Thanks for this post, it being another in the tread of perception & the Khandras (which is of special interest to me). I particularly the rigorous text-based philology here. These are complicated issues without being made even more confusing by poor translation.
The challenge however rests the same : to look within one's own personal experience & see if it is true, or indeed simply to locate more or less where this might be is occurring in one's own life.
Every few of us particularly like to locate within ourselves " an experience born of a reaction from ignorance."
Re: self-identification with perception. OK… perception is a compound of sense object + sense faculty + sense cognition. Just trying to think this through & apply it to what I find to be true in western, modern theories of perception plus the little bit of working knowledge I have found to be workable…. What is this 'sense cognition'? Isn't it that our understanding of sensory input is processed by various filters, rather like algorithms which manipulate data & then apply it to a function or purpose, an aim. This 'sense cognition' is culturally relative to the type of input in it's scripting. Most of this happens unconsciously & one only becomes aware of this processing when one slows down or has a shock. Also, personal experiences affects the scripting (as psychotherapists will tell you, childhood experience are formative in shaping our prejudices, our character).
However raw data coming in from a sensory organ without any filters or scripting from a 'sense cognition' is rare . The most famous example is that of a blind man who gains his sight for the first time but is incapable to understand what the sensations mean; it's all just a jumble of colours & flashes of light, etc. However the degree or amount of filters applied is flexible. With practice, I can work my eyes close to this abstract perception of forms etc, without meaning. Dipping in & out of this mode is normal working knowledge for most painters who work from direct observation.
At what point can one say sense cognition stops & self appears? When self-identification happens. In its grosser , least subtle form, the big ME writ-large. This is mine. This me. These temples & shrines & dogma & books & statues & ceremony shore up the ME who is (a buddhist or whatever is your thing). Taste (in meaning of personal preferences) is very dependent on the person. I.E. it is differs from person to person. Just like opinions. I sometimes say to myself when I walk around art galleries etc, 'I am not my taste. This taste is not me.' In simple western parlance, we say more objective, less subjective (though this doesn't take into account object/subject relations i.e. you cannot see something without NOT having a seer).
I have always had the aspiration that the perception of the not-me, the not-self is possible. In quieter, more mindful moments, my eyesight becomes less familiar, more about seeing, less about recognition. Less knowing. Not knowing isn't the same as ignorance but rather more about a suspension of some of the filters scripted into the 'sense cognition.'
even google thinks my comment is long -winded ;-) it being over the limit of characters
however... here is the rest of it
I paste Stephen Bachelor on unknowing & perception. I concur with it :
'As mindful awareness becomes stiller and clearer, experience becomes not only vivid but simultaneously more baffling. The more deeply we know something in this way, the more deeply we don't know it. As we listen to the ray or look at a chair, these familiar things become not only more apparent but also more puzzling. As we sit aware the breath, it is on the one hand ordinary and obvious, but on the other a mystery that we breathe at all. Attending to this dimension of experience where descriptions and explanations fail challenges assumptions about how we know. Experience cannot be accounted for by simply confining it to a conceptual category. Its ultimate ambiguity is that is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. No matter how well we may know something, to witness its intrinsic freedom impels the humble admission : "I don't really know it." ' Stephen Bachelor - Buddhism without Beliefs.
Please, what is pali & sanskrit for 'sense cognition' , 'sense object' & 'sense faculty' ?
I suppose I can hardly complain about other people being long winded!
The short version is that what we think of as experience is a complex representation that is composed partly from sense impressions and partly from our side. From this bases we go on to add ideas like "in here" or "out there". It all relies on notions of self-hood derived from the raw sensory data. But keep in mind that if it wasn't helpful to think this way natural selection would not have favoured the development and sustained it in our species.
The object, faculty, cognition distinction is made in a number of different ways not all of which provide us with collective nouns. So the 12 āyatanas are "form and the eye, sound and the ear, smells and the nose etc." 6 senses and 6 classes of object. Similarly with the 18 dhātus which use triads like "form, the eye, and eye cognition." Though the latter is always viññāṇa i.e. cakkhu-viññāṇa, sota-viññāṇa etc". I take 'the eye, the ear' etc to be metonyms for the whole sensory faculty, but I'm not sure that ancient Indians could have made such a distinction.
Some texts distinguish external (bāhira-āyatana) and internal (ajjhātika-āyatana)- meaning sense objects outside us, and sense faculties inside. More generally we could say that faculty is 'indriya'. However as far as I know there is no collective term for sense objects - and this is quite telling.
