⏑⏑−⏑⏑¦−⏑−⏑−−¦¦⏑⏑−−⏑⏑¦−⏑−⏑−− Aupacchandasaka
na
bhaven-maraṇāya jīvitaṁ me viharet-svāsthyam-idaṁ ca me na
rogaḥ |
⏑⏑−⏑⏑¦−⏑−⏑−−¦¦⏑⏑−−⏑⏑¦−⏑−⏑−−
na
ca yauvanam-ākṣipej-jarā me na ca saṁpattim-imām
hared-vipattiḥ
|| 5.35
5.35
My life shall not lead
to death;
No breakdown shall put
asunder my present state of soundness;
Growing old shall not
take away my youthfulness;
And going wrong shall
not impinge upon what presently goes well.”
COMMENT:
The obvious
interpretation of today's verse is that the prince is rhetorically asking the king to
guarantee four things which are totally impossible for anybody to
guarantee, since death/dying (maraṇa), disease/breakdown (roga), aging/growing old (jarā), and
adversity/going wrong (vipatti) are all unavoidable.
But if we look for
irony, irony can readily be found in the following readings of the
four pādas, each of which reading retains the original negation but
with a meaning which is different from the ostensible negation, viz:
(1) The prince's life
did not lead to death; rather the way he lived his life
led him to obtain, for himself and for everybody, amṛta, the nectar
of immortality.
(2) As the enlightened
Buddha, the prince realized a state of soundness or ease in himself
(sva-stha) which disease could not put asunder; hence, in his epic story of Beautiful Joy, Aśvaghoṣa describes the Buddha as
overcoming the grim army of Māra and awaking to the step which
is happy, irremovable, and irreducible (śivam-ahāryam-avyayaṁ;
SN3.7).
(3) As the enlightened
Buddha, again, the prince realized youthful virtues like energy and
open-mindedness that did not dim with age.
(4) Even if the Buddha's life was, as Dogen described his own life, just one mistake after another, those
mistakes did not detract from the universal truth that if anybody stops doing the wrong thing the right thing tends to do itself. In
other words, going wrong in no way detracts from what, as the Lotus
Sutra says, is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in
the end.
If we carry on
digging, another layer of irony can be found, not far below the
surface, in the following readings of the four pādas, each of which
reading contradicts the original negation with an ironic affirmation, viz:
(1) The prince's life
did in fact lead to his death, or his dying, in the
sense of his losing his own body and life.
(2) This process of
losing his own body and life invariably did involve
former certainties taking a battering along the way, and breaking
down, so that immature self-confidence or complacency (one meaning of
sva-sthya) eventually gave way to another kind of confidence, which
was Gautama being easy in Gautama's own skin (another meaning of
sva-sthya).
(3) Growing old (i.e.
gaining the wisdom of experience, and developing into a mature human
being) did in fact take away the prince's immaturity.
(4) The prince's
failure (vipatti) did in fact bring near or usher in success (saṁpatti) – “to bring” or “to carry in” being the original meaning of √hṛ. The most celebrated example of such a failure is the prince's ineffectual ascetic
stumbling in the scrub, traditionally reckoned in Japan to have
lasted for six years, which eventually gave way to his sitting like the
king of mountains under the bodhi tree.
There may be other
deeper layers, utilizing further ambiguities of the root √hṛ, that remain to be dug. But even if I did manage to dig down and uncover any deeper layers, I am afraid, the
effort to leave the various meanings open would cause my translation
of today's verse to become even more stilted.
In conclusion, then, so what?
What is the point of
all this ambiguity?
I think the point might
be to stimulate philosophical inquiry.
Apropos of which I am caused
to reflect that in the 1980s there were two philosopher-businessmen
endeavoring to find a synthesis between Hegel's thesis of dialectic
idealism and Marx's anti-thesis of dialectic materialism. One of
those philosopher-businessmen was my own teacher Gudo Nishijima; the
other was George Soros, who in The Alchemy of Finance
(1987), wrote:
Hegel propounded a dialectic of ideas; Marx turned the idea on its head and espoused dialectic materialism.
It is remarkable that these two men from such widely separate cultures, who had been on opposite sides in WWII, and working totally independently from each other, so evidently saw the philosophical challenge that faced them in exactly the same terms – to find a
synthesis between Hegel's dialectic and Marx's dialectic.
To his proposed
synthesis Gudo Nishijima gave different names at different times – the
philosophy of action; realism; true Buddhism; the theory of four
philosophies; three philosophies and one reality; and so on. What
Gudo's proposed solution lacked, it seems to me, were precisely the
elements which form the dual pillars of Soros's proposed solution,
which are namely fallibility and reflexivity.
