7. Contexts of Language and Meaning in the Five Nikāyas

There are totally four major issues concerning to the theory of language to be emerged in the Five Nikāyas.

The first issue is a requirement of language comprehension and language production in the first factor of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right View (sammādiṭṭhi).

The Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 43.13 points out the two necessary conditions to arrive right view; that is,

1. ‘voice of another’ (paratoghosa), and
2. ‘wise attention’ (yonisomanasikāra).

These two conditions require the process of language comprehension.

The Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 43.14 announces that apart from two conditions above, right view is assisted by other five factors:

1. virtue,
2. learning,
3. discussion,
4. serenity, and
5. insight.

Among these five, the middle two factors; that is, learning and discussion, require both the process of language comprehension and process of language production while the last two are the cultivation of mind.

The second issue is found in Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 44.13-5 at which it points out three kinds of formation, those are:

1. body formation,
2. verbal formation, and
3. mental formation.

The verbal formation is defined as “applied thought and sustained thought” whereas mental formation is as “perception and feeling.”

The third issue is the language behaviour which comprises of four emergent topics:

(i) cultivating right speech and abandoning wrong speech; this point is showed in Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 27.13, 41.9, 13, 47.14, 51.14, 54.4-8; 141.26;

(ii) the attitude to other’s abuse and honour as exposed in Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 21.6; 22.39;

(iii) training and maintaining loving-kindness in verbal acts as showed in Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 21.11; 48.6; and

(iv) kinds of speech that one should and should not utter as described in Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 58.1-8; 139.3-12.

The fourth issue is the silent language of the Buddha which is showed in the Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta number 63; 72. This issue opened the door for the establishment of the Mādhyamika dialectic, a great system of Buddhist philosophy.

The central idea of the Five Nikāyas in general the Majjhima Nikāya in particular is the cultivation and development of mind. The subject of mind, therefore, appears in all discourses of the Collections.