Not sure about Sanskrit, but the PED often leads to Sanskrit forms if you check there.
I do not think we look to see if experience is true. Experience is what it is, no more or less. We look to see what it is like, and to take responsibility for our side of it.
I try to avoid the words subjective and objective these days as I think they confuse things. In a sense there is no subject and no object distinct from each other. Experience always arises from the interaction of the two without us ever having access to either alone. Experience is always both objective and subjective.
And yes, I more or less agree with Bachelor too. Paying attention to experience is only another mode of experience. The first-person perspective is another type of experience. It arises and passes away in dependence on conditions being present.
We can never get behind experience to know the pure subject or the pure object, though we can, at least temporarily, suspend our sense of being a self in some types of experience such as so-called oceanic boundary loss. This experience can be induced by meditation, psychoactive drugs, epileptic seizure, transcranial magnetic stimulation, direct stimulation of the brain by electrodes, and by brain injury such as a stroke amongst other methods. Meditation being the most wholesome I think.
Regards Jayarava
Friday, December 09, 2011
Sophie Kuhn, Switzerland said...
Dear Jayarava Thanissaro's translation of 'avijjāsamphassaja' with 'born of contact with ignorance' seems to me also quite valid as not all buddhist traditions regard ignorance as the default situation of a sentient being. I'm in no way a specialist in buddhism or attached to any tradition. But reading widely in buddhist literature, blogs (especially yours - a great 'thank you' is overdue!) etc. has helped me a lot in life. Grateful regards Sophie
Thanks for writing in and I'm so glad you think this blog makes a difference. What more could I ask?
I don't think any Buddhist tradition regards ignorance as the default situation. But I'm not sure how this affects the translation of avijjāsamphassaja. Could you say more?
Regards Jayarava
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Sophie Kuhn said...
As I said, I'm no specialist in buddhist matters. I was thinking here of the Tathagatagarbha discussion of Mahayana and I was under the impression that Theravada (based on the Pali Canon) was somehow against the idea of Buddha-Nature. I don't completely understand you when you say in your post:- But what is "contact with ignorance"? In the Buddhist model of mental functioning it can only be contact while being ignorant surely? But you say in your nice answer to my comment:- I don't think any Buddhist tradition regards ignorance as the default situation. I think I have a mix-up here. I shouldn't have used the word 'default' perhaps. In very lay-woman terms: originally the sentient being is pure and then contacts ignorance. Ignorance is around everywhere in the form of prejudices. (Memes?!) These are taken up avidly by the sentient being (perhaps because it is ignorant... there seem to be two meanings of ignorance...) and together with the senses the scene is set for any form of sankhara. That is why I find Thanissaro's translation very plausible. But the problem is probably that I haven't understood ignorance properly. Do you have a post on ignorance? Hoping for one; Sophie
Well let's think about what ignorance is. Ignorance is not a thing, it is the absence of knowledge. This is the etymology in-gnosis 'lacking knowledge'.
A person can be ignorant - that is they can lack knowledge. But what can it mean to say that a person is "in contact with ignorance"? How can there be contact with an absence?
Ignorance is not the presence of prejudices. Prejudices are what replace knowledge when we do not have it. Prejudice is a result of being ignorant, it is not equivalent to ignorance. Ignorance has no content.
I think you are confusing the issue by talking about ignorance as a thing, or as having a definite content.
Just had a peek at your latest and the topic coincided with something on conditionality I was writing today:
'In the run up to his enlightenment the Buddha didn’t ask himself what caused craving, but only asked: ‘What now being present, is craving also present? What conditions craving?’ In other words what is in my experience along with craving? What specific condition(s) (paccaya) are present? The word paccaya refers to the ground upon which other conditions arise. We can see it in the phrase vedana-paccaya-tanha, which means ‘conditioned by feeling (Pali: vedana,) craving (Pali: tanha,)’ or ‘on the ground of feeling being present, craving is present.’
Notice that craving does not have to be present when feeling is present (the Buddha experienced feeling without craving - in the bliss of release.) This fact suggests that when feeling is present other specific conditions are also present that either exacerbate craving or mitigate against it, such as the conditions of wisdom and ignorance.
Therefore when the specific conditions of feeling and ignorance are both present, craving is present;
and when the specific conditions of feeling and wisdom are both present, craving is absent.
This argument suggests that every mental outcome has a multiplicity of specific conditions.
