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