Ceisiwr wrote: ↑Sun Jan 09, 2022 7:19 amThe parallel talks of descent into name yes? This is a bit odd.
AFAIK, they don't. It's "descent of." Even in modern biology, the egg descends down the fallopian tube: the "descent of the egg." I don't understand why people are thinking it's "descent onto" on linguistic grounds. The argument in favour of "descent into/onto" seems to be mostly doctrinal, based on the notion that consciousness precedes namarupa and that consciousness must "descent onto/into" it, and it doesn't seem to be based on the contents of the material texts.
"Descent onto" is tricky, because it confuses the object of the noun "descent of." The "descent of X" is something that X does. The "descent into/onto X" is something that something else does to X, and that would have to be differently declined in Pali. Now, "of" is a fraught word in English and has many diverse ways to connect nouns. I talked about that
here. Nonetheless, from the established context surrounding the phrase "descent of X," it seems "of" is coordinating a relationship between "descent" and "X" wherein X itself "does" the descent. For instance, this belief in the "descent of the gandharva" is taken so literally by some Tibetan exegetes that they argue that an airy spectral body, the gandharva, literally descends into the mother's womb, attracted by the sexual intercourse of the mother and father. Where did it descend from? The airs above. During the last moments of life, the body formed in the air above the old body. Some say that it exits the old body via the mouth when air is expelled from the lungs as the body dies. It travels through the air, experiencing a "bardo of death," and descends into the womb of the mother. I don't believe in this model. I think that it seems too ham-fistedly literal about "the gandharva." Secondly, though the gandharva is not the self, is not "the same consciousness," it seems too close to the heresy of Sati the fisherman's son that "this same consciousness" transmigrates for me to comfortable with it. That being said, I have not given a particularly generous account of how rebirth is supposed to work according to that model. I personally don't believe in it, because I can't see a significant difference between it and a transmigrating soul, even though the difference has been explained to me. The gardharval body is not a soul that transmigrates because it is simply another set of aggregates that are acquired and discarded in the intervening period between two more significant births. Personally, I think the explanation is a proto-physicalist explanation. The mind-stream must be "embodied" in the form of the gandharva during the antarabhava. I disagree that it must be so embodied.
Touching on the matter of the school affiliation of the second SA collection, there's one thing that thomaslaw and Bingenheimer are starting to agree on, and that is that the attribution to the Kāśyapīya sect is problematized and tentative at best:
https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.p ... /7677/1313
Compare that with Mun-Keat's theory (NOTE: his last name is actually "Choong." I've been mistakenly referring to "Mun-Keat" as his surname) that it
does belong either to the Kāśyapīya sect or an unknown one from his 2011 article
A comparison of the Pali and Chinese versions of the 'Devata Samyutta' and 'Devaputta Samyutta,' on p. 62, note 6. This very citation was once linked to me by a poster also posting in this thread who
insisted that the second SA was Kāśyapīya. Minds change, it seems, and there's nothing wrong with that.