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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard (whichever) wrote:
> 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.

I agree with all that. There are attendant issues emerging from this that 
concern me. First, putting aside the issue of mantras (and whatever 
exceptionalism we may or may not grant them), while we are on the topic of 
Oxford imaginations (and imaginations from similar haunts) hopelessly 
enmeshing our treatment of Buddhist materials from previous millennia, what 
becomes evident if one starts to examine actual old manuscripts, i.e., what 
the Buddhists (and others) of yore actually wrote and read, one finds all 
sorts of "irregularities" in their "Sanskrit". In some cases, such as some 
of the Gandharan mss., their variance is so great and pervasive, that we 
consider them a different language, today dubbed "Gandharan." But the more 
mss. one surveys, the more one finds "irregularities", some well known and 
also pervasive, such as bodhisatva instead of bodhisattva. These 
irregularities can occur in what otherwise appears to be sound Sanskrit 
usage (I have, e.g., seem Asanga's Skt described by some Indian Sanskritists 
as elegant, perfectly formed, etc., while others find it horrrendous, 
bordering on the barbarous -- the latter perhaps overly sensitive to such 
spelling issues, since Asanga's grammar is fairly standard). Ms. variants, 
which may appear consistently in a text, can affect the grammar. What sharp, 
astute, Oxford-influenced scholars do is assume the original must have been 
in pristine (i.e., panini-conformant) Sansrkit, and they go about creating 
"critical" texts where all the endemic variants are "corrected." Great for 
maintaining the illusion of a pristine Sanskrit, but not good enough to 
squelch entirely the debate whether to call the language of some Buddhist 
texts Buddhist-hybrid Sanskrit, or simply Prakrit (the latter is applied, 
without complaint, to many Jain texts). We might reserve "Sanskrit" for only 
those texts that are written in Paninian (or pass a proximity test of some 
sort), and find other names for the rest, or we might start to acknowledge 
that paninian is only one dialect of Sanskrit, which in the 1st millennia CE 
did not have a monopoly on the grammatical rules either (there was Candra's 
grammar, preferred by Buddhists, and others; not clear what the Kashmiris 
were up to at certain times re: grammatical innovations -- the Tibetans 
learned much of what they understood to be Skt grammar from the Kashmiris).

Now, returning to mantras, as you know there is a long held traditional 
theory that mantras are not about the semantics but the sounds, and that 
meanings cannot be attached to them. Proper pronunciation, utterance, is 
more important than semantic analysis. That's what makes it a mantra and 
simply a recitation. Tibetans reciting Om manipadme hum are chanting in a 
foreign tongue, just as Westerners would be. May as well recite In Hoc Signo 
Vinces or Allah-hu akbar (though the Latin and Arabic do mean something).

So if it is silly to try to attach meanings to mantras (and probably we 
could at least agree that there are mantras so obscure or "corrupt" that 
trying to make sense of them *is* silly), that doesn't preclude the fun one 
has inventing meanings. The Oxford professor, therefore, was in his own way 
very much participating in the tradition, and in fact devised a very 
ingenious decoding. The only "rule" he broke is that grammar should act as a 
constraint on the imagination, and he dipped his mani into the padma 
(wouldn't be the first would-be tantric to attempt that maneover) instead of 
being the manipadma: be the manipadma, sit/be born in your manipadma...

>> 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...

Excellent. So, combining all that we've learned from all sources, we have 
eliminated bahuvrihi, tatpurusa, dvandva, and shown there is something 
unacceptable about each of the declension choices (vocative vs locative). 
See, isn't it fun doing something silly like trying to make sense of a 
mantra?

Looking forward to a silly new year,
Goo gooka choo,
Dan