Daniel 10:16 Meaning Behold

Saṃvega: Urgent shock

Saṃvega is the shudder that comes when something true is seen too clearly. The sight opened above the great river knocks the ground out from under Daniel and leaves him face down, mute, three weeks of mourning already behind him. This kind of shock does useful work, turning a person toward what matters, the way a near miss on the road empties a driver of small talk for an hour.

Devatā: Radiant being

Devatā names the shining beings who come to humans and speak with them. One in the likeness of the sons of men is how such a visitor arrives: near enough in form to be addressed as "my lord," strange enough to flatten the man who looks at him. He stands higher on the same road and under the same birth and death, which is why he can steady Daniel and still cannot spare him the vision.

Phassa: Contact

Phassa is the meeting of a sense and its object, from which all experience follows. Lips that could not move are touched, and speech comes; the whole exchange turns on one small point of contact, like the strike of a match. Every world a person lives in opens this way, by a touch or a sound or a sight landing where a faculty can receive it.

Domanassa: Grief

Domanassa is mental pain, sorrow and dejection. "By reason of the vision my sorrows have overtaken me": the grief arrives with the seeing, as its consequence, the way news of a death changes a room before anything in the room has moved. Overtaken is the honest word, since grief runs faster than the one it follows, and Daniel says so plainly to the figure standing over him.

Anattā: Not-self

Anattā is the fact that nothing here answers to an owner. "I retain no strength" reports it exactly: strength was on loan the whole time and has now been called in, and a body that could be commanded would not be lying on the ground refusing to rise. Admitting this aloud to the one before him is already insight, since he has stopped pretending his legs are his to order.