Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

cpa can best be understood as the verbal noun 'colouring', meaning
'touching up', 'filling out', 'giving body to'." And it may be that
Vasubandhu's inclusion of samsthiina in his definition of riipa results in a
similar meaning to that proposed by Wayrnan. Wayman's suggestion brings
the meaning of riipa/varpz nearer to the more general criterion of visibility,
which is the main characteristic of riipa where it is the object of the sense
'eye', and also of riipa as part of the cosmic triad in the Brhadiirayaka
Upani;ad passage we have been discussing here. While niima, the conferral
of a name, is a conceptual differentiation by verbal means, riipa is differentiation
by means of (visible) appearance or form: as the earlier passage of
the Upani!ad puts it, 'he [or it] is called so-and-so, and looks like such-andsuch'.
The Upani~adic understanding of niimariipa, then, is, as stated above,
close to the literal meaning of the term. One might put this differently and
suggest that name and form together confer individuality, and that in this
figurative sense, therefore, nimarfipa does have a psychophysiological
meaning. Reat suggests that in the Upani;ads nimariipa is used to denote the
"conceptual and apparitional aspects of a given object".18 This fits well
with the notion of individuality, since both concept (which represents
name) and appearance are peculiar to the individual. And in spite of
Yajfiavalkya's statement about niima being eternal, which is perhaps
characteristically profound, nimarzipa, as both conceptual and apparitional
aspects, is associated with the temporal existence of a thing as much as
with the duration of an individual's lifetime. Thus the Munp'akopani~ad states
that just as flowing rivers cast off name and form when they flow into the
ocean, so one who knows is freed from name and form and attains the
divine person, higher than the high. lg
Just as scholars of Buddhism have often understood the term niimariipa to
refer to 'mind and body' rather than its more literal meaning of 'name and
form',20 so the later Theravada tradition has understood niimariipa. Such an
understanding, however, is scarcely compatible with the main context in
which niimariipa is found in the Pali canon, which is as the fourth link in the
usual twelvefold version of the chain of dependent origination, the
paticcasamuppiida formula. In another version of the formula, nimariipa
appears as the second link in the chain, but is still preceded by uiiiiiiina. If
mind and body arise at this stage, how can one make sense of the subsequent
arising of what seem to be mental faculties, and why do we findjiti,
birth, so much further along the chain? Several suggestions have been
made to explain this, both within the Theravada tradition and outside it,21
most of which have been in terms of spreading the chain over the previous,
present and next lives of the individual. In the following discussion of
nirnariipa we will see that some of the contexts in which the term is found in
the Sutta fitaka do suggest that it means 'mind and body'. I will also suggest
that in contexts where such an interpretation is problematic, primarily the
pa~iccasamuppida formula, an alternative interpretation makes considerably