Hi all ,
Sn 12.19
“Bhikkhus, for the wise man, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this body has thereby originated. So there is this body and external name-and-form: thus this dyad. Dependent on the dyad there is contact. There are just six sense bases, contacted through which—or through a certain one among them—the wise man experiences pleasure and pain. What, bhikkhus, is the distinction here, what is the disparity, what is the difference between the wise man and the fool?”
Does it mean nama rupa of someone else ?
If meaning of namarupa can't be resolved ,
External namarupa could not be determined also .
What does it mean external namarupa ?
What does it mean external namarupa ?
Last edited by sentinel on Tue Mar 06, 2018 9:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Below is some sujato reply on namarupa from SC .
This is not a simple question! But my own suggestion is to avoid the Abhidhamma explanations of this particular term, as the usage in later years is quite different from that found in the suttas.
The underlying sense of the word nāma is “name”. But in pre-rational societies, such as that which Buddhism was emerging from, name has a much more potent meaning. We still feel this when we call an evil Lord, “he who must not be named”. Simply using a name is to invoke the essence of that thing. It was felt that names and the things that they represent (i.e. rūpa) are bound together. When you know something’s name, you have power over it. This is the heart of magic.
The pre-Buddhist Upanishads critiqued this idea, moving beyond the notion of separate rūpas each with their own nāma. Instead, they postulated that, just as when the rivers flow into the ocean, each of them loses their “name” and “shape” and become one with the ocean; so too, each of us will lose our individual “name” (i.e. concept of self) and “shape” (i.e. this corporeal body into which we happen to be incarnated) and become one with the infinite ocean of consciousness (vijñāna).
The Buddha went a step further, showing that consciousness itself depends on nāmarūpa; in other words, our awareness evolves together with the external sense stimuli and the concepts and designations associated with that.
Thus the notion of nāmarūpa is evolving and shifting through this philosophical evolution. It is losing its connection with magic and pre-rational thought, and becoming a rational, psychological idea. This shift is present within the EBTs, which enable us to trace the connections backwards through the Upanishads to magic, and forwards to the hyper-rational explanations of the Abhidhamma, where the connection with magical thinking is lost entirely.
Again, I don’t really want to spend too long on this, as I have written extensively on this problem elsewhere. But the basic problem is that the Abhidhamma treats the nāma as “mind”, which it never means in the suttas, and then rūpa becomes “body”, which it sometimes means in the suttas, but not here. (Rūpa is broader than “body”, as it includes the objects of the five sense, and even the objects of the sixth sense that have material properties such as color and position).
This then creates a dualistic mind/body analysis. The primary mode of analysis is to distinguish between the mind and the body, and again, this is never found in the suttas. The suttas are much too sophisticated to fall into this kind of trap. They never treat the mind and the body as separate entities, or posit them as primary forms of analytical categories.
This mind/body dualism lies at the heart of much Western philosophy, such as Descartes, and has been responsible for many of the most insoluble and damaging implications of western philosophy. Indeed, I believe that the reason we are subject to such an influential extremist materialism today, with its far-reaching and devastating consequences in terms of divorcing fact and value, lies precisely because the West has never escaped the dysfunctional abyss of mind/body dualism.
When the Buddha discussed the mind and the body, he always placed their relation foremost, not their separation. This is apparent in the commentarial attempt to justify the so-called nāmarūpapariccheda. This means the “cutting between, complete separation of mind and body”. But this is not found anywhere in the EBTs, so to support it they use a passage on meditative vision. But that passage speaks not of the separation between these things, but quite the opposite: that they are bound together, dependent on each other.
Question :
what does nāma mean in the suttas?
Sujato :
It means “name”. But see above, I talked about the evolution of the use of nāma as a philosophical term. The Sutta use is dialectical, i.e. based not on an absolute sense but on a response to the pre-existing uses and ideas and baggage.
Imagine that objects in the world came labelled with hidden metadata: that’s name.
P/s :
In short , No answer given .
This is not a simple question! But my own suggestion is to avoid the Abhidhamma explanations of this particular term, as the usage in later years is quite different from that found in the suttas.
The underlying sense of the word nāma is “name”. But in pre-rational societies, such as that which Buddhism was emerging from, name has a much more potent meaning. We still feel this when we call an evil Lord, “he who must not be named”. Simply using a name is to invoke the essence of that thing. It was felt that names and the things that they represent (i.e. rūpa) are bound together. When you know something’s name, you have power over it. This is the heart of magic.
The pre-Buddhist Upanishads critiqued this idea, moving beyond the notion of separate rūpas each with their own nāma. Instead, they postulated that, just as when the rivers flow into the ocean, each of them loses their “name” and “shape” and become one with the ocean; so too, each of us will lose our individual “name” (i.e. concept of self) and “shape” (i.e. this corporeal body into which we happen to be incarnated) and become one with the infinite ocean of consciousness (vijñāna).
The Buddha went a step further, showing that consciousness itself depends on nāmarūpa; in other words, our awareness evolves together with the external sense stimuli and the concepts and designations associated with that.
Thus the notion of nāmarūpa is evolving and shifting through this philosophical evolution. It is losing its connection with magic and pre-rational thought, and becoming a rational, psychological idea. This shift is present within the EBTs, which enable us to trace the connections backwards through the Upanishads to magic, and forwards to the hyper-rational explanations of the Abhidhamma, where the connection with magical thinking is lost entirely.
Again, I don’t really want to spend too long on this, as I have written extensively on this problem elsewhere. But the basic problem is that the Abhidhamma treats the nāma as “mind”, which it never means in the suttas, and then rūpa becomes “body”, which it sometimes means in the suttas, but not here. (Rūpa is broader than “body”, as it includes the objects of the five sense, and even the objects of the sixth sense that have material properties such as color and position).
This then creates a dualistic mind/body analysis. The primary mode of analysis is to distinguish between the mind and the body, and again, this is never found in the suttas. The suttas are much too sophisticated to fall into this kind of trap. They never treat the mind and the body as separate entities, or posit them as primary forms of analytical categories.
This mind/body dualism lies at the heart of much Western philosophy, such as Descartes, and has been responsible for many of the most insoluble and damaging implications of western philosophy. Indeed, I believe that the reason we are subject to such an influential extremist materialism today, with its far-reaching and devastating consequences in terms of divorcing fact and value, lies precisely because the West has never escaped the dysfunctional abyss of mind/body dualism.
When the Buddha discussed the mind and the body, he always placed their relation foremost, not their separation. This is apparent in the commentarial attempt to justify the so-called nāmarūpapariccheda. This means the “cutting between, complete separation of mind and body”. But this is not found anywhere in the EBTs, so to support it they use a passage on meditative vision. But that passage speaks not of the separation between these things, but quite the opposite: that they are bound together, dependent on each other.
Question :
what does nāma mean in the suttas?
Sujato :
It means “name”. But see above, I talked about the evolution of the use of nāma as a philosophical term. The Sutta use is dialectical, i.e. based not on an absolute sense but on a response to the pre-existing uses and ideas and baggage.
Imagine that objects in the world came labelled with hidden metadata: that’s name.
P/s :
In short , No answer given .
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Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
i SN12.2 Vibanga Sutta : paticca samuppada is ecplained as Aviijja, sankara, vingnana, namarupa, salayatana,phassa, vedana, tanha, upadana, bhava, jati , jara marana, dukka domanassa & disress conditioned one by the other.James Tan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:48 am Hi all ,
Sn 12.19
“Bhikkhus, for the wise man, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this body has thereby originated. So there is this body and external name-and-form: thus this dyad. Dependent on the dyad there is contact. There are just six sense bases, contacted through which—or through a certain one among them—the wise man experiences pleasure and pain. What, bhikkhus, is the distinction here, what is the disparity, what is the difference between the wise man and the fool?”
Does it mean nama rupa of someone else ?
If meaning of namarupa can't be resolved ,
External namarupa could not be determined also .
As all are well described I select the description of namarupa: explains " what is nama rupa" & describes as feeling, perception, intention, contact & attantion as nama. And the four great elements ( maha buta) apo, tejo,
vayo, patavi as form or rupa.
Hence rupa or form is matter formed in dependant origination with nama as described above.
It is noted that Prof. ediriweera saraccandra in his book,
Buddist psychology of perceptions write " external stimulus ( rupa) and subjective individual " nama".
(This book is yet to be located and read by me.) But I feel that it gives a clue to external named form as the external stimulus and the referred subjective individual as nama per this post.
