English form, material object Sanskrit रूप (rūpa) Japanese 色
(rōmaji: shiki) | Pali रूप (rūpa) Chinese 色
(Pinyin: sè) Korean 색
(RR: saek) | |
Los angeles percussion quartet r pa khandha
In Hinduism and Buddhism, rūpa (Sanskrit; Pāli; Devanagari: रूप; Thai: รูป) generally refers to material objects, particularly in regard to their appearance.
Contents
R pa slimy dhamma
Definition
According to the Monier-Williams Dictionary (2006), rūpa is defined as:
Buddhism
In general, rūpa is the Buddhist concept of material form, including both the body and external matter.
More specifically, in the Pali Canon, rūpa is contextualized in three significant frameworks:
In addition, more generally, rūpa is used to describe a statue, in which it is sometimes called Buddharupa.
Rūpa-khandha
Rūpa is not matter as in the metaphysical substance of materialism. Instead it means both materiality and sensibility — signifying, for example, a tactile object both insofar as that object is made of matter and that the object can be tactically sensed. In fact rūpa is more essentially defined by its amenability to being sensed than its being matter: just like everything else it is defined in terms of its function; what it does, not what it is. As matter, rūpa is traditionally analysed in two ways: as four primary elements (Pali, mahābhūta); and, as ten or twenty-four secondary or derived elements.
Four primary elements
Existing rūpa consists in the four primary or underived (no-upādā) elements:
Derived matter
In the Abhidhamma Pitaka and later Pali literature, rūpa is further analyzed in terms of ten or twenty-three or twenty-four types of secondary or derived (upādā) matter. In the list of ten types of secondary matter, the following are identified:
If twenty-four secondary types are enumerated, then the following fifteen are added to the first nine of the above ten:
A list of 23 derived types can be found, for instance, in the Abhidhamma Pitaka's Dhammasangani (e.g., Dhs. 596), which omits the list of 24 derived types' "heart-basis."