Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

24 Identity and Experience
Khuddakdp@ha.lLg The list is identical to the standard list of thirty-one parts
found elsewhere in the Sutta Pitaka save for the fact that it includes the brain
(matthaluriga) as the thirty-second part. The commentary does not acknowledge
how unusual it is in including the brain, and no explanation for its
inclusion here, or its exclusion elsewhere, is given.Iz0 The Khuddaka JVihya is
comprised of a variety of books, some of which are considered to be
considerably later than other parts of the Sutta Pi!aka.l2l It is possible,
therefore, that these two passages are late, and that matthalunga might have
been added to the extant standard list as a part of the body which had
become more widely known about. Alternatively, this list might have been
one which circulated among different people from those who recorded the
list which survives in other places in the Sutta &aka.
The brain is also mentioned both in the Enaya122 and in the Sutta
N$~iita.l~~ The context in which it is found in the Enaya is a discussion of a
brain-destroying disease from which a householder is suffering. No other
parts of the body are mentioned, and the passage does not offer an analysis
of the body. The Sutta Nipiita passage, on the other hand, is more
comprehensive:
Joined together with bones and sinews, having a plastering of skin and flesh,
covered with hide, the body is not seen as it really is - full of intestines, full of
stomach, (full) of the lump of the liver, of bladder, of heart, of lungs, of kidneys
and of spleen, of mucus, of saliva, of sweat, and of lymph, of blood, of
synovial fluid, of bile, and of fat.. . and its hollow head is filled with brain.lZ4
Many of the parts mentioned are also included in the standard list.
Probably because the Sutta NipGta is in verse rather than prose, the order
of those parts that are common to both is different; and several of the standard
parts are omitted in the Sutta NipGta passage.125 It is acknowledged by
scholars that much but not all of the Sutta JVipiita is very early. The inclusion
of matthaluriga here may be an indication that this particular passage is late.
But it may only be that the brain was not an organ which was known to
those early Buddhists who were concerned to give an analysis of the body,
whether for classification or for meditational purposes. Certainly, there is
no suggestion in the canonical material, early or late, that it is manas or the
physical base of manas.
There are three possibilities concerning the location of manas. First, we
have seen above that in the Sutta fi!aka the senses are not explicitly stated
to be upiidi rzipa. I have suggested that this might be because they principally
represent the potential processes of seeing, hearing and so on. Their
corresponding physical organs might have been excluded from the classification
partly because they are readily identified (in all but one case) and
partly because the physical organs as such, though necessary, are of minor
significance in the psychological implications of seeing. If the terms used to
list the first five senses (cakkhu, sota, ghdna,jivhii and kqa) are actually