[Buddha-l] Re: Aama do.sa I

[Stephen Hodge]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> This could quickly get a bit too technical for this list, and I'm not sure
> how many besides us are interested, so I will try to frame this in general
> terms.

Dear Dan,

I shouldn't let that worry you.  After all, at one time, Buddha-L had 
pretensions to be a quasi-scholarly list.  But thank you for the detailed CS 
explanation of the term.  I personally find this all more interesting that 
much of recent Buddha-L fare -- raw or cooked.

But, for my part, it's not so much a question of what "āma" means in an 
āyurvedic context -- that is not in dispute -- but how Xuanzang decided to 
translate the term. One can suppose that he was faced with a term which he 
did not fully understand in its āyurvedic sense or else he was unable to 
find an appropriate parallel term from Chinese medicine. Whichever was the 
case, he decided to play safe and translate it as 生 in its well-attested 
sense of "raw, uncooked, unprocessed" which is the literal meaning of āma 
outside of āyurveda. As you know, āyurvedic terminology for digestive and 
metabolic functions in general is derived from words whose primary meanings 
involve the processing and cooking of food -- probably because digestion was 
seen as an extension of the cooking process. Note that these terms are also 
used for the processing and smelting of metalic ores.
The Tibetan translation here is a bit less opaque: "ma-zhu-ba bsags-pa 
'byin-par-mi-'byed-pa" -- not ejecting accumulated undigested [matter].

This short dialogue tends to illustrate the perils of translating from 
Chinese without referring to the Tibetan and Sanskrit if available.  But, 
needless to say, I think an eventual translation of that portion of the YBS 
should reflect the āyurvedic sense -- even if Xuanzang has only translated 
things literally.

Best wishes,

Stephen Hodge




> First, aama here does *not* mean "raw" -- as Bernie indicated, it is a
> technical medical term. The current ayurvedic meaning derives from (but is
> not exactly identical with) the way it is treated in the Caraka-samhita.
>
> The problem here is not simply linguistic or something to be solved with a
> dictionary, but contextual and historical, namely the question of what
> exactly were the Buddhist medical theories of the day that are being drawn
> on or alluded to.