In his commentary, Śabara focuses on a problematic Vedic passage which appears to forbid modification (that of na mātā vardhate na pitā). Veṅkaṭanātha explains the same instance, but first spells out the argument in full. At the end of the explanation, which I have summarised above, he also adds a further reason. Since the reason is not spelt out, I assume Veṅkaṭanātha imagined his readers to recognise it immediately, which is interesting, since it may reveal something about his target readers or about how conversant they were with Mīmāṃsā devices. The text passage runs as follows:

The modification is purposeful because, if there were no expression [of the meaning], there would be no application of the Aindrī rule.

vacanābhāve caindrīnyāyānavatārād ūho’rthavān (ad PMS 1.2.52)

I have encountered the aindrī-rule only in ŚBh ad PMS 3.2.3. It points to the fact that in case of conflict between prescription and mantra, the latter should be interpreted as yielding a secondary meaning. Here the point is: If the mantras expressed no meaning at all, then there would be no scope for the application of such a rule.

• they have a given text as their main interlocutor/they are mainly about a given text
• like with Origene’s commentaries, they are a genre in its own right, not a minor specialisation for authors at their beginnings (Sakai 2015, section 4, suggests that authors in fact needed to have already become acknowledged authorities before being entrusted with the honour of composing a commentary on an influential text.)
• they are characterised by a varied but strong degree of textual reuse
• they allow for significant degrees of innovation (This is evident in the case of the Navya Nyāya commentaries on the NS. Outside the precinct of philosophy, juridical commentaries often reflect the recent juridical developments much more than the original text they are commenting upon.)

As for reuse, one might object that reuse is much more present in later commentaries such as the Seśvaramīmāṃsā than in earlier ones, such as the Śābarabhāṣya. However, the ŚBh does indeed quote extensively from a previous commentator and the fact that contemporary readers do not recognise many other reuses does not rule out the possibility that Śabara did in fact extensively reuse but, as it is often the case throughout Indian philosophy, without marking his reuses, as he could assume that his audience would have recognised what was happening. In other words: the seeming increase in the amount of textual reuse from, e.g., the 2nd c. to the 14th. could be due more to the increase of our awareness of reuse. In this connection, it is worth remembering that:

• commentaries are also an important source for the retrieval of (written or oral) texts which would otherwise be lost

Commentaries bring us back within a close analysis of a text, often even in an advanced classroom milieu. Thus, they need to evoke important textual authorities, including the ones which happen to be fashionable at their time and might have been lost or never recorded in script.

By contrast, commentaries diverge sharply as for other characters. So much, that even the first item listed above might need to be re-conceived in a plural form, with texts entangling at the same time various others, as it can comment on various different texts and discuss with various others, named and unnamed ones. The landscape of Indian philosophy (perhaps of all philosophical traditions?) is complex and invariably entangled.

What is your experience with the genre of commentaries? Do you have counter-examples or would you rather agree with my preliminary assessment?
For a first attempt towards the definition of the genre of commentaries, see here. I am grateful to Ramakrishna Bhattacharya for his feedback on this post (see below).

What makes a text a “commentary”? The question is naif enough to allow for a complicated answer. First of all, let me note the obvious: There is not a single word for “commentary” in Sanskrit, where one needs to distinguish between bhāṣyas, vārttikas, ṭippanīs, etc., often bearing poetical names, evoking Moons, mirrors and the like.