I'm sure already aware of the translation for saṅkhāra that Rhys Davids jocularly suggested: he said that, given the Latin cognates of the components, the best English rendition of saṅkhāra would be "confection". :D
I actually like this suggestion because, just like confectionery, saṅkhāras taste delicious but if you eat a steady diet of them you'll end up suffering!
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Anonymous said...
Dear Jayarava,
I can only agree. You translated "while being ignorant" for avijjāsamphassajena which makes absolute sense. In fact this is how this phrase occurs to me: "when you feel something [feelings are born from sense contact, phassa] due to (sense impression) under the influence of avijja (i.e. not knowing what is actually happening - not knowing and seeing this process) to someone who is touched by feeling thus, obviously thirst is going to arise (and that thirst can come in all three flavors as mentioned by the Buddha) - born from that (tatojo) is this (so) saṅkhāro (activity, construct, etc.)
One remark though: besides the possiblity of polysemy which you mention with "Note the statement that saṅkhārā are a saṅkhāra does not seem to bother the author of the text" - have you thought of the other (to me more reasonable) explanation - that we are describing in fact a circular or almost fractal kind of activity (!). While rūpa+vedanā+saññā+sankhāra = nāma+rūpa and are objects to viññāna, what if sankhāra stands for a chain in itself:
Here, if you fill in the blanks: Yaṃ sañjānāti = saññā Yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti. Yaṃ papañceti = sankhāra (!) But, that in itself, would be māna-samphassa ;-)
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
[Image]This word saṅkhāra is one of the most puzzling terms in our Buddhist lexicon. It is used a number of different ways, meaning quite different things in different contexts. There is no reason why a word should not have different senses - a phenomenon known technically as polysemy 'many meanings'. Indeed polysemy is the rule with words in most languages. Take a word like gravity. It has a sense in Physics as one of the fundamental forces. As an adjective in ordinary speech it might signify that someone, or something is important or wise. Incidentally the Sanskrit word guru is cognate and means 'weighty'. Context usually resolves any contradictions so if I say that "Newton spoke with gravity about gravity", you'll probably be able to see the two distinct ways I'm using the word gravity. However within a technical jargon it is much less useful to have important words being polysemic, in fact it's downright confusing. And yet so many of our important Buddhists jargon terms are polysemic: dharma is particularly troublesome, and whole books have been written on this one word.
I want to highlight a particular use of this word saṅkhāra in a Pāli text, but let's see if I can encapsulate the main senses of the word to begin with. The Pāli saṅkhāra is equivalent to the Sanskrit saṃskāra - the skā conjunct being reduced to khā in Pāli. The root of the word is √kṛ 'do, make' and here the prefix saṃ is equivalent to the Latin com- and means 'with, together; or complete'. The basic sense here is 'to construct or make up', and a close English cousin is confect, where -fect is from the Latin facere 'to make, do'. The word has a technical meaning in Vedic, but we'll leave that aside for our present purposes.
Saṅkhāra occurs in Pāli as the second of 12 nidānas, and the 4th of 5 khandhas. In the first instance it seems to mean volitional activity (and is defined in terms of cetanā). In the second it suggests a wider definition of all mental activity or indeed everything constructed from conditions - e.g. in the phrase sabbe saṅkhārā anicca. It is used in the sense of 'function' in reference to the body, speech and mind. So we might say that it has the active sense of "putting together" and the passive sense of "having been put together". [1]
In the text I am exploring today - The Pālileyya Sutta (SN 22.81; S iii.94f) it seems to have the sense of 'construct'. I'm particularly interested in this sense because it appears to confirm an intuition I've had about this term for some time (which should alert readers to the problem of confirmation bias!). In the Pālileyya Sutta we find this equation - I have simplified the text a little: rūpaṃ attato samanupassati... yā samanupassanā saṅkhāro so. he perceives form as his self, that perception is a construct.Why is the perception (samanupassanā) a construct? Because in order to have a perception sense object and sense faculty must come together in the presence of sense cognition - perceptions are constructed (saṅkhāta) from these specific building blocks. The text asks the same question and answers (again simplifying a little:) avijjāsamphassajena vedayitena phuṭṭhassa [tassa] uppannā taṇhā, tatojo so saṅkhāro thirst has arisen for the one affected by an experience born of a reaction from ignorance.Bear with me here as this sentence is not easy to translate. Firstly uppannā taṇhā is easy 'desire has arisen'. Here tassa 'for him' is standing for assutavato putthujjanassa 'for the unlearned ordinary person' and phuṭṭhassa tassa 'for the one who has been affected (phuṭṭha)'. Then vedayitena 'by the experience [which is] 'avijjāsamphassaja'. This last compound needs unravelling: it is made up of three parts: avijjā 'ignorance' + samphassa 'contact, reaction' + ja 'born'. So the whole thing is probably: 'born of contact with ignorance' or perhaps 'born of a reaction from ignorance'. I suggest the latter makes more sense. Bhikkhu Bodhi has come up with a particularly torturous translation here: "When [he] is contacted by a feeling born of ignorance-contact, craving arises." It's not clear what "ignorance-contact" is. [2] Thanissaro does better on Access to Insight with "To [him] touched by the feeling born of contact with ignorance, craving arises." But what is "contact with ignorance"? In the Buddhist model of mental functioning it can only be contact while being ignorant surely? Hence my translation: "thirst has arisen for the one affected by an experience born of a reaction from ignorance." Thirst for existence perhaps?
The sutta notes that this construct is impermanent (anicca), constructed (saṅkhāta) and arisen in dependence on conditions (paṭiccasamuppanna). Similar constructs include rūpavantaṃ attānaṃ samanupassati - perceiving myself as endowed with form attani rūpaṃ samanupassati - regarding form as within myself rūpasmiṃ attānaṃ samanupassati- seeing myself amongst formsAll of these are conditioned and impermanent constructs. The whole formula is repeated with other four khandhas vedanā, saññā, saṅkhārā and viññāṇa. Note the statement that saṅkhārā are a saṅkhāra does not seem to bother the author of the text, probably because he is consciously using the word in two different senses. In the plural it is defined in some places as the cetanā or 'intention' associated with the six senses (e.g. S iii.60).
So we may say that these perceptions of a being a self are only what we project onto experience., they are a construct, and not a property of experience. By the way, I see no connection here with Upaniṣadic thought on the nature of the ātman. There's no reason to think that this formulation of the teaching was in reaction to Brahmanical metaphysics.
~~oOo~~
Notes Nyanatiloka in his Buddhist Dictionary insists that the interpretation of saṅkhāra as 'subconscious tendencies' (which is common in the Triratna Movement) is incorrect and "entirely inapplicable to the connotations of the term in Pali Buddhism" (p.193). Bodhi. (2000) The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom. P.922.
10 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formDear Jayarava
Thanks for this post, it being another in the tread of perception & the Khandras (which is of special interest to me). I particularly the rigorous text-based philology here. These are complicated issues without being made even more confusing by poor translation.
The challenge however rests the same : to look within one's own personal experience & see if it is true, or indeed simply to locate more or less where this might be is occurring in one's own life.
Every few of us particularly like to locate within ourselves " an experience born of a reaction from ignorance."
Re: self-identification with perception. OK… perception is a compound of sense object + sense faculty + sense cognition. Just trying to think this through & apply it to what I find to be true in western, modern theories of perception plus the little bit of working knowledge I have found to be workable…. What is this 'sense cognition'? Isn't it that our understanding of sensory input is processed by various filters, rather like algorithms which manipulate data & then apply it to a function or purpose, an aim. This 'sense cognition' is culturally relative to the type of input in it's scripting. Most of this happens unconsciously & one only becomes aware of this processing when one slows down or has a shock. Also, personal experiences affects the scripting (as psychotherapists will tell you, childhood experience are formative in shaping our prejudices, our character).
However raw data coming in from a sensory organ without any filters or scripting from a 'sense cognition' is rare . The most famous example is that of a blind man who gains his sight for the first time but is incapable to understand what the sensations mean; it's all just a jumble of colours & flashes of light, etc. However the degree or amount of filters applied is flexible. With practice, I can work my eyes close to this abstract perception of forms etc, without meaning. Dipping in & out of this mode is normal working knowledge for most painters who work from direct observation.
At what point can one say sense cognition stops & self appears? When self-identification happens. In its grosser , least subtle form, the big ME writ-large. This is mine. This me. These temples & shrines & dogma & books & statues & ceremony shore up the ME who is (a buddhist or whatever is your thing). Taste (in meaning of personal preferences) is very dependent on the person. I.E. it is differs from person to person. Just like opinions. I sometimes say to myself when I walk around art galleries etc, 'I am not my taste. This taste is not me.' In simple western parlance, we say more objective, less subjective (though this doesn't take into account object/subject relations i.e. you cannot see something without NOT having a seer).
