Talk:Kasaya (clothing)

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I will write more, I just need more time! Keaze 00:24, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions if one may suggest...

• This is a sadly short stub indeed. Perhaps a bit of research into the origins of the Buddhist religious habit will assist. I'm sorry I cannot give you citations, some are gleaned from the Dharmapada, most from the Vinaya.

• 1)A king whose name may not be known 1st suggested to the Buddha that his congregation ought to wear a religious habit. There was no concept as such in those days, so it was a brilliant suggestion.

• 2)The Buddha charged Most Rev. Ananda to design a habit. Part of the habit was the Kasava (O-Kesa in Japan, Jia-Sha in China), originally intended as a cloak/makeshift tent. It had no especial significance attached to it. It was one of the three pieces of the tricivara (Buddhist habit).

• 3)Most Rev. Ananda received some inspiration from the rice paddies, in that the clerics would have to scavenge for rags. With the rice field in mind, Ananda said the cleaned rags could be trimmed into rectangles, then sewn together to make the fabric. This was then dyed (brown was the color instructed, all other colors were forbidden), then cut according to fit.

• 4)The Kasava attained a certain status only when newly converted and ordained Chinese clerics put it on over their own traditional robes. They rejected the rest of the original Buddhist habit.

• Hope this helps, O Mi To Fu and good luck here. If I can help I'll come back and plug in a few citations and some further history. By the way, the Kasava most like the original is that worn by the D'Gelugspa Tibetan Buddhists, of which H.H. 14th Dalai Lama is the leader.75.21.105.228 (talk) 15:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Kesa is the English name

I'm not sure who keeps deleting this, but the accepted English term for this item is Kesa. Please see WP:Ownership, and stop. Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 04:55, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Kesa is only the Japanese pronunciation, so I placed it with the other languages. The term is originally Indic (Sanskrit or Pali), so these terms are often preferable rather than their transliterations into other languages. Moreover, I have not seen the term kesa used widely outside the scope of Japanese Buddhism. A search on Google Books, for example, shows that kesa yields results overwhelmingly for books on Japanese Buddhism (Japanese Zen, Tendai, etc.) or Japanese art, rather than general books on Buddhism. When writing about Indian Buddhism or any tradition other than Japanese Buddhism, actual Buddhologists do not seem to use kesa when describing the robes of Buddhist monastics.

Almost as a rule, to use the Japanese pronunciation of a pan-Buddhist term is not a standard practice, and Indic terms are preferable due to the wide range of languages used in Buddhist countries. Scholars will often go to great lengths to track down the original Sanskrit words for terms in East Asian Buddhist works for this specific purpose. That is, because foreign terms in other languages than Sanskrit or Pali are generally seen as being inappropriate for use outside of their respective traditions, as there are usually numerous translations of the term into different languages such as Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan, etc.

Additionally, if you check the other pages for pan-Buddhist terms, which set some basic precedents and standard practices, they are overwhelmingly in either Sanskrit or Pali. Finally, the term kesa does not appear in a standard dictionary of the English language, so it is dubious that it could be considered an "English" term in the pure sense. If there were a term to be put in bold alongside the Sanskrit kasaya, then it would certainly be kasava, which is the Pali term. Tengu800 (talk) 07:23, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. You are clearly very well-informed on this topic. However if you look for a definition of "kesa" online, you find three English definitions. Searching for "kasaya" [1] yields no definition in English. Further, this article was formerly titled "Kesa", and this is still the title at Commons. I think the current headline is not quite right for a general encyclopedia. I propose this first line:

Kāṣāya or kesa (Sanskrit: काषाय kāṣāya; Pali: kasāva; Chinese: 袈裟; pinyin: Jiāshā; Japanese: 袈裟 kesa; Vietnamese: Cà-sa) are the robes...

--as a compromise, and as a service to the general reader coming in from the kesa (clothing) redirect. --Pete Tillman (talk) 21:05, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... if we go down that route, then it might seem strange as to why only the Sanskrit and Japanese forms are selected, whereas the others are given a more obscure position. Specifically, we often think of Japanese Buddhism as coming by way of Chinese Buddhism, and the Theravada term might be seen as being slighted as well. Maybe we could incorporate the local name of the garment into the header for each of the sections. For example:

• Kāṣāya in Indian Buddhism
• Jiāshā in Chinese Buddhism
• Kesa in Japanese Buddhism
• Kasāva in Theravada Buddhism (hypothetical section)

Then in each section, the local name could also be used. This would make each of the local names of each tradition more prominent, and give a nod to the various traditions. Then someone who comes to the page expecting to see kesa would see it right away in the Contents section, or in the bigger letters of the headline itself for the Japanese section. Would this be okay? Tengu800 (talk) 04:05, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

That seems a reasonable approach. We should probably add redirects in all-Roman characters as well -- I noticed, for example, that "kasaya" is used pretty widely in English articles that Google turns up. Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk)