As far as I am aware "kāya" is not found in the pre-Buddhist literature (the Vedas and Upanishads). It is found in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, where Pāṇini gives it's root as √ci, which means "to arrange in order, heap up, pile up, construct". On the whole it seems to be an innovation of the Buddha. I think this is significant, since we do have another well attested word for the physical body in "śarīra/sarīra", which always seems to mean the physical body proper. Given that kāya has to do with "that with parts" it seems the adoption of this word was a means via which the Buddha could stress the not-self of the body proper. The same then with nāmakāya, which would stress that the mind is also not one whole, and so a potentially static thing. The point then, it seems, is to stress that that by which you know the physical world and that by which you know the mental world are both made of parts that stand in a conditional relation to each other, thus being stamped with the 3 marks. Returning then to how "body" was used in the pre-Buddhist literature, certainly śarīra/sarīra pops up there, which always means the physical body proper, but we also find instances where where "body" is used in a difference sense. For example, the ātman can mean either the True Self or it can mean "body", and it's not all that clear if the True Self ātman was not also thought of as being of body. If we think back to puruṣa, we can see in the Vedic creation myth the act of creation being connected to the sacrifice of puruṣa, who's many parts become the basis for the world. For example his fat become wild beasts, and so on (RV 10.90). This myth harks back to the ancient Indo-Europeans, where the creation of the world is tied to the sacrifice and dismemberment of a cosmic giant into many different parts. This crops up again in the Upanishads, namely the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, although this time it is a cosmic horse which is sacrificed:waryoffolly wrote: ↑Wed May 19, 2021 12:16 am
Can you or someone else point me to some scholarly work discussing the common (ie cultural) usage of kaya in the time of the Buddha? (Discussing usages of kaya external to the canon. I know where to look if I want to see it’s usages inside the canon!)
Notice here that we have ātman being used as "body". It seems that when the Brahmins and Rishis wished to speak of the physical body proper śarīra was used, whilst ātman was used when discussing a body of a more metaphysical nature. An interesting thing about this creation myth is that the cosmic giant, puruṣa, is very much composed of a body, for he has parts which are divided, but exists before creation as a complete whole. This is interesting because to say "whole" in sanskrit we would say "sarvām", which in Pāli is "Sabbaṁ". In the Upanishads we do find a metaphysical conception of sarvām. It is tied to Brahman. Brahman then should not be seen as "all" as in everything here in the phenomenal world but rather as "whole", the complete one behind the universe. This ties Brahman back to puruṣa, the cosmic giant, and I believe this connection is made in either the Upanishads themselves or in later commentary. As Jan Gonda has shown, sarvām in the Vedas means "whole" which is tied to being "complete" and "healthy", which stands in opposition to that which is a part, thus being broken and so ill-health. Incidentally this would mean that when we read Sabbaṁ atthi in the suttas, such as in SN 12.15, we should read it as "Brahman exists" and indeed this is strongly hinted as in SN 12.48 and in other suttas (MN 74 comes to mind). With all this in mind then, to the Brahmins body had two senses. There was the physical body, which is śarīra, and there is the metaphysical and transcendent body of ātman which is tied to the complete whole of Brahman, who we may say is complete in all his parts (this reminds us of the mind-made body perhaps in the suttas). In opposition to them we have the Buddha who used "kāya". We can see that with all of it's connection to "parts", it would stress that the physical body and the mental body are not whole but are broken and ill-health (we might say dukkha) and within them no whole body, complete in all of its parts (reminding us again of the mind-made body/mind made acquisition of self in DN 9), can be found. The Buddha's use of the word "kāya" seems then to have been chosen for it's polemical value, as a means to attack the Brahmins metaphysical notions of body and parts. With all this in mind, we can see then that "body" was not used to simply refer to the physical body, but rather the concept of bodies and parts was suffused with metaphysical speculation during the time of the Buddha. It is this cultural, religious and philosopohical background we should be aware of when we read the Buddha discussing "kāya" for it seems it carries more meaning than simply the physical body, for which he seems to prefer to use the standard and more philosophically neutral word "sarīra".Verse 1.1.1
उषा वा अश्वस्य मेध्यस्य शिरः । सूर्यश्चक्षुः, वातः प्राणः, व्यात्तमग्निर्वैश्वानरः, संवत्सर आत्माश्वस्य मेध्यस्य । द्यौः पृष्ठम्, अन्तरिक्षमुदरम्, पृथिवी पाजस्यम्, दिशः पार्श्वे, अवान्तरदिशः पर्शवः, ऋतवोऽङ्गानि, मासाश्चार्धमासाश्च पर्वाणि, अहोरात्राणि प्रतिष्ठाः, नक्षत्राण्यस्थीनि, नभो मांसानि । ऊवध्यं सिकताः, सिन्धवो गुदाः, यकृच्च क्लोमानश्च पर्वताः, ओषधयश्च वनस्पतयश्च लोमानि, उद्यन् पूर्वार्धाः निम्लोचञ्जघनार्धः, यद्विजृम्भते तद्विद्योतते, यद्विधूनुते तत्स्तनयति, यन्मेहति तद्वर्षति, वागेवास्य वाक् ॥ १ ॥
uṣā vā aśvasya medhyasya śiraḥ | sūryaścakṣuḥ, vātaḥ prāṇaḥ, vyāttamagnirvaiśvānaraḥ, saṃvatsara ātmāśvasya medhyasya | dyauḥ pṛṣṭham, antarikṣamudaram, pṛthivī pājasyam, diśaḥ pārśve, avāntaradiśaḥ parśavaḥ, ṛtavo'ṅgāni, māsāścārdhamāsāśca parvāṇi, ahorātrāṇi pratiṣṭhāḥ, nakṣatrāṇyasthīni, nabho māṃsāni | ūvadhyaṃ sikatāḥ, sindhavo gudāḥ, yakṛcca klomānaśca parvatāḥ, oṣadhayaśca vanaspatayaśca lomāni, udyan pūrvārdhȧḥ nimlocañjaghanārdhaḥ, yadvijṛmbhate tadvidyotate, yadvidhūnute tatstanayati, yanmehati tadvarṣati, vāgevāsya vāk || 1 ||
l. Om. The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn, its eye the sun, its vital force[7] the air, its open mouth the fire called Vaiśvānara, and the body of the sacrificial horse is the year. Its back is heaven, its belly the sky, its hoof the earth, its sides the four quarters, its ribs the intermediate quarters, its members the seasons, its joints the months and fortnights, its feet the days and nights, its bones the stars and its flesh the clouds. Its half-digested food is the sand, its blood-vessels the rivers, its liver and spleen the mountains, its hairs the herbs and trees. Its forepart is the ascending sun, its hind part the descending sun, its yawning is lightning, its shaking the body is thundering, its making water is raining, and its neighing is voice.
