🔗📝 collection of notes for kāya-sakkhi = 'eyewitness', kāyena phusitvā = 'eyewitness' (lit. touched with the 'body')

Internal notes

4👑☸ → EBpedia📚 → kāya-sakkhī:

kāya-sakkhī, kāyena phusitvā = eyewitness, body witness

✅ kāya-sakkhī = eyewitness, body witness. 'Body' here can be both literal and figurative, sometimes only figurative.
✅ kāyena phusitvā = eyewitness, literally contacted with the 'body'. 'Body' here can be both literal and figurative, sometimes only figurative.
⛔ 4 jhānas are part of 8 vimokkhas, part of 8 abhi-bh-āyatanas, part of 9 meditative attainments.
They are part of those groups, not equivalent to them.
So you can not say because formless attainments are also part of 8 vimokkhas,
and formless has a figurative mind only 'body',
therefore 4 jhānas must have a formless mind only 'kāya'.
That's fallacious. It would be like saying, Australia was a British penal colony where they sent their criminals,
and since John Doe is Australian, therefore John Doe is a criminal.

External notes

Related articles

B. Sujato third jhāna, "The body as metaphor", more like out of context, out of his body, out of his mind

eye-witness at 9 summer parties complex: How some body becomes a mind only 'body'

Sujato and his famous friends get into all the V.I.P. rooms in the hottest spots in town, anywhere in the world

DN 2: I perform a miracle, B. Sujato claims Buddha had an impoverished language and was forced to redefine 'body' as 'mind'

kāya-sakkhī (body witness)

 I found a great English term to translate kāya-sakkhi and kāyena phusitvā.

This English word has been around since 1539, and is used  the same way as kāya-sakkhi and kāyena phusitvā. 

Eyewitness

(Definitions from Oxford Languages)

noun: eyewitness; plural noun: eyewitnesses; noun: eye-witness; plural noun: eye-witnesses

   a person who has personally seen something happen and so can give a first-hand description of it.

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eyewitness

 First Known Use of 'eyewitness' 1539, in the meaning defined below

 one who sees an occurrence or an object especially : one who gives a report on what he or she has seen

Examples of eyewitness in a Sentence

* The police are hoping to locate an eyewitness to the shooting. 

* He was able to give an eyewitness account of the shooting.

* He had an 'eyewitness' meditation experience of seeing the emptiness of the five aggregates.

(as oppposed to) He heard about someone's meditation but has no personal eyewitness experience.

(as opposed to) He studied the theory of how meditation is used to see five aggregates, but has very limited eyewitness experience and personal realization of it.

* He personally experienced the physical pleasure in this flesh and blood anatomical body in third jhāna, as well as having eyewitness experience of the formless meditations. 

* I did not have an 'eyewitness' account of the moment Sujato first transcribed his third jhāna translation, but his published translation can be 'seen' by all, he admits to authorship, and that is sufficient evidence to convict him. 

We are not dummies. We can tell the difference between literal and figurative in this case.

Some translators have literally rendered   kāya-sakkhi and kāyena phusitvā.as "body witness" and "touched with the body" even in contexts where the physical body is not involved, such as formless meditations. 

Some translators, such as Sujato, render  kāya-sakkhi and kāyena phusitvā figuratively as "direct experience" and "personally experience." Nothing wrong with that on the surface, it's a legitimate choice, especially if something is lost in cultural translation and the figurative meaning is not clear.

However, just as 'eyewitness' doesn't require using a physical eye in some contexts but the meaning is still clear, there is no reason for translators to overtranslate kāya sakkhi and explain the figurative meaning to us. We already know how to do that.

There's also abundant precedence with right view, knowing and seeing, 'dhamma eye' arising, etc., where we know how to contextually recognize the difference between literal and figurative. I.e. the physical body and physical eye were not necessary for those phrases. 

So the 'body' and 'eye' are clearly cases where we can easily discern the difference between literal and figurative according to context. 

Sujato is grooming you for his erroneous translation of third jhāna

Perhaps Sujato's translation of kāya figuratively as "direct personal experience" was originally an innocent decision. But in the critically important third jhāna formula that appears over 100 times in the suttas,  he uses the premise that readers can't be trusted to discern between literal and figurative use of the 'body', to justify removing the literal physical body and physical pleasure out of third jhāna, and replace it with a non-literal body that is 'mind only happiness'.

He uses fallacious reasoning (4 jhānas are not part of the stages of 8 vimokkhas and 8 abhiayatana where formless attainments are active). Full details audited here:

https://notesonthedhamma.blogspot.com/2021/04/b-sujato-third-jhana-body-as-metaphor.html

One more thing to consider. If Sujato's reasoning for eliminating the body in third jhāna were legitimate, don't you think Buddhaghosa and the team of scholar monks he was an editor in chief of, would have thought of that first, and used that same fallacious argument in their elimination of the 3rd jhāna body in Visuddhimagga? They wouldn't have had to resort to their more complicated sequence of redefining several important terms in meditation to accomplish the same maneuver that Sujato does so concisely.

Digital Pāḷi Dictionary

kāyasakkhi

adj. body-witness, who experienced formless states [under construction]

kāyasakkhī

adj. who has witnessed (the truth) with the body; who has experienced viscerally. [kāya + sakkhī]

kāyena phusitvā

idiom. having personally experienced; (comm) having touched with the mental body; lit. touched with the body

Forum discussion

https://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=42889

https://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?p=675584#p675584