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

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 30, 2010, at 6:40 PM, Jim Anderson wrote:

> Jim:
> Your use of "verbal noun" doesn't make sense here. Did you mean to say
> "gerund"?

No, I was referring to ājavaṃjavībhāva. Your translation made it look as though you were taking ājavaṃ as an accusative governed by javībhāva, which is a verbal noun.

> Gerunds can take objects in the accusative
> but it seems that all the translations of the verse take the gerunds
> without an explicitly stated object.

As I understand the verse, none of the gerunds do have an explicitly stated direct object.

> I have since noticed that
> "ājavaṃjavībhāva" has its own entry in BHSD and can accept that it is
> all just one not two words.

It depends on what you mean by a word. In Sanskrit cvi forms an indeclinable. What the Sanskrit tradition regards as a single word is a group of syllables that has a single accent. A compound is regarded as a single word; it is a new word composed of two or more elements that were themselves words before they were placed into a compound.

> Okay. I'm still trying to sort out exactly what the clauses are and
> what is the subject of "upadiśyate" (a passive verb) : "so" or
> "nirvāṇam"?  A translation that goes like "is taught to be nirvāṇa"
> doesn't seem to agree with the Sanskrit, in my opinion.

The subject of the first clause is yaḥ (yo) and the verb is implicit asti. The subject of the second clause is saḥ (so), and nirvāṇam is a verbal complement in the nominative. If it helps, you can think of upadiśyate as "is called."

I am called Richard