, expression, and delineation. This is the extent to which the sphere of discernment extends, the extent to which the cycle revolves for the manifesting (discernibility) of this world — i.e., name-and-form together with consciousness.”

The Buddha here is transitioning betweeen his metaphorical expressions and what he’s trying to convey, by first telling us that he’s talking about the way we think about things. This is the extent to which there’s birth, aging, death, and the rounds of rebirth: in our designations, expressions, delineation, and our discernment of those cycles in the world. It’s all in our heads. He makes the rest of the transition between metaphor and the reality by, immediately thereafter, going on to ways we discern and delineate “the self”. Given the limits of language in his day, it could not have been made plainer that he’s telling Ananda, “This is how I am expressing it – figuratively, via those representative terms – but don’t take that literally. But here, as I talk about how people perceive the self, this is what I am trying to get people to see when I use those terms.” He doesn’t use the word pariyāya in the rest of the sutta, when he’s talking about the way people conceive of the self.

The Buddha was using the shape of Vedic beliefs about how people create and maintain ātman in hope of achieving a better future, to express the way, while working from a misunderstanding of the self, we inadvertently create a false self, a not-ātman, which causes us endless problems. Our mistaken beliefs about the self and its place in the world — which the Buddha pointed out to Ananda after describing his earlier descriptions as figurative — are the literal problem being pointed out in DA. This is as true now as it was then, even though our belief systems have evolved and new ones have emerged. The way we create that false, unlasting, changing self is a direct parallel to Vedism’s practices to create ātman. Mistaking DA for a lesson about rebirth can easily cause us to lose its real point.

 

The Importance of How We Translate

Our translators, as quoted above, who perhaps weren’t expecting the Buddha to be so clearly saying to Ananda, “Don’t take this literally,” did not give pariyāya the weight it deserved in their translations. After discovering its repeated place in the Pali, I tried my hand at translating one of the many instances:

“Birth is the cause of aging and death,” thus it has surely been said, Ananda, and this is the figurative way it should be known, as birth is the cause of aging and death.^8”

 

 

Footnotes

1 For detail on that sutta’s two tracks, see my paper “Anatomy of Quarrels and Disputes”

2 Note for those new to Buddhism, and newcomers to this interpretation: though the Buddha is describing the problem in terms of the belief systems of his day, what he’s describing is more fundamental than that. It describes human nature as it exists now, as it has likely always existed. This makes the lesson he’s teaching worth the effort to understand.

3 He addressed the non-believers over other issues, like the dangers in sensual pleasures. For those non-believers, then and now, translating jati as “birth” — not rebirth — is best.

4 Page 6 of Prof. Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha Thought“

5 I leave out traditional translations of saṅkhārā because they don’t capture the meaning well.

6 The methods of his day, as described in Prof. Joanna Jurewicz’ books, “Fire and Cognition in the Rg Veda” and “Fire, Death, and Philosophy” 

7 The Buddha uses pariyayā to say he’s not being perfectly literal about these eighteen sets of terms:

1. Birth conditions aging and death (jātipaccayā jarāmaraṇaṃ)

2. Becoming conditions birth (bhavapaccayā jāti)

3. Fuel conditions becoming (upādānapaccayā bhavo)

4. Thirst conditions fuel (taṇhāpaccayā upādānaṃ)

5. Experience conditions thirst (vedanāpaccayā taṇhā)

6. on account of protecting, a whole bunch of other stuff happens including (Thanissaro’s translation): “the taking up of sticks and knives; conflicts, quarrels, and disputes; accusations, divisive speech, and lies.” (ārakkhādhikaraṇaṃ daṇḍādānasatthādānakalahaviggahavivādatuvaṃtuvaṃpesuññamusāvādā)

7. protecting depends on avarice (macchariyaṃ paṭicca ārakkho)

8. avarice depends on possession (pariggahaṃ paṭicca macchariyaṃ)

9. possession depends on clinging (ajjhosānaṃ paṭicca pariggaho)

10. clinging depends on passionate desire (chandarāgaṃ paṭicca ajjhosānaṃ)

11. passionate desire depends on firm opinion (vinicchayaṃ paṭicca chandarāgo)

12. firm opinion depends on gain/acquisition (lābhaṃ paṭicca vinicchayo)

13. quest conditions firm opinion (pariyesanaṃ paṭicca lābho)

14. thirst conditions quest (taṇhaṃ paṭicca pariyesanā)

15. Contact conditions feeling (phassapaccayā vedanā)

16. Name and form conditions contact (nāmarūpapaccayā phasso)

17. Consciousness conditions name and form (viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpaṃ)

18. Name and form conditions consciousness (nāmarūpapaccayā viññāṇaṃ)

To understand why pariyāya applies, simply recognize that any of these may be part of a chain of events leading to dukkha, but they are not the very definition of that chain. They can be seen as examples of things that play a part (especially 6-14), as well as an example to provide a template with which to understand the process being explained.

8 DN 15 [pts D ii 57]