Many thanks for your letter and for the C.O.D. extracts. As I thought, the words are so imprecisely used in English that one can make them mean very much what one pleases without violating usage; and I suspect that the situation was much the same, mutatis mutandis, in the Buddha's day. At the same time, there seem to be certain parallels between English usage and the Sutta usage: for example, CONSCIOUSNESS, according to the C.O.D., can mean "the totality of a person's thoughts and feelings", and it can also mean "perception (of, that)". The second meaning, with due allowance for looseness in the meaning of the English word "perception", approximates to what I understand by viññāṇa, and the first meaning is quite close to citta (which I translate as "intent"). The Sutta connexion between these two is nāmarūpapaccayā viññāṇa and nāmarūpasamudayā cittassa samudayo. "Mind" is delightfully Protean—as "seat of consciousness" it is manāyatana, as "soul, opp. to body" it is mano in manokamma.
The comic element in the Netti has now, I think, given us all the laughs it was capable of; and we can now say, in a phrase of my schooldays, "Joke over". Perhaps needless to say, the charge of being comic is no more directed at you than is the charge (if I were to make such a charge in a general way: "Those who...") of being a champion, even quasi-crypto, of the Commentaries. I am quite well aware that you are quite well aware of the deficiencies (not to put the matter too strongly) both of the Netti and of the Commenatries, and that you are not deceived by them. (Upon occasion I give more credit to the Commentary than you do—notably in the Cittavisuddhi section of the Vis. Mag., and also, perhaps, in its analysis of the four mahābhūtāni. Apart from its usefulness as a dictionary, it also contains, however muddleheadedly, certain earlier interpretations that are of value.) What, then, is the origin of the suspicion, suspected by you, that I, and perhaps the Ven. Kheminda Thera too (though whether he would be so anti-commentarial were the Ven. Nyanaponika Thera not so pro-commentarial I don't know) may or may not entertain, of the propriety of your relations with the Commentary? Perhaps a remark of the Ven. Soma Thera's, that you once told me of, throws some light on the matter. It seems that, upon reading a disparaging passage in an early draft of your Vis. Mag. Introduction ("an opinion expressed", apparently, "only as dispraise"), he exclaimed "But if that is your opinion of the Visuddhi Magga I can't think why you bother to translate it". It is true that this does not take into account the fact that you translated it in order to find out what it was about, and not at all in order to propagate it as the Eternal Truth (which you might have done had you been an admirer of the work); but even when this is taken into account there seems to remain a vague unaccounted-for residue, perhaps expressible as "But is it necessary, in order to find out what it is about, to translate it quite so thorougly?" That, to other people, there is an air, a faint aura, of ambiguity about your relations with the Commentary, you will probably admit, since you seem to be aware of it yourself; but I, for one, should not attribute it to a secret admiration (though to what, exactly, it might be attributed is not altogether easy to say). Perhaps it is really, after all, nothing more mysterious than a slight self-indulgence in the pleasure of (18th century) scholarship. (I should certainly not suspect you, except to be perverse, of the seriousness of Scholarship in its present-day meaning—indeed, of the three of us, the Ven. Nyanaponika Thera, yourself, and myself, you are the least serious, though not, therefore, the most comic.)
It seems very probable that the existence of the Commentaries have preserved the Text of the Vinaya and Suttas, which would long since have fallen into neglect and oblivion after the decision that practice was less important than preservation. But the question arises, for whose benefit have they been preserved?
The new cistern is directly in front of the room, so placed that water from the guttering can be caught in it. It is sunken, two feet below ground and one foot above (though it would be wrong to think of it as a tripod), and is thus inconspicuous and does not exclude the gaze from the ultimate horizon. The earlier one is under the trees to your right as you stand at the entrance to the caṅkamana facing outwards. Since neither is empty, there are no voices singing out of them, but by the end of September there will be, no doubt.
This letter is partly to uncross the situation, since my last letter to you crossed yours to me.
P.S. An alternative translation of yathābhataṃ nikkhitto evaṃ niraye is "he is as if set-down like a burden in hell" (i.e. "he is in hell as if set down [there] like a burden"). This takes evaṃ as referring to the whole of yathābhataṃ nikkhitto, instead of as just the complement of yathā (yathābhataṃ nikkhitto evaṃ [nikkhitto] niraye), which gives (as I suggested) "as if carried, so he is placed in hell", placed being here a pun in the two senses of "to be placed (put down) like a burden" and "to be placed (located) in hell". Of these two renderings I prefer the second ("as if carried...") being a verbal ambiguity, whereas the first is a rhytmical ambiguity.
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