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
If I get you right ,justindesilva wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:21 pmi SN12.2 Vibanga Sutta : paticca samuppada is ecplained as Aviijja, sankara, vingnana, namarupa, salayatana,phassa, vedana, tanha, upadana, bhava, jati , jara marana, dukka domanassa & disress conditioned one by the other.James Tan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:48 am Hi all ,
Sn 12.19
“Bhikkhus, for the wise man, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this body has thereby originated. So there is this body and external name-and-form: thus this dyad. Dependent on the dyad there is contact. There are just six sense bases, contacted through which—or through a certain one among them—the wise man experiences pleasure and pain. What, bhikkhus, is the distinction here, what is the disparity, what is the difference between the wise man and the fool?”
Does it mean nama rupa of someone else ?
If meaning of namarupa can't be resolved ,
External namarupa could not be determined also .
As all are well described I select the description of namarupa: explains " what is nama rupa" & describes as feeling, perception, intention, contact & attantion as nama. And the four great elements ( maha buta) apo, tejo,
vayo, patavi as form or rupa.
Hence rupa or form is matter formed in dependant origination with nama as described above.
It is noted that Prof. ediriweera saraccandra in his book,
Buddist psychology of perceptions write " external stimulus ( rupa) and subjective individual " nama".
(This book is yet to be located and read by me.) But I feel that it gives a clue to external named form as the external stimulus and the referred subjective individual as nama per this post.
feeling, perception, intention,
contact & attention as nama and
the four great elements ( maha buta)
apo, tejo, vayo, patavi as rupa.
But , what is external named form ?
Could you explain , what you mean by
subjective individual as nama ?
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Prof. Piya Tan's note from SN 12.19:
external name-and-form” (aya c’eva kāyo bahiddhā ca nāma,rpaṁ) [§§2, 3], which the Commentary explains as referring to the conscious body of others externally, and that the meaning should be explained in terms of the five aggregates and six sense-bases of oneself and of others (SA 2:38). Technically and academically, the commentarial explanation may be correct, but it is somewhat narrow, considering the context. Bodhi instructively notes...
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Thanks Santa ,santa100 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:31 pm Prof. Piya Tan's note from SN 12.19:external name-and-form” (aya c’eva kāyo bahiddhā ca nāma,rpaṁ) [§§2, 3], which the Commentary explains as referring to the conscious body of others externally, and that the meaning should be explained in terms of the five aggregates and six sense-bases of oneself and of others (SA 2:38). Technically and academically, the commentarial explanation may be correct, but it is somewhat narrow, considering the context. Bodhi instructively notes...
(This interpretation of bahiddhā nāmarūpa seems dubious. We may have here, rather, a rare
example of the term nāmarūpa being employed to represent the entire field of experience avail-
able to consciousness, “external name” being the concepts used to designate the objects cognized.)
The problem is , external name (external
feeling, perception, intention, contact &
attention as nama) , could not be perceived by other people .
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
True, but it could be inferred. If you did something terrible to a person, and s/he's really pissed, then you can certainly pick up their feeling, perception, intention, etc. just by looking in their eyes without them having to do or say anything to you.
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
It doesn't really sounds right , what about the contact and attention ? Further more , that is only an assumption which could be wrong .
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Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
On this earth we are not alone and beings specially are interdependant. Therefore we internally are subject to our own feeling, perception .........., and externally we are subjective to the feelings, perception........ of other beings.James Tan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:37 pmIf I get you right ,justindesilva wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:21 pmi SN12.2 Vibanga Sutta : paticca samuppada is ecplained as Aviijja, sankara, vingnana, namarupa, salayatana,phassa, vedana, tanha, upadana, bhava, jati , jara marana, dukka domanassa & disress conditioned one by the other.James Tan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:48 am Hi all ,
Sn 12.19
“Bhikkhus, for the wise man, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this body has thereby originated. So there is this body and external name-and-form: thus this dyad. Dependent on the dyad there is contact. There are just six sense bases, contacted through which—or through a certain one among them—the wise man experiences pleasure and pain. What, bhikkhus, is the distinction here, what is the disparity, what is the difference between the wise man and the fool?”
Does it mean nama rupa of someone else ?
If meaning of namarupa can't be resolved ,
External namarupa could not be determined also .
As all are well described I select the description of namarupa: explains " what is nama rupa" & describes as feeling, perception, intention, contact & attantion as nama. And the four great elements ( maha buta) apo, tejo,
vayo, patavi as form or rupa.
