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!)

The final round-table tried to extract some general conclusions of the three-days discussion:

STEP 1. Should we use European categories at all?
Most of the art-historians and some of the philologists among us suggested just to refrain from using European categories such as Renaissance. They influence their users with unneeded assumptions and offer no concrete advantage. One of the philologists suggested therefore a 20–30 ys moratorium in the use of such categories.

Most other scholars, however, rather agreed on the need to use (also) European categories. In a beautiful simile, a musicologist explained that our categories are unavoidable and we should rather be aware of them and careful in their use: “One of the practices in ethnomusicology is to transcribe music that is traditionally transmitted orally into European staff notation in order to preserve and convey the music being discussed. However, it became apparent fairly early in the history of the discipline that by transcribing music that is not based on concepts in European art music into staff notation, the music thus conveyed was altered substantially. The categories and concepts through which we understand European art music are not necessarily significant in the music of other cultures, but it is almost impossible to bypass them as they become part of the way that those trained in European art music then perceive music”.

STEP 2: Careful and self-conscious use of “Renaissance”
In order to use the term and concept of “Renaissance”, we need a working definition of it. The following working definition has been therefore suggested (notes on each word follow):

What does Renaissance mean? An efflorescence prompted among a group of people by a revival of the past after an interruption.
An efflorescence is needed, since a revivalistic movement not leading to any new outburst in the arts, literature, philosophy, etc. cannot be labelled “Renaissance”.
It is difficult to define how many people make “a group”, but there needs to be a movement, not just a few connected individuals not gaining momentum.
The rupture element is also needed, otherwise there is just continuity. In other words, each generation is quite naturally inspired by the preceding one, but a Renaissance is characterised by the fact that one seeks inspiration from a more distant past. This past needs to be real (not mythical*), but not the immediately preceding one (otherwise it is just continuity). The past must therefore be felt to have been dormant for a while. Further, the appeal to be the past must be something one is aware of, something deliberate and intentional (otherwise, again, there is just continuity) and usually something the audience is also aware of. Therefore, one needs a golden age period which is specifically located and gives inspiration for a new efflorescence.
Please note that in the case of performative arts we don’t really know whether the elements we go back to were really existing, since we don’t have visual or audio recordings (as pointed out by LPe).
Why can’t the past be just a mythical one? Readers who are familiar with South Asia will for instance be reminded of the omnipresent hints at the lunar dynasty (virtually each king claims to descend from it). However, we don’t have any real artefacts we can look back to in the case of the lunar dynasty; there is no lunar poetry, no lunar painting, no lunar capitals.

STEP 3. Beware of the political element
As highlighted by AP, CF and others, the use of the term “Renaissance” is not value-neutral. By saying that something is a “Renaissance”, one is often issuing a statement of value. Nor can scholars forget that this is already happening in front of our eyes, with the term “Renaissance” appropriated by various groups, usually for controversial political purposes (as discussed, for instance, in BL’s speech). Thus, we don’t want to lean back in our armchairs and issue verdicts about Renaissances in the world, but nor can we just abjure our scholarly responsibility while others are issuing these verdicts already, for non-scholarly purposes.

STEP 4. Should we add also some specific elements to the operative definition above?
The main problem is finding a balance between a precise definition (a vague definition is just useless) and a too-narrow one. Thus, the following criteria are, as stressed by EM, sufficient, but not necessary conditions. Renaissance(s) are complex phenomena, but they may entail one or the other elements between individuality, secularism, knowledge circulation (CP) and the formation of a Canon (the last addition is due to LPa). Other possible ingredients for Renaissance(s) are economic prosperity, as well as a dynamic society and possibly also religious changes.

STEP 5. Why should we use the label and concept “Renaissance”?
I personally think that our use of this term and concept should not be part of a hegemonic discourse, but rather meant as a tool to ask new questions.
RK for instance suggested looking at the function of these and similar terms (“awakening” in the so-called Bengali Renaissance, for instance) in the settings in which they were used.

What do readers think? Shall we speak of “Renaissances” in the plural? And what does this entail?

