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Who has written this book is really has stupid attitudes.

plan B,

If the scales were to fall from your eyes, you just might see plenty of evidence that I am no fan of the West and their new world order.

And I am not concerned exclusively and obsessively with the sanctions like you, although I’m sure you’ve heard the bad news that Congress has approved extending them for another year. So more foam around your overexcited mouth I should imagine.

Please do not kid yourself that ASEAN members behave as they do out of sympathy or love for Burma. It’s purely business, and not about East vs West. To them the ‘Ugly American’ is as relevant as the Cold War it harks back to. Kim is more likely to see it as ‘them and us’ than even Wen when China’s fortunes are hard to disentangle from those of the US despite the good old capitalist competition between the two. No wars among the capitalist powers since 1945, remember? Only in the Third World, gainfully testing out their hardware backing one party or another.

Hard to believe the papers will be made quickly accessible. No doubt the institute will want to gather the papers into an edited volume. That will likely take far too long to be published, and will be far too expensive as a paperback.

I am not as current on this topic as I should be, but we are talking about farting here, right?

Pete S 6.
Thitinan finishes with the most succinct phrase:
“The challenge was to reform the establish order and make it more accommodating and accountable to the electorate while keeping a Thaksin-style oligarchy at bay.”

I broadly agree, however in the Land of the Jao Por/ Nak Leng/Phu Yai it cannot happen. How to dismantle this apparatus and bring these untouchable supporters of the status quo to accountability is the issue, as they are the core of support for any despotic regime, dynastic/oligarchal or military. My thai friends smilingly tell me: “ah , but this is thai culture…”
But we know that the smile is a tool of concealment for all those things that cannot be said in a society who’s engine is lubricated by fear.

Yes, please let’s have some access to these papers as soon as possible.

Without a coup, there would be no phenomenon called “р╕Хр╕▓р╕кр╕зр╣Ир╕▓р╕З” [enlighten].

When I ask many of my friends when do they become “р╕Хр╕▓р╕кр╕зр╣Ир╕▓р╕З”, they will usually says the 19th of September coup is the beginning. From someone who never has any interests in politics or history of their own country, they become very active and read a lot into Thai history since a coup.

A coup may represents just a blur picture of monarchy’s involvement in politics that could led to funny interpretations from the royalists (for example, some may say a coup leader forced the monarchy to do so, he had no choice, bloody bla bla). But what follow after a coup (speeches in many occasions, funeral attendance, silence for the crackdown etc.) is a clear picture that could not be interpreted in any other way but the monarchy involves in politics and clearly chose their side!

If since a coup to a crackdown was some kind of test, the monarchy failed to answer all the question correctly according to democratic standards. 4 mistakes from 10 choices are still acceptable, but if it is 9 from 10 then I am not surprising why a large number of population become “р╕Хр╕▓р╕кр╕зр╣Ир╕▓р╕З”. They have so many chances to answer in a right way or even correct many mistakes they made in order to save their own legitimacy, unfortunately they didn’t.

Much ado about nothing!

As Mazard points out, his translation of apana is not controversial to students of yoga or Sanskritists. Indeed, considering how the Buddha was said to have died, (or attained mahaparinirvana). One can understand why the Pali canon might contain passages concerning the abdominal gas that is passed after one dies.

As another example, take a look at the Maranassati Sutta, the Meditation on Death, from the Pali canon. In the sutta, in describing how a monk might die this example twice:

Upakkhilitv─Б v─Бhaс╣Г papateyyaс╣Г bhattaс╣Г v─Б me bhuttaс╣Г by─Бpajjeyya, pittaс╣Г v─Б me kuppeyya, semhaс╣Г v─Б me kuppeyya, satthak─Б me v─Бt─Б kuppeyyuс╣Г, tena me assa k─Бlakiriy─Б, so mamassa antar─Бyo.

“Stumbling, I might fall; my food, digested, might trouble me; my bile might be provoked, my phlegm… piercing wind forces [in the body] might be provoked. That would be how my death would come about. That would be an obstruction for me.” [Translation is from here] .

I’m not planning to “attend to” the comments section, but it’s inevitable that this article will cause controversy, and I thought I should put in a brief appearance.

It’s sad to see that attempts at rebuttal show a lack of awareness of the contents of the article itself.

The Rt. Hon. J.F.D. McKechnie tries to invoke Monier-Williams to disprove Monier-Williams, with predictable results. The text he quotes to confound my hypothesis only affirms my hypothesis (and Monier-Williams is alluded to in the text of my article itself as a further source that M. Cone could have considered as at least raising considerable doubt about this “downward breath”): “ap├вn├б, m. (opposed to pr├вс╣З├б), that of the five vital airs which goes downwards and out at the anus…” (that leaves somewhat less to the imagination that “abdominal breathing”, hm?).

The Rt. Hon. “Derek Dangle” is trying to claim that the meanings of the words assasati and passasati are (i) etymologically unrelated to ap─Бna and pr─Бс╣Зa, and (ii) that either I myself am unaware of the distinction, and/or the sources I’m quoting are unaware of it, and that therefore (iii) you can supposedly ignore the entire question of the meaning of ap─Бna and pr─Бс╣Зa, or of how we know such meanings (from dictionaries, or etc.), and simply assign notions of breathing to the verb-forms without any evidence, and while blatantly disregarding a mountain of evidence. Wrong on all three counts, old boy. The article tries not to bore the reader with details that don’t translate, but if you know any Pali or Sanskrit, you’ll be able to infer both I and the sources I’m quoting are aware of the relationships between these (closely-related) words, and the other forms do come up in the article, e.g.,
“Vajira├▒─Бс╣Зa (1962, p. 232) offers the conclusion that the meaning of the Pali word pass─Бsa is, in fact, equivalent to the Sanskrit usage of prasv─Бsa “as the expulsion of the abdominal wind”” (did you miss that part, or did you fail to finish the article before commenting?)

