Prapatti, to begin with, cannot be sought for independently, because one only becomes eligible for prapatti only after having become aware of one’s desperation because one cannot ever be eligible for bhakti (not to speak of karma- and jñānamārga). Thus, one’s only way to reach prapatti is by means of trying to achieve bhakti and becoming aware of one’s inability to do so and therefore deciding to just surrender to God or His spouse.

Bhakti, in turn, has an intellectual aspect and an emotional one. On the one hand, it is defined by Rāmānuja as a continuous meditation on the real nature of God, and therefore needs a preliminary ascertainment of what this nature could be. On the other, it is based on a surplus of loving affection, one that will never be satiated, not even in Vaikuṇṭha. Therefore, since the time of Rāmānuja’s Śaraṇāgatigadya, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors have engaged in a pedagogy of emotions, one enhancing one’s raw emotions and transforming them into soteriologically-relevant ones. The former are temporary and might be about the wrong topic, the latter focus on God, and are able to last forever and become more intense with time. Veṅkaṭanātha tries to reach this level through his learned religious poetry, which is made to be listened/read, re-listened/re-read and pondered upon for a long time, since its many layers of theological meanings can only reveal themselves through a long perusal.

For instance, the detailed descriptions from head to toe (anubhava) of God’s body in various poems by Veṅkaṭanātha are meant to show how one can train one’s sense faculties to relish always more in their object, rather than being satiated by it. The same poems also underline the poet’s unworthiness, possibly so that the listener/reader can get a chance to contemplate their own unworthiness (for some beautifully translated poems by Veṅkaṭanātha, see Hopkins 2007).

Do you agree that emotions come at the end of one’s soteriological journey for Veṅkaṭanātha?

Vedānta Deśika (13th c. South India) stages a discussion between thinkers of the Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya schools on the topic of the validity of cognitions. The first school thinks that validity is intrinsic, the latter thinks it is extrinsic. The Naiyāyika starts by stating “Valid cognitions are produced by the cause producing cognitions plus an additional element (producing their validity), because, while being an effect, they are specified by such an additional element, like invalid cognition are specified by an additional element distinguishing them from valid ones” (vigitā pramā samyaṅmithyāvabodhasādhāraṇakāraṇāt atiriktasahitāj jāyate, kāryatve sati tadviśeṣatvāt apramāvat).
But this does not hold in the case of the Lord’s cognition, which is permanent and uncaused (the Lord has no new cognitions, but perpetually knows everything).

And, if you admit that the Lord’s cognition is intrinsically valid, why should human cognitions be different?

Nor does the syllogism hold in the case of the cognitions of liberated souls, which are also uncaused and still valid.
If the inference were construed as not including the cognitions of liberated people, then these would belong to the contrary case (vipakṣa). But one should not find the probandum in the vipakṣa, whereas this would be the case in a possible contrary inference along the lines of “The validity of the cognitions of ordinary people is unproduced, because it is a valid cognition, like the valid cognition of liberated souls”.

After this long discussion, Vedānta Deśika adds a puzzling statement:

cārvākādeḥ prakṛtaprayoge kā vārtteti cet eṣaiva vipakṣe bādhakābhāvādimayī.

Which relevance/role is there for the Cārvākas and similar [thinkers] in the syllogism under examination (“Valid cognitions are produced by the cause producing cognitions plus an additional element (producing their validity), because they are specified by such additional element, like invalid cognition are specified by an additional element distinguishing them from valid ones”)?

That only, that there are no subsequent invalidating cognitions and other invalidating factors in the vipakṣa.

How do you understand the last sentence? The following is my interpretation, but I am not sure:

The vipakṣa of the given syllogism should be “cognitions that are not effects”. For Naiyāyikas, this is not a good vipakṣa, because there are cognitions that are not effects and are valid, like in the case of the Lord and of liberated souls. For Cārvākas, the problem is that there are no uncaused cognitions, but a valid syllogism needs a vipakṣa.

