Sylvester wrote:Perhaps it's really about time to abandon Ven T's translation of paṭigha in the DN 15 and the arūpa pericope as meaning "resistance". That leads to confusion with the latency tendency of aversion. It would be clearer if we adopted BB's several translations, eg sensory impact, sensory impingement. Nevertheless, since my answer to (2) posits that paṭighasamphassa in DN 15 as kammically neutral, you understand me correctly that it is not associated with the anusaya of aversion per se.
Hmmm. Well, I disagree with paṭigha not being used in DN 15 as resistance, but I draw that conclusion from just a quick look at its roots and the way it is used elsewhere, and (more importantly) from the larger context of what's being said in DN 15 via the language of the creation myth that underlies the first five steps of DA (a subject I still need to take up).
...But by and large, for an uninstructed worldling, bodily/impingement contact will be followed by the reactions driven by the respective anusaya.
So, I don't agree with (4). If this will make things clearer, let me make explicit my belief -
- SN 36.6's bodily darts arise from DN 15's paṭighasamphassa (impingement contact)
- SN 36.6's mental darts arise from DN 15's adhivacanasamphassa (designation contact)
Even if paṭighasamphassa in DN 15 is kammically neutral, MN 44 suggests that the reactive sequel driven by the anusayas is almost always inevitable.
So paṭighasamphassa always gets a reaction, but the reaction is not always action (kamma) in the sense that the Buddha was defining it as having the sort of consequences we're trying to stop experiencing. I'm okay with that, since in my understanding an awakened person still experiences the conditions that could result in that sort of kamma -- so the awakened person could experience paṭighasamphassa -- but doesn't go on to cling to it/react to it in the way that is kamma. Maybe a kammically neutral reaction would be to be mindful of what's happening.
I wonder if the problem you and BB have with the word being translated as "resistance" is that it tends to carry a connotation of something that is necessarily negative, not neutral?
If the Buddhist texts record this teaching as being given with a grammatical construction that is apparently commonly understood, what evidence is there that the brahmins would have understood it differently from the Theravada Commentators?
And I suspect there may be a misunderstanding in there, because I don't have the impression that the *grammatical structure* (or even the statement's structures) of the field/set/where was "commonly understood" by people in the Buddha's day. In fact, I seriously doubt anyone had ever done what he did in the precise way he did it ever before -- what he did was brilliant but not simple.
Well, I did give the example of the grammatical construction from DN 16 that was used in a non-DA context.
As I understand this, you still have the impression that somehow DA's very factual-sounding descriptions of a life in a world in which rebirth is the order of the day undermines my thesis that DA isn't describing rebirth, even though I've tried to detail how the Buddha uses the factual to (1) show the pattern of how things happen in a "as in this large literal context it happens, so it happens in what I'm trying to point out to you" sort of way while simultaneously (2) providing the object of meditation we should be looking at to see what is going on -- look in the large field to find the weeds we need to pull.
When he is doing this, he is going to sound *perfectly* literal. That he uses literal-sounding language in DN 16 to be literal in a non-DA context, doesn't, as I see it, make his use of literal language in DA mean anything other than what I'm saying it should mean. If I'm missing some other point you're trying to make, I apologize; please let me know.
He's using literal sounding language in DA because he wants it to sound literal, because he is discussing the literal. It is not meant to hint at anything else. He is describing literal consciousness as being the condition for literal name-and-form because the way people perceive name-and-form and consciousness supporting each other in this larger, literal context is *exactly* the same relationship as they have in the smaller subset of things he's trying to get us to see. (In the case of name-and-form and consciousness, the exactness of the relationship, necessary complete set as compared to the critical subset -- is really, really important.)
So when he says -"if there was no birth of any being, in any form, anywhere, would there be aging-and-death?"- he is saying a couple of things at once: One is what seems fairly obvious: that birth is a condition for aging and death to happen (we can all agree with that), but he's also saying that without literal birth, the more specific thing he's describing in birth could not happen, and neither would what he's describing in aging-and-death because there would be no birth of the subset sort. AND he's saying that what he is describing as going on in birth that leads to what he's describing as going on in aging-and-death has the exact same relationship as the literal relationship. So what he really wants us to see going on in birth happens because literal birth happens, same with aging and death: if there were no aging and death we wouldn't experience impermanence and dukkha.
I wish I could get this across so that you could see how elegantly he constructed this argument, and how useful it is to practice with. Once you see it, it provides a really rich environment for insight in daily life, as well as into the suttas.
Are we to suppose that the Buddha's auditors would not have understood it in a manner that did not require an exposition? Yes, the DA chain was novel, but the grammar underlying each nidana within the chain was not.
Removing the double-negatives, I'm going to rephrase the question above as: "Are we to suppose that the Buddha's auditors would have understood DN 15 in a manner that required an exposition?"
We are to suppose that the Buddha's auditors would have understood DN 15 in a manner which required thought and investigation. The method used of a multi-layered structure in DA set the student up to recognize, first, that the language of rebirth used in the later versions was not making a positive statement about rebirth. No exposition was required to make that point: the names of links #2 through #11 talk to us about what people believed about the conditions that bring us into the world and our condition on arrival; about the rituals we perform throughout a life; about transitioning to whatever comes after death and what we'll experience there. Links #1 and #12 tell us this is not a nice commentary about those beliefs: instead of being all about knowledge and ending in bliss or a better life, it starts with ignorance and ends with (see it as you like) dukkha or the Same Old Stuff (aging and death).
No further exposition is needed to let the Upanisadic student know that DA discusses rebirth but not in a positive light: it denies that all the knowledge everyone thinks they possess about rebirth is in their possession (starts with ignorance) and denies that it leads where they think it leads (ends with dukkha). From there, the student has only to recognize what you, Sylvester, see yourself: that the detail on key elements describes something else, something other than what those students (and everyone else in the area) believe about the world. Not only is namarupa very different, the rituals we perform in the middle section are way different -- they are all about how we form opinions (largely about how we form opinions about rebirth) and the results are definitely different, going after death not into a happier place but to the S.O.S.
What I assume is that, when your Upanisadic student was listening to the Buddha talk about consciousness and name-and-form, he had already heard the short version -- ignorance to sankhara to consciousness to name and form to the six senses... up to aging-and-death -- and recognized that this was about rebirth but was saying something negative, so when he was listening to the Buddha talk about consciousness and name-and-form he will have already been cued to try to understand that there was something very different being said throughout.
A lot of the Buddha's sermons talk about how clinging to *things* gets us into trouble -- how possessions (sometimes undetailed, sometimes detailed as material wealth: cows, pigs, wives) get made into "mine" and this leads to grief. I say he is doing the same thing with those lessons as he does with everything else. He is stating what everyone knows to be true -- the obvious -- and it may be true, but it isn't really what he's talking about, or at least it isn't *all* that he's talking about. He is also talking about self, possessions as in "bits that we make into self", and how clinging to those leads to dukkha. He talks about how the impermanence of our possessions will ultimately cause us to suffer, but the same is true of every element we possess as self -- when we come to discover they are not self, it hurts, at least it does in the context of ignorance. When we, in life, lose some cherished belief we have held for a long time, lose it in an encounter with a reality that doesn't match the stories we have told ourselves, that's very painful. It's less painful to do this (maybe even joyful) through a conscious practice, that looks for those things/beliefs we are holding onto as self, and know we can let go of them because we know where that holding leads.
Anyway, what I'm saying is he is doing the same thing -- it's the same pattern -- all over the suttas.