Mapping the territory: Sanskrit cosmopolis, 1500–today

There is a lot to do in the European intellectual history, with, e.g., major theories that await an improved understanding and connections among scholars that have been overseen or understudied. Using a simile, one might say that a lot of the territory between some important peaks (say, the contributions of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Heidegger) is still to be thoroughly investigated.

When one works on the intellectual history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis*, by contrast, one still needs to map the entire territory, whose extension still escapes us. Very few elements of the landscape have been fixated, and might still need to be re-assessed.

What are the mountains, main cities as well as rivers, bridges, routes that we would need to fix on the map? Key authors, key theories, key schools, as well as languages and manners of communication and how they worked (public debates? where? how?).
I mentioned authors before schools because for decades intellectual historians looking at the Sanskrit cosmopolis emphasized, and often overemphasized the role of schools at the expense of the fundamental role of individual thinkers, thus risking to oversee their individual contributions and to flatten historical developments, as if nothing had changed in astronomy or philosophy for centuries. This hermeneutic mistake is due to the fact that while the norm in Europe and North America after Descartes and the Enlightenment has been increasingly to highlight novelty, originality is constantly understated in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. It is not socially acceptable to claim to be novel and original in the Sanskrit world, just like it is not acceptable to be just “continuing a project” in a grant application in Europe or North America.
Still, schools are often the departure point for any investigation, since they give one a first basic understanding of the landscape. How does this exactly work?
For instance, we know that the Vedānta systems were a major player in the intellectual arena, with all other religious and philosophical schools having to face them, in some form of the other. However, it is not at all clear which schools within Vedānta were broadly influential, where within South Asia, and in which languages. Michael Allen, among others, worked extensively on Advaita Vedānta in Hindī sources, but were they read also by Sanskrit authors and did the latter react to them? Were Hindī texts on Vedānta read only in the Gangetic valley or throughout the Indian subcontinent? The same questions should be investigated with regard to the other schools of Vedānta (Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śaivādvaita…), the other vernacular languages they interacted with (respectively: Tamil and Maṇipravāḷam, Kannaḍa…), and the regions of the Indian subcontinent they originated in. And this is just about Vedānta schools.
Similarly, we still have to understand which other schools entered into a debate with philosophy and among each other and which interdisciplinary debates took place. Scholars of European intellectual history know how Kepler was influenced by Platonism and how Galileo influenced the development of philosophy. What happened in the Sanskrit cosmopolis?
Dagmar Wujastyk recently focused on the intersection of medicine (āyurveda) alchemy (rasaśāstra) and yoga. Which other disciplines were in a constant dialogue? Who read mathematical and astronomical texts, for instance? It is clear, because many texts themselves often repeat it, that Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vyākaraṇa (hermeneutics, logic and grammar) were considered a sort of basic trivium, to be known by every learned person. But the very exclusion of Vedānta from the trivium (it cannot be considered to be included in “Mīmāṃsā” unless in the Viśiṣṭādvaita self-interpretation) shows that the trivium is only the starting point of one’s instruction and is not at all exhaustive. And we have not even started to look at many disciplines, from music to rhetorics.

One might wonder whether it is not enough to look at reports by today’s or yesterday’s Sanskrit intellectuals themselves in order to know what is worth reading and why. However, as discussed above, such reports would not boast about innovations and main breakthroughs. Sanskrit philosophy (and the same probably applies to Sanskrit mathematics etc.) is primarily commentarial. That is, authors presuppose a basic shared background knowledge and innovate while engaging with it rather than imagining to be pioneers in a new world of ideas. In a commentarial philosophy, innovations are concealed and breakthroughs are present, but not emphasised. Hence, one needs a lot of background knowledge to recognise them.

I would like to map the territory to realise who was studying what, where and how. How can this be done? The main obstacle is the amount of unpublished material, literally millions of manuscripts that still remain to be read, edited, translated and studied (I am relying on David Pingree’s estimate). Editing and translating them all requires a multi-generational effort of hundreds of people. However, a quick survey of them, ideally through an enhanced ORC technology, would enable scholars to figure out which languages were used, which theories and topics were debated, which authors were mentioned, and who was replying to whom.

