Friday, June 08, 2007

'dzin and 'dzin pa

The next good word to learn concerning how suffering happens over and over is the verb 'dzin, to grasp or to hold. If you place the pa after this word you get 'dzin pa, grasping or holding.

This is one reason why you see so many pa (and po, ba, ma and mo) letters in Tibetan, they are used to create other words from verbs and other constructs. It's another way to figure out where the word ends, too! As in Sanskrit, there are no clear word ending indicators, like spaces in Western languages, so you need to build an instinct where words end and others start.

This is a very, very common set of words when reading Tibetan, if you know the meaning, you could even sometimes indirectly figure out what the combinational word is.

Usually grasping and holding is a negative activity, but there are positive cases, too, such as in the word ting nge 'dzin, Sanskrit samadhi, single-pointed concentration, or as you have now an intuition for this word usage, holding on to objects.

We will next go through three different kinds of 'dzin pa that are the cause of samsara, two main ones used in presentations about this topic, and one interesting one that might open up new views about reality.

No comments: