History of Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 007593
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Surendranath Dasgupta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Year: 1922
Total Pages: 2517
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 125 MB

Page 116

Ignorance
99
Avijjā and Āsava. As to the question how the avijjā (ignorance) first started there can be no answer, for we could never say that either ignorance or desire for existence ever has any beginning! Its fruition is seen in the cycle of existence and the sorrow that comes in its train, and it comes and goes with them all. Thus as we can never say that it has any beginning, it determines the elements which bring about cycles of existence and is itself determined by certain others. This mutual determination can only take place in and through the changing series of dependent phenomena, for there is nothing which can be said to have any absolute priority in time or stability. It is said that it is through the coming into being of the āsavas or depravities that the avijjā came into being, and that through the destruction of the depravities (āsava) the avijjā was destroyed? These āsavas are classified in the Dhammasangani as kāmāsava, bhavāsava, ditthāsava and avijjāsava. Kāmāsava means desire, attachment, pleasure, and thirst after the qualities associated with the senses; bhavāsava means desire, attachment and will for existence or birth; ditthāsava means the holding of heretical views, such as, the world is eternal or non-eternal, or that the world will come to an end or will not come to an end, or that the body and the soul are one or are different; avijjāsava means the ignorance of sorrow, its cause, its extinction and its means of extinction. Dhammasangani adds four more supplementary ones, viz. ignorance about the nature of anterior mental khandhas, posterior mental khandhas, anterior and posterior together, and their mutual dependences Kāmāsava and bhavāsava can as Buddhaghosa says be counted as one, for they are both but depravities due to attachment'.
Warren's Budilhism in Translations (Visuddhimagsa, chap. xvi.), p. 175.
M. N. 1. p. 54. Childers translates "āsava" as "depravities and Mrs Rhys Davids as "intoxicants." The word "āsava" in Skr. means “old wine." It is derived from "su" to produce by Buddhaghoşa and the meaning that he gives to it is "cira pārivāsikatthena" (on account of its being stored up for a long time like wine). They work through the eye and the mind and continue to produce all beings up to Indra. As those wines which are kept long are called "āsavas" so these are also called āsavas for remaining a long time. The other alternative that Buddhaghoşa gives is that they are called āsava on account of their producing samsāradukkha (sorrows of the world), Atthasălini, p. 48. Contrast it with Jaina asrava (flowing in of karma matter). Finding it difficult to translate it in one word after Buddhaghoşa, I have translated it as "depravities," after Childers.
3 See Dhammasangani, p. 195. - Buddhaghoşa's Atthastīlini, p. 371.