[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada

[Dan Lusthaus]

(continued from previous message)

5. While, like Lance, I am also interested in what the "original" Indic text might have said, I am also interested in how it was expressed in Chinese (we don't have much evidence that either of these texts exerted much influence on Chinese Buddhism overall). The differences in choices of equivalents -- if not simply signs of incompetence -- may provide us with some indications of how the Indic terms were understood and employed by different Buddhists at that time.

6. As discussed previously, the short text uses shishe for prajnapti. This became one of the standard equivalents, and implies something like Stephen's "label" or, more precisely, verbally imputing, i.e., something with merely linguistic status. The long version's equivalent, jiaoshou, is a surprise and unusual. Jiaoshou means something like "to express so as to teach," an expression used to teach, and hence my "heuristic," which is a teaching device. Reflecting on the context of the use of prajnapti in Pudgalavada, especially in these passages, jiaoshou seems to be a clever translation attempt. These are prajnaptis that are used to impart the Dharma, e.g., in terms of the second prajnapti, to reinforce jataka stories (which were very popular in China and Central Asia at that time, judging from Faxian's travelog and Chinese discussions of this time -- keeping in mind that rebirth theories were relatively new and exotic to the Chinese, rather than pervasive as in India), and to guarantee pranidhana predictions. If one doesn't believe in spiritual progress, i.e., that one can improve one's status, progress on the path, etc., one will be nihilistic concerning that possibility. A person who "annihilates" cannot make meaningful progress. On the other hand, one has to avoid falling into the conceptual pitfalls of assuming that the progressing person has a permanent self. So the person (pudgala) is neither permanent nor annihilational; yet, while there is no atmanic substance, stories of past and future lives are positive exhortations, useful prajnaptis, heuristics, jiaoshou.

7. As I mentioned when posting my initial translations, the long version seems to use a number of Chinese terms in ways that are unusual in a Buddhist context; terms like bi, which, in Buddhist contexts, usually means "comparison," or "inference," here seems to mean "figure of speech," a Chinese literary usage. Fangbian also has a Chinese literary usage, viz. "metaphor," or indirect use of language.

8. While I haven't surveyed the full extent of the long text searching for additional "literary" usages of terms such as these, their concentration in this passage suggested that Kumarabuddhi's assistants might have been literati more used to such literary Chinese usages than to developing Buddhist usages, i.e., Chinese steeped in their own literary tradition. The case of fangbian, I have been discovering, poses additional problems.

Since its use as an equivalent for upaya became well-known -- the idea of upaya itself becoming a major Mahayana notion in East Asian Buddhism, its Buddhist usage eclipsed its incipient Chinese usage -- so much so that quite a few standard reference works treat the term fangbian as a Buddhist invention. While it is true that fangbian does not appear in the ancient classical literature (Zhuangzi, Guanzi, Huainanzi, etc.) as far as I can tell, it does appear in some early chronicles, initially in a "political sense," which Mathews (in his Ch-Eng Dict) unintentionally captures as "that which is not strictly according to rule, but which is convenient." In the chronicles the stories using the term usually involve some linguistic element -- a diplomatic turn of phrase, avoidance of saying something, or saying/implying something indirectly. In a literary sense it also came to mean a "metaphor" in the broad sense of that term, i.e., a word or expression that indicates something indirectly rather than literally -- a verbal reference that does "not strictly" follow the "rule" of literalness (cf. upacāra). It was that usage that, I think, led the Buddhists to adopt it for upaya (and not the other way around).

9. That leaves the question of what Indic term underlies fangbian in the long version in place of the unambiguous "prajnapti of the past" of the short version. Frankly, I don't know. Kumarabuddhi, according to the colophons, was from Turfan, a member of the royal family, so that his language and conceptualizations would have been influenced by C. Asianisms (about which we have only the dimmest sense) is plausible. Thich T.C. briefly discusses the possibility (asserted by Bareau) that this text was originally in a Prakrit, nor pure Sanskrit, and doesn't rule that possibility out.

10. We should note that Thich T.C. Sanskritizes the three prajnaptis (Preface, p. ix) as follows:

āśraya-prajñapta-pudgala,
saṃkrama-prajñapta-pudgala, 
nirodha-prajñapta-pudgala

How solid these suggestions are I am not sure (only the 3rd corresponds exactly with what we have in both the long and short text; āśraya for shou -- rather than upādhi -- seems unlikely).

Dan Lusthaus
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