 result of misconduct with children he beholds boys floating about in the River of Brine. They cry out to him, and he plunges into the river through the impulse of grief and pain arising from his keen affection and attachment to them.
The'sin of sodomy' isn't very literal.  That's in case you had any doubts. Buddhists never shrink back from talking about every possibility. They never had a Victorian phase. That's why they're not quite sure what'repression' is. Well, at least as far as talking about things is concerned.
And here's the original Sanskrit for those who insist on having it. It could really help solve some arguments that might arise about the meaning.
Right away we ought to observe, at the very least, that 'River of Brine' is not a very accurate translation of the Sanskrit, certainly, where it's kṣāra-nadī, with nadī meaning 'river.' Although kṣāra can mean'salty,' the first meanings in the Monier-Williams dictionary are: caustic, biting, corrosive, acrid, pungent, saline.
Equipped with the Sanskrit and Tibetan words, I started searching out rivers of brine or whatever, along with words for salt and types of salts, all over the place. I'd bother you with all the details, but I guess you won't have patience for it. Anyway, my dull conclusion is that the various words for salts and salty waters are confused in the sources — even the two texts for animal metaphor no. 56 disagree whether it's lan-tshwa or ba-tshwa — so little wonder if we're confused about which is which. Ba-tshwa, to the best of my current guesses means, to some authors at least, 'borax' such as you find in lakes with internal drainage — the Northern Plains of Tibet are full of it — and as your mother knows very well an ingredient in some popular clothes-washing detergents. Sanskrit lavaṇa is in Tibetan lan-tshwa, the usual word for sodium chloride, or common table salt, NaCl.
Still, a Tibetan medical dictionary told me that lan-tsha has two meanings: [1] ordinary salt and [2] medicinal salts. According to this, when the latter meaning is intended the letter 'w' is added as a subscript, lan-tshwa. That is interesting... But who followed this spelling advice?
I went to such lengths to find out more about salt symbolism, I even wrote to Austria in quest of a mysterious scripture entitled Lan-tshwa'i Chu-bo'i Mdo. It was quoted by Atisha, but it has probably always been quite difficult to find in Tibet or anywhere else. It was translated at about the beginning of the 11th century, probably in fact at Tholing, where Dharmapāla, the Indian master named in the colophon, started the Highland Monastic Ordination Lineage.
That could help explain why it only exists in two Kanjurs located in the westernmost parts of the Plateau, the Gondhla and the Tholing Kanjurs (this information accepted with thanks from Helmut Tauscher, who kindly went out of his way to help me on this, far more than was necessary, really). Its Sanskrit title has been reconstructed in two different ways. It seems that Mark Tatz once Sanskritized it as Lavaṇa Nadī Sūtra, although Kṣāra Nadī Sūtra would also be possible. Even the Tibetan title is not always given consistently. Sometimes it's Lan-tsa'i Chu-bo'i Mdo, but we also find reference to it as Ba-tshwa'i Chu-klung zhes bya-ba'i Mdo.
I won't go into this scripture very much, since I think anyway someone will do a study of it before too long. I think we already learned something of significance, that even Tibetans might sometimes confuse or consider equivalent ba-tshwa and lan-tshwa. Not everyone is cut out to be a chemist. I'll just quote one brief passage and make a stab at understanding it. In this scripture the Buddha makes a kind of extended metaphor, and later on in the scripture it's interpreted in every last detail.
Let me try to get the gist of it without laboring over every word. It's meant to describe our situation here in sangsara, but you knew that.
On the banks or shores of the salt river there are lots of thorns. A waterwheel lies ahead. The myriad beings are disoriented in the pitch-black darkness. They are getting carried along by the constant stream of the river. There is no way they can turn back [from going under the water mill].
"I say to you, the salt means sin, non-virtues, and thoughts about them, all three."
Salt is a positive symbol in Christianity and Judaism. You even find salt along with oil used in significant ways in Roman Rite consecration ceremonies. Have you ever heard anyone called "salt of the earth"? That's a good thing. Salt preserves. Salt heals. Salt is good. Salt is something like life.
Salt is hardly ever positive, or at least unequivocally positive, in Buddhism. In general in Buddhist metaphors, salt doesn't preserve. It makes you more and more thirsty, and it corrodes things. Salt most often stands for desires, since fulfilling them is only temporary at best, and leads to addiction, just as drinking salt water only makes you want to drink more and more. It doesn't quench your thirst like you might have thought it would.
And what is salt water? Salt water stands for defilement. The defilements of the mind are saltier than salt. When we try to eat salt — even just a little — we can't swallow it because we find it so salty, but the defilements are even saltier than that. They can crust us over so that we spoil and rot in all sorts of ways. When this is the case, what can we do? We have to filter or distill them.
Try this page, also, where you'll find another Salt Sutra.
This is not positive. Notice that this Buddhist salt is said to be corrosive. I see the same in many of my Tibetan texts, including scriptures (I'd quote more of them, but the day is slipping away), and this leads me to think that at least some of the time they aren't intending ordinary table salt, or ordinary ocean salt,* but rather some kind of borax or, perhaps even more likely to fit the symbolism, caustic soda.
Are you with me this far? That's amazing! Thank you for being so patient. Just remember that a monkey paw when placed in caustic soda or lye would soon dissolve into nothingness. This knowledge will come in useful next time when we try to figure out what the turtle is doing with it in the first place. I should learn to say what I want to say right away instead of wasting time getting around to it. Good advice for any ordinary day. Today is just too hot, and on days like this, it's best to have a little extra salt. We'll talk again before too long. You can drop me a line meanwhile.
Śāntideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya. For the English, I used Cecil Bendall & W.H.D. Rouse, Śikṣāsamuccaya: A Compendium of Buddhist Doctrine, Motilal Banarsidass (Delhi 1971), reprint of 1922 edition. For The Sanskrit, I used p. 45 of the P.L. Vaidya edition reproduced by Sridhar Tripathi at the Mithila Institute (Darbhanga 1999), but you can also do as I did and compare this with the Jens Braarvig's edition of Chapter Four here. For the Tibetan I made use of the version in the Gangs-can Rig-brgya'i Sgo-'byed Lde-mig series vol. 23, published by Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 1995), just because I happened to have it at hand, not because I particularly recommend it.
Tibetan Buddhist Digital Altar, blog dated March 20, 2009 entitled Acid River. This blog provoked a rhetorically heated and here & there mildly interesting and informative discussion at E-sangha. You may have to register to see this thread, I'm not sure of it, though.
Helmut Tauscher, Catalogue of the Gondhla Proto-Kanjur, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien (Vienna 2008). This is by far the most fascinating Kanjur catalog ever made. I would never say such a thing lightly or in jest. If you can't see the beauty in it it's probably because you're not a Tibetologist yet. If you are a Tibetologist already, look here for more details. If not, don't.
There's a fairly nice discussion of worldwide salt symbolism here. Just ignore the Scientology video advertisements and whatnot.
they become affected by vice.
it turns into brine.
This is the illustration and text on ba-tshwa* from Jampal Dorjé's** materia medica work, which lists all-in-all 20 types of salts, 16 of them naturally occurring, including ba-tshwa, and 4 of them produced by special processes, or '