All of this stuff is well-enough known amongst scholars of Sanskrit (indeed, it’s even somewhat popular, in the form of modernized “Yoga” exercises, as mentioned…). One colleague wrote in to tell me that he has a forthcoming chapter dealing with the details of this “theory of the winds” within the abdomen as discussed in the Mah─Бbh─Бrata –but the details do not change the very basic point made in this article by one iota.

That simple point is: what people have come to call “breathing” (in translating these passages) is not really breathing. For those who now delve into what the controversies about the translation of the English passages have heretofore been, you’ll see that many are puzzling at things that didn’t make sense under the former (PTS) paradigm, but that do make sense now (e.g., the controversy about the “breath” being something that pervades the whole body, etc., vs. some creative re-interpretation of the “whole body” as the “breath body” to avoid thinking too much; and Buddhaghosa’s discussion of breath in the formation of the embryo, etc., is already pointed out as an interesting example in the course of the article above).

At any rate, the Rt. Hon. “Derek Dangle” is presuming to debunk me by claiming that I haven’t read the Pali (good luck, old boy!) and by misrepresenting what my thesis is: I do not say that the canon prescribes “farting meditation” (i.e., I do not put forward the view Dangle ascribes to me). Re-read the essay, and see for yourself what my thesis really is here. If you think I’m worth refuting, shouldn’t I be worth reading in the first place?

Regarding the question from Brian: these are issues that I have raised in many of my publications, some of which you can find listed online, and some of which are in the (eons-long, but still impermanent) purgatory of peer-review.
https://profiles.google.com/118222702679452306115/about

To what extent were Thai, Cambodian and Burmese translations influenced by European scholarship? The answer is, to an astounding extent. To what extent were the untranslated Pali texts simply typeset anew, copying from European originals? Again, the answer is, to an astounding extent. I have written articles dealing with these issues, and, sadly, nobody wants to hear it.

The other sad thing is that we can only understand the importance of Asian sources that either (i) pre-date or (ii) intentionally contradict the European versions once we’re aware of the extent of the influence of those European sources (i.e., we need to mark out textual transmission, both within Pali and in Pali translations). There is a very important “Mon” edition of the Pali canon that pre-dates the PTS versions (and it is beautifully typeset and bound in hardcover, unlike a palm-leaf manuscript) –and, indeed, this “Mon” version was “ripped off” to various extents in the creation of some of the PTS editions (not others, it varies from book to book). I have never seen a single article cite that version of the text, and the few living Pali scholars I have known have admitted to me that they never made any comparative reference to it. Why is that version important? Precisely because it is a version of the text that is independent in its sources (it is not influenced by European precedents one way or the other).

Alas, this applies only to the very small number of people who read “raw” (untranslated) Pali –and within that small number, an even smaller group who are capable of comparative reading in multiple orthographies (the Burmese tradition of writing Pali looks nothing like the Sinhalese, although the underlying language is the same, etc., something I’ve written about in a down-to-earth way for many years, cf. http://www.pali.pratyeka.org/ ).

The comparative study of translation and interpretation is both “easier” (because more people have reading comprehension of living languages) and “more difficult” (because these languages are totally unrelated to one-another, and totally unrelated to Pali). In Laos, the single most influential book on what Buddhism “is supposed to be” is written by a French author (Louis Finot!) although the Lao monks who use it as a classroom textbook seem to regard the Lao translator as its author (wishful thinking?). This is a very palpable example of a European author defining Buddhism for an Asian audience –although his opinions have long since been taken up by men in robes as if they were of local (and ancient) origin. In Cambodia, the translation of the canon into Khmer was done extremely rapidly, and probably relied on (earlier) English and French translations as precedents; however, I’m not aware of a single comparative study examining this issue, and thus we simply don’t know how much “independence” the translators exercised (i.e., it would take a lot of confidence to say, “No, the European experts are incorrect…” –and it still does!).

These are tremendously important issues that you’ve asked about, Brian, and the mistranslation of breathing meditation is just one example that would be very interesting to track and compare between different languages, and between different historical periods in any one Therav─Бda milieu. I’ve given lectures on topics of that kind for years, I’ve delivered papers, and met and spoken with all manner of scholars, monks, and university professors. Sadly, that research is not happening, and is not going to happen.

Instead, what you’re going to see is are dismissive, ad hominem, and contemptuous attempts to ignore the very simple questions raised in this article –and I know that I can’t expect any better, given the reaction to (e.g.) my earlier work on the question of the Buddha’s hair (vs. baldness) and the re-invention of the “12 links” formula (both are examples of article on this same website, New Mandala).

Finally, many thanks should go to the editors of New Mandala for carrying articles on Buddhist studies that would be considered too shocking by the small covens that control most of the other publications in the field. I would encourage anyone reading this who really does conduct original research on Therav─Бda Buddhist sources and societies (including those of you who find this article shocking or unsettling) to consider submitting work to New Mandala. Although it is outside of the remit of the professors who inaugurated the website, I think they’re filling an important gap in publishing this material (and this gap exists, in part, because so many other publications have failed, be it on paper or online).