Somewhere in COLDNESS lies Nibbāna : lexical manifestations of COLDNESS

Abstract

This paper starts with an investigation of three coldness-related tactile words, viz. 寒 han2 ‘cold’, 冷 leng3 ‘cold’ and 涼 liang2 ‘cool’, in their synaesthetic and metaphorical uses in Modern Chinese. It is found that 冷 leng3 ‘cold’ is most versatile whereas 涼 liang2 ‘cool’ is most inert with regard to their synaesthetic and metaphorical mappings, with 寒 han2 ‘cold’ standing in the middle. Moreover, 寒 han2 ‘cold’ tends to be object-oriented, while 涼liang2 ‘cool’ is likely to be subject-oriented, with 冷 leng3 ‘cold’ allowing both subject- and object-oriented readings. We further conduct a study on the uses of these three tactile words in Buddhist texts of Āgamas, finding that 涼 liang2 ‘cool’ was consistently employed to refer the nibbānic status. Apart from it, two counts of 冷leng3 ‘cold’ exhibit the nibbānic meaning. However, 寒 han2 ‘cold’ is never attested in this philosophical meaning. It is interesting to note that a kind of tactile feeling is associated with nibbāna, even though nibbānic experience is supposed to transcend sensory experience. This finding, together with some other findings with regard to the relation between sensory expressions and nibbāna, can shed light on the linguistc expressions of the inexpressible nibbāna.