In relation to further reading I can recommend the following:
"The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World"
"Indian Linguistics: Journal of the Lingusitic Society of India" Volume XVI, 1955 (this is for Jan Gonda's discussion of Sarvam. If you can't get it PM me and I can email it).
"The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation" by Patrick Olivelle
The Rig Veda
The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad & Chāndogyopaniṣad
"The Religious, Political, and Medical Roots of Personhood in Pre-Classical India" (I've just started reading this myself, but looks promising)
The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation.In ancient India, however, the human body was invested with unparalleled cosmological significance, and parts of the body were homologized with cosmic phenomena. I have made reference to the ancient cosmogonic hymn found in the Rgveda (10.90) and predating the Upanisads by several centuries, a hymn that depicts the creation of the universe through the sacrificial dismemberment of the body of a primeval man (purusa). From the parts of his sacrificed body, there emerged not only the varnas of society but also the parts of the cosmos: sun from the eye, moon from the mind, wind from the breath, sky from the head, earth from the feet, and so on. I will deal in greater detail with these cosmic connections in the next section; here I want to briefly describe the Upanisadic assumptions about human physiology and psychology. In these documents, the term most frequently used with reference to a living, breathing body is atman, a term liable to misunderstanding and mistranslating because it can also mean the spiritual self or the inmost core of a human being, besides functioning as a mere reflexive pronoun. The body which is the object of investigation, moreover, is primarily the male body; the female body enters the discussion infrequently and then mostly within the context of male sexual activity. The term yoni used in these contexts can mean both the vagina in which the semen is deposited and the womb in which the fetus develops...
4.9-10 the Whole: the exact sense of the term sarva, here translated as "the Whole," has been much debated. As Gonda 1955a has shown, the term in its earliest usage did not mean "everything" but carried the sense of completeness, wholeness, and health. It is, thus, opposed to what is partial, broken, sick, or hurt. In the Upanisads the term is used to indicate not all things in the universe but a higher-level totality that encompasses the universe. Gonda (1955a, 64) observes that the phrase sarvam khalv idam brahma at CU 3.14.1 does not mean "'Brahman is everything here,' but 'Brahman is the complete here, this whole (one),' or: 'Brahman is what is the whole, complete here, is what is entire, perfect, with no part lacking, what is safe and well etc., i.e. Completeness, Totality, the All seen as the Whole.'" Unless the context dictates otherwise, I translate sarvam throughout as "the Whole" and the phrase idam sarvam as "this whole world." To the English reader the term "whole" should evoke the senses of totality and
So you can see I cannot help raise an eyebrow when someone tells me we should simply read "kāya" as the physical body, because its common sense and obvious that it means "body". To me said person is reading said passages from the perspective of a 21st Century, usually European, person rather than from the perspective of Iron Age India where, as we have shown, discussions about "body" and "parts" are not so simple and are, rather, pregnant with metaphysical debates. It is my proposal that in order to understand the Buddha we should do our best to think like he did, by placing ourselves as much as possible in his cultural worldview. To bring this back to my own arguments then somewhat, I think it is entirely consistent to interpret "kāya" in the Jhāna pericope as not being the physical body but rather the nāmakāya, since the use of "kāya" seems to be simply a means by which the Buddha stresses the impermanence, dukkha and not-self of such lofty attainments. That which knows Jhāna then, namely nāma, is not some Whole, some Sarvām/Sabbaṁ, but rather that which is made of parts and so is inherently impermanent, ill-health (or dukkha) and so not-self. The same when we read passages which state one comes to know nibbāna via the kāya, which seem to be stressing how nibbāna is separate from yet known by that which is marked with the 3 marks. That is to say, known not via a True Self but simply via conditioned phenomena yet is itself free of them.
शरीर [ śarīra ] [ śárīra ]
- the body
- bodily frame
- solid parts of the body (pl. the bones) Lit. RV.
चि [ ci ] [ ci ]1 Root cl. [5]
- to arrange in order
- heap up
- pile up
- construct
“Manomayaṁ kho ahaṁ, bhante, attānaṁ paccemi sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṁ ahīnindriyan”ti.
“Sir, I believe in a mind-made self which is complete in all its various parts, not deficient in any faculty.” - DN 9