[Buddha-l] MMK 25.09 (was: as Swami goes...)

[Richard Nance]

Thanks for your extensive contributions to this thread, Dan (and Erik,
and Richard).

Dan wrote:

> Richard N. asked why I found the passage conceptually
> difficult.

I did? I seem to remember beings curious as to why you felt that the
Tibetan translation hid tensions and difficulties in the Sanskrit. I
don't recall suggesting that the verse wasn't conceptually difficult,
in whatever language. It is.

> That we might, in our laziness or misguided dravya-guna thinking, typically
> let such statements go as if they were intelligible is precisely the sort of
> thing Nagarjuna repeatedly brings to our attention as a serious problem that
> camoflagues the svabhavic thinking undergirding our usual thinking.

I'm not sure which statement ("such statements") you have in mind
here. If you mean to refer to the translations that I and Richard H
have so far offered for MMK 25.09, I'm not sure that we (and here I
mean most literate speakers of English) _would_ "typically let such
statements go as if they were intelligible." It seems to me that a
more standard reaction to the verse as we've translated it would be to
read N. either as contradicting himself here, or as making no sense at
all (I've seen otherwise stable college students barely able to
constrain themselves from throwing the MMK across the room). I
wouldn't wish to advocate either of these reactions, but both seem to
me more likely than "letting such statements go as if they were
intelligible."

> I take it that the two Richards are content to accept "dependent" and
> "conditioned" as adequate equivalents for upādāya or pratītya, respectively.

I'm content for the purposes of weighing in. I don't deny that these
are very important terms for N.,and that we know less about how he
uses them than we could. But one has to start somewhere.

> Richard N. also asks why I find the Tibetan possibly smoothing over the
> problems. Perhaps it doesn't. Jay Garfield's translation of the Tib. reads:
>
> That which comes and goes
> Is Dependent and changing
> That, when it is not dependent and changing
> Is taught to be nirvana.
>
> The bhāva has disappeared behind indicative pronouns.

Yes, in Garfield's translation. In the Tibetan, however, it's there: dngos.

(So that I'm not misunderstood here: I've found Garfield's translation
and study of the MMK to be useful both inside and outside the
classroom, and I'm grateful to him for writing it. For what it's
worth, however, the Tibetan doesn't say "dependent and changing"; it
says -- to adopt Garfield's choice of terms -- "dependent or
changing." The Tibetan "'am" faithfully renders the Sanskrit "vā," and
the translation also faithfully renders the relative-correlative
structure of the Sanskrit (gang... de...). Moreover, there's no "when"
explicitly signaled in either the Sanskrit or Tibetan.)

Re: Inada's version from Chinese:

"The status of the birth-death cycle is due to existential grasping (of the
skandhas) and relational condition (of the being). That which is
non-grasping and non-relational is taught to be nirvana."

This is interesting -- and it may well have been what N. intended (who
knows?) -- but the extant Sanskrit of MMK 25.09 simply doesn't say
this. The problem is not in choice of translation terms here, but in
construing the grammatical relations between them. Among other things
(and there are other things), Inada jettisons the relative-correlative
structure noted previously. If we re-introduce that structure and
adopt Inada's choice of terminology, the Sanskrit tells us that "that
which is non-grasping and non-relational" _is_ "the status of the
birth-death cycle." Inada's translation doesn't quite rule the latter
reading out completely -- but it certainly doesn't suggest it. I can't
speak to the underlying Chinese.

Finally, re: Weijing and Dharmarakṣa's:

> An existent entity having life and death
> is an existent marked by going and coming;
> Because of not grasping the cause of that,
> That is called nirvana.

I don't wish to claim that the Chinese from which this has been
rendered isn't faithful to some underlying Sanskrit. It may be. But if
it is, it's a different recension of the verse from the one with which
we've been grappling.

Best wishes,

R. Nance
Indiana