Sanskrit authors, thus, had in mind a widely different set of texts which we all bring back to the seemingly single category of “commentary”. Some of them are chiefly line-by-line or word-by-word explanations (an illustrious example is Manorathanandin’s commentary on Dharmakīrti’s PV). Others entail elaborate philosophical disquisitions (such as Vācaspati’s Nyāyakaṇikā on Maṇḍana’s Vidhiviveka). Still others just comment on a few words or sentences every 10 pages or so (such as Cakradhara’s Granthibhaṅga on Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī).
Some of them are part of a longer history, that they fully embrace. This is especially true in the case of the philosophical sūtras and of their first Bhāṣya-commentary, which tends to be fused in a single text. This last sentence could also be interpreted as saying that a sūtra-part was only later extracted out of the respective Bhāṣya.
Vācaspati’s commentary of the Nyāyasūtra, for instance, embeds comments also on its Bhāṣya by Vātsyāyana, but typically also on the Vārttika thereon. Others focus only on one text and neglect the successive history. Śrīprapāduka’s commentary on the same Nyāyasūtra, for instance, explicitly focuses only on it.
What is constant in all these cases is that a commentary is in close dialogue with a root text (with or without its commentaries), which remain(s) its main interlocutor(s).
This makes the definition wide enough to encompass texts such as the Nyāyamañjarī itself, which comments extensively on some selected Nyāyasūtras (Graheli 2016 contains an appendix with the sūtra numbers and the impressive amount of pages dedicated to each of them). Similarly, Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments anew the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, programmatically neglecting the commentary by Śabara.
Thus, we could sum up the relation “A is a commentary of B” as “B is the main interlocutor of A”. **UPDATE: The relation of “being the main interlocutor” can be more loosely understood if A and B belong to the same śāstric tradition, whereas it needs to entail a very close (e.g., page-by-page or line-by-line) dialogue in order to consider A, which is polemical about B, a commentary of it.**
However, the picture may become still more complicated, because a text A apparently commenting on B may have in fact in view most of all B’s other commentary, C, so that C, though never mentioned, is A’s main interlocutor.
Coming back to the example mentioned above, the Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments on the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, but while having constantly in view the Śabara’s Bhāṣya thereon and, more strikingly, Rāmānuja’s Bhāṣya on a different sūtra, namely the Brahmasūtra. One ends up with a net of main interlocutors rather than a single one.

**I thank Amod Lele for the discussion in the comments on the same post at the Indian Philosophy blog.

This reminds me of Richard Rorty’s discussion of the value of literature. Literature, Rorty argued, makes one identify with single persons, and not just with humankind in general. One sees Lolita’s perspective and Humbert’s one and one cannot fully condemn in a crude, rationalising way, because one sees the human side of the story.

In this view, I look forward for Marco Lauri‘s presentation at our panel on Testimony at the Atiner Conference (here is the program), since he will focus on the epistemological value of story telling. Story telling is not just the frame, it alters the meaning of the content communicated, it adds shades of meaning and depth to the content communicated —so that the listener’s belief or lack thereof in the content presented is intrinsically dependent on the story in which it is embedded (think of the Cretan paradox as the utterance of a repented lier and it is no longer a paradox). Story telling can even have a transformative value, insofar as it changes the listener (and perhaps through her also the speaker). Thus, the ideal situation of a listener, a speaker and a content is possibly much more muddled in actual reality and the three can be reciprocally linked. However, let me add that the investigation of this hermeneutic circle does not need to lie outside the precinct of philosophy (although it has often lain outside analytic philosophy), as shown by Ancient Greek (Plato, Aristotle’s attention to poetical structures) and Arabic philosophy (Lauri will refer to Ibn Ṭufayl), by the fact that Rorty and Gadamer were also philosophers, by the usage of poetry and story telling in the works of well-known philosophers such as Derrida, Nietzsche (and Veṅkaṭanātha).

You can read a great post on philosophy and poetry (especially in Indian Philosophy) here. The same author (Andrew Ollett) dwells further on the issue here.

A Sanskritist-historian, Anand Venkatkrishnan, opened his research on the family of Āpadeva in 16th–17th c. Banaras to this wider issue in a recent article published on South Asian History and Culture*. The backbone of the article is Anand’s research on the production of the intellectuals belonging to the “Deva” family, several of which have been intensely prolific and have even played an important role in the Sanskrit intellectual history. Anand seems to read Sanskrit well and with pleasure, given that he freely travels through genres in order to reconstruct an intellectual flair rather than splitting hairs on specific doctrinal problems. Even more valuable is the fact that he broadens the scope of his research to also Marathi texts —the Deva family moved to Banaras from Mahārāṣṭra. Of particular interest in this connection is a genealogical reconstruction by Anantadeva II (“fl. 1650 CE”), where he speaks of the glory of his family starting with

[…] vedavedīsamanvitaḥ |
śrīkṛṣṇabhaktimān eka ekanāthābhidho dvijaḥ ||

A brahmin, fully endowed with Vedic knowledge,
A devotee of Krishna: Ekanātha by name. (p. 150)

This Ekanātha should be identified, maintains Anand (against Keune and Edgerton and with Pollock, O’Hanlon and Kane) with the Marathi poet-saint Eknāth (latter halfth of the 16th c.) and this throws light on the interesting mix of bhakti and scholarship in the Deva family. The article was perhaps too short to allow Anand to dwell deeper in the issue and discuss, e.g., the frequence of the name Ekanātha in Mahārāṣṭra —one might imagine that many people might have been named after the saint Eknāth— or the reasons for a short mention of such an illustrious predecessor in Anantadeva II’s genealogical reconstruction, as if he were nothing more than a normal devotee. Nonetheless, it remains clear that the family linked an intellectual profile with a bhakti commitment. This mixture is prominent in Anantadeva, who wrote a drama, the Kriṣṇabhakticandrikānāṭaka, in which a Mīmāṃsaka and a Vedāntin discuss and are last converted by a devotee of Kṛṣna. Of particular interest to me is the fact that at times the Mīmāṃsaka seems to be an ally of the devotee:

buddhiṃ parasya bhettuṃ kevalam etad hi pāṇḍityam || 93 ||

Which I would translate plainly as an attack of the Vedāntin as if he were no more than an eristic Buddhist:

In fact, [your] scholarship only consists in this: You destroy the ideas of your opponent [without establishing anything on your own]!

Anand’s translation is slightly different in its first part (honestly, I can not understand the English form of his first clause, that’s why I offered a different translation):

Some scholarship that is: you only deconstruct the ideas of others. (p. 152)

The alliance of Mīmāṃsā and devotion against the Advaita Vedānta approach might be a direction worth exploring further. Anand also hints at the prehistory of this alliance, mentioning a verse of Kumārila’s Bṛhaṭṭīkā quoted by Anantadeva II:

nanu niḥśreyasaṃ jñānād bandhahetor na karmanaḥ |
naikasmād api tat kiṃ tu jñānakarmasamuccayāt ||

‘Surely the highest good arises from knowledge, not from action, that cause of bondage.’**
‘No: It arises nor from one [of these two], but from a synthesis of knowledge and action.’ (p. 158)

According to Sheldon Pollock (which is very present in the theorethical framework of the article), the rise of theistic Mīmāṃsā “produced no systemwide change”. Is this judgement accurate although it necessarily oversimplifies things?

*I am grateful to Anand for having sent me a copy of his article.

(Full disclosure: I am myself very interested in the issue of the links between Mīmāṃsā and theism. After my 2012 book (on a theist Mīmāṃsaka), I have recently published a discussion of the link of Mīmāṃsā and devotion in South India in Puṣpikā 3 (ed. by Robert Leach and Jessie Pons). You can read an early draft of it for free here).

The latter possibility seems to me more likely. This led me to some investigation on Jaina libraries in India in general.
An interesting article is The Jain Knowledge Warehouses: Traditional Libraries in India, by John E. Cort (published on the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 115, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1995), pp. 77-87, available on Jstor). Cort deals primarily with the Jaina library in Pāṭaṇ (Gujarat) and has collected a lot of historical information, especially on its last centuries. However, I have collected and re-arranged here some general passages.
A first group of passages deals with the rationale of Jaina collections. Cort starts with the reason for collecting Jaina books:

Written copies of manuscripts have long played an important role in Jain intellectual, ritual, and community life. In the absence of any living enlightened teachers—according to Jain cosmological doctrines, enlightenment in this era became impossible shortly after the demise and liberation of Mahāvīra […]—the texts containing the teachings of Mahāvīra are essential for the guidance of the Jain community. (p. 77)

The next step is the reason for collecting also non-Jaina books:

Jains insist that a book, any book, should be treated with respect. Once a year, therefore, on the fifth day after the New Year, known as “Knowledge Fifth” (Jñān Pañcamī), Jains of to the libraries and bhaṇḍārs to worship both the knowledge contained in the manuscripts and the physical manuscripts themselves. Both modern printed books and older hand-written manuscripts are arranged in tiers on tables. Laity stand before the books with hands joined in a gesture of veneration, and sing vernacular hymns to Knowledge. Offerings of the sacred, charged sandalwood powder known as vāskep (as well as money) are made onto metal trays on the tables, and then, in an act sure to run shivers up the spine of any library archivist, the powder is sprinkled over the books and manuscripts themselves.
The very book and manuscripts as physical objects are to be treated with respect and veneration, and disrespect is considered as an aśātnā, or moral fault. (p. 87)

Beside that, Cort has some scattered passages on the history of Jaina libraries, from its beginnings:

Among the key events in the crystallisation of the split between the Śvetāmbara and Digambara sects were three Śvetāmbara councils held in Valabhi in Gujarat and Mathurā in north India in the fourth and fifth centuries to commit to writing standard editions of key Jain texts. According to a Śvetāmbara Jain tradition, the first libraries were built in the late eight century. (p. 78)

To its end:

The history of theses collections further reveals a dramatic change that has occurred in the last one hundred years, as Western notions of public libraries and research institutions have come to dominance in India (p. 86)

Cort also adds that manuscripts are now much less significant, given the wide availability of print.

Now, to the real possibility of Jaina libraries to survive across India:

Arranging for manuscripts to be copied for monks to use and establishing places for them to be kept were among the duties expected of laity as part of their support for and devotion to the monastic community. The three most important ‘fields of donation’ for medieval Śvetāmbara laity were images of the Jinas, temples containing such images, and Jain texts. Furthermore, the colophons on some manuscripts indicate that commissioning the copying of a manuscript generated merit that could be dedicated to a living or deceased ancestor. […] It is therefore not surprising that medieval Jain kinds and merchants were famous for the libraries that they established. (p. 78)

Thus, it seems that a living Śvetāmbara lay community would be a guarantee for the possibility of a library to be established and preserved. In case you are interested in the physical place, Cort has something for you:

The libraries themselves were kept either in small, dark, unventilated cellars, or in similar chambers above ground. (p. 79) […] Many Jain pilgrimage shrines still have secret cellars where, in times of political instability, images, ornaments, manuscripts, and other valuables could be stored for safe-keeping. (p. 80)

Up until the early decades of the twentieth century, the actual ownership of many of the manuscript collections was in the hands of specific mendicants who resided permanently in their monasteries. These mendicants, known as yatis, did not take the full-fledged mendicant vows of non-posssession (aparigraha), and so could legally possess monasteries and manuscripts. (p. 80)

Last, the topic which most interests me, namely, which manuscripts were actually preserved?

A perusal of the title of the manuscripts indicates that the number of copies of a given manuscript are directly related to its ritual and authoritative roles. We find many copies of texts belonging to the Śvetāmbara ‘canon’, devotional texts used in community rituals, narrative texts used by monks as the bases for sermons, grammars used for the learning of Sanskrit and Prakrit, and texts that are crucial to the mendicant praxis. […] More technical or philosophical works were copied less frequently. (p. 79)

The texts [preserved in Jain libraries, EF] have significantly augmented our understanding of the social, royal, intellectual, and artistic history of Western India. Since the Jains have been quite catholic in their attitudes towards the collection and retention of texts, the bhaṇḍār collections have also included valuable Brāhmaṇical and Buddhist texts that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. (p. 85)

Careful readers will have noted that Cort only speaks of Western India. This is due to the fact that this article is based on his PhD thesis (1989), focusing on North Gujarat. Still, I wonder whether some similar study is available for Jaina libraries in South India…

The following elements had been discussed at the round table after the panel on reuse (about which see this announcement and these comments right at the end of it) at the IABS conference:

• genre: it seems that philosophy is a special case, in which literality of quotations is especially evaluated, whereas commentaries on religious texts are mid-way (as shown by Jowita Kramer) and religious and ritual texts reuse more freely (as shown by Cathy Cantwell). Petra Kieffer-Pülz observed that genre plays no role in Pāli literature (whereas time does, see immediately below). Paul Hackett noticed that within tantric literature of all religious trends, reuse is so extensive, that even chapters’ numbers which make no sense in the new environment may be copied.
• authorship: unexpectedly, even a strong concept of authorship, as the one common in kāvya does not prevent a free reuse, since the readership still regards authored texts as it regards other kind of texts (as shown by Camillo Formigatti using the example of the avadāna-collections)
• time: surprisingly enough, Petra Kieffer-Pülz’ findings concerning Pāli harmonise with my own ones on Sanskrit and confirm that after a certain century, authors tend to be much more specific as for their sources, explicitly mentioning author’s and work’s names. When does this change take place? Petra suggested “after the 14th c.” in Pāli literature. I would say even before that in Sanskrit literature, that is, around the 11th c. (see however below, fn *, for the proposal that the turn can be traced back already to Dignāga). Further views on this topic: Philipp Maas noted that Vācaspati, in his commentary on the Yogaśāstra clearly feels the need to name his sources, sometimes by inventing names if he does not know them. Referring to an even earlier date, Charles DiSimone noted that Śāntideva quotes up to five authorities on the same topic (thus showing that “name dropping” was important, I would say).

