[Buddha-l] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Richard Hayes]

On Jan 1, 2010, at 10:18 PM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Now that we got that out of the way, Studholme, putting aside the fact that 
> it is a mantra and thus not susceptible to regular Skt rules

Since when is it a fact that a mantra is not susceptible to regular Sanskrit rules? If a phrase does not follow regular Sanskrit rules, it is not Sanskrit. Now if the claim is that mantras need not be Sanskrit sentences but can be just sounds, then it would be silly to try to attach any meaning to the sounds at all. 

> So manipadme is a tatpurusa after all.

It could be in theory, but it there is one very good reason to doubt that that's what it is in practice. It is a strange sentence that consists of nothing but tatpuruṣa in the locative singular and nothing else. If it is a tatpuruṣa, then it can only mean something like "in the lotus with, for, out of, belonging to or in the jewel" (depending on whether one takes it to be a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh vibhakti tatpuruṣa. None of those means the same as "the lotus is in the jewel." Lopez admits the mantra has puzzled commentators for years. No one would deny that. His point is that no one ever understood "om maṇipadme hūṃ" to mean "the jewel is in the lotus" until an Oxford professor with an overly active imagination claimed the mantra to have that meaning and suggested that it was a sexual metaphor consistent with left-handed tantra. What is interesting is how such a completely untenable interpretation could come to be regarded by so many as the "right" interpretation and how every Comparative Religions 101 professor has repeated that untenable interpretation as if it made some sense. It does not encourage one about the future of education.

But what the hell, eh? Ninety-eight percent of the world wrongly regarded 2000 as the first year of the 21st century instead of the last year of the 20th, and all manner of television people who should have known better were calling 2010 the first year of a new decade, when it is clearly the last year of the decade that began with 2001, the first year of the 21st century. If television journalists can't even get the simple matters straight, why should Comparative Religion 101 professors be able to sort out what an obscure mantra is all about?

Richard (any Richard will do)