cjmacie wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2016 1:05 pm
mikenz66 wrote:
...overinterpreting some of these brief statements.
The modern mind, confronting ancient literary traditions, displays several idiosyncrasies that complicate the task.
One is the idea of "authorship", embodied in which is an assertion of identity, of self, so to speak. (Think of, for example, the whole issue of "intellectual property".) To illustrate this at another extreme, in ancient Chinese literature (philosophy, religion, medicine, etc), if a writer wanted something to be heard and respected, it would have to be phrased as "The Yellow Emperor said…", or, "According to the ancient masters…". One never touted "I have this great new idea!" That would be an affront to tradition, to the ancestors. As I have noted now and again around here, there's much in common between the ancient Indian-Buddhist mind and the contemporaneous Chinese practices – not least of which the enthusiasm which the Chinese embraced Buddhism itself.
mikenz66 wrote:
... The Visuddhimagga doesn't seem to be claiming to be presenting something new, it seems to me to be a summary of ancient commentary and experience.
Another modern aspect is the Western philosophical attraction to literal interpretation, seeing black or white – tracing perhaps back to Aristotelian logic of "non-contradiction": either A or not-A is true. This is compounded when the interpretation works through translations, using modern terms where it's an easy trap, using modern associations of those terms, to find something to quibble about when looking for "THE truth" of what is said/written long ago in the context of a different worldview.
Counter example being that extensive passage quoted above cataloging the various ways in which that key phrase in the Satipatthana-Sutta -- "
ekayano ayam magga" may be viewed, and especially without any emphasis on having to eliminate all but the "correct" meaning. (C.f. Ven. Analayo's two Satipatthana books for multiple examples of both where he does honor multiple meanings, but also some where he s/t goes a bit overboard trying to assert a single "true" meaning.)
Related is the notion of "polysemous" dimensions of interpretation: "poly" = many, "semous" = meaning, as in "semantics". Illustration, again, in ancient Chinese core texts – which were, btw, largely intended, very much as ancient Buddhists texts, as mnemonic aids to an essentially oral tradition, rather than as irrefutable text-book definitions. Chinese characters ("words") being "pictographic" images, originally depicting concrete objects, were, over time extended to represent, in addition, more abstract ideas, and diverse in different areas of application. So one witnesses modern interpreters, including modern Chinese eager to out-science the Westerners, trying to prove the one true meaning of some rather obtuse ancient text. But then there are, thankfully, also interpreters – both Western and Eastern -- more attuned to the original contexts and willing to admit that the original intention might well have been polysemous expression of simultaneous multiple perspectives.
Indo-european scripts (from Sanskrit/Pali all the way down to English) are more "literal" (composed of abstract "letters") than "graphic" (as Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics). Non-the-less, the "meanings" in ancient Indic languages (i.e. Sanskrit, Pali,…) are often heavily imbued with symbolic or metaphorical dimensions, which readily admit of polysemous interpretation. Modern scholarship has been digging out how the Buddha appears to have used terms and images well-know in his time from their usage in Vedic, Brahmanic, and other traditions, and then overlaid, twisted their traditional meanings to communicate his radical insights into the same problem areas they were earlier used to illuminate.
The significance of such scholarly findings shows us that seeing the meaning of terms from simultaneous multiple dimensions can be critical to understanding how they were being used. E.g. to appreciate the play on words the Buddha often used get his listeners attention and guide them to new realizations.
Recognizing that dimension at work in the Buddha's texts, and seeing how it's been re-enforced over time in the core abhidhamma and commentarial practice of constantly turning words over, around, and inside-out to see their multiple semantic dimensions -- reading, e.g., the
Vissudhimagga, one can't help but notice the extensive amount of the text devoted to dissecting quotations (most often from
sutta-s) into the meanings of each word – we may well notice with greater insight how we, today, in fact are overlaying (commenting, if you will) the ancient texts with linguistic associations that originate in our modern mental lifestyle.
If we're not acutely aware of this dimension, we're then in danger of becoming trapped by our more modern biases, and miss what treasures may be dug-up in ancient texts that, in fact, can help liberate us from our conditioned limitations.
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