This leads to some further important points, namely:

• reasons for not naming one’s sources: Petra Kieffer-Pülz preliminarly observed that the lack of naming one’s sources cannot be interpreted as due to the reliance on oral instructions, since in the Pāli milieu books were indeed used and there are even records of libraries. Cristina Pecchia noted that Dharmakīrti is consistently referred to as ācārya among his commentators and that the main authors would have been immediately present to their relevant audience. Another person (unknown to me, unfortunately, but if you recognise yourself, please add a comment below) highlighted the fact that we must imagine that there was a shared repertoire, especially in the case of texts to be performed (once the performative stage was ended, one needed to fill the names, etc.). Cathy Cantwell, last, observed that no naming of the source is needed if the text has the status of a revelation, nor if it is reused almost unconsciously, since it has become a part of oneself, after having memorised it at a very early age. This last comment fits with my own findings regarding the fact that one does not name authors in one’s own school (see my Introduction in the special issue of the JIPh I edited).
• “Forge” of textual material: This topic has been dealt with in connection with Madhva (see Mesquita’s books on this topic) and with the extraordinary fact that some authors felt the need to forge new quotes instead of using the well-accepted device of over-interpreting extant ones. It is interesting to note that, as observed by Petra Kieffer-Pülz, already in the Aṭṭhakathā literature there are accusations to people who would have “forged” sentences. A further interesting indication of the awareness that forgery was not admitted is the justification of new Buddhist rules or part of rules by attributing them to the Buddha and (implicitly?) saying that ‘Had the Buddha been alive, he would have said that’. UPDATE: This point is discussed in Kieffer-Pülz’ book Verlorene Gaṇṭhipadas, Vol. I, p. 252 and pp. 490–492 (thanks to Petra for pointing it out!).

Can you think of further elements you would take into account? Further applications of the elements we highlighted? For instance, we did not have time to discuss about geographic differences, nor about the impact of multilinguism (which had been dealt with by Charles DiSimone in his talk) on the accuracy of textual reuse.

*Kiyotaka Yoshimizu has kindly reminded me of an article by Larry McCrea in this volume) on how Dignāga’s way of referring literally to his opponents has changed at once the Indian way of doing philosophy and of engaging with one’s opponents. Could Dignāga be the source of such later developments?

For my first post on the same round table, see here. For the complete series of posts on the IABS, see here. Please remember that these are only my first impressions and that all mistakes are mine and not the speakers’ ones.

1. They were part of their own tradition
2. One agreed with them

By contrast, naming or identifying one’s source was done in order to

• add authority to one’s statements

or

• distantiate oneself from what was said

The synergy of these two aspects leads to the fact that usually sources external to one’s school are identified.

Now, I just read an interesting statement by Vedānta Deśika in this regard. He comments on Pūrva Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.1.5, in which Jaimini describes what is śabdapramāṇa and then adds “according to Bādarāyaṇa”. Why this addition?

in order to convey that the whole concept which he (Jaimini) spoke of follows the tradition and is a conclusive opinion (sāmpradāyikatāṃ siddhāntatāñca
jñāpayituṃ).

Even more interesting is the next statement:

In fact, this [mention of Bādarāyana] is not for the sake of highlighting someone else’s view, since what has been said is a valid piece of knowledge (so that one does not need to distantiate oneself from it by saying that it is (just) someone else’s opinion), and since he has not uttered his opinion [as distinct from Bādarāyaṇa’s one] (na hy etat matāntaradyotanārtham, uktasya prāmāṇikatvāt; svamatasyāvacanāc ca).

The implicit consequence seems to be that usually the mention of other sources is used in the case of invalid claims (in order to distantiate oneself from what others incorrectly said) and is followed by one’s own one.

Did you ever encounter similar statements regarding why one names or identify one’s sources? And would you share my initial claim?

I have been working a lot on the topic of textual reuse, especially in philosophical texts. If you are interested, just check the label “reuse” here or “philology” in my previous blog.
Should you really be interested in the topic, you can also read my article about it here and the Journal of Indian Philosophy special issue dedicated to this topic (which should be online by August 2014).

