Bīja (Buddhism)

Explanation in English

(The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism) ^[1]

Bīja (T. sa bon ས་བོན་; C. zhongzi), literally “seed”, is used in two contexts:

1) “karmic seeds” that ripen upon meeting with appropriate causes and condition;

2) “seed syllables” used as a focus for visualization in tantric practices.

(SuttaCentral — Dictionary)^[2]

bīja

1. seed; germ; generating element

Nature and the Environment in Early Buddhism by S. Dhammikabīja

Seed. A seed is a new plant in the form of an embryo. Some of the parts of seeds mentioned in the Tipiṭaka include the husk (thusa), the kernel (miñja), and in the case of germinating seeds, the sprout or shoot (aṅkura). The seeds of certain plants are encased in a pod (sipāṭaka or kuṭṭhilika). In order to germinate a seed has to have an intact casing, be fresh, be unspoiled by wind or heat and be sown in a good field with properly prepared soil AN.i.135. Some seeds have hard shells that crack only if burned and it was noticed that new shoots often appear quickly after a forest fire SN.i.69. The two factors that enable a seed to grow are nutrition from the soil (paṭhavi rasa) and moisture SN.i.134. Whether the leaves or fruit of the plant is sweet or bitter was believed to depend not on the nutrition but on the nature of the seed AN.i.32. Commenting on the endless cycle of agriculture the monk Kāḷudāyin said: “Again and again they sow the seed; again and again the god king rains; again and again farmers plough the fields; again and yet again the country has grain” Thag.532. The seven types of edible seeds usually mentioned in the Tipiṭaka are sāli, vīhi, mugga, māsa, tila and taṇḍula MN.i.457. Elsewhere, the first two of these are included in a list of edible grains Vin.iv.264. See Dhañña.

(Wikipedia) ^[3]

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the Sanskrit term Bīja (बीज) (Jp. 種子 shuji) (Chinese 种子 zhǒng zǐ), literally seed, is used as a metaphor for the origin or cause of things and cognate with bindu.

Explanation in Burmese ^[4][5]

၁ – မူလဗီဇ=အမြစ်မျိုး။
၂ – ခန္ဓဗီဇ=အပင်မျိုး။
၃ – ဖလုဗီဇ=အဆစ်မျိုး။
၄ – အဂ္ဂဗီဇ=အညွန့်မျိုး။
၅ – ဗီဇ ဗီဇ=အ‌စေ့မျိုး။

(မူလပဏ္ဏာသ)

Pali Word Grammar from Pali Myanmar Dictionary ^[6]

bījagga：bījagga（na）
ဗီဇဂ္ဂ（န）
[bīja+agga]
[ဗီဇ+အဂ္ဂ]

Tipiṭaka Pāḷi-Myanmar Dictionary တိပိဋက-ပါဠိမြန်မာ အဘိဓာန် ^[6]

bījagga：ဗီဇဂ္ဂ（န）
[ဗီဇ+အဂ္ဂ]
မျိုးစေ့ဦး （အလှူ）။

[Volunteer needed for Eastern Pwo Karen translation for this post]

[ဤအကြောင်းအရာအား အရှေ့ပိုးကရင်ဘာသာစကားသို့ ပြန်ဆိုရန် စေတနာ့ဝန်ထမ်းအလိုရှိသည်။]

Directly extracted from the following sources:

1.  Robert E. Buswell Jr., Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: 2014), s.v. Bīja
2. Definitions for: bīja (suttacentral.net)
3. Bīja – Wikipedia
4. ဗီဇငါးမျိုး – ဓမ္မဗောဓိ (bawdiwiki.com)
5. ဗီဇ (၅) မျိုး ~ သရုပ်ပြ မာတိကာကျမ်း (pikay.org)
6. bījagga – Definition and Meaning – Pāli Dictionary (sutta.org)