One Gloss, Four Occurrences
A vocabulary exercise gives a single gloss, 'saṅkhāra = formation', and asks students to apply it to four occurrences in a short anthology. The occurrences are: (1) 'sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā'; (2) 'avijjāpaccayā saṅkhārā'; (3) 'kāyasaṅkhāraṃ abhisaṅkharoti'; (4) 'saṅkhārapaccayā viññāṇaṃ'. A student uses 'formation' in all four and produces a Hindi passage in which the Buddha appears to say that ignorance conditions 'formations' and that a person 'forms a bodily formation', which is circular. The teacher asks the student to sort the four occurrences into at least two senses, justify each from collocation and context, and then choose one Hindi gloss per occurrence. A further constraint: the student may not simply replace 'formation' with 'thing' everywhere, because occurrence (1) is a universal characteristic statement and occurrence (3) is an ethical-psychological statement.
1. Sort the four occurrences into at least two senses of saṅkhāra, justifying each from collocation and context.
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Two senses are needed, with a sub-sense in the third occurrence.
- (1) sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā: here saṅkhāra means conditioned phenomena, everything that is made by causes. The collocations sabbe ('all') and aniccā ('impermanent') signal a universal characteristic statement, so the broad sense is required.
- (2) avijjāpaccayā saṅkhārā and (4) saṅkhārapaccayā viññāṇaṃ: these are links in dependent origination. Here saṅkhāra means volitional or karmic formations - the activity conditioned by ignorance and conditioning consciousness. The paccaya frame is causal and soteriological, not a list of all existents, so the broad 'conditioned things' sense would blur the chain.
- (3) kāyasaṅkhāraṃ abhisaṅkharoti: here saṅkhāra is a specific bodily formation or bodily volitional activity, and the verb abhisaṅkharoti means 'forms, constructs, produces'. The compound kāya- restricts the sense to the bodily domain.
So: broad conditioned phenomena in (1); karmic/volitional formations in (2) and (4); bodily volitional formation in (3).
2. Why is 'formation' in all four places misleading, especially in (3)?
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A single English gloss hides the shift from a universal characteristic to a causal-psychological chain. In (1), 'formations' is acceptable as a label for conditioned phenomena, but in (2) and (4) the term names the activity that ignorance conditions and that conditions consciousness. If the same word is used without comment, the reader loses the doctrinal point that the link is volitional activity, not a generic 'thing'.
In (3) the problem becomes circular: 'a person forms a bodily formation' uses the same root in verb and object. Pali can do this because abhisaṅkharoti and saṅkhāra are morphologically related, but a literal Hindi calque reproduces the circularity instead of explaining it. The translation should distinguish the act from the result, for example by rendering the verb as 'produces' or 'generates' and the object as 'bodily volitional activity'. That preserves the ethical-psychological sense without tautology.
3. Choose one Hindi gloss per occurrence and defend the choices against the objection that 'thing' would be simpler.
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Proposed glosses:
- (1) sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā: 'all conditioned phenomena are impermanent' - a universal statement requires the broad sense.
- (2) avijjāpaccayā saṅkhārā: 'conditioned by ignorance, volitional formations' - the dependent-origination link is activity, not a generic thing.
- (3) kāyasaṅkhāraṃ abhisaṅkharoti: 'produces bodily volitional activity' - separates verb from object and avoids the circular 'forms a formation'.
- (4) saṅkhārapaccayā viññāṇaṃ: 'conditioned by volitional formations, consciousness' - same chain sense as (2).
'Thing' is simpler but wrong. In (1) it is too vague for a characteristic statement, and in (3) it destroys the ethical-psychological point by turning an activity into an object. The gloss must follow the collocation: sabbe with a characteristic, paccaya with a causal link, and kāya- with bodily activity.