[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada

[Stephen Hodge]

L.S. Cousins wrote:

> Thanks for letting us see this. It is very interesting to get some further 
> sense of the problem areas.
Yes, these occasional specialist exchanges make Bud-L worth the time.

> I do have questions ! Obviously they concern what the original text might 
> have meant and not how the Chinese (or later Indians for that matter) 
> would have taken it.
That would coincide with my interest as well.  Dan is perhaps a little more 
interested in how the Chinese understood.


> Firstly, what is prajñapti of appropriation ? Is this rendering upaadaaya 
> prajñapti ? Or, something more like the Pali upaadaapaññatti ?
There is no way of deciding apart from informed inference.  Chinese often 
doesn't convey those differences.  The character "shou" could cover all 
variants of upadaana -- it is also widely used elsewhere for "vedanaa". 
This might give you an idea of the problems involved with Chinese texts.  A 
lot of guesswork based on context.  You are probably as well-placed as 
anbody to decide, but I think it is less likely to be "upaadaaya" as that is 
often expressed differently.

> I would take upaadaa(ya) as just meaning 'in relation to' or 'in 
> dependence upon'. It doesn't appropriate them.
I suspect it could be something like "upadaana" as in "upadaana-skandha"


> Secondly, there is some problem with prajñapti itself here.
Agreed -- I believe I said as much myself.  But as Dan highlighted, there 
are two understandings of "praj~napti" here -- the short text (T1506) 
translates it in the technical sense ,while the longer text (T1505) seems to 
understand it as just "makes known".   It is difficult to draw any 
conclusions here about the original usage intentions of the authors.

> Thirdly, I too am not very convinced by the idea of *upaayaprajñapti.
Again, I am in agreement with you here.  The use of "fangbian" is very 
common for "upaaya", but it is, I hope, obvious that we are not dealing with 
that here.  I have looked through the various indices I have to hand, as 
well as the index to Ogiwara's Bon-Wa Jiten, but nothing obvious stands out. 
But apart from upaaya / naya, fangbian most often translates some derivative 
of YUJ, so something like "sa.myoga"might be feasible - especially as the 
definition of the term uses a form often translating "sa.myukta".

Your lists of Pali "paññatti"s look suggestive -- there seems to be some 
commality of thought there.   The "continuity (santati) paññatti" would 
seems closest in sense to the "fangbian-praj~napti" just discussed.  . This 
normally applies to labels
applied to the 'same' person at different times in one life, but
could presumably apply to the 'same' person across multiple lives.

A simpler version is given by the commentator Buddhadatta (who may or
may not have been a contemporary of Buddhaghosa). He divides into
three kinds of paññatti:

> 3. relative (upanidhaa).  This would be quite close to the list of three
> in our second Pudgalavaadin text, if upanidhaa were the underlying term
> corresponding to the supposed upaaya-.
I wonder how "upanidhaa" might get distorted in some Prakrits -- the 
Sammitiyas were said to use Apabhramsha at a later stage and we all know 
what fun Apabhramsha can be (eg: "uaaa" for "upaaya").   I also find it 
useful to think of the scripts used -- with the well-known possibilities for 
mis-reading certain letters -- "ya" being one of them.

> In that case, the text is giving illustrations of ignorance concerning 
> relative or comparative terms, in this case 'past',
> 'present' and so on.
I would have thought they were more concerned here with the problem of 
continuity / non-continuity of an individual over the three times, rather 
than the three times themselves.  Or have I misunderstood you ?.   See Thien 
Chau p162 for another, more detailed, source.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge