Nidahas

The final part of the Mahāhatthipadopama Sutta con­tains an inter­est­ing analy­sis by Ven. Sāriputta Thera which sheds light on the con­nec­tion between saḷāyatana and pañcupādā­nakkhandha. I had care­lessly com­mented on this sec­tion by read­ing the Eng­lish trans­la­tion with­out refer­ring to the Pāḷi, and in his reply to my notes Bhante Ñāṇananda pointed out an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion I had failed to make.

Ven. Ñāṇamoli’s trans­la­tion of the rel­e­vant sec­tion reads as follows:

If, friends, inter­nally the eye is intact but no exter­nal forms come into its range, and there is no cor­re­spond­ing [con­scious] engage­ment, then there is no man­i­fes­ta­tion of the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tion of con­scious­ness. [MLDB (2009) p. 283]

‘Cor­re­spond­ing [con­scious] engage­ment’ is Ven. Ñāṇamoli’s ren­der­ing of tajjo saman­nāhāra. I had taken this to be iden­ti­cal to man­asikāra (atten­tion), influ­enced by Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera’s writ­ings. In my inter­view, I ask Bhante Ñāṇananda for an expla­na­tion on the dif­fer­ence between the two.

“Ear­lier we pointed out how, in a dis­cus­sion that may be cat­e­go­rized as nītattha, the Bud­dha cor­rected Ven. Moliyaphagguna’s ques­tions which implied an agent behind action. He rephrased them with the pac­caya ter­mi­nol­ogy. Sim­i­larly, when we say man­asikāra, some may tend to think of an agent behind the atten­tion. But Ven. Sāriputta Thera takes a dif­fer­ent approach here when explain­ing the aris­ing of viññāṇa.

“He dis­cusses three possibilities:

1. The eye is not ‘bro­ken’ – it is func­tional. Exter­nal forms don’t come to the vicin­ity. And Tajjo saman­nāhāra, what­ever that may be, is not present. Then, there’s no eye consciousness.

“Here, we have to be spe­cific about viññāṇa. Again, I’m reminded of some­thing Dr. W.S. Karunaratne said: “There is no ‘the viññāṇa’; it is always ‘a viññāṇa’. Every­thing has to be con­crete – there is no abstract con­scious­ness.” But peo­ple think that con­scious­ness exists on its own, and this has given rise to var­i­ous the­o­ries. Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera also pointed this out when he said “paṭiccasamuppāda is viññāṇa”.^[1] I may not agree with every­thing he said, but here he did reveal an impor­tant mat­ter. The rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between viññāṇa and nāma-rūpa is the vor­tex of exis­tence, and it is the heart of paṭiccasamuppāda.

2. The eye is not bro­ken, and exter­nal forms do come to the vicin­ity. But tajjo saman­nāhāra is absent. Then, there is no eye-consciousness.
3. The eye is not bro­ken, exter­nal forms come to the vicin­ity, and there is tajjo saman­nāhāra. Then, there is eye-consciousness.

“The word tajjo comes from tat + ja. Tat means ‘that [itself]’. It is the root of such impor­tant words as tādī and tam­maya. So tatja means ‘arisen out of that itself’. What is saman­nāhāra? You might remem­ber that, in the Caṅkī Sutta, the Bud­dha hap­pens to see the Kāpaṭhika Brah­min youth. There we find the word upasaṃharati along with saman­nāhāra,^[2] refer­ring to a sort of focus­ing that may have not been planned – a chance meet­ing of eye to eye. Saman­nāhāra (āharati = brings) refers to a cer­tain ‘bring­ing together’.

“So tajjo saman­nāhāra points to the fact that this ‘bring­ing together’ of the nec­es­sary fac­tors for the aris­ing of con­scious­ness is inher­ent to the sit­u­a­tion itself. It is unique to the sit­u­a­tion, and does not come from within a per­son or from the out­side. It is not exerted by one­self or an exter­nal agent: some thought that there is an ātman inside who is in charge, while oth­ers said that it is a God that injects con­scious­ness into the man. Let­ting go of all these extremes, Ven. Sāriputta Thera pointed out the cru­cial role of tajjo saman­nāhāra with his analy­sis of the three possibilities.”

And then Bhante falls silent, and looks on with a smile.

After a few moments, he asks: “What do you hear?”

There is a bird singing in the distance.

“Did it start singing only now?”

It prob­a­bly had started ear­lier (and now that I am lis­ten­ing to the tapes as I tran­scribe this, I know that it had started many min­utes earlier).

“It must have been singing all this while, but only now…” I say.

“Only now…?”

“Only now did the atten­tion went there.”

“There you have tajjo saman­nāhāra! So is it only because of the sound of the bird that you heard it? Didn’t you hear it only after I stopped talk­ing? There could be other rea­sons too: had there been louder noises, you may not have heard it. So we see that it is cir­cum­stan­tial. That is why we men­tioned in our writ­ings: every­thing is cir­cum­stan­tial; noth­ing is sub­stan­tial.”

Please allow me to inter­ject here and add that the last sen­tence would remain some­thing that I’ll always cher­ish from these inter­views. Not only because of the sim­ple pro­fun­dity of the state­ment or the nice lit­tle prac­ti­cal exper­i­ment that led up to it, but also because of the gen­tle kind­ness in the way it was uttered.

“The atten­tion that is present in a sit­u­a­tion is to be under­stood as hav­ing arisen out of the cir­cum­stances. If there is any­thing of value in the Paṭṭḥāna, that would be here, in its analy­sis of the 24 causes. I can’t say for cer­tain, but it may well be an attempt at sys­tem­a­tis­ing the gen­eral con­cept men­tioned in this sutta: how a thought is con­nected to another. Since it is impos­si­ble to explain this mech­a­nism by break­ing it apart with words, Ven. Sāriputta Thera says it is cir­cum­stan­tial – unique to the sit­u­a­tion itself.

“It is because of this nature of the Bud­dhad­hamma that the later Indian philoso­phers called it a saṅghātavāda – plu­ral­ism, or a the­ory of aggre­gates, where the causes are not lim­ited to one or two or none. So my silence paṭicca, the sound of the bird paṭicca, absence of other sounds paṭicca etc. there was the aris­ing of a dif­fer­ent ear-consciousness.

“It is alright to refer to tajjo saman­nāhāra as man­asikāra as long as we make it clear that the process is imper­sonal. We may also bring in the Kiṃ Mūlaka Sutta^[3] here. Unfor­tu­nately my expla­na­tion of it in The Magic of the Mind, in the chap­ter ‘Essence of Con­cepts’, was not accepted even by Ven. Nyanaponika. In the sutta we find the state­ment man­asikāra samb­havā sabbe dhammā (born of atten­tion are all things). The com­men­tary lim­its the dis­cus­sion just to skill­ful states, which is a very nar­row way of look­ing at it. Be it sammā or mic­chā, there the Bud­dha is point­ing out the gen­eral principle.

“It is prob­a­bly because of the impor­tance of the prin­ci­ple dis­cussed that the Bud­dha brought up the sub­ject with­out being prompted by any­one. It is as if He declared it because the world would not hear or real­ize it oth­er­wise. The sutta is a won­der­ful rev­e­la­tion about what we take as a ‘thing’. It is not some­thing exist­ing on its own in the world but a result of many psy­cho­log­i­cal causes. But when we say that, we are accused of being viññāṇavādins and suññatavādins.

“One has to ask: why did the Bud­dha say ‘manopubbaṇgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā’ (Mind pre­cedes all dham­mas. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought – Dhp 1)? One has to admit that the Dhamma is mano-mūlika. But again, the mind is just one of the senses. What we have here is just a self-created prob­lem. We dis­cussed how exis­tence is a per­ver­sion. The aris­ing of dham­mas is also the aris­ing of dukkha. Not real­iz­ing this, some go look­ing for the truth among ‘things’.

“The search goes on because of delu­sion, and it is fruit­less because they are chas­ing illu­sions. Dham­mas, things, are all fab­ri­cated. They are all rel­a­tive. They are all results of maññanā (ideation). Just as those who were entrenched in self-view saw the Bud­dha as a nihilist, those who are entrenched in mate­ri­al­ism can­not grasp the Bud­dhist phi­los­o­phy which puts the mind first.”

