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THOUGHT.
his mind is not perplexed, if he has ceased to think of good or evil, then there is no fear for him while he is watchful.
root syai, 'to become rigid;' but the participle of that root would be sîta, not syuta. Professor Weber suggests that anavassuta stands for the Sanskrit anavasruta, which he translates unbefleckt, unspotted.' If avasruta were the right word, it might be taken in the sense of not fallen off, not fallen away,' but it could not mean unspotted;' cf. dhairyam no 'susruvat, our firmness ran away.' I have little doubt, however, that avassuta represents the Sanskrit avasruta, and is derived from the root sru, here used in its technical sense, peculiar to the Buddhist literature, and so well explained by Burnouf in his Appendix XIV (Lotus, p. 820). He shows that, according to Hemakandra and the Gina-alankâra, ásravak shaya, Pâli âsavasamkhaya is counted as the sixth abhigña, wherever six of these intellectual powers are mentioned, instead of five. The Chinese translate the term in their own Chinese fashion by stillationis finis,' but Burnouf claims for it the definite sense of destruction of faults or vices. He quotes from the Lalita-vistara (Adhyâya XXII, ed. Rajendra Lal Mittra, p. 448) the words uttered by Buddha when he arrived at his complete Buddhahood :
Sushkâ âsrava na punah sravanti,
The vices are dried up, they will not flow again ;' and he shows that the Pâli Dictionary, the Abhidhânappadîpikâ, explains âsava simply by kâma, 'love, pleasure of the senses.' In the Mahâparinibbâna-sutta, three classes of âsava are distinguished, the kâmâsavâ, the bhavâsavâ, and the aviggâsavâ. See also Burnouf, Lotus, p. 665; Childers, s. v. âsavo.
That sru means 'to run,' and is in fact a merely dialectic variety of sru, has been proved by Burnouf, while Boehtlingk thinks the substitution of s for s is a mistake. Asrava therefore, or asrava, meant originally the running out towards objects of the senses (cf. sanga, âlaya, &c.), and had nothing to do with âsrâva, a running, a sore,' Atharva-veda I, 2, 4. This conception of the original purport of a + sru or ava-sru is confirmed by a statement of Colebrooke's, who, when treating of the Gainas, writes (Miscellaneous Essays, I, 382): ·Âsrava is that which directs the embodied spirit (âsravayati purusham) towards external objects. It is the occupation and employment (vritti or pravritti) of the senses or organs on sensible objects. Through the means of the senses it
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