[Advaita-l] upAdAna kAraNam.h

[S Jayanarayanan]

--- Siva Senani Nori <sivasenani at yahoo.com> wrote:

[..]

> If you were to conduct a survey and I were the first respondent, I
> would have no problem in understanding your translations, but would
> I use it myself? No, not yet - for two reasons. To me 'material
> cause' works well enough, as you yourself have shown in an earlier
> post.

Actually, in my earlier post giving several meanings for the word
"Material", I had only looked the *noun* form of the word, not the
*adjective* form.

Here's adjective form of "Material":

---
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/material

Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English materiel, from Middle French & Late Latin;
Middle French, from Late Latin materialis, from Latin materia matter
-- more at MATTER

1 a (1) : relating to, derived from, or consisting of matter;
especially : PHYSICAL <the material world>
(2) : BODILY <material needs>
b (1) : of or relating to matter rather than form <material cause>
(2) : of or relating to the subject matter of reasoning; especially :
EMPIRICAL <material knowledge>
---

Note that the term "Material Cause" (where "Material" is an
adjective), is used primarily as RELATING TO MATTER.

> Secondly, I am not confident enough and would confirm as much
> as possible - unless such confirmity is against the basic tenets -
> to ensure respectability. For similar reasons I would also not use
> 'ignorance', except in informal posts.
> 

The fact that this translation/terminology has been used in the
literature for a few decades doesn't necessarily mean that it is
accurate. Perhaps it was reasonably accurate a long time ago, but not
as of today, as proven by the fact that many in this list have been
misled by the term:

1) Bhaskar implicitly took "Material Cause" to mean something
"solid".
2) Prem has conceded that he too had misunderstood the term as
referring to something physical.
3) In my reply to Bhaskar, I pointed out that he had made the mistake
of considering the composition of Ignorance to be something MATERIAL,
without realizing that he had good cause for misunderstanding the
term, and I was only adding to the confusion.

How many more people have been misled into thinking that upAdAna
kAraNam.h should be matter-composed? Is it worth misleading another
generation of students?

> Regards
> Senani

Regards,
Kartik


 
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