Re: SN 35.23 Sabba Sutta: The All
Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 9:55 am
Thanks Sylvester. I'm not sure how we got to SN 1.27, but since we have, let me quote from Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought, page 151.
Mike
Gombrich wrote:There is a famous verse in the Taittiriya Upanishad:
This describes the salvific experience according to the Vedanta, in which the individual self is felt to merge into brahman. It is not, I think, well known that there is a short poem in the Pali Canon (SN 1.27) which begins by asking
- Before they reach it, words turn back,
together with the mind;
One who knows that bliss of brahman,
he is never afraid.
"From what do words turn back?"
The answer (by implicated) is nibbana. This has probably been overlooked because the tradition has misinterpreted the question. The pali word used here for 'words' is sara (Sanskrit svara); but the commentator seems to have interpreted it as a homonym which means 'streams' and assumed a reference to another metaphor, that of rivers merging into the ocean (swee Mundaka Upanishad 3.2.8).
Mike