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v:12 1923

STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD.

PRINTERS, HERTFORD.

Folk-lore
Hoffer

3-24-26

12869

то

EDWARD T. STURDY,

BY

WHOSE GENEROUS ASSISTANCE

THE EDITION OF THE COMMENTARY

HAS BEEN RENDERED ACCESSIBLE TO SCHOLARS,

AND

A TRANSLATION OF THE TEXT TO READERS GENERALLY,

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

WITH THE CORDIAL REGARD OF HIS FRIEND,

THE TRANSLATOR.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

To Section II of the following introductory essay there has been waiting to be added, nearly as many years as that has been written, a point of literary history not without interest. It is the linking up of the Dhammasangani, in one respect, with the Suttas-in respect namely, of the method of psychological introspection consistently pursued throughout Book I.

When my work was nearing completion, the Pali Text Society published that part of Mr. (now Lord) Chalmers's edition of the second half of the Majjhima-Nikaya (left unfinished by Trenckner), which contains Sutta No. 111: the Anupada-Sutta (vol. iii, p. 25 f.). And when, my labours on the Dhammasangani being over, I was making an analysis of this new material, I came, in this Sutta, upon a reference to mental introspection methodically carried out, and ascribed as a notable feat, because of his sometime persistence in it, to the diligent, wise, and modest apostle called Sariputta. He is stated to have practised "for a fortnight" such introspection, insight, or intuition (vipassanā), that the contents (content, as our philosophers prefer) of a "state of mind" at any given moment in meditation is elicited in the way called anupada. The passage may be translated thus:

66

Sāriputta, brethren, for a fortnight, intuited the intuition of successive states of mind. His intuiting was this: When he, aloof from sense-desires, aloof from evil states, attained to an abode in First Jhāna, which is with applied and sustained thought, is born of solitude, is full of zest and ease, then those states which are in First Jhāna, to wit, applied thought and sustained thought and zest and ease and selfcollectedness; contact, feeling, perception, volition, thought, desire, resolve, energy, mindfulness, indifference, attention, were by him successively determined; he understood them as they arose, as they were present, as they vanished. And he knew thus: Verily thus for me states which were not

have come to pass, and reveal themselves as such. He, with respect to them, remained in detachment, independent, unbound, loose, without mental barrier, knowing: "there is an escape beyond. From practising this, it just came to him."

This mental analysis is pursued through the four stages of Rūpa-jhāna and the five stages called Āruppa (§§ 265–76), plus trance.1 On emerging from the last, Sariputta is said to have judged that to be the limit-point of " escape ”.

The Sutta, as are so many, is an obvious patchwork of editorial compiling, and dates without a reasonable doubt long after Sariputta had preceded his Master in leaving this world. We have first a stock formula of praise, spoken not once only of Sariputta (cf. Kindred Sayings, i, 87 f.; 242). Then, ex abrupto, this tradition of his fortnight of systematic introspection. Then, ex abrupto, three more formulas of praise. And that is all. The Sutta, albeit put into the mouth of the Founder, is in no way a genuine discourse. It is a little "wreath" (Kranz) or album of Sariputtiana handed down in probably the Savatthi traditional memorized records; or only put together (and badly) when the records were, after centuries, arranged in MSS. And there is sufficient in the Sariputta anthology and elsewhere to show that introspective meditation was held to have been a tendency in this disciple. For instance, his verses praise ajjhattarati

Who loveth introspective work 2...

But the intrusion of two words—of anupada, and of vavatthita "determined "-which are not of the older idiom, suggest a later editing and show us that when this editing took place, the period of the compiling of the naïf crude analyses of the Abhidhamma Pitaka was either at hand, or not far removed in time.

And that is not quite all there is to be said. Short as is the cataloguing of mental factors in the Sutta, as compared

1 The Dhs. does not include this, presumably because it involved cessation of that consciousness which it sets out to analyze. 2 Pss. of the Brethren, ver. 981.

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