This approach will remind some readers of the distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti. I am personally a trained philologist and a spokesperson for close reading. However, moving back and forth between the two methods seems to be the most productive methodology if the purpose is mapping an unknown territory. Close reading alone will keep one busy for decades and will not enable one to start the hermeneutic circle through which one’s knowledge of the situation of communication helps one better understanding even the content of the text one is closely focusing on. As hinted at above, this is particularly crucial in the case of a commentarial philosophy, where one needs to be able to master a lot of the author’s background in order to evaluate his contribution.

*As discussed several times elsewhere, I use “Sanskrit philosophy” or “Sanskrit intellectual history” as a short term for “philosophy in a cosmopolis in which Sanskrit was the dominant language of culture and everyone had to come to terms with it”, as with the use of “philosophy in the Islamic world”, that includes also thinkers part of the Islamic world but who were not themselves Muslims.

(The above are just quick notes. Any feedback is welcome!)

Can we speak of “multiple Renaissances”? What are the historical and political consequences of this use?

I just came back from a conference on the many Renaissances in Asia. Since it was part of the Coffee Break Conference project, it was meant to be most of all an open discussion on a fascinating topic (rethinking the concept of Renaissance and asking whether this could be applied also outside its original context, and more specifically in South Asia). The starting point of the discussion was Jack Goody’s book “Renaissances: The one or the many?”, which has been analysed from very different perspectives in the opening talks by Camillo Formigatti and Antony Pattathu and to which most of the following talks referred back to. There was a general consensus about the fact that Goody’s depiction of South Asia is at best incomplete and at worst repeats some orientalist prejudices about its being changeless.

Andrew Ollett’s Review of Duty, Language and Exegesis in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā

This post is the first one in a series discussing reviews of my first book. An introduction to the series can be found here. I am grateful to the reviewers for their honest reviews and will answer in the same, constructive way.

Quotations, references and interlanguage in a Buddhist shrine

The categories of “quotation” (literal or semi-literal and acknowledged reuse), “reference” (paraphrase, often unacknowledged) and “interlanguage” (floating ideas common to a whole cultural milieu) have been distinguished and discussed (in Freschi 2015, special issue of the JIPh) in regard to texts. Accordingly, a quotation is an instance in which a text passage is purposefully acknowledged as belonging to a different work and reused with little or no modifications. Quotations are often linked to the desire to enhance the value of one’s work by appeal to the authority of a different one. However, at the same time, quoting a work means distantiating oneself from it.

By contrast, a reference reuses a text without mentioning that it is being reused and usually in a looser way. No explicit appeal to the authority of the previous text is made, although in some cultural milieus (see again Freschi 2015 for the case of philosophical schools in Classical India) the reuse of materials of the same milieus is consciously or subconsciously recognised by the audience who thus accepts the new work as part of their own cultural milieu.

Amorino at Miran M III (wikipedia)

Last, the category of interlanguage points to a wide-spread reuse of a motif which is so common that authors just reuse it without any further thought, as if it belonged to their basic tool kit. Similarly, the audience does not perceive interlanguage as a distinct element of a given work and they do not acknowledge it as pointing to some other work.

Already Bignami 2015 (in the same issue of JIPh) has suggested to apply these category to the history of art. The following examples discuss possible applications:

  1. the term quotation could cover cases such as Andy Warhol’s reuse of well-known works of art (notably the Mona Lisa) within his creations. In fact, in this case, the reuse is acknowledged and the viewers need to be aware of the original painting for the mechanism to work.
  2. the term reference could cover cases such as the reuse of a content without a specific form, as in the above=mentioned case of Motycka’s Christ which reuses the motif of the crucified Christ although it does not reuse a specific representation of him.
  3. the term interlanguage could cover cases such as the diffusion of Corinthian columns throughout the Roman Empire. Their use outside of Greece was in fact no longer linked to a specific geographic area and readers were not reminded of a single building whose style would have been reused. They were just the shared common language for prestige buildings.\footnote{By contrast, the reuse of the same Corinthian columns in Washington D.C. is a case of reference, since it did not represent the obvious way of building and it rather clearly referred to the classical model of ancient Greece, trying to evoke democracy and other classical ideas.