I have always had the aspiration that the perception of the not-me, the not-self is possible. In quieter, more mindful moments, my eyesight becomes less familiar, more about seeing, less about recognition. Less knowing. Not knowing isn't the same as ignorance but rather more about a suspension of some of the filters scripted into the 'sense cognition.'
Friday, December 09, 2011
even google thinks my comment is long -winded ;-) it being over the limit of characters
however... here is the rest of it
I paste Stephen Bachelor on unknowing & perception. I concur with it :
'As mindful awareness becomes stiller and clearer, experience becomes not only vivid but simultaneously more baffling. The more deeply we know something in this way, the more deeply we don't know it. As we listen to the ray or look at a chair, these familiar things become not only more apparent but also more puzzling. As we sit aware the breath, it is on the one hand ordinary and obvious, but on the other a mystery that we breathe at all. Attending to this dimension of experience where descriptions and explanations fail challenges assumptions about how we know. Experience cannot be accounted for by simply confining it to a conceptual category. Its ultimate ambiguity is that is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. No matter how well we may know something, to witness its intrinsic freedom impels the humble admission : "I don't really know it." ' Stephen Bachelor - Buddhism without Beliefs.
Please, what is pali & sanskrit for 'sense cognition' , 'sense object' & 'sense faculty' ?
Friday, December 09, 2011
Hi Adam
I suppose I can hardly complain about other people being long winded!
The short version is that what we think of as experience is a complex representation that is composed partly from sense impressions and partly from our side. From this bases we go on to add ideas like "in here" or "out there". It all relies on notions of self-hood derived from the raw sensory data. But keep in mind that if it wasn't helpful to think this way natural selection would not have favoured the development and sustained it in our species.
The object, faculty, cognition distinction is made in a number of different ways not all of which provide us with collective nouns. So the 12 āyatanas are "form and the eye, sound and the ear, smells and the nose etc." 6 senses and 6 classes of object. Similarly with the 18 dhātus which use triads like "form, the eye, and eye cognition." Though the latter is always viññāṇa i.e. cakkhu-viññāṇa, sota-viññāṇa etc". I take 'the eye, the ear' etc to be metonyms for the whole sensory faculty, but I'm not sure that ancient Indians could have made such a distinction.
Some texts distinguish external (bāhira-āyatana) and internal (ajjhātika-āyatana)- meaning sense objects outside us, and sense faculties inside. More generally we could say that faculty is 'indriya'. However as far as I know there is no collective term for sense objects - and this is quite telling.
Not sure about Sanskrit, but the PED often leads to Sanskrit forms if you check there.
I do not think we look to see if experience is true. Experience is what it is, no more or less. We look to see what it is like, and to take responsibility for our side of it.
I try to avoid the words subjective and objective these days as I think they confuse things. In a sense there is no subject and no object distinct from each other. Experience always arises from the interaction of the two without us ever having access to either alone. Experience is always both objective and subjective.
And yes, I more or less agree with Bachelor too. Paying attention to experience is only another mode of experience. The first-person perspective is another type of experience. It arises and passes away in dependence on conditions being present.
We can never get behind experience to know the pure subject or the pure object, though we can, at least temporarily, suspend our sense of being a self in some types of experience such as so-called oceanic boundary loss. This experience can be induced by meditation, psychoactive drugs, epileptic seizure, transcranial magnetic stimulation, direct stimulation of the brain by electrodes, and by brain injury such as a stroke amongst other methods. Meditation being the most wholesome I think.
Regards
Jayarava
Friday, December 09, 2011
Dear Jayarava
Thanissaro's translation of 'avijjāsamphassaja' with 'born of contact with ignorance' seems to me also quite valid as not all buddhist traditions regard ignorance as the default situation of a sentient being.
I'm in no way a specialist in buddhism or attached to any tradition. But reading widely in buddhist literature, blogs (especially yours - a great 'thank you' is overdue!) etc. has helped me a lot in life.
Grateful regards
Sophie
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Dear Sophie
Thanks for writing in and I'm so glad you think this blog makes a difference. What more could I ask?
I don't think any Buddhist tradition regards ignorance as the default situation. But I'm not sure how this affects the translation of avijjāsamphassaja. Could you say more?
Regards
Jayarava
Sunday, December 11, 2011
As I said, I'm no specialist in buddhist matters. I was thinking here of the Tathagatagarbha discussion of Mahayana and I was under the impression that Theravada (based on the Pali Canon) was somehow against the idea of Buddha-Nature.
