Borderline beings: plant possibilities in early Buddhism.

• Author: Findly, Ellison Banks

THE QUESTION OF WHETHER PLANTS are considered living and sentient beings in Pali Buddhism is brought to the fore by early Buddhist teachings on non-violence. In discussions of the Patimokkha, the Vinaya makes clear that monks and nuns are not to cut down trees (rukkha) in the course of repairing their lodgings, because in so doing they will cause injury to one-facultied living beings. (1) Likewise, they are not to cut down young palmyra palms to wear as shoes, and are also cautioned against trampling down crops and grasses as they walk among alms-donors during the rainy season, as they may injure one-facultied living beings. (2) This monastic prohibition is then echoed in the Majjhima Nikaya as a virtuous monk celebrates his practiced restraint from destroying seed- and vegetable-growth. (3)

If plants and seeds--including grasses, creepers, bushes, and trees--are, as one of the objects of the ethic of non-violence, not to be injured, then it would make sense that they would be included among those designated as living, sentient beings. And if they are designated as living, sentient beings, then they should, concomitantly, be a part of the samsaric world and in some way subject to the laws of kamma. The texts of the early Pali canon are, however, as Lambert Schmithausen has carefully shown, relatively silent about the place of plants in the scheme of samsaric life. While later Buddhist texts are clearer about plants being not counted as sentient beings, earlier texts have "no explicit statement declaring plants or even earth and water to be living, sentient beings," nor do they seem to have "an explicit... statement denying them the status of sentient beings." Thus, "plants... in Earliest Buddhism [are] a kind of borderline case." (4)

Pro-life prescriptions on plants in the Patimokkha refer, most likely, to prevailing social views rather than to those of the renunciants themselves. "This code' Schmithausen argues, "is not concerned with spiritual practice nor even with morality proper ... but, mainly, with regulating how monks and nuns had to behave in society." (5) Many local householders of the time still retain their old belief in plants as sentient beings, and, although they themselves cannot consistently practice an impractical standard like ahimsa, especially with regard to plants, they think it unfit for ascetics of the time to practice anything but plant ahimsa. The Patimokkha proscription on killing plants, then, is not "an element of moral, or ethically motivated, conduct in the strict sense but ... rather a matter of ascetic decorum." (6) Thus, Buddhist practice is influenced by renunciant desire to please the local people--or, as I have shown elsewhere, the donors to the Sangha (7)--by, on the one hand, practicing plant ahimsa themselves and, on the other, by allowing householder donors to freely use plants and plant products in their daily lives. This latter Buddhism does by, at first, being silent about plants as living things and, later, actively excluding them as objects of a non-violent ethic.

Schmithausen further suggest that "originally also the monks themselves, and even the Buddha, [may] still somehow [have] held the view that plants and seeds were living beings." Early on, however, there is a "shifting emphasis from the ahimsa aspect towards matters of ascetic decorum"--already evident in discussion of the Patimokkha rule--and the exclusion of plants from the ahimsa rule then becomes, more or less, standard practice. "My personal feeling," he concludes concerning early Buddhist monastic sentiment, is that plants "are certainly not sentient in the same way as men or so-called higher animals. But they may not be entirely insentient either, and they are certainly alive. We simply do not know what it means for a plant itself to live or to be injured or killed." (8)

In this paper, then, I follow Schmithausen's suggestion as a starting point and, assuming that plant sentience is a viable view for monastics in early Buddhism, explore in religious systems of the broader contemporary period some of the dimensions of this sentience: first, the sense faculty of "touch" and, second, the idea of "stability" as related to the gunas of tamas and sattva.

For early Buddhism one of the most important traditions for views on plants is that of the Jains who, as hylozoists, consider all matter to have life. Jams unabashedly view plants as living beings, and still vital forms of plants such as mildew, seeds, and sprouts are to be conspicuously avoided as food by renunciants. Not only are plants living beings, but they are clearly the objects of a Jam ethic of non-violence. (9) It is this view, in fact, which textual prescriptions carry to unprecedented extremes and, in putting off potential donors with the rigidity of rules about what can be eaten and what not, open the door for the more accommodating Buddhist practice of generating donor goodwill and avoiding censure through a practice of the middle way.

