Abstract
While metaphors for the human mind have been intensively discussed across multiple disciplines, there remains a gap on how Buddhism deals with the mind metaphorically. This study explores how Mahāyāna Buddhist discourse resorts to embodied and discursive metaphors in describing and explaining the mind. Buddhist texts analyzed are the Treatise on the Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna and its two commentaries by Wŏnhyo. The Awakening of Faith discourse abounds in metaphors for the sentient being’s mind in two aspects: the ordinary phenomenal mind and the transcendental essential mind. The focus of this study is on the relationship between the seemingly opposing two minds, and the ways in which these two opposites are unified metaphorically. To do so, I first examine how the essential mind, which is said to transcend ordinary experience and verbal expression, is made speakable through primary metaphors and NON-CONTAINER (unboundedness) image schema, and how the phenomenal mind is metaphorically understood according to the covarying scalar properties in primary metaphors. With respect to the argument for harmonizing the two minds, in which introducing more apt analogical metaphors is important, two representative discursive metaphors (a mirror metaphor and an ocean metaphor) are compared and discussed.
Highlights
There has been a considerable amount of academic attention paid to the metaphoric nature of how we talk about the human mind, which is invisible and elusive
Where the metaphor of the clear and bright mirror is apt for conceptualizing the essential mind, which is pure and enlightened, the metaphor of the stained mirror is ill-suited to explaining the non-dualistic relationship between the essential mind and the phenomenal mind
The transcendental supramundane mind, this study focused on exploring the relationship between the two minds articulated through metaphoric language
Summary
There has been a considerable amount of academic attention paid to the metaphoric nature of how we talk about the human mind, which is invisible and elusive. The metaphorical conceptualization of the mind and its mental processes in bodily and physical terms has been one of the main interests within the field of cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). A broad range of metaphors conceptualizing human mental processes in terms of their bodily processes was called the MIND IS BODY1 metaphor by Sweetser (Sweetser 1990; see Dancygier and Sweetser 2014). In contrast to prior work exploring conceptual metaphors in a particular Buddhist sutra or contemporary dharma talk texts, this study is concerned with a core Buddhist topic that is addressed in a specific Buddhist discourse by resorting to metaphor: the enlightened true mind or the Buddha-nature..
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