Partly because he
failed to recognize the problem of fallibility, and partly because he
was the archetypal post-war Japanese brahmin, Gudo tended to want to
impose his One True Buddhism on others as an ideology.
And because he
failed to recognize reflexivity, when Gudo's philosophy was taken
into the laboratory of sitting-meditation, his teaching was
discovered – primarily by yours truly – to be inadequate. Gudo's
teaching was inadequate because, when it came to sitting-meditation,
Gudo failed to recognize the role that thinking has to play, not only
as something to be avoided and negated, but also as something to be
learned and practised in the interests of directing spontaneous flow,
or allowing the right thing to do itself. Because of his bias against
thinking, Gudo's teaching of how to sit leaned heavily in the
direction of doing based on feeling – and if one's feeling was
faulty that was bad news, as I eventually discovered and understood
in my own sitting practice, aided and abetted by FM Alexander.
In putting forward his
proposed solution, based on the dual pillars of fallibility and
reflexivity, George Soros wrote:
Now there is a new dialectic that connects the participants' thinking with the events in which they participate – that is, it operates between ideas and material conditions. If Hegel's concept was the thesis and Marxism the antithesis, reflexivity is the synthesis.
What is missing from
George Soros's system, it seems to me, is a convenient laboratory
that is open to anybody for safely testing out fallibility and reflexivity. George Soros used the financial markets as
the laboratory for testing out his ideas, and in some respects the
financial markets are a truly excellent laboratory for testing out
ideas. The recent sharp drop in the price of gold, for example, has
been very chastening for those of us who took an optimistic view that
gold would easily go to $2000 per ounce before testing the downside. In the
laboratory of the financial markets, however, there must be winners
as well as losers. Whereas in the laboratory of sitting-meditation,
everybody can learn, every time, by being the loser.
VOCABULARY
na: not
bhavet =
3rd pers. sg. optative bhū: to be
maraṇāya
(dat. sg.): n. the act of dying , death
jīvitam
(nom. sg.): n. life ; duration of life
me (gen.
sg.): my
viharet =
3rd pers. sg. optative vi- √ hṛ: to put asunder ; to
disperse (clouds); to cut off , sever ; to carry away, remove
svāsthyam
(acc. sg.): n. (fr. sva-stha) self-dependence , sound state (of body
or soul) , health , ease , comfort , contentment , satisfaction
sva-stha:
self-abiding , being in one's self (or " in the self "
Sarvad. ), being in one's natural state , being one's self uninjured
, unmolested , contented , doing well , sound well , healthy (in body
and mind ; often v.l. for su-stha) , comfortable , at ease ; relying
upon one's self , confident , resolute , composed
idam (acc.
sg. n.): this
ca: and
me (gen.
sg.): my, of mine
na: not
rogaḥ
(nom. sg.): m. " breaking up of strength " , disease ,
infirmity , sickness
na: not
ca: and
yauvanam
n. (fr. yuvan) youth , youthfulness
ākṣipet
= 3rd pers. sg. optative ā- √ kṣip: to draw or take
off or away ; to disperse
jarā
(nom. sg.): f. aging, growing old
me (gen.
sg.): my
na: not
ca: and
saṁpattim
(acc. sg.): f. prosperity , welfare , good fortune , success ,
accomplishment , fulfilment , turning out well ; good state or
condition , excellence
patti: f.
(fr. √2 pad, to fall, go) going , moving , walking
imām
(acc. sg. f.): this ; this , this here , referring to something near
the speaker ; known , present
haret =
3rd pers. sg. optative √ hṛ: to take , bear , carry in
or on (with instr.) , carry , convey , fetch , bring ; to take away
, carry off , seize , deprive of , steal , rob ; to remove , destroy
, dispel , frustrate , annihilate ; to master , overpower , subdue ,
conquer , win , win over (also by bribing) ; to outdo , eclipse ,
surpass
apāharet
= 3rd pers. sg. optative apa- √ hṛ: to snatch away ,
carry off , plunder ; to remove
apa: ind.
(as a prefix to nouns and verbs , expresses) away , off , back
ā- √ hṛ
: to fetch , bring , bring near ; to fetch for one's self , take
away , take , receive , get
vipattiḥ
(nom. sg.): f. going wrongly , adversity , misfortune , failure ,
disaster ; ruin , destruction , death ; cessation, end
保子命常存 無病不衰老
衆具不損減 奉命停出家
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