Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

56 Identity and Experience
classical Sanskrit one of the meanings of samjzii (Pali san"n"9 is 'name'.'* In
Buddhism, the sapiiric cognitive process is based on not seeing things as
they really are: and this rnisperception is what constitutes the ignorance
which generates continued samsiiric existence. Misperception involves
'naming': the process by which what we see or experience is identified by us
according to our understanding of it. It is also relevant that though the Pali
papazceti is usually understood to mean 'to be obsessed' (so the phrase above
is translated "what one reasons about obsesses onenL9), in Sanskrit prapaiica
means manifoldness. It is the term used by the great Mahayana Buddhist
N~ejuna in his Madhyamakukiih- to indicate that which needs to cease in
order for liberation to take place:20 manifoldness implies our mistaken
imposition of separateness upon things that are in reality dependently
originated. The Pali English Dictionary states that it is unclear whether
papaiica means the same in Pali as it does in Sanskrit. In my opinion, the
context in which we find it here demands a similar interpretation of it.
While such manifoldness could be understood in terms of obsession, in the
sense that it is our misperception of the way things are that brings about
the various desires which represent bondage (or 'obsess' us), the meaning of
the passage is more readily understood if we translate papaiiceti as 'one causes
to become manifold'. Papafca is associated with saiiiiii throughout this Sutta
in a manner which suggests that manifoldness is a concomitant of
identification. And the significance of such manifoldness here, as for
Nagarjuna, is that it implies that in perceiving manifoldly one is attributing
separate independent existence to everything one perceives. That this is
the meaning ofpapaiica is confirmed by other passages in the Sutta Maka in
which it is found. In the Safiyatana Samyutta, for example, we read:
Men who have conceptions of manifoldness of some kind go on separating
things when apperceiving; but [eventually] he [a bhikkhu] drives out
everything that is [thus] constructed by the mind and to do with the
mundane life and proceeds to a life of ren~nciation.~~
In this passage there is a clear indication that the attribution of
manifoldness, in the sense of separateness, where there is (according to the
Buddha's teaching) no such separateness, is part of samsiiric perception: the
term rnanomaya, constructed by the mind (literally,'mind-madeyz2)
indicates
that papalica is not perception of 'things as they are' lyathibhitam) but that
the bhikkhu has to proceed from such mundane ('constructed') samsiiric
perception. Similarly, in the Aettara Nikiiia we read that whoever is given
to manifoldness will not reach Nirvana.23 In two other passages in the
Ariguttara Nikiya, we read that the classical 'unanswered questions' (referred
to in the Introduction) are papaii~itam,~~ and that other such views are the
result of "making manifold what is not (really) manifold".25
Johansson points out that such examples "bind the concept ofpapaiica to
the psychological area of associative and analytical tho~ght",~~ and