One of the leitmotifs of Andrew Ollett’s review (for which, let me repeat it, I am deeply grateful) is that he suggests locating the work of Rāmānujācārya historically, perhaps by comparing his sources and methodology with what was happening in Benares in the 16h and 17th centuries (and about which one might want to read the studies by Anand Venkatkrishnan). Again, as for context, Ollett suggests identifying the abhiyukta ‘experts’ mentioned in the following quote with lexicographers (against my hypothesis of identifying them with Viśiṣṭādvaitins on the basis of the context and of the occurrences of abhiyukta in the Tantrarahasya):

devatoddeśena dravyatyāgo yāga ity abhiyuktopadeśaś ceti. (TR IV, 9.4.4)

And it is instructed by learned people that the sacrifice is the relinquishing of the substances in the name of the deity

On a different note, Ollett notes that some of the parallels with Western philosophers (which he, overall, praises), for instance “von Wright’s formalization of Thomistic deontics (pp. 124–127) do not immediately help us to understand the positions that Rāmānujācārya represents” (p. 635). This is a problem most of us have to come to terms with, since comparisons often risk to require much energy before they can at all lead somewhere. In fact, they often need a double expertise in order to be effective. Nonetheless, I still think that we comparisons are just unavoidable. I hope that my more recent works on deontic logic (together with A. Ciabattoni, B. Lellmann and F. Genco, see for instance here) could spread more light on the parallel with von Wright and on its usefulness in understanding conundrums such as the Śyena one.

Similarly, Ollett on the one hand thinks that my charts and schemes are “necessary”, while on the other he notes that I “rarely explain precisely what relations the arrows signify”, which is true, I must admit. I will do better in the future, now that I know that not everyone shares my intuitions regarding arrows.

In the second paragraph of p. 635, Ollett discusses my analysis of the arthabhāvanā as being the object which is caused to be by the svargabhāvanā. Apart from indirectly noting a typo (a missed -m in yāgakaraṇā svargabhāvanā), Ollett notes that “śābdī– and ārthībhāvanā are joined incoherently […], since it is the Vedas, and not the person addressed by the injunction, that bring-into-being the bringing-into-being of heaven on the part of the person addressed by the injunction”. Now, although Ollett is right that the śabdabhāvanā (I prefer this terminology, since śābdībhāvanā is later and is not found in Rāmānujācārya) pertains to language and causes to be the initiation of the activity by the person, svargakāmo yajeta imposes an obligation on the svargakāma. It is him, not the Vedas, who is addressed by the injunction as the one upon which the duty to bring about a sacrificial activity rests. In this sense, and taking into account Ollett’s objections, svargakāmo yajeta can perhaps be paraphrased as yāgakaraṇāṃ svargaphalabhāvanām bhāvayet ‘he should undertake an activity leading to heaven and having the sacrifice as its instrument’. An alternative (and easier) way out could be to stop at yagakāraṇena svargam bhāvayet. Or, if one wants to make the śabdabhāvanā explicit and take the risk of hiding its imperative character, yāgakaraṇāṃ svargaphalabhāvanāṃ bhāvayitum (vedaiḥ) prerito’sti.

A second point mentioned by Ollett regards a sentence found at p. 88, where I show how the verbal root expresses both content and instrument. Ollett would have probably liked both elements to be signalled in the Sanskrit paraphrasis, like they are in the scheme before the paraphrasis.

The review makes further subtle points, aiming at understanding better terms which I translated in a “less specific” way. I am surprised (but I should not, knowing Ollett as a sarvajña-to-be) by Ollett’s easyness in understanding the intricacies of the text (something I spent years on). I welcome, in this sense, Ollett’s glosses of aidamarthya (“a condition of standing in a teleological relationship that must be ‘fulfilled’ in the construal of all prescriptions”) and of codaka (“a rule of transference of elements from the archetype into the ectype”). By contrast, I thought that saying that a prescription “promotes” the performance of a sacrifice could have been understood easily enough to mean that the prescription causes the sacrificer to perform the sacrifice (whereas Ollett laments that I have used this term “without explaining what it would mean for a prescription to ‘promote’ the performance of a sacrifice”). Once again, my lack of command of English may have deluded me.

