[Buddha-l] RE: seeking the Pali and Sanskrit term for "holy/ religious/, sacred objects"

[Richard Nance]

> >Perhaps the disinterest in this inquiry is because (a) I am female
> >... (joke, I hope! unless Joanna was right...) and/or (b) the
> >participants in this list have what Gregory Schopen called
> >"Protestant Presuppositions" and reject the idea of relics and other
> >"sacred objects" having any benefit in spiritual practice and thus
> >they simply don't merit discussion.

I wouldn't be too quick to attribute motives. Personally, I've
refrained from weighing in on this simply because I can't recall a
general category of "sacred material object" being explicitly
thematized or discussed in the Buddhist Sanskrit texts I've read. This
doesn't mean that the texts don't occasionally discuss objects
(including the texts themselves) as worthy of veneration -- they do. 
But this veneration is due to them not because they belong to a more
general class of "sacred material objects," but because, e.g., they
constitute the body of the Tathaagata. I'd be wary of assuming that
this description generalizes to the category of "sacred material
objects."

One resource that might prove of some use to you in the current
context is the Mahaavyutpatti (a 9th century Sanskrit-Tibetan
translation lexicon).  This is available in an English translation by
Csoma de Kőrös (_Sanskrit-Tibetan-English vocabulary : being an
edition and translation of the Mahaavyutpatti_); there are also
e-versions available from various sites.  In the text, terms and
phrases are not listed alphabetically; instead, they're grouped under
various categories. This fact makes the work somewhat cumbersome to
use, but it provides an interesting window into the way in which some
Buddhist scholars of the period thought that the terms and phrases
they were regularly encountering in Buddhist texts could be
categorized.

A quick glance at the work turns up the following: the term mchod rten
(which you previously mentioned, and which is offered in the text as
an equivalent for the Skt. caitya) is not itself used to label a
category. It does occur in the text, where is incorporated under a
category of miscellany (skad go 'dun gyi ming la), along with
apparently completely unrelated terms (e.g., sgrib pa, skt. aavara.na
= "taint").  There is a category devoted to "mchod pa'i yo byad kyi
ming la," a phrase that translates to something to something like
"names pertaining to the practice of worship" (Tib. mchod pa is here
being used to translate the Skt. puuja). This might seem promising --
but it turns out that this category is devoted for the most part to
words for things like powders, flags, perfumes, garlands, and so on:
i.e., terms for that which is offered rather that terms for that to
which offering is made.  Although the category does include short
descriptive phrases applicable to the latter (e.g. Tib. mchos par byed
pa is offered as an equivalent for the Skt. mahita, "esteemed"),
nothing in these phrases signals the materiality of the recipient, and
there appears to be no comparable category subsuming all and only
estimable material objects.

Best wishes,

R. Nance