After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor

Author:Stephen Batchelor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

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The five-bundle model is only one way Gotama illuminates human experience for the purpose of practicing the fourfold task. A more complex model of experience is found in his presentation of name-form (nāmarūpa) and how that is related to consciousness. “And what,” he asks, “is nāmarūpa?”

Touch, feeling, perception, intention, attention: this is nāma (name). The four great elements and the forms derived from those elements: this is rūpa (form). So name and form together are nāmarūpa.23

Although this analysis covers much of the same ground as the account of the five bundles, nowhere in the discourses does Gotama include consciousness, the fifth bundle, as part of nāmarūpa. The omission is not careless. As we shall see, consciousness is not part of nāmarūpa because nāmarūpa is understood as the necessary condition for consciousness to come about in the first place.

In the passage just cited, rūpa is presented through the metaphor of what we “sense” with our bodies, not just with our eyes. Although later schools of Buddhism understood the four great elements (earth, water, fire, air) to be composed of different physical atoms, the discourses never mention atoms. Gotama understands the four elements phenomenologically as the tactile sensations (phohabba) of heaviness (earth), wetness (water), warmth (fire), and movement (air), which we know firsthand through our embodied experience. The Pali phohabba is a gerundive of the verb phusati, “to touch.” Literally, it means “that which is touched.” And since rūpa extends to whatever “is derived from” these elements (which here would have to include what we see, hear, smell, and taste), this implies that Gotama compares our entire physical sensorium to what we touch with our skin and sense with our bodies as heavy or light, damp or dry, warm or cool, mobile or immobile. The language is metaphorical. “Touch” is being used here, just as “form” is elsewhere, as a metaphor for everything we encounter through the physical senses.

However tempting it is to translate nāmarūpa as “name and form,” there is no “and” in the original. As soon as the “and” intervenes, we become prone to thinking that nāmarūpa involves two discrete entities that somehow interact with each other, which has led, perhaps, to the common Buddhist misunderstanding of nāmarūpa as a synonym for “mind and body.”24 That nāmarūpa has nothing to do with “mind” (citta) is reinforced by the fact that consciousness (a synonym of citta) is never mentioned as part of it. Gotama’s contemporaries may have been familiar with the term nāmarūpa as referring to the world of multiplicity and variety but they would not have recognized it as referring to a world neatly divided into two components, one material and one mental.25

“Touch, feeling, perception, intention, attention,” says Gotama: “this is nāma (name).”26 These five “nāma factors,” as they are called, include three of the five bundles—feeling, perception, and inclination (= intention)—but add two more: touch and attention. “Touch” in Pali is phassa, also from the verb phusati (to touch) and thus a cognate of phohabba, “what is touched.

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