[Buddha-l] query about a term in Japanese zen, translated as "soul" in one text.

[Jo]

In my comments here I’m not referring to E. Asian Buddhists but to what we think or someone thinks the Buddha thought. 

 

As I've understood it since back in the day when I studied Hindu philosophy of moksha etc., " a notion of a constantly changing soul" as Richard broached would fit with the Hindu idea of jiiva or jiiv.  The idea of jiiva in Hindu thought, it has seemed to me, was that it is different from aatman, and could be rendered in English as soul. It was the individual's jiiva, not atman, that transmigrated over lifetimes, according to the Hindus. 

This jiva was a personal entity, whereas aatman wasn't. Aatman, being based on Hindu psychology of mind, was the  mirror of the universal entity, brahman, the ultimate abstract principal.  Jiva has personhood, aatman doesn't. According to one Sanskrit scholar I consulted about this, the term jiva is in the Rig Veda, but it's meaning as noted above, as an individual soul entity, appears later, with the Brahmanas : Chandgoya Up etc. (See Monier Williams' dict.)  

 

Can we assume that the Buddha's world chronologically was before the Upanishads? The timing has been an issue--some asserting that he knew of some Upanishads, or of Upanishadic thinking, others that Up. thought was later. So chronology doesn’t help to figure out if the Buddha might have considered a soul concept.

                                                            

Does the term jiiva appear in early Pali texts? If it does how does it operate? As an analog of aatman, or as something else?  I looked it up in the Pali to English dictionary online :

4.  <http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.1:1:1810.pali> Jīva : (page  <http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/contextualize.pl?p.1.pali.1321883> 284) 

One def applies to wages

The other:

Jīva  Jīva 1 (adj.-- n.) [Sk. jīva, Idg….. 1. the soul. Sabbe jīvā all the souls, enumd with sattā  [again the Eng. term soul] 

 

One also finds related terms suggestive of life, a lifetime, lifespan-- jīvita .

The phrase sabbe jīvā (all the souls) hints to me of entities affected by karma that might transmigrate. If so, then the Pali terms could be seen as analogous to the Hindu ideas of karmic migration of jivas. However, the Hindus thought the same jiva entity migrated and re-migrated, whereas recently I read somewhere that Buddhists don’t hold with jivas retaining identity from one life to the next—might have been a Tibetan idea-- (but Buddhist humans do think so, (Richard’s allusion to East Asians for ex.), otherwise why be worried about your next incarnation?).

 

Buddha was right to warn someone not to bother about karma, that it could drive you nuts if you think about it too much. But Sally MacAra’s question is interesting because it sure does invoke issue of translation and meaning.

 

Maybe Lance could explain whether or not the Pali texts, presumably recording the Buddha’s thinking, can be construed as having anything to do with a transmigrating  “soul” concept analogous to western or Hindu thought.  

Sorry for any errors in spelling or transliteration. 

 

Hopefully, 

Joanna