Here I ask a recur­ring ques­tion, prob­a­bly because I still can’t bring myself to accept the already given answers due to my own mate­ri­al­is­tic ten­den­cies (of those days): what would one see if one looks at the world ‘objec­tively’ – if such a thing were pos­si­ble? Per­haps this is another way of ask­ing what one sees in the ara­hat­taphala samādhi.

“Suññatā” comes the quick reply.

“Whether peo­ple accept it or not, the truth is empti­ness. We need not go far: it is already there in the three words ani­mitta, appaṇihita and suññata. One has to go from nimitta (sign) to ani­mitta (sign­less), with the help of signs. The cul­mi­na­tion of paṇidhi (resolve) is appaṇihita (undi­rected). ‘Thing­ness’ gives way to emptiness.

“Imag­ine there were a large box here, with a label say­ing that the con­tents weigh 1000kg. If I were to ask you to move it, you’d object say­ing that it is too heavy for one per­son to han­dle. Let’s say I some­how coax you to try. When you try to lift, it comes off almost with­out effort – there’s no bot­tom to the box! The 1000kg sign was deceiv­ing you. That’s why the real­iza­tion of the Dhamma is equated to lay­ing down of a burden.

“To real­ize empti­ness, one has to know what one is aim­ing at. Yad’anuseti, tad’anumīyati, yad’anumīyati, tena saṇkhaṃ gac­chati (If one has an under­ly­ing ten­dency towards some­thing, then one is mea­sured in accor­dance with it. If one is mea­sured in accor­dance with some­thing, then one is reck­oned in terms of it. [SN 22.36]). As long as there is anusaya there would be mea­sur­ing, giv­ing rise to the con­cept of ‘things’. Elim­i­na­tion of anusaya is like the bot­tom of the box giv­ing way. After that, any­one can lift it.”

Colophon

This is part 5 of a series on Ven. Katuku­runde Ñāṇananda Thera. In Novem­ber 2009 I had the oppor­tu­nity to stay at his monastery for a few days and have sev­eral long con­ver­sa­tions with him. The arti­cles are based on the record­ings of these discussions.

Notes

1. ^{^} … any exem­pli­fi­ca­tion of paṭiccasamuppāda in the sphere of expe­ri­ence can be re-stated in the form of the fun­da­men­tal exem­pli­fi­ca­tion of paṭiccasamuppāda in the sphere of expe­ri­ence, which is, as it must be, that begin­ning with viññāṇa. Thus, viññāṇa and paṭiccasamuppāda are one.
   – Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera, Notes on Dhamma, “A Note on Paṭiccasamuppāda”, para. 20
2. ^{^} Atha kho kāpaṭhikassa māṇavassa etada­hosi: ‘yadā me samaṇo gotamo cakkhunā cakkhuṃ upasaṃharissati, athāhaṃ samaṇaṃ gotamaṃ pañhaṃ pucchissāmī’ti. Atha kho bha­gavā kāpaṭhikassa māṇavassa cetasā cetopariv­i­takka­maññāya yena kāpaṭhiko māṇavo tena cakkhūni upasaṃhāsi. Atha kho kāpaṭhikassa māṇavassa etada­hosi: ‘saman­nāharati kho maṃ samaṇo gotamo, yan­nūnāhaṃ samaṇaṃ gotamaṃ pañhaṃ puc­cheyyanti. [MII p. 169 (PTS)]
   Then the thought occurred to Kāpaṭhika the youth, “When Gotama the con­tem­pla­tive meets my gaze with his, I will ask him a ques­tion.” And so the Blessed One, encom­pass­ing Kāpaṭhika’s aware­ness with his aware­ness, met his gaze. Kāpaṭhika thought, “Gotama the con­tem­pla­tive has turned to me. Sup­pose I ask him a ques­tion.” [MN 95]
3. ^{^} […] Rooted in desire (or inter­est) friends, are all things; born of atten­tion are all things; aris­ing from con­tact are all things; con­verg­ing on feel­ings are all things; headed by con­cen­tra­tion are all things; dom­i­nated by mind­ful­ness are all things; sur­mount­able by wis­dom are all things; yield­ing deliv­er­ance as essence are all things; merg­ing in the Death­less are all things; ter­mi­nat­ing in Nib­bana are all things. [Excerpted from AN 8.83]
   – Trans­la­tion by Bhante Ñāṇananda (The Magic of the Mind)