Ollett does not suggest any emendation in the Sanskrit text, although he notes that the Telegu manuscript collated was probably the same one used by the original editor and that the variants are all due to conjectures or typos (note that the Tantrarahasya has been edited twice and that the Telegu manuscript I collated was known to the second editor, who believed it was an additional manuscript to the one used in the first edition). This brings me back to the problem of whether one should collate all manuscripts available or not. In the case of my book, the first reason for reproducing the text of the Tantrarahasya was the apparatus with parallel texts and sources (the variant readings of the Telegu manuscript alone would not have prompted me to prepare a new edition). On the other hand, one could always suggest (see Petra’s comments to the post linked to above), that the more evidence the better and that collating additional manuscripts gives at least more reasons to accept or reject the text as it had been previously edited.

Let me close with one of Ollett’s flattering remarks:

Although less comprehensive, it [=the book] does for Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā what Edgerton’s version of the Mīmāṃsānyāyaprakāśa and Benson’s recent (2010) version of the Mīmāṃsānyāyasaṃgraha have done for Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, namely to make these valuable overviews of their respective systems available to a wider audience.

Last, let me note that ironically, one of the “examples of the value added by Freschi’s commentary” was the topic of a paper I submitted to a WSC. It was rejected, something which makes me once again aware of how many among my best results (the papers on deontic logic, the books on textual reuse, the paper on Jayanta’s linguistics) originate out of previous rejections (but perhaps there is no causal relation other than the fact that I received many rejections).

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).

1. Yoga-Hayagrīva, seated in padmāsana, holding in the upper arms discus and conch and in the lower ones the Vedas (represented as a thin book) and the jñānamudrā
2. Lakṣmī-Hayagrīva, seated in padmāsana and with the same attributes, but with Lakṣmī sitting on his left knee

Both are very well-spread, in temples, paper and cloth paintings and both appear to originate from Veṅkaṭanātha’s writings, the Yoga-Hayagrīva from his Hayagrīvastotra whereas the Lakṣmī-Hayagrīva seems to be a modification of the first according to the theology of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism (in which Lakṣmī is inseparable from Viṣṇu) and is described in Veṅkaṭanātha’s Śatadūṣaṇī. The center of his cult seems to have been the temple at Thiruvahindrapuram, which is also considered the “home-temple” of the Vaṭakalai religion. Unfortunately, I have never been there, nor can I plan a trip there in the immediate future. Thus, I would welcome comments and corrections by the readers.

The following one is a photo of the whole temple.

Next follows the photo of (possibly, since I have not been there) the main icon of Hayagrīva found either in the main temple or in one nearby. Readers will immediately recognise that it conforms to the Yoga-Hayagrīva typology.

Last, an icon of Lakṣmī-Hayagrīva, whose origin I do not know. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a good image of the Lakṣmī-Hayagrīva image in the Thiruvahindrapuram temple (it is reproduced as Fig. 12a in Sridhara Babu 1990).
For more information on Hayagrīva and his connection with Veṅkaṭanātha, you can see this presentation. On Hayagrīva in general, see the posts under this tag.

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 occurrences of Hayagrīva in the Mahābhārata (henceforth MBh) have been neatly summarised in van Gulik 1935, pp. 10–15 and in Nayar 1994, chapter 3. Van Gulik notes that in different portions of the Mahābhārata we find Hayagrīva connected with the recitation of the Vedas and that in MBh 12.335.43–69 Viṣṇu horse-headed brings back the Vedas and kills their thieves, the two asuras Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who had stolen them from Brahmā. The following is an excerpts of the main action (my tentative translation):

Having entered the mythical stream, [Viṣṇu-Hayagrīva] performed the supreme Yoga |

Performing the sound according to the rules of phonetics, he pronounced the Oṃ || 12.353.50 ||

The sound was resonant and went in each direction and was charming |

It was in the whole earth and had all good qualities || 12.353.51 ||

Then, the two asuras, made up an agreement regarding the Vedas (presumably: regarding when to come back and pick them up) |

and having threw them on the bank of the mythical stream, they run whence the sound came from || 12.353.52 ||

At that point, the king god carrying a horse head, |

Hari, grasped all the Vedas which had arrived to the bank of the mythical stream || 12.353.53 ||