I don't completely understand you when you say in your post:-
But what is "contact with ignorance"? In the Buddhist model of mental functioning it can only be contact while being ignorant surely?
But you say in your nice answer to my comment:-
I don't think any Buddhist tradition regards ignorance as the default situation.
I think I have a mix-up here. I shouldn't have used the word 'default' perhaps. In very lay-woman terms: originally the sentient being is pure and then contacts ignorance. Ignorance is around everywhere in the form of prejudices. (Memes?!) These are taken up avidly by the sentient being (perhaps because it is ignorant... there seem to be two meanings of ignorance...) and together with the senses the scene is set for any form of sankhara. That is why I find Thanissaro's translation very plausible. But the problem is probably that I haven't understood ignorance properly. Do you have a post on ignorance?
Hoping for one; Sophie
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Hi Sophie
Well let's think about what ignorance is. Ignorance is not a thing, it is the absence of knowledge. This is the etymology in-gnosis 'lacking knowledge'.
A person can be ignorant - that is they can lack knowledge. But what can it mean to say that a person is "in contact with ignorance"? How can there be contact with an absence?
Ignorance is not the presence of prejudices. Prejudices are what replace knowledge when we do not have it. Prejudice is a result of being ignorant, it is not equivalent to ignorance. Ignorance has no content.
I think you are confusing the issue by talking about ignorance as a thing, or as having a definite content.
I hope that helps to clarify the issue.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Hi Jayarava,
Just had a peek at your latest and the topic coincided with something on conditionality I was writing today:
'In the run up to his enlightenment the Buddha didn’t ask himself what caused craving, but only asked: ‘What now being present, is craving also present? What conditions craving?’ In other words what is in my experience along with craving? What specific condition(s) (paccaya) are present? The word paccaya refers to the ground upon which other conditions arise. We can see it in the phrase vedana-paccaya-tanha, which means ‘conditioned by feeling (Pali: vedana,) craving (Pali: tanha,)’ or ‘on the ground of feeling being present, craving is present.’
Notice that craving does not have to be present when feeling is present (the Buddha experienced feeling without craving - in the bliss of release.) This fact suggests that when feeling is present other specific conditions are also present that either exacerbate craving or mitigate against it, such as the conditions of wisdom and ignorance.
Therefore when the specific conditions of feeling and ignorance are both present, craving is present;
and when the specific conditions of feeling and wisdom are both present, craving is absent.
This argument suggests that every mental outcome has a multiplicity of specific conditions.
Lots of Love
Mahabodhi
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
I'm sure already aware of the translation for saṅkhāra that Rhys Davids jocularly suggested: he said that, given the Latin cognates of the components, the best English rendition of saṅkhāra would be "confection". :D
I actually like this suggestion because, just like confectionery, saṅkhāras taste delicious but if you eat a steady diet of them you'll end up suffering!
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Dear Jayarava,
I can only agree. You translated "while being ignorant" for
avijjāsamphassajena which makes absolute sense. In fact this is how this phrase occurs to me: "when you feel something [feelings are born from sense contact, phassa] due to (sense impression) under the influence of avijja (i.e. not knowing what is actually happening - not knowing and seeing this process) to someone who is touched by feeling thus, obviously thirst is going to arise (and that thirst can come in all three flavors as mentioned by the Buddha) - born from that (tatojo) is this (so) saṅkhāro (activity, construct, etc.)
One remark though: besides the possiblity of polysemy which you mention with "Note the statement that saṅkhārā are a saṅkhāra does not seem to bother the author of the text" - have you thought of the other (to me more reasonable) explanation - that we are describing in fact a circular or almost fractal kind of activity (!). While rūpa+vedanā+saññā+sankhāra = nāma+rūpa and are objects to viññāna, what if sankhāra stands for a chain in itself:
Cakkhuñcāvuso paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati cakkhuviññāṇaṃ. Tiṇṇaṃ saṅgati phasso. Phassapaccayā vedanā. Yaṃ vedeti, taṃ sañjānāti. Yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vitakketi. Yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti. Yaṃ papañceti tato nidānaṃ purisaṃ papañcasaññāsaṅkhā samudācaranti atītānāgatapaccuppannesu cakkhuviññeyyesu rūpesu." MN 18.
Here, if you fill in the blanks:
Yaṃ sañjānāti = saññā
Yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti. Yaṃ papañceti = sankhāra (!)
But, that in itself, would be māna-samphassa ;-)
Tuesday, December 27, 2011