taxonomy question

[elisa freschi]

Dear James and Stefan,

I should have mentioned that Prābhākara authors explicitly deny the  
existence of "spontaneously born" bodies —since they are nowhere to  
be seen (the appeal to common sense is the standard device of  
Mīmāṃsā authors).

As for your question, L. Schmithausen's work (see references in A.  
Thrasher's post) seems to confirm the idea that plants were admitted  
as a class of living beings in early India (including the earliest  
layers of the Buddhist Pāli Canon) but then a general tendency to  
rationalisation excluded them from the field of living beings in the  
śāstric literature. This might have happened at an earlier stage in  
Buddhist *texts* (due to the historical circumstances of its being a  
"new" religion and of relegating myth often outside the precincts of  
its reflection), whereas in "Hinduism" traditions favouring the  
inclusion of plants have been preserved in epics, Purāṇas, etc.

I cannot really understand what you mean by "since yoni
> here serves as the cover term they were evidently not meant to be
> covered"

Could you explain further?

elisa freschi


Dr. Elisa Freschi
research fellow of Sanskrit
Facoltà di Studi Orientali
Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'
via Principe Amedeo 182b, 00185 Rome (Italy)
fax +39 06 49385915
http://elisafreschi.blogspot.com
http://uniroma.academia.edu/elisafreschi



On 06/ago/11, at 13:33, Stefan Baums wrote:

> Dear James and Elisa,
>
>> "born from an uterus" (yoni-ja or jarāyuja), "born from an egg"
>> (aṇḍaja), "born from sweat/warmth" (svedaja) and born from water
>> (udbhijja). The latter group includes all sorts of plants.
>
> the Buddhists have aṇḍaja, jarāyuja, saṃsvedaja and upapāduka
> (spontaneously born: some classes of gods, etc.). Plants are not
> included in this variant of the classification, but since yoni
> here serves as the cover term they were evidently not meant to be
> covered. I wonder which of the two variants of the list is
> primary.
>
> All best,
> Stefan
>
> -- 
> Dr. Stefan Baums
> South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
> School of Asian Studies, Universiteit Leiden



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