The Yamaka, here translated as The Book of Pairs, is the sixth of the seven books of the Theravādin Abhidhamma Piṭaka. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka consists of a scholastic re-working of the Buddha's teaching as recorded in the Sutta Piṭaka, or “basket of discourses”. During the first few centuries after the Buddha's death, the various lists of terms and concepts, so beloved of the early Buddhist oral tradition, were defined, discussed and re-worked into a systematic form. The books of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, or “basket of higher doctrine”, each present different ways in which this systematic doctrine was handled in the Theravādin tradition. While translations of the other six books of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka have long been available, the Yamaka has until now remained unavailable in English translation, despite the Pali text having been published over a century ago by the Pali Text Society. Hence this late appearance of a high-quality translation of such a central canonical work of Theravādin Buddhism is significant and welcome.
The foreword, by Charles Shaw, explains how he was responsible for the translation of the text of the Yamaka, while Lance Cousins translated the briefer text of the commentary and wrote a (rather short) preface. However, Cousins died suddenly in 2015, and the book is thus dedicated to his memory. The present book is the first of two or three projected volumes. The combination of text and commentary is very welcome, as the traditional Theravādin commentaries are an invaluable resource for understanding the canon, but can remain obscure in translation unless carefully coordinated with the texts upon which they are commenting.
The Yamaka consists of ten chapters, each presenting questions and answers about central topics of Buddhist doctrine. The first chapter, on “Roots” (mūla), explores the relationship between the phenomena of experience (dhamma) and their originating circumstances. But this is not early Buddhist psychology (for which one might turn to the Dhammasaṅgani, the first book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka). It is difficult, in fact, to say what it is. It is noticeable that the present translators make no particular effort to explain to the new reader the point of the questions and answers, and the intense, relentless repetitiveness of every page and paragraph. It is agreed, however, that the form of the text derives from a context of chanting, and indeed Abhidhamma texts are still regularly chanted in Burma, especially at funerals. Despite the lucidity of this new translation, the Yamaka remains very hard to read, as the repetitions entirely lack an explanatory narrative. It seems likely that the questions and answers were designed to be memorized, such that the student might internalize the implicit logic of terms and categories.
In his preface, Lance Cousins explains how in 1987 a senior Burmese monk, U Ñāṇika, gave an intensive course on the Yamaka to abhidhamma students in Manchester, evidently bringing the contents of the text alive to those students such that Cousins and Shaw eventually decided to undertake this translation. It seems a pity then that this translation does not offer any hints at how a new reader might make sense of the Yamaka. One has to look elsewhere for orientation, especially to Nyanatiloka's Guide through the Abhidhamma Piṭaka (Buddhist Publication Society, 5th ed. 2007, available online). Nyanatiloka describes the Yamaka as a “work of applied logic”, and this is a helpful orienting idea. The questions and answers hone the student's understanding of the precise meaning of Buddhist terms and their relationship to other terms and concepts of Buddhist doctrine. Another source of insight into the meaning of the Yamaka is Ledi Sayadaw's letter to Mrs Rhys Davids (whom he describes as landana-pāli-devī, “Queen of Pāli from London”), included as an Appendix to vol. 2 of the PTS text of the Yamaka, and translated in part in the Journal of the Pali Text Society, vol. VII (pp. 115–64, available online). The Sayadaw illuminates the significance of some of the otherwise abstruse distinctions that the Yamaka makes.
A representative example, which is incidentally of considerable interest to modern Western students of Buddhism, is a pair of questions with which chapter 5, “Pairs on truths” (sacca-yamaka), opens: “Is suffering, the truth of suffering?” and “Is the truth of suffering, suffering?” The answer to the first question is “Yes”. But the answer to the second is, “Apart from unpleasant bodily feeling (dukkha) and unpleasant mental feeling, the remaining truth of suffering is truth of suffering but is not unpleasant feeling; unpleasant bodily feeling and unpleasant mental feeling are both suffering/unpleasant feeling (dukkha) and truth of suffering” (p. 279). The first of these questions concerns the relationship of the term “suffering” (dukkha) to the term “truth of suffering” (dukkhasacca), which is the first of the Four Noble Truths, one of the most important early Buddhist doctrinal lists. The answer “Yes” to this question tells us that the scope of the term “suffering” is entirely contained within the scope of the term “truth of suffering”. But the terms are nevertheless not identical. The answer to the second question implies a distinction between two meanings of the term “suffering” (dukkha). The term firstly means “unpleasant feeling” (dukkhavedanā), whether bodily or mental. But the term also has a much wider reference, to the unsatisfactoriness of the human condition. This is the meaning of “suffering” in “truth of suffering”, and in this sense dukkha even includes a pleasant feeling (sukhavedanā), which is impermanent and liable to change, and is therefore unsatisfactory. Ledi Sayadaw's discussion of this point (JPTS VII, pp. 133–5) is wonderfully clear and points towards the value of the Yamaka’s applied logic. The Yamaka may be hard to access just by reading, but nevertheless Shaw and Cousins’ new translation of the text makes a very clear English translation easily accessible for students who are ready to try to understand it.