This does not mean that all emotions are necessarily good. The emotions which are praised are, chronologically speaking, dejection and desperation and then confidence, love (ranging from friendship to passion and awe) and possibly compassion.

Dejection and the absolute desperation in one’s ability to improve one’s condition are absolutely needed at the start of one’s spiritual path. In fact, as long as one thinks to be able to achieve something, no matter how small, one is unconsciously doubting God’s omnipotence and locating oneself above Him. Paradoxically, one’s extreme dejection and the feeling that one will never be saved, since one is not even worthy of begging God for help, are therefore the preliminary step for God’s grace to take place. One’s feeling of extreme distance from God is therefore way closer to Him than the self-conscious confidence of a person who were to think that they are a good Vaiṣṇava.

Once God’s grace has touched one, one feels blissed and joyfully responds to God’s grace with an emotional overflow of confidence and of love. The hymns of the Āḻvārs, which have been recognised as being as authoritative as the Veda for Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, display a vast array of love. One can love God with maternal love (vātsalya), looking at Him as if he were the young Kṛṣṇa. One could also love God with admiration, looking at Him as the ideal king Rāma, and so on. This vast array is less variegated in the reflections of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta philosophers, who rather focus on their feeling of reverence and awe for God. For instance, Tamil and Maṇipravāḷa texts insist on one’s being a slave (aṭiyēṉ) of God.

The interesting element here is that this feeling is not instrumental to the achievement of God’s favour. One does not present oneself as a slave in order to secure God’s favour and then be able to raise to a higher status. By contrast, one’s ideal condition, the liberated state one strives to reach is exactly permanent servitude (as described in Veṅkaṭanātha’s Rahasyatrayasāra).

Kumārila also targets the belief in a Lord akin to the one defended by rational theology, both in Europe and in South Asia, again because this leads to contradictions. Kumārila explains that there is no need of such a Lord in order to explain the creation of the world, since there is no need to adduce further evidence in order to justify the world as it is now (i.e., existing), whereas one would need to adduce a strong external evidence to justify everything contradicting the world as we know it. Therefore, the continuous presence of the world becomes the default status and the theist has the burden of the proof and needs to be able to establish independently of his religious belief that there has been a time when the world did not exist. Similarly, Kumārila shows that the idea of a Lord who is at the same time all-mighty and benevolent is self-contradictory, since if the Lord where really all-might, he would avoid evil, and if he tolerates it, then he is cruel. If one says that evil is due to karman or other causes, Kumārila continues, then this shows that there is no need to add the Lord at all as a further cause and that everything can be explained just on the basis of karman or any other cause.

Are Kumārila’s criticisms also targeted at the idea of an impersonal and non-dual brahman? Kumārila does not explicitly address the issue of the possible distinction between one and the other target. However, a few scant hints may help readers. In a fragment from his lost Bṛhaṭṭīkā preserved in the work of a Buddhist opponent (the Tattvasaṅgraha), Kumārila speaks of deities as being vedadeha, i.e., ‘embodied in the Veda’ (so Yoshimizu 2008, fn. 78). In a verse of the TV, he says that they are ṛgvedādisamūheṣu […] pratiṣṭhitāḥ, i.e., ‘who reside in the Ṛgveda and all other [Vedic scriptures]’ (Yoshimizu 2007b, p. 221). Does this mean that Kumārila was accepting a conception of deities inhabiting the Vedas? I discussed the idea with a colleague who just said that the verses must be interpolated.

What do readers think? Was there local atheism in ancient India?

See also Yoshimizu’s comment to my post on Bhavanātha.

The range of omniscience
A problem (raised by Sudipta Munsi in a comment on this post) connected with the scope of omniscience regards the question of whether an omniscient being also knows all erroneous beliefs. At first sight it might seem that if she does not, she is not completely omniscient and that if she does, she shares also erroneous beliefs, which seems paradoxical. A possible way out consists in claiming that she knows all erroneous beliefs but she attributes them to us. In other words, she knows that I do not know about the place and year of birth of Kumārila, but still correctly knows where and when he was born. Is this solution satisfactorily? Possibly, although this kind of omniscience would lack the first person grasp on how it feels to not know that X or to hold a false belief.

A connected problem regards specifically God’s omniscience: Does God also knows what it is to be in pain? If He does not, He seems to be not omniscient. If He does, He is no longer untouched by sufferance (duḥkha), as claimed in Nyāya and Yoga. In other words, an Īśvara-like God (see below) cannot be said to have experience of duḥkha. His knowledge would nonetheless not be incomplete because duḥkha would be conceived as just a negative entity (the absence of pleasure), which does not need to be separately known. God would be omniscient insofar as He knows all states of affairs, without needing to know also their corresponding absences. By contrast, God as conceived in theistic Vedānta (see below the lines on Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta) can even be said to have experience of duḥkha, insofar as He is the inner controller of each conscious being and shares therefore their experience from within.

God’s omniscience
Nyāya authors accept the existence of a God, usually referred to as Īśvara, who can be proved to exist, and develop on this basis a rational theology which accepts His omniscience and omnipotence. They explain that Īśvara `Lord’ needs to be omniscient in order to deploy His functions, which include the re-arrangement of the world after each periodic destruction and the re-assignment of their karman to each living being. Accordingly, God’s omniscience needs to be understood in a robust sense as the knowledge of all present, past and future states of affairs and as completely actualised (against some Buddhist conceptions discussed above). This, however, entails some problem, insofar as the Lord’s knowledge needs to be at any time complete and is in this sense atemporal. But this seems to mean that (a) there is no space for human free will and (b) the Lord knows the world outside of time. He knows, in other words, all states of affairs simultaneously and independent of time. This mirror-like omniscience has been criticised by authors of the Buddhist epistemological school (see Moriyama 2014 and forthcoming).

Śaiva authors, especially of the Pratyabhijñā school, accept both omniscience of yogins and of the Lord/Īśvara. The first one is often referred to in discussions aiming at establishing the omnipresent nature of the Lord as the supreme subject. In fact, how could memory be possible, if there were not a single subjectivity connecting events from a subjective point of view? And how could knowledge be possible, if there were not a fundamental similarity of nature between knower and known things, which does betrays its partaking to the nature of the absolute subject? The Nyāya account of a plurality of subjectivity is rejected insofar as it clashes with cases like the yogins’ ability to access other minds. The yogin, explain Pratyabhijñā authors, knows other minds from within, as the subject of their thoughts, and does not take other minds as an object to be known, since this knowledge would not be a real knowledge of the other mind, which is intrinsically subjective and cannot be reduced to an object. This ability of the yogin depends on the fact that he has recognised his identity with the Lord and can therefore access any mind. The Lord, as the single all-pervading subject, is in fact de facto omniscient and liberation consists in recognising one’s identity with Him (see R. Torella’s studies on yogipratyakṣa in this school).

Vedāntic authors conceive of God as brahman, and therefore as the only absolute reality. In this sense, the brahman is not an additional entity in the world, and the latter only exists because of Him (Dvaita Vedānta), in Him (Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta) or does not exist ultimately (Advaita Vedānta). Knowledge is considered in Vedāntic school to be a substance. Advaita Vedāntins resolve the duality which would emerge out of the assumption of brahman and knowledge by stating that brahman consists of cit `consciousness’. This is unintentional, since any content would include duality.

Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors conceive of God as brahman and at the same time as a personal God. He is therefore the material cause of the world, which is conceived by Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedāntins to exist only as a specification of Him. Like in the case of Advaita Vedānta, knowledge is conceived as a substance. Unlike in Advaita, knowledge is intentional, and has as its content the whole world. The reality of the world is thus guaranteed by its being a specification of the brahman and by its being a content of His knowledge. At the same time, the brahman is conceived of as a personal God, which means that the two above mentioned ways of relating to the world are not mutually exclusive (as it happens to be the case in Spinoza’s pantheism). Rather, knowledge is connected to Him as His characteristic. It is not just one characteristic among many, nor is it connected to the Lord as a quality to its substrate. By contrast, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors describe the relation between God and His knowledge as one of indissolubility. The two cannot be experienced the one without the other and, although knowledge is ultimately a substance, it behaves as a characteristic of Him (it is therefore called dharmabhūtajñāna `cognition [behaving] like a characteristic’).

