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

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 28, 2010, at 4:58 PM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

ya ājavaṃjavībhāva upādāya pratītya vā |
so 'pratītyānupādāya nirvāṇam upadiśyate || MMK_25,09


> That would yield:
> 
> "The process of making something come and go which is dependent or 
> conditioned:
> That, neither dependent nor conditioned, is taught to be nirvāṇa."
> Yes? 

Not quite, but close. If I were to offer a more refined translation than I had time to do just before I rushed off to teach a class on Dignāga, it would be like this:

The process of making something come and go in ontological or conceptual dependence is, when not in metaphysical or conceptual dependence, called nirvana.

Some explanation is in order. First it is the entire process of making things come and go that is dependent, and it is dependent in two way, each indicated by a different gerund. Pratītya alludes to pratītya samutpāda, which is coming into being as a result of encountering conditions. So I render than "in ontological dependence" (if I can be forgiven for having departed from the usual clunky way of rendering gerunds). Upādāya alludes to upādāya prajñapti, which is refers to conceptual dependence. For example, the concept of a person depends on the dharmas, and the concept of someone's being a father depends on the concept of someone else's being a son. So I render that "in conceptual dependence." The entire verse refers to the claim, made in various ways in the MMK, that nirvāṇa is but another way of viewing saṃsāra (and vice versa). One way of viewing nirvāṇa-saṃsāra is to view the process of coming and going as ontologically and conceptually conditioned. When one stops seeing the process in that way, one is seeing it as nirvāṇa.

> The main difference between the two Richards seems to focus on "what is 
> characterized by the qualifiers in the first line." Is it a process that 
> makes things come and go? Or the state (condition) itself?

The process (bhāva) of making things come and go is conditioned in the two ways I have described above. But I should also point out that the nominalized form bhāva is ambiguous. It may be a nominalization of either the vanilla verb or the causative. That is, the non-nominalized form could be either "ājavaṃjavī bhavati" (it becomes something that comes and goes) or "ājavaṃjavī bhāvayati" (it makes something come and go). I think the former is probably more likely, now that I think of it, so my translation should be modified accordingly, producing this:

The process of becoming what comes and goes in ontological or conceptual dependence is, when not in metaphysical or conceptual dependence, called nirvana.

In any case, most of the translations I have seen do no adequately capture the force of the idiomatic force of the construction of a word with a cvi pratyaya followed by a derivative of the verb bhavati.

> So now we know where contributers peeked (or great minds think alike).

Actually, I peeked at nothing. I just translated the Sanskrit directly. Rarely do I do that without consulting a couple of commentaries. Being in a hurry, I did not consult Candrakīrti or anyone else. I don't often find any of the extant English translations very helpful. The new one by Katsura and Siderits is the best I have seen, but even it renders some things in ways other than I understand them. (For example, they completely fail to capture the many equivocations that undermine Nāgārjuna's arguments.)

> The seemingly strange one is 
> Inada's. That's because he is translation the Chinese version, not directly 
> from the Sanskrit.

It's odd that his translation has the Sanskrit for each verse along with the English. If he was translating from the Chinese, why does he give the Sanskrit instead of the Chinese? Just trying to fool us? Whatver the case may be, Inada's translation is never particularly good. Kalupahana's is dreadful, since essentially what it does is to follow Inada closely most of the time, departing from Inada only to introduce mistakes. Often Kalupahana's translation totally misconstrues the syntax of the Sanskrit. McCagney's study of Nāgārjuna is insightful and helpful, but she is a philosopher, not a Sanskritist, and her translation is rarely accurate. If she had published her study without the second-rate translation, it might have inspired more confidence. Sprung is another philosopher, and I quite admire his translation as a philosophical text that can be read in English; he was helped by T.R.V. Murti with the Sanskrit, and Murti was an excellent Sanskritist.

Garfield's translation is heavily influenced by Tsong kha pa's commentary on the Tibetan translation of the text. If the Sanskrit were translated accurately, it would not be the mistranslated text that Tsong kha pa commented upon. Mistranslations take on a life of their own in a new cultural setting and often produce new traditions that are quite interesting and useful in their own right. That they do no quite reflect the ideas conveyed by the Indian texts is quite irrelevant.


Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico