Source of Indra's Net?

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Caoimhghín
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by Caoimhghín »

I think my treatment of Luke was more damaging to myself than a thousand slanderings of the Buddha. Intentional or not.
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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PuerAzaelis
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by PuerAzaelis »

_/\_
Generally, enjoyment of speech is the gateway to poor [results]. So it becomes the foundation for generating all negative emotional states. Jampel Pawo, The Certainty of the Diamond Mind

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Caoimhghín
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by Caoimhghín »

PuerAzaelis wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 4:32 am_/\_
I thank you for your sympathy and prayers, but the only way to right what I have done is to help Luke. And he does not want me help, hating me as he does. So all I can do is know that what I did was a profound wrong, and have the wisdom and resolve to not seek revenge again.
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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PuerAzaelis
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by PuerAzaelis »

Well it was also a bow of deep respect for posting.
Generally, enjoyment of speech is the gateway to poor [results]. So it becomes the foundation for generating all negative emotional states. Jampel Pawo, The Certainty of the Diamond Mind

For posts from this user, see Karma Dondrup Tashi account.
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Caoimhghín
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by Caoimhghín »

PuerAzaelis wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 5:06 am Well it was also a bow of deep respect for posting.
Then I thank you without the caveats.
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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Caoimhghín
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by Caoimhghín »

Two points of clarification regarding this tangent. Rest assured, the Luke Sutcliffe is not the individual's real name. He spent less than 24 hours in holding, though that does not lessen the wrongness of the situation. It was long, long ago. Alas, though, IMO this demonstrates the point made in the earlier tangent in a very graphic way.

Hopefully that is the end of such tangents here!
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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rory
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by rory »

Malcolm wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 4:17 am
Coëmgenu wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 4:10 am Unfortunately, I have done far worse in my life already than slandering the Buddhadharma.
There is nothing worse than slandering Buddhadharma. Slandering Buddhadharma is like killing your parents, etc.
Oh please he wrote a limerick, give it a rest Malcolm! Slandering the Buddhadharma would be like coming to the NIchiren forum and arguing so that people there lost faith...gee have you done that? Stick to criticizing the Tibetan buddhists that need and want authority figures to tell them what to do...
gassho
Rory
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu
Chih-I:
The Tai-ching states "the women in the realms of Mara, Sakra and Brahma all neither abandoned ( their old) bodies nor received (new) bodies. They all received buddhahood with their current bodies (genshin)" Thus these verses state that the dharma nature is like a great ocean. No right or wrong is preached (within it) Ordinary people and sages are equal, without superiority or inferiority
Paul, Groner "The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture"eds. Tanabe p. 58
https://www.tendai-usa.org/
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Caoimhghín
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Re: Source of Indra's Net?

Post by Caoimhghín »

Coëmgenu wrote: Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:13 pm
Queequeg wrote: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:51 pm
Coëmgenu wrote: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:48 pm

Luckily, though, this is Buddhist Chinese. This is no excuse not to educate one's self on the finer points of Chinese grammar. I will be the first to say that I do not have exhaustive grasp of this, my earlier mistake involving 中 testifying to that (that mistake would be a very pertinent example of stringing characters together with a fast-and-loose notion of how they rightly ought to relate). However, Buddhist Chinese generally imitates Sanskrit inasmuch as it is able to in word ordering, although sometimes Chinese authors had a rather fanciful notion of what Sanskrit word ordering implies.

I was just listening to one of the links Admin_PC left substantiating this curious detail of the dharma-in-Chinese.

http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/net ... 10301.html

This effect is even more striking and even more starker the older you go into the history of Chinese translations of the Buddhadharma, to the point where one can line up EBTs with their Sanskrit/Pāli parallels and draw clause-for-clause, and very frequently word-for-word correspondences between Sinitic and Indic recensions (at the price of making the texts very difficult to understand to a native Chinese speaker). Obviously this is not nearly as striking in the works of, say, translators like Ven Kumarajiva, who translate for the Chinese rather than translating into Chinese.

Either way, we are working with very small fragments, clauses rather than full complex phrases. I think we can be trusted with a few character-relations.
Well, did not know that. That is very interesting. Makes for translating into English a terribly labored exercise... Where does the Avatamsaka fall in this spectrum?
It was translated by Śikṣānanda (實叉難陀, 652–710), so it's not one of these super early texts.

I'm referring to things like this, this is from a very old (~200AD) Sarvāstivāda Saṃyuktāgama translation:

如內身身觀住
Iti ajjhattaṃ vā kāye kāyānupassī viharati
Evaṃ adhyātmaṃ kāye kāyānupaśyi viharaty

Iti 如 evam

ajjhattaṃ 內 adhyātmaṃ

vā (n/a)

kāye 身 kāye

kāya 身 kāya

anupassī 觀 anupaśyi

viharati 住 viharaty

It is literally Prākrit written with Chinese characters. And, like mentioned before, it is quite difficult to read. The grammatical differentiation between kāya & kāye, for instance, is absent. One could not really read this easily (compared to a "properly Chinese" text) without access to the original as well, or at least knowledge of it.

A lot of Buddhist Chinese looks to this as a stylistic ideal, but most well-established definitive translations of mainline East Asian Mahāyāna sūtrāṇi come from a latter period than this.
I came upon another interesting example of what we could call "extraordinarily literal" Sanskrit/Prākrit-to-Chinese, or perhaps even "Chinese non-translation" (Sanskritic vocab & grammar being essentially presented in Sinitic glyphs as-they-are, rather than a "true" translation to Chinese).

(yathāha bhagavānsaṁti) trīṇi saṁskṛtasya saṁskṛtalakṣaṇāni
there are three, of the conditioned, conditioned-marks

Or perhaps more fluently: there are three marks of the conditioned that mark it as the conditioned.

saṁskṛtasya saṁskṛtalakṣaṇāni

-sya = genitivity
āni = nominativity + pluralisation

Check out the Saṁskṛtalakṣaṇasūtra 有為相經, T125.607c13, Ekottarāgama 22.5:

「此三有為有為相。[…]」

saṁskṛtasya saṁskṛtalakṣaṇāni = 有為有為相

The genitivity has been lost, like the locativity in the example further above.
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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