Against omniscience
Basing on the same elements, the authors of the Mīmāṃsā elements altogether deny the possibility of omniscience. They explain that omniscience contradicts our experience, where knowledge always increases but never reaches on outmost limit. Against the argument of repeated exercise, they observe that exercise does not need to be able to reach whatever result. For instance, no matter how much one exercises, one will never be able to jump until the moon. Nor will one’s smell be able to perceive sounds, even after an intense training. Thus, there are intrinsic boundaries to each faculty, including one’s intellect, which cannot directly grasp things, without the mediation of perception, inference and the other instruments of knowledge.
Moreover, no one could judge the omniscience of someone else. Thus, claim the Mīmāṃsā authors, the accounts about the Buddha’s omniscience cannot be trustworthy, since no one but an omniscient can vouch for someone else’s omniscience.

Why do Mīmāṃsakas insist so much on the impossibility of omniscience? From an internal and argumentative perspective, because of their commitment to common experience, which should not be contradicted without a valid reason. From an external and socio-philosophical perspective, because their defence of the Veda depends on its uniqueness as instrument of knowledge for knowing dharma `duty’. It is clear that no other human instrument of knowledge could compete with the Veda, since all human instruments of knowledge can only grasp what there is and not what ought to be. However, if there were an omniscient human or divine being, then they could reasonably compete with the Veda and possibly even falsify it.

The Buddhist arguments against omniscience (see Moriyama 2014 and Moriyama forthcoming) are different, insofar as they object only against the Lord’s omniscience, but accept the Buddha’s one. The difference lies in the fact that the Buddha became omniscient, whereas the Lord is allegedly permanently omniscient. Hence, only in the case of the Lord’s omniscience one encounter paradoxes such as the ones seen above and regarding the incompatibility of temporality and omniscience.

Do we need God to make sense of the world’s reality? Michael Dummett, who was surely not known for his religious fanatism came to this conclusion. God is, for this well-known philosopher, the objective perspective from which the world is intelligible as it is. In this sense, God could also be said to be needed in order to avoid the idea of a world as noúmenon, i.e., real but never grasped as it really is.

Against that, one might object that there is no intrinsic reason whence the world needs be intelligible. Yes, it would be hard to imagine that the world is unintelligible for us. But being “hard to believe” is not enough to rule out a view, unless you have a fundamental premiss saying that you prefer what looks reasonable (i.e. harmonises with your background belief). The “reasonability” premiss would rule out all gnostic or Matrix-like world-views, but there is no intrinsic reason to choose it over them.

In other words: Dummett’s thesis is based on the premiss that it is unintelligible to conceive the universe as never having been observed. Dummett sees this premiss as needed in order to safeguard subject-independent direct realism.

However, as it has been argued by Alex Watson, this premiss is not necessarily shared by Indian realists. Some of them, like most Mīmāṃsakas and the author(s) of the Vaiśeṣikasūtra, and even theists among them like Praśastapāda and Udayana do not mention God in relation to the thesis that all existents are knowable. So, even after God has been introduced into Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, He does not play the role of rescuer of the external world. In other words, in spite of claiming that the world is intelligible, Indian realists did not see this as committing them to idealism (the world is not just contained in God’s thoughts) and even less do they see God as the rescuer of the external world.

My contribution, by contrast, focussed on another problem connected with the idea of God as support for the world’s reality, namely the conception of God it requires.

NOTE: The post has been updated thanks to Alex Watson’s thoughtful comments. All shortcomings remain mine only.

The first two parts of my marginal notes on the workshop on Omniscience, Realism and God/no-God have been published here and here.