−−⏑−¦−⏑⏑¦−⏑−−¦¦−−⏑−¦−⏑⏑¦−⏑−− Upajāti
(Indravajrā)
āhāra-śuddhyā
yadi puṇyam-iṣṭaṁ tasmān-mgāṇām-api
puṇyam-asti |
−−⏑−¦−⏑⏑¦−⏑−−¦¦−−⏑−¦−⏑⏑¦−⏑−−
ye
cāpi bāhyāḥ puruṣāḥ phalebhyo bhāgyāparādhena
parāṅmukhārthāḥ || 7.28
7.28
If
the good is to be got through purity of food,
It
follows that there is good in even the creatures of the forest;
As
well as there are human beings who,
through
the reaping of fruits, subsist as outsiders –
Human
beings who, because of contravening destiny,
are
turned away from wealth.
COMMENT:
Today's
verse is a difficult one. It seems ostensibly to be ridiculing the
idea that “holy purity” or “religious merit” (puṇyam) can be
got by eating wholesome and pure food, and it seems to do so with
reference to outcasts who, though they are excluded from the
advantages of human society and live out in the wilds, eking out an existence from nature in the raw, are nonetheless conspicuously lacking
in religious merit – as a result of reaping evil karma whose seeds
they sowed in past lives.
If
ever a verse was calling out to have its hidden meaning dug for,
then, it is today's verse – because on the face of it, today's
verse sounds like a bit of Āryan nonsense that would not be worthy
of the Śākya prince even before he became the Buddha.
A
good place to start digging is bāhyāḥ
phalebhyaḥ in the 3rd
pāda.
The
nominal plural bāhyāḥ
(being outside [nom. pl.]) can mean, with the ablative phalebhyaḥ
(fruits/enjoyments/rewards), “they are situated outside of
enjoyments/rewards,” hence EBC translated bāhyāḥ phalebhyaḥ
as “outcasts from all enjoyments”; EHJ as “excluded from the
rewards of dharma”; and PO as “excluded from such rewards.” In
these readings phalebhyaḥ are the enjoyments, benefits, or rewards
of civilized society from which outcasts due to their bad karma are
excluded.
EHJ
clarifies this reading in his translation and footnote:
If merit is held to derive from purity of food, then merit accrues also to the deer and even to those men who are excluded from the rewards of dharma and on whom by some fault of their destiny wealth has turned its back. (EHJ)
FN:
I
take the reference in c to be to those who under the rules of caste
could not practise the higher forms of Brahmanical religion. The
implication, explicitly stated by C [the Chinese translator], is that
they are too poor to afford anything but food such as hermits live
on.
PO
brings out and spells out this ostensible meaning of today's verse
even more clearly in his own translation and footnote:
If you seek merit through the purity of food, then even by the deer merit should be acquired! So also should men excluded from such rewards, who, due to some misfortune, are bereft of wealth.
FN:
If
merit comes from the purity of one's food, then the deer should
acquire a lot of merit, because they eat only grass, leaves, and
berries, which are all pure food. And if simple poverty or lack of
wealth is meritorious, then even outcastes and other people normally
excluded from religion should acquire merit because they are poor
from birth or due to some misfortune.
If
we stop and consider what EHJ and PO think the Buddha-to-be is
saying, why on earth would Aśvaghoṣa put such words into the mouth
of the Buddha-to-be? To suggest that the prince, although he had
established the will to the truth, was still harbouring arrogant
prejudices based on a determinist / Brahmanist understanding of
karma?
No,
as with yesterday's verse, I think Aśvaghoṣa intention is to
encourage us to smash through the surface meaning with a sharp spade
and dig out the hidden meaning below.
So
in the first half of the verse, the prince is ostensibly saying
something absurd as a rhetorical device, suggesting that it is
ridiculous to think that eating natural food conduces to goodness,
virtue, or religious merit. But Aśvaghoṣa's ironic recognition may
be that, yes, the creatures of the forest do indeed benefit from
eating those natural foods – as opposed to the processed foods
eaten by human beings in towns and villages.
In
the second half of the verse, the ablative phalebhyaḥ can be read
as meaning “because of fruits,” so that bāhyāḥ phalebhyaḥ,
which ostensibly means “they were excluded from fruits/benefits/enjoyments” can also mean “they were outsiders, because of fruits.” This might be intended to suggest a literal
meaning (phalebhyaḥ = on the basis of [harvesting and eating] fruits) as well
as the more obvious metaphorical meaning (phalebhyaḥ = because of the results
of their actions, because of reaping the fruits of what they sowed).
The
3rd
pāda can thus be read as a description of those who, far from being
unfortunate outcasts, are true human beings who have taken themselves
outside of human society and into the forest – people who, in other
words, have got themselves well and truly out, as per the title of BC
Canto 5, abhiniṣkramaṇaḥ, “Getting Well & Truly Out.”
In that case, in the
4th pāda bhāgyāparādhena (EBC: by the fault of
their destiny; EHJ: by some fault of their destiny; PO:
due to some misfortune) is an ironic expression of the
exercise of individual autonomy. On the surface bhāgyāparādhena
means something like bringing misfortune upon oneself by offending
(aparādha) Lady Luck (bhāgya). But
below the surface contravening (aparādha) destiny (bhāgya) means
refusing to accept karma as karma has been understood since time
immemorial by superstitious and irrational Indians. Rather,
bhāgyāparādhena (contravening so-called destiny) means
understanding karma to be a function of those actions for which each
individual is able to exercise individual responsibility here and
now. The latter affirmation of the true law of karma might be an
out-and-out violation of the law that Narendra Dabhoklar (who was
assassinated in August as a result of offending Indian holy men)
observed his superstitious countrymen blindly clinging to – the
karma which he called a law for sheep and slaves.
And
finally parāṅmukhārthāḥ (EHJ: on whom wealth has turned its
back; PO: are bereft of wealth) on the surface suggests
the kind of misfortune to which outcastes are subject – the
misfortune of being shunned (parāṅmukha) by wealth (artha). But
the expression parāṅmukhārthāḥ leaves it open whether ye
puruṣāḥ (those human beings who...) are the shunned or the
shunners; and artha is a term whose many meanings (including wealth
and aims, purposes, ends) Aśvaghoṣa is always playing on. So below
the surface parāṅmukhārthāḥ could describe buddhas as great
human beings of small desire who shun opulence, or it could
equally describe Zen practitioners as human beings who keep their
attention turned away from
ends, because with both eyes fixed on the destination one
is liable to veer off the road.
Having
written the above and then sat, I ask myself, not for the first time:
if Aśvaghoṣa really did intend such deliberate ambiguity and irony
– and in a verse like today's the surface meaning is so open to
criticism that I cannot see how he didn't – then why? Why did he go
to all this trouble? Why did he make his intention so inscrutable as
to be totally missed by three generations of professors of Sanskrit?
At the same time, since Aśvaghoṣa has been revered for nearly two
thousand years as a founding Zen ancestor, one wonders what the heck
a verse like today's verse has got to do with the one thing Zen
ancestors are supposed to be devoted to, which is sitting-dhyāna,
sitting-Zen?
And
the first answer that I keep coming back to is based on my own
experience over the last 30-odd years of a great big cosmic irony.
For more than ten years I understood that sitting-Zen was mainly
about physically doing something that I felt to be right – “a
kind of physical gymnastics” in Gudo Nishijima's words. But for the
last 20 years, in a totally ironic twist, I have been investigating sitting based on the opposite conception. I have been investigating, bit by bit, what happens in sitting when we learn NOT TO DO what
feels right but is actually wrong. I would not claim to have got very
far yet along this path, which requires the individual to open
himself or herself to the very thing we tend to fear – our own
wrongness. In any event, this sort of dramatic irony which may be
inherent in anybody's zealous pursuit of the truth of non-doing, and Aśvaghoṣa's
pervasive use of verbal irony, seem to me to be all entangled with
each other. So I suspect that verbal irony was Aśvaghoṣa's way of
pointing us to the kind of dramatic irony, or cosmic irony, in which
sitting-dhyāna is liable to entangle the zealous practitioner.
In
recent comments I have written of the difference between knowing the
Buddha's teaching, as those who sit know it, and knowing about
the Buddha's teaching, as academics know about it. In this also there
may be an irony, in that really to know the Buddha's teaching, by
sitting, is to enter into uncertainty itself. So this may be another,
albeit related, answer to the question of why Aśvaghoṣa so
evidently favoured inscrutability of expression. Aśvaghoṣa's
intention may have been to save us from the sin of certainty.
Finally,
having asked myself the above why question in preparing this comment
yesterday, and then slept on it, and sat again, I remembered that
Aśvaghoṣa in several places in his epic poems describes the joy of
the first stage of sitting-zen as viveka-jam (born of
solitude/separateness; e.g. SN17.42; BC5.11). And so truly to be an
outsider might be related in Aśvaghoṣa's mind with this kind of
separateness, which in fact is not so easy to come by. It is not
always easy to separate oneself, for example, from emotional,
familial, financial, and professional commitments. Some monks in the
Theravada tradition seem in many ways to be paragons of such
separation, though they tend to be tied to the Theravada rule book,
and even they – if they are living as a foreigner in a Southeast
Asian country – are liable to run into visa problems and the like.
Perhaps the greatest freedom is afforded by being paid to do a job
that one loves doing, though there again the law of impermanence is
liable to apply.
Thus,
when I reflect on today's verse in light of my own experience,
including at some times a deep sense of the joy of separation, and at
other times frustration at being caught up in involvements, I think
the real turning word in today's verse might be phalebhyaḥ.
Those human beings who are outside (ye bāhyāḥ puruṣāḥ) are
truly outside because of fruits (phalebhyaḥ) – because of reaping
what they sowed.
Today's
verse, then, is really saying something about karma. But what it is
really saying about karma is totally different from what it appears
to be saying on the surface.
VOCABULARY
āhāra-śuddhyā
(inst. sg.): by purity of diet
āhāra:
m. food ; taking food
śuddhi:
f. cleansing , purification , purity (lit. and fig.) , holiness ,
freedom from defilement
yadi:
if
puṇyam
(nom. sg.): n. the good or right , virtue , purity , good work ,
meritorious act , moral or religious merit
iṣṭam
(nom. sg. n.): mfn. sought, wished, desired ; regarded as good ,
approved
iṣ:
to endeavour to obtain , strive , seek for ; to desire , wish , long
for , request
tasmāt:
ind. from that, therefore
mṛgāṇām
(gen. pl.): m. creatures of the forest, deer
api:
even, also
puṇyam
(nom. sg.): n. the good or right , virtue , purity ,
asti
(3rd pers. sg. as): there is
ye
(nom. pl. m.): [those] who
ca:
and
api:
even, also ; api api or api-ca , as well as
bāhyāḥ
(nom. pl. m.): mfn. (fr. bahis) being outside (a door , house , &c
) , situated without (abl. or comp.) , outer , exterior ; not
belonging to the family or country , strange , foreign ; excluded
from caste or the community , an out-caste
puruṣāḥ
(nom. pl.): m. man
phalebhyaḥ
(abl. pl.): n. fruit (met.) , consequence , effect , result ,
retribution (good or bad) , gain or loss , reward or punishment ,
advantage or disadvantage; benefit , enjoyment
bhāgyāparādhena
(inst. sg.): because of going against fate / fortune
bhāgya:
mfn. ( √ bhaj) to be shared or divided , divisible; entitled to a
share ; lucky , fortunate ; n. sg. or pl. (ifc. f(ā). ) fate ,
destiny (resulting from merit or demerit in former existences) ,
fortune , (esp.) good fortune , luck , happiness , welfare ; n.
reward
aparādha:
m. offence , transgression , fault; mistake
apa-
√ rādh : to miss (one's aim , &c ) ; to wrong , offend
against (gen. or loc.)
parāṅmukhārthāḥ
(nom. pl. m.): shunning wealth / being shunned by wealth
parāṅmukha:
mfn. having the face turned away or averted , turning the back upon
; averse from , hostile to , regardless of , shunning , avoiding
(loc. ; gen. ; acc. with prati , or comp.) ; unfavourable , unkind
(as fate &c )
artha:
mn. aim, end, purpose ; utility ; substance , wealth , property ,
opulence , money
parāṅmukhatvāt
[EBC]: because of the state of being shunned' ; EBC: 'through
being estranged'
食淨爲福者 禽獸貧窮子
常食於果葉 斯等應有福
常食於果葉 斯等應有福
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