In some cases, it is clear that Veṅkaṭanātha could depend on second-hand quotations, because already Yāmuna and Rāmānuja used the same quotes and/or because they were widespread in Indian philosophy. A clear instance is the well-known enunciation of the sahopalambhaniyama (restriction according to which an object and its mental image always occur together, so that there is no need to imagine that they are separate), which is found in all three Yāmuna, Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha:

sahopalambhaniyamād abhedo nīlataddhiyoḥ | (PVin 1.54ab)

Then there are quotes which I could not trace in Veṅkaṭanātha’s own predecessors, but which are used by other non-Buddhist authors, such as this well-known one (reused also by Vācaspati):

nirupadravabhūtārthasvabhāvasya viparyayaiḥ || na bādhā yatnavattve ’pi buddhes tatpakaṣapātataḥ | (PV 2.210–211)

The text probably had a moral meaning, but it is reused by Vācaspati and Veṅkaṭanātha within an epistemological context, as supporting the intrinsic validity theory of Mīmāṃsā:

uktaṃ ca bāhyair eva
anupaplavabhūtārthasvabhāvasya viparyayaiḥ | na bādho yatnavattve ’pi buddhes tatpakaṣapātataḥ || iti (Seśvaramīmāṃsā ad 1.1.5, 1974 p. 74)

Last, there are quotes found only in Veṅkaṭanātha, like the following discussion of inference:

pakṣadharmas tadaṃśena vyāpto hetus tridhaiva saḥ | avinābhāvaniyamād hetvābhāsās tato ’pare || (Hetubindu, v. 1)

āha ca dharmakīrtir hetubindau
pakṣadharmas tadaṃśena vyāpto hetus tridhaiva saḥ | avinābhāvaniyamād dhetvābhāsās tato ’pare || iti (Sarvārthasiddhi ad Tattvamuktākalāpa 9)

What can we conclude out of it? That Veṅkaṭanātha was independently interested in Pramāṇavāda, since he looked for further quotes apart from the stock ones received by his forerunners. This is in itself a significant point, given that Buddhism had already disappeared from South India and was, thus, no longer a real menace. Thus, I would say that Veṅkaṭanātha was intellectually intrigued by Pramāṇavāda and thus wanted to find adequate answers to their challenges.

What do you think? Did you ever encounter “fresh” Buddhist quotations in times when Buddhism was no longer a living tradition?

(On Veṅkaṭanātha, see this post.)
(Cross posted on the Indian Philosophy Blog)

Gerald Kozicz discusses in “From Mainamati to Nyarma. Remarks on the Development from Cruciform to Oblong-shaped Temple Layouts” (Journal of Bengal Art, 13) some key transformations in temple architecture and their import. He notices that Buddhist temples around the 10th c. move from an initial structure where a solid stūpa lies at the middle and an ambulatory encircles it to one where the center is occupied by a cella. This is probably due to the influence of the maṇḍala-concept, in order to make it possible for the practitioner to access the center of the temple/of the maṇḍala (and, thus, to identify with its supreme figure). But can one convincingly argue that a practitioner was aware of the symbolic value of the spatial elements within the temple? Was not he just worshipping images, wherever they were put?

image by GK

The topic has to do with two of my pet-topics.

1. There are no “lay” users of “texts” (including in this definition whatever can be interpreted, be it a philosophical work, a work of art, a performance, an architecture) in Classical South Asia. The audience does not need to be furnished with all interpretative clues, it does not need any in-troduction (Ein-leitung) to lead him/her into the text. By contrast, the audience is usually made of educated people who know the context well enough.
2. Perception is not a natural, neutral (i.e., subject-independent) process. Rather, it depends on what the perceiver already knows about what s/he is currently perceiving. In my favourite example, one only sees a willow if one knows how it looks like. If not, s/he will not see the willow among other trees. Similarly, Gerald Kozicz comments about the fact that a practitioners perceives the architectural rendering of a maṇḍala also once put in an oblong shape because “the way we experience our environment largely depends on what we know. In other words: perception is not a passive act, but a reflective process. Thus, once the practitioner was initiated, i.e. had the ability to understand the architectural language that was underlying the process of transformation from an ideal diagram to an architectural plan, he was also able to perceive the spatial system as a maṇḍala“.

Do you know of other examples of knowledge-influenced perception?

For my discussion of the dependence of perception on Linguistic Communication, see this post on my previous blog. For other posts on Gerald Kozicz’ work on the spatial symbolism in Buddhist art, see here and here.