Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

Manomaya
meaning: that the mind is the cause of something else coming to be. The
genitive meaning, on the other hand, indicates that the stuff of something
is the mind, and its concern with what something is means that it is an
ontological interpretation of the compound. Both of these meanings of
manomaya are given in the Pali English Dictionar~y,' and both are used by
tran~lators.~ In understanding the term manomaJva one needs to consider the
implication of these two possible meanings.
The point has already been made, especially in the Introduction and in
chapter v, that it is important to distinguish between what something is
made 05 and how it is made: whether a passage is concerned with the
former or the latter. In the Sutta Pi.taka, I have suggested, the prime concern
is with understanding how samsiric existence operates so that one can
understand how to achieve liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Even those
analyses which appear to offer an explanation of what there is, and the
analysis of the person into khandhas is a good example, are intended to assist
in understanding how the human being should be understood to function,
rather than simply as a separate 'self'. There is no suggestion that the
analysis has any ultimate ontological significance: rather, it is notable that
insofar as the analysis of the human being into Wlandas is concerned with
the 'what' of the human being, it is 'what' in the sense of structure rather
than substance that matters; and we have seen that all the khandhas are to
be understood as processes. To achieve liberation it is more important to
understand, for example, that the processes which we think of as the
substance of the body are subject to decay and dissolution, thus emphasising
the body's lack of permanence, than what that substance is. This point
is the subject of one of the stock expressions in Pali: "This is my physical
body, made up of the four great elements.. . and the very nature of it is
impermanence, it is subject to erosion, abrasion, decay and breaking up".3
And it is also notable that in the analysis of the nipakbiandha non-corporeal
bodily processes are given equal emphasis to the more concrete aspects of
the body, as we have seen.
I will discuss the term manomaya in four different contexts. First, I will
consider the first line of the first and second verses of the Dhammapada. In
this context the main question which arises is whether or not manomaya is
being used to indicate a particular ontology. The context also shows the
extent to which Buddhist teachings are concerned with the power of the
mind. Second, I shall briefly refer to rnanomya in an unusual context
where it refers specifically to manas as a sense and not to 'mind' in general.
We shall nevertheless see that here too it is the power of the mind that is
being referred to, if in a different way. Third, I will discuss its use as a
metaphorical synonym for the riipadhitu level in Buddhist cosmology and
how this corresponds to a samsiric mode of existence. In order to understand
its use in this context, I will also discuss the fact that in the Sutta
Pibka there is no explicit or implicit ontological discontinuity between what
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