[Buddha-l] FW: ;sa;svat. Was Eternalism

[Jayarava]

Hi Joanna

I think Richard has signed off to go back to his lucrative book contract, but he did comment on Ashok's explanation in an earlier post. 

Having thought about it a bit more I don't see how śaśīyas can be related to śaśvat. Though it does suggest an adjective śaś meaning 'numerous', that is not in the dictionaries. The suffix -īyas is added to adjectival stems to make comparatives. Are you even allowed stems in -ś? 

I think who ever said that we have to just treat it as a word is probably right.

Incidentally "eternal" can be traced back to the IE root 'i', which occurs in Sanskrit  - 3rd person present indicative: eti. It comes into English via Latin ævum, and is related to words like age, aeon. 

The sassata belief seems to arise from seeing many lifetimes or many world ages in meditation. That is, one sees in a vision a large number of recurrences of rebirth/redeath or creation/destruction of the universe (what a vision that must be!), and concludes that they go on repeating forever. Where the Buddha's vision is different is that he sees an escape from the recycling. The version of rebirth in which an ātman comes back again and again *without end* is a primitive one. It seems to match one of the versions of redeath in the first chapter of the Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad. Later of course even the Brahmins accepted the idea of mokṣa. Did I mention in my post about Bronkhorst that he thinks that the idea of an ātman providing the continuity between lives came from the Ājivakas? But he also says that the Ājivakas believed in mokṣa - although one could not speed it along, one could only keep the deadline from being extended by refraining from
 action. So the idea of an endless cycle of rebirth/redeath of an ātman seems to be unique to the Brahmins of that period - or at least associated with some people, probably Brahmins, who composed an oral tradition, two different versions of which, possibly based on an ur-text but more likely to have emerged out of two oral lineages, have survived from an unknown period which may or may not have preceded the Buddha (if there even was a Buddha). We don't actually know anything, we just make up plausible stories.

The wisdom of no escape?

Anyway it become clear that the reason sassatadiṭṭḥi is problematic is that it denies the possibility of ending the cycle of rebirths.

Yours in happy pedantry.
Jayarava