[Buddha-l] Rain / Query on Non-Local Consciousness

[Dan Lusthaus]

Dear Antonio,

Very helpful, wonderful post. Thank you.

I haven't looked at those glossaries (T.2131-2136) -- with the exception of
the two versions of Yijing's "1000 Words" (2133A and B) which prove
occasionally helpful for Yijing's own transcriptions, especially 2133B -- 
for a very long time, and have thought about them more as curiosities and
even fetishes rather than useful tools, but one thing they do provide is
attestations for usage, when the term one is looking for happens to be
included in their selective lists.

That Liyan records aama as an equivalent for sheng (as well as jaata/jati)
is interesting, since he is a bit later than Xuanzang. Especially since this
text, and the others, are quite limited as to the range of vocabulary they
cover, that aama is included suggests it was on people's mind.

ÌÆèóƒÉÕZëpŒ¦¼¯ T.54.2136.1242c15 repeats Liyan's gloss verbatim: Éú(°¢¡²Òý¡³
üN). There are some technical anomalies with how a couple of these glossary
texts treat sheng (and in one case a contiguous character), but as these are
technical matters and don't bear on the aama attribution directly, I'll
leave that for another day.

> The conveniently one-volume Guhanyu
> Dacidian (Íõ½£Òý et al. ¹ÅººÓï´ó´Êµä. Shanghai, 2000 p.2076) under the 7th
> definition for Éú quotes a Yang Wanli (12th century) poem where Éú
> clearly has the sense of uncooked.

I never disputed that sheng -- in compounds or in conjunction with other
characters it modifies -- can mean uncooked, etc. My inquiry was to whether
it carries that meaning when alone. The sense of "immature," "undeveloped,"
etc., does occur for sheng in isolation, as some of the examples I included
showed. More specifically, my resistance to "raw" (or uncooked) in this
context is that it would be misleading to understand the cause of untimely
death to be the result of eating raw food. ‡I, ‡†, êP¸ñ, Ðîʳ, ʳ̵, îB̵
and Îå·e, etc. (especially the one associated with the spleen) are
traditional Chinese medical terms that would have been viable choices for
translating/glossing aama in this context.

>> Hope that helps!

Absolutely! Thanks.

Dan