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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Now that both Richard's have had their morning coffee, we have some more to 
think about. Thanks again to everyone for contributing.

If I understand Candrakirti's point about this verse (and some of the 
adjoining verses), he sees it as encapsulating a certain Buddhist claim 
about Nirvana, one which Buddhists relish, but which, when stripped to its 
essentials, as Nagarjuna has done, shows itself to be self-contradictory. In 
other words, he reads it like a true prasanga.

If, for instance, read in the way Richard H. proposes, i.e., as suggesting 
two different ways of viewing the same bhāva (whether process or thing), 
then there might be some coherence, assuming one can see something as both 
involved in conditional relations and as not so involved, and that that 
double vision is somehow coherent. Assuming such double-vision works 
(because as Robinson suggested the issue is seeing, not being, i.e., 
epistemic, not ontological), wouldn't that nirvanic bhāva, in its 
non-relational isolation, be an exemplar of svabhava? That would, for 
Nagarjuna, entail a more fundamental incoherence. So perhaps Candarakirti's 
understanding of this on target. The idea of a non-relational process sounds 
a lot like a round square.

A appreciate Richard N.'s defense of the Tibetan rendering. Like R.N. I find 
Garfield's translation very useful for the classroom, but because it strays 
from the Sanskrit too often, and misses many important nuances. As a logical 
thinker, he makes his own sense of some of the text so well that one may be 
excused for thinking that that was Nagarjuna's sense, even when it's not.

As for the Chinese renderings (and Inada's, which I think I've shown comes 
from, or is *deeply influenced* by the Chinese, no doubt via some Japanese 
translations), I would reiterate what Richard H. said about the Tibetan 
renderings and Tsong kha pa's comm.:

"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."

Inada does not exactly translate the Chinese -- here or elsewhere -- and he 
is looking at the Sanskrit, but his reading is shaped by the Chinese 
versions, and the East Asian tradition.

If find the Chinese translations interesting *interpretations* of the Skt, 
not exactly literal renderings. Some verses in Kumarajiva's translation one 
can line up word for word with the Sanskrit; some are very close to the 
Sanskrit, with only slight rearrangement or adjustment. And a minority are 
more interpretive, as is the case with this one. That itself is interesting. 
The "Blue Eyes" commentary tends to stay very focused on unpacking the 
arguments, and not straying off into additional concerns as commentators are 
sometimes wont to do, so when the comm. to the verse treats it as a matter 
of skandha-upadana based on whether or not one's thinking is 'perverse' 
(viparyasa) because not yathābhūta-parijñāna, such that dispelling the 
perversities with a good dose of yathābhūta-parijñāna would eliminate 
appropriating skandhas, I find that plausible, or at the very least, an 
interesting interpretation.

Here again is the Kumarajiva, with the Chinese for those either curious or 
would like to tinker:

　受諸因緣故　　輪轉生死中
　不受諸因緣　　是名為涅槃

Because of holding/receiving causes and conditions,
cycling in birth and death.
Not holding causes and conditions
is called Nirvana.

The later translation by Weijing and Dharmarakṣa that includes Sthiramati's 
commentary is in a very difficult Chinese, done at a time when the Chinese 
language -- its grammar and syntax -- was changing, so it is not in the 
standard Buddho-Chinese of most Buddhist translations. Here is that version, 
with the Chinese:

復次頌言

有體有生死       卽有往來相
因彼無取故       卽說爲涅槃

釋曰因其取故施設有生卽有差別皆是世俗非勝義諦

Next, a verse says:

An existent having life and death
is an existent marked by going and coming;
Since without grasping at that cause,
it is called nirvana.

Explanation: Because of its grasping, hence one figuratively differentiates 
beings as having life. All this is samvrti, not paramartha-satya.

If any of the readers would like to offer a different translation of this 
(or the previous) Chinese versions, please do.

Richard N. is right to question this. 有體 for bhāva certainly indicates an 
"existent entity," not a process. The syntactical structure has been 
altered, the second part does not negatively reiterate the first part; in 
fact there is no repetition at all; and so on. Again, this is interesting 
precisely for that reason. The translators had trouble with the verse, and 
offered a narrative gloss instead of a strict translation. If we assume they 
had some grasp of its meaning, then this tells us something about how the 
passage was read back then. That both Kumarajiva and Dharmarakṣa take 
upādāya as upādāna -- and specifically pañca-skandha-upādāna, though that's 
only implied in the Dharmarakṣa -- is also interesting, given the 600 years 
between the two translations.

Candrakirti also explains ājavaṃjavībhāva as meaning either "arising and 
passing away or the succession of birth and death." (Sprung, 255) That 
process, he says, is based a complex of hetu-pratyaya (as in Kumarajiva's 
rendering), OR as things being dependent on what is outside of them, "like 
light from a lamp, or a sprout from a seed." (ibid) Being based on the 
hetu-pratyaya complex he designates as pratītya, and being dependent on what 
is outside of itself is his take on upādāya (hence reading upādāya as 
"receiving, taking, holding," again, as did Kumarajiva). In either case, "it 
is the ceasing to function (aprav.tti) of this continuous round of birth and 
death, due to its being taken as uncaused or as beyond dependence, that is 
said to be nirvana." (ibid)

That Candrakirti's explanatory terms are in line with what we find in the 
Chinese, we may assume either that these were established connotations of 
the terms, or that this was a well-ingrained interpretation of this verse 
and terminology. So the apparent variance between the Chinese and the 
Sanskrit may not be a matter of a different recension, but rather an 
expression of common interpretive tradition.

Dan