Metaphor and Literalism in Buddhism: The ... - misterdanger.net

THE TWO NIRVANA THEORY IN THE EARLY CANON
derived from abhiprê meaning ‘to go near to, approach; to approach with
one’s mind, to think of’ according to MWD. The noun abhiprAya means
‘purpose, intention, wish, opinion, meaning and sense (as of a word or of a
passage)’. It thus refers to meaning depending on context. In other words,
the exposition of the sEtra depends largely on taking words in their context,
on taking the text as a whole.
What is taught through the image of fire 37 in the Aditta-pariyAya? It reads
as follows:
O monks, all is on fire. And, O monks, what all is on fire? I say, Oh
monks, eye is on fire. Visual objects are on fire. Eye-consciousness
is on fire. Eye-contact is on fire. This feeling which is caused by the
eye-contact and is pleasant, painful or neither painful nor pleasant
is also on fire. With what is it on fire? It is on fire with the fires of
passion, hatred and delusion. It is on fire with birth, old age, death,
sorrow, lamentations, sufferings, grieves, and distresses. 38
What it says is that ‘all’ is on fire with passion, hatred and delusion and
later that the key to being liberated is to lose interest in (nibbindati) the ‘all’
and, as a consequence, to put out the triple fire of passion, hatred and
delusion. 39 By the word ‘all’ it means the organs, i.e. the five sense faculties
and the mind; their objects, such as visual objects; six consciousnesses; six
contacts and the feelings arising from these contacts. In other word, it simply
lists all parts of our cognitive process. 40
What is the fuel of the triple fire in this context? In the Fdittasutta in the
SaNyuttanikAya, 41 the five aggregates are used metaphorically as the fuel of
a triple fire: passion, hatred and delusion. Within the early canon, the five
aggregates are often designated as upAdAna-kkhandhA, which is typically
translated as ‘the aggregates of grasping’ by taking the subjective meaning
of upAdAna. The awkwardness in understanding this word is easily solved
if ‘fuel’, the objective meaning of upAdAna, is taken into consideration. It
simply means ‘the aggregates of fuel’ or ‘the aggregates as fuel’ if taken as a
descriptive compound (karmadhAraya). Since nirvana literally means ‘going
out’, what has to go out is this triple fire of passion, hatred and delusion
fuelled by these five aggregates.
On the origin of the word upAdisesa, Ñyaoamoti said in his translation of
the KhuddakapAMha, The Minor Readings, 42 that the term upAdisesa was
originally used as a medical term, meaning ‘a residue of a poisoned arrow’s
poison still clinging to the wound after treatment’, and then used ‘figuratively
of the Arahant, who during the remainder of his life manifests the “residue
of clinging left” in the form of the five-category process, which, however,
“will cease” with the end of his life-span’.
Ñyaoamoti 43 traces this medical usage of the word to the Sunakkhattasutta
in the MajjhimanikAya. 44 Here the blessed one gives the simile of a person
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