tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2595537203277298730.post8966632973897401614..comments2022-04-01T06:30:31.335+02:00Comments on Philosophia Buddhica: A Buddhist Theory of Anamnesis?Dorji Wangchuk (Kuliśeśvara)http://www.blogger.com/profile/02042613761261634658noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2595537203277298730.post-86300741096511903252014-01-28T18:13:54.833+01:002014-01-28T18:13:54.833+01:00I think it's worth separating out various thre...I think it's worth separating out various threads in relation to dhāraṇī. <br /><br />The exact etymology is uncertain but it is clearly derived from √dhṛ 'to support, to remember (In the sense of bear in mind)' and related to dhāraṇa 'holding, possessing; remembering, keeping in mind'. The word dhāraṇī is grammatically feminine, whereas dhāraṇa is masculine. <br /><br />In the context of the early Prajñāpāramitā texts a dhāraṇī is indeed a mnemonic - akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmānam adyutpannatvād. The syllable a, reminds us of the word anutpada 'unarisen' which we use in a meditation, reflecting that with respect to dharmas, nothing real arises when we have an experience. Lists of key words in the alphabetical order of the Gāndhārī language (a ra pa ca na...) are found in many texts. Some of these are Sanskritised so they use the Sanskrit alphabetical order (in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra for example).<br /><br />Incidentally the letter 'a' is the mother of all letters because in this early context, Gāndhārī is written in Kharoṣṭhī script, which like Tibetan scripts only has one character for initial vowels and uses diacritics to get the rest. And consonants are cited with an inherent 'a'. <br /><br />But most dhāraṇī are not in fact mnemonics at all - they are much more like Pāli parittā texts. Texts chanted for the purposes of protection. If you look at the dhāraṇī chapter of the Sudharmapuṇḍarikā Sūtra you'll see a range of dhāraṇīs that seem quite strange - they utilise patterns of words that are found more often in Dravidian languages (called "echo words"). Their express purpose is protection of the chanter from misfortune and similar functions. These dhāraṇīs can be quite long, like the Uṣnīṣavijaya Dhāraṇī or the Nīlakaṇṭhā Dhāraṇī and some become sūtras in their own right (there are in fact hundreds of dhāraṇī sūtras in Chinese translation). And their efficacy is due to being chanted rather than any connection with memory. Why these passages and texts are called dhāraṇī is unclear.<br /><br />However because of the presumed etymology and the Prajñāpāramitā mnemonics its common for people who write about Buddhism to say that all dhāraṇīs are mnemonics even though this is factually incorrect. <br /><br />A third category of dhāraṇī are much more like mantras, though this distinction is blurred, but some of the dhāraṇīs seem very likely to have been composed in a Tantric/mantric context unlike the Sudharmapuṇḍarikā. Possibly the Uṣṇiṣavijaya Dhāraṇī falls into this category?<br /><br />By the way anamnēsis must mean 'non-forgetfulness' where amnēsis means 'forgetfulness' from the Greek root √mnē, which comes from Proto-Indo-European *√man 'to think'. Thus despite some similarities this word is not related to either the English word remember or mnemonic, or the Sanskrit √smṛ (> smṛti, smarati) which are from a PIE root *√(s)mer - which reduplicates in Latin to give memor-. Though I don't think this undermines your suggestion since the semantic fields clearly overlap. Jayaravahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13783922534271559030noreply@blogger.com