More in detail, the use of references may be part of an important legitimizing strategy also in history of art (as it is the case in Classical Indian philosophy, see above), since the conscious reuse of a motif which is familiar to one’s audience can be a device used by artists in order to be accepted by the audience. A typical example might be a religious work of art including iconographic elements of a well-known depiction of the same theme. This example also shows how the boundaries between quotation, reference and interlanguage are in art-history, just like in textual history, blurred. The reuse of the Amorini or of the garland-bearers in Buddhist art in Central Asia , for instance, seems today to be a case of interlanguage. However, for the coeval viewers of the paintings at the Miran’s shrines labelled as M III and M IV (see Lo Muzio 2014) the link with a single well-known model, perhaps circulating through note-books might have been so evident that we should rather speak of a quotation (see Filigenzi 2006 for the thesis that the paintings at Miran M III and M IV were inspired by Gandharan ones at Saidu Sharif, in Swat, perhaps through the medium of reproductions in painted albums), perhaps aiming at enhance the prestige of one’s site by linking it ideally with a famous one, as it happened in the case of Roman reproductions of Greek statues. Last, the same kind of reuses could be conceived as instances of reference if they were reusing a specific motif without reproducing it exactly nor presupposing that the viewers would have noted the reference, as perhaps suggested by Bussagli’s comparison of the same Miran paintings with the 1st–3rd c. Gandharan sculptures in Bussagli 1963.

As usual, categorizations are only useful if they serve to understand phenomena or to draw similarities and differences one would not have been able to understand otherwise. Do these categories help you in this sense?

This blogpost is part of my series on reuse in art (see here). It has further been inspired by a lecture at the ISTB by Ciro Lo Muzio (who is not at all responsible for my interpretation of the data, nor for the mistakes I may have added).

Hayagrīva in South Indian temples

After the 17th c. and as a consequence of the Vaṭakalai-Teṅkalai split and of the resultant decision of the Vaṭakalai devotees to adopt Veṅkaṭanātha’s theology, the icons of Hayagrīva start to rapidly grow in number and importance in Tamil Nadu–Karṇāṭaka.
Two types of Hayagrīva are reproduced:

Anand Venkatkrishnan on Vedānta, bhakti and Mīmāṃsā through the history of the family of Āpadeva and Anantadeva in 16th–17th c. Banaras

When, where and how did bhakti become acceptable within the Indian intellectual élites?

The origins of Hayagrīva

The Hayagrīva (horse-head) form of Viṣṇu is slightly disturbing, not only for his half animal aspect (a characteristic shared by various other avatāras, from Narasiṃha to Matsya), but also for the fact that the horse head does not find a proper justification in most texts… And when it does find one, I strongly suspect that it is an ad hoc explanation, in order to solve the riddle. Let me elaborate a bit more:

Jaina libraries in India

Readers might have noticed that I am working on the availability of Buddhist texts after the disappearance of Buddhist communities in South India. Did the vanished Buddhist communities leave beyond libraries of Buddhist texts? —I have no evidence of that. Did Jainas collect Buddhist texts also in South India?

Buddhism in Tamil Nadu until the end of the first millennium AD

Was Buddhism ever predominant in Tamil Nadu? Which Buddhism? And when?

After my last post on the disappearance of Buddhism from South India, I received two emails of readers pointing to the fact that Buddhism must have been prosperous in Tamil Nadu, given that Dharmakīrti himself was born in Tamil Nadu and that the Maṇimēkalai (a Buddhist literary text in Tamil, datable perhaps to the 5th–7th c.) presupposes a Buddhist community and reuses materials from Śaṅkarasvāmin’s Nyāyapraveśa.