Hence rupa or form is matter formed in dependant origination with nama as described above.
It is noted that Prof. ediriweera saraccandra in his book,
Buddist psychology of perceptions write " external stimulus ( rupa) and subjective individual " nama".
(This book is yet to be located and read by me.) But I feel that it gives a clue to external named form as the external stimulus and the referred subjective individual as nama per this post.
feeling, perception, intention,
contact & attention as nama and
the four great elements ( maha buta)
apo, tejo, vayo, patavi as rupa.
But , what is external named form ?
Could you explain , what you mean by
subjective individual as nama ?
This interdependence hence is with internal nama rupa snd external namarupa.
Pls. knock me out if I am wrong as a sutra cannot be found to this effect. But there is enough evidence with interdependence in the biosphere with ecology in science webs.
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Until one's developed the supernormal power, one will have to infer. Anyway, that's the info. from the Commentary, Piya, and Bodhi. If you have better sources, feel free to share it.
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Here is the parallel to sn12.19
sa 294 agama .
Probably you can't understand Chinese .
爾時,世尊告諸比丘:「愚癡無聞凡夫無明覆、愛緣繫,得此識身。內有此識身,外有名色,此二因緣生觸。此六觸入所觸,愚癡無聞凡夫苦樂受覺,因起種種。云何為六?眼觸入處,耳、鼻、舌、身、意觸入處。若黠慧者無明覆,愛緣繫得此識身。如是內有識身,外有名色,此二緣生六觸入處,六觸所觸故,智者生苦樂受覺,因起種種。何等為六?眼觸入處,耳、鼻、舌、身、意觸入處。愚夫、黠慧,彼於我所修諸梵者,有何差別?」
If according to the translation , it says ,
Internal consciousness body ,
external namarupa .
There is a difference between two translation .
Perhaps someone could figure it out .
P/s . how to use the color paste it on character so to make it distinct ?
sa 294 agama .
Probably you can't understand Chinese .
爾時,世尊告諸比丘:「愚癡無聞凡夫無明覆、愛緣繫,得此識身。內有此識身,外有名色,此二因緣生觸。此六觸入所觸,愚癡無聞凡夫苦樂受覺,因起種種。云何為六?眼觸入處,耳、鼻、舌、身、意觸入處。若黠慧者無明覆,愛緣繫得此識身。如是內有識身,外有名色,此二緣生六觸入處,六觸所觸故,智者生苦樂受覺,因起種種。何等為六?眼觸入處,耳、鼻、舌、身、意觸入處。愚夫、黠慧,彼於我所修諸梵者,有何差別?」
If according to the translation , it says ,
Internal consciousness body ,
external namarupa .
There is a difference between two translation .
Perhaps someone could figure it out .
P/s . how to use the color paste it on character so to make it distinct ?
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Please provide English translation to the whole paragraph in order for folks to see the full meaning, and also any Commentary for Saṃyuktāgama 294.
Example of bold, underlined, and colored: Test String
Example of bold, underlined, and colored: Test String
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Sorry ,
I checked up SC , sa 294 do not have English translation .
If you don't mind , I could try .
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
Re: What does it mean external namarupa ?
爾時,世尊告諸比丘:「愚癡無聞凡夫無明覆、愛緣繫,得此識身。內有此識身,外有名色,此二因緣生觸。此六觸入所觸,愚癡無聞凡夫苦樂受覺,因起種種。云何為六?眼觸入處,耳、鼻、舌、身、意觸入處。」
At that time , the World Honoured One told the bhikkhus , “Bhikkhus, for the fool, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this consciousness body has thereby originated. So there is this internal consciousness body and external name-and-form: thus this pair. Dependent on both there is contact. There are this six contact through which—the fool experiences pleasure and pain. Thus all arises .
And what is the six , namely , eyes contact base , ....mind contact base .
P/s : could you screenshot the test string ?
Got to go . Catch you later .
At that time , the World Honoured One told the bhikkhus , “Bhikkhus, for the fool, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, this consciousness body has thereby originated. So there is this internal consciousness body and external name-and-form: thus this pair. Dependent on both there is contact. There are this six contact through which—the fool experiences pleasure and pain. Thus all arises .
And what is the six , namely , eyes contact base , ....mind contact base .
P/s : could you screenshot the test string ?
Got to go . Catch you later .