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Dear list members,
Our next seminar will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Thursday 6 June in
the Rogers Room (N397), John Wooley Building (A20), University of
Sydney.
We hope you can attend.
Kind regards,
AABS Executive
Nothing is pure enough for the pure. A note on the
‘Purification of the view’ (diṭṭhi-visuddhi)
described in the Visuddhimagga (Vism 587-597) in comparison with the
Sārasaṅgaha (Ss 107-108).
The structure of the Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga is based on the
description of the seven purifications. One of these, the purification of
view (diṭṭhi-visuddhi,
Vism 587-579), is defined as “correct seeing of name and form” (nāmarūpānaṃ yāthāvadassanaṃ diṭṭhivisuddhi
nāma). On the base of understanding Buddhaghosa’s hermeneutic
use of nāmarūpa we
can interpret his definition of the purification of the view.
In this paper I will investigate from an historical, linguistic and
philosophical point of view how and why Buddhaghosa’s description of the
purification of view has been conserved in a medieval Singhalese Pali
compendium of the Buddhist teaching, namely, the Sārasaṅgaha. Taking into
consideration previous scholars' understanding of the purification of
view section of the Visuddhimagga (e.g. Hamilton 1996, Endo 2015, Heim
and Ram-Prasad 2018), I will analyse the original Pali texts and discuss
the value of the concept of purity for Buddhaghosa and its evolution in
later Medieval Sri Lanka.
Chiara Neri is Honorary Associate in
Sanskrit language and literature in the Department of Philology,
Literature and Linguistics at the University of Cagliari, Italy. She also
currently holds a Robert H. No Ho Family Foundation Grants for Critical
Editions and Scholarly Translations (An
Annotated English and Italian Translation of Select Chapters of the Pali
Sārasaṅgaha) and is Visiting Researcher in the Department of
Indian Subcontinental Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research
predominantly focuses on the study of Pali canonical and commentarial
literature from a linguistical, historical and philosophical point of
view. She has published numerous research papers in conference
proceedings and international journals. Since 2013 she has been engaged
with the Prof. Tiziana Pontillo (University of Cagliari) in a research
project aimed at tracing the conjunctive and disjunctive
linguistic-cultural connections between Vedic and Pali canonical
literature.
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