The Buddhism of the Pali canon is indefinite at best about whether plants are living beings. The exclusion of plants from this category is found, generally, in the use of the term pana, "breathing beings." While in Jainism this term includes plants, in early Buddhism (with the exception of such passages as Suttanipata nos. 600-611) it usually designates only animals (10) and is often the designation of objects of a non-violent ethic. (11) Moreover, while plants are included in the traditional listing of births found in the Upanisads and Jainism, viz., as "sprout-born" (udbhijja), (12) similar lists found in Buddhism do not include any possibilities for plants: e.g., "egg-born" (andaja), "womb-born" (jalabuja), "moisture-born" (samsedaja, as in beings arising from the fluids of rotting materials), and "spontaneously arisen" (opapatika, as in devas). (13) Again, the Buddhist scheme of the five gatis, or destinies after death--hell/purgatory (niraya), animal (tiracchana) birth, hungry ghost world (pittivisaya), human (manussa) birth, deity (deva) birth (14)--does not include plant rebirth as a possibility among its destinies. This theme, finally, is reflected in a later passage from the Milindapanho which distinguishes among 1) those things born of kamma (kam-maja), 2) those things born of cause (hetuja), and 3) those things born of physical change (utuja). Kammic beings are those which are cognizant; caused beings are fire and everything born of seeds; (15) and beings born of seasonal or physical change are earth, mountains, water, and wind. Thus plants, in these passages, are excluded from the kammic/samsaric cycle.

More favorable to the notion of plants as living beings is the Buddhist list of the five ways to propagate vegetable growth, viz., from roots, stems, joints, cuttings, and seeds. (16) These propagational categories, moreover, support the general sense of the term for plants or vegetation, bhutagama, whose components (bhuta, evolving being, and gama, collection) suggest objects full of life and growth in a Buddhist world that is perceived to be continually arising and decaying. It is this measure of bhutagama which Schmithausen has so carefully taken, and which may be a useful starting point for suggesting notions supportive of an early Buddhist pro-life view of plants.

PLANTS AS EKINDRIYA AND THE SENSE FACULTY OF "TOUCH"

If the goal is to discern the prospects for plant participation in the samsaric cycle, there are two helpful clues in the Pali canon. The first is the canonical designation of plants as ekindriya or one-facultied beings, and the clarification that the one sense faculty they have is that of touch (kaya). The indriyas, the "controlling powers" or sense faculties, are a common element in the psychologies of the emergent Buddhist world, and in the Pali canon there is frequent mention of the five or six indriyas either alone (17) or as the first section of longer lists. (18) The early tradition understands the process of perception to begin with the senses and to be based on ayatanas or "spheres" associated with each of the faculties. Each sphere has two aspects, an inner or subjective one (ajjhattika) and an outer or objective one (bahira). The interior aspect designates the organ itself, i.e., eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body, and the exterior aspect designates the objects, i.e., the visible, the audible, the olfactory, the gustatory, and the tactile, with which the organ comes in contact. When there is contact (phassa) between an organ and an object, there is sensing and knowing. (19) For example, in the case of touch, the body (kaya) comes in contact with a tangible (photthabba), and there is touching (phusitva) as well as the sensory knowledge that is brought about by touching, or the consciousness gained by means of touch (kayavinnana). Moreover, because through touch the tangible is known, that which is to be perceived by touch, photthabba, is known as the kayavinneyya. (20)

Because the senses are the faculties through which sensory data is initially received, they belong to the first khandha or "aggregate" of the "selfing" process known as rupa or form. Without form there would be no reception of data for the more complex processes of intellection to work on, for it is the collection of these five aggregates--rupa ("material form"), vedana ("sensation"), sanna ("perception"), sankhara ("concrete mental syntheses"), and vinnana ("consciousness")--which give rise to the "self" that is perceived and experienced as the individual. Moreover, it is those more complex dynamics of the experienced "self" known as sankhara and as vinnana which contribute to the connecting of body with body in the Buddhist understanding of rebirth. As links two and three, respectively, of the twelve links of dependent origination (paticcasamuppada), concrete mental syntheses and consciousness pass into the new body shaped by the attribute of kamma. Thus, as one billiard ball passes on...