He gave them back to Brahmā and went then back to his own nature |

[…] Then, the two [demons] sons of Danu, Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who did not see anything [as the source of the charming sound they had head before] |

went back quickly to the place [where they had left the Vedas] and they looked || 12.353.55 ||

Where the Vedas had been thrown, the place was empty! |

[…] Then there was a fight between them and Nārāyaṇa |

The two Madhu and Kaiṭabha, whose bodies where filled with rajas and tamas, |

were killed by the [now become] ‘Killer of Madhu’ (Madhusūdana, a name of Viṣṇu), who thereby pleased Brahmā || 12.335.64 ||

rasāṁ punaḥ praviṣṭaś ca yogaṁ paramam āsthitaḥ |
śaikṣaṁ svaraṁ samāsthāya om iti prāsr̥jat svaram || 12.353.50 ||
sa svaraḥ sānunādī ca sarvagaḥ snigdha eva ca |
babhūvāntarmahībhūtaḥ sarvabhūtaguṇoditaḥ || 12.353.51 ||
tatas tāv asurau kr̥tvā vedān samayabandhanān |
rasātale vinikṣipya yataḥ śabdas tato drutau || 12.353.52 ||
etasminn antare rājan devo hayaśirodharaḥ |
jagrāha vedān akhilān rasātalagatān hariḥ |
prādāc ca brahmaṇe bhūyas tataḥ svāṁ prakr̥tiṁ gataḥ || 12.353.53 ||
[…]
atha kiṁ cid apaśyantau dānavau madhukaiṭabhau |
punar ājagmatus tatra vegitau paśyatāṁ ca tau |
yatra vedā vinikṣiptās tat sthānaṁ śūnyam eva ca || 12.353.55 ||
[…]
atha yuddhaṁ samabhavat tayor nārāyaṇasya ca || || 12.353.63 ||
rajastamoviṣṭatanū tāv ubhau madhukaiṭabhau |
brahmaṇopacitiṁ kurvañ jaghāna madhusūdanaḥ || 12.353.64 ||

The connection with the Veda, perhaps both with their oral and written form (although it is possible that what is rescued is still an oral version of the Vedas), is here very evident. It is also interesting that this version of the rescue of the Vedas is the only one which will be referred to in Pāñcarātra and in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta texts. I will also come back (in a future post) to the motif of the ocean, which is sometimes connected with Hayagrīva (although the word rasā might also mean ‘lower regions, hell’, its connection with tala `bank’, as well as the evidence derived from parallel texts, seem to suggest the meaning ‘stream’). However, the rationale for the fact that Viṣṇu assumed exactly a horse head is altogether absent (unlike in the case of his Matsya or Varāha-avatāras, where the transformation had to do with the task to be accomplished).

Another mention of Hayagrīva in the MBh has it figure as the name of a demon slaughtered by Viṣṇu:

The two Madhu and Kaiṭabha have been slain by [Viṣṇu], who lies on the ocean |

Having reached a different birth, Hayagrīva has also been slain in the same way || 5.128.49 ||

Instead, the following one is a summary of the Hayagrīva story in one of its Purāṇic forms:

A horse-headed Asura called Hayagriva once invoked Brahma and sought from him [\dots] a boon by which he could be defeated by none other than another being who also had a horse’s head, also called Hayagriva. Such a creature did not exist […] The Devas did not know what to do. […] When they went to Vishnu, they found him taking a nap, resting his chin on his bow. Taking the form of termites, the Devas ate into the bowstring so that the bow shaft snapped with such force that it severed Vishnu’s neck. To save the headless Vishnu, the Devas sacrificed a horse and placed its head on his neck. Vishnu thus transformed into a horse-headed being. […] Vishnu challenged Hayagrīva to a duel, smote him with his mace and restored the Veda. […] Brahma then restored Vishnu’s head. (Skanda Purāṇa). (Pattanaik 2006, s.v)

There are various versions of this story (other versions have, e.g., Viṣṇu loose his head because of a curse and involve no good finality for it, see Nayar 1994, chapter 3) and in any case the story looks somehow strange, since:

• it looks like an ad hoc explanation for Viṣṇu’s horse head
• it looks like the conflation of three different stories, i.e., the slaughter of the demon Hayagrīva, the slