Open the DPD on nimitta and you get eight numbered senses:
- mark; sign; symbol; indication
- mental feature; aspect of experience
- sign; omen; portent
- (interpretation of) signs; omens; portents
- cause; reason; foundation; basis
- meditation object; theme of contemplation; mental hyperlink
- sexual organ
- hint; suggestion; clue
Every one of those is defensible in its own context. That is exactly the problem.
A translator who picks the contextually nicest English word each time produces eight different words, and the reader never learns that the Buddha was using one. The connection to the Pāḷi is severed at precisely the point where it would have paid off — because what makes nimitta worth learning is not any one of those senses, it is what all eight have in common.
So I render it “sign” everywhere, and let the context do the work the context was always doing. Once you do that, the samādhi nimitta passages stop looking like a scattered set of unrelated remarks and start looking like one subject:
- AN 3.102 — the goldsmith: you balance three nimittas, samādhi, paggaha (energy), upekkha. Blow on it at the wrong time and you ruin it.
- AN 4.14.1 — guarding the six sense doors: don’t grab the sign and the features.
- AN 4.14.4 — the samādhi nimittas are the 5siv
(corpse contemplations). - MN 20 — five kinds of mental activity, each one a sign/method for removing unwanted thoughts.
- SN 8.4 — Vaṅgīsa: turn away from the subha nimitta, develop animitta.
- SN 46.2 — the hindrances eat subha and paṭigha nimittas.
- SN 47.8 — the cook simile: follow the good nimitta to get samādhi.
- SN 47.10 — inspiring nimittas are good Dhamma thoughts, for vitakka in directed samādhi.
Read those with eight different English words and they are eight topics. Read them with one word and they are one topic: what you attend to, what you follow it back to, and what it grows into.
The post also reproduces my old primer on how nimittas work — which argues that we already do this in plain English and just don’t call it nimitta. “I got a good sign from her.” “That’s a red flag.” Same interpretive work, and we are about as good at it as Jack was, who got five clear good nimittas from Jill and talked himself out of every one of them.
What connects the story to the suttas is a·yoniso manasi·kāra. “Unwise attention” only grades you; yoni is the womb, the origin — the mind tracing the source. Jack never traced a single sign back to where it came from. Had he followed the laugh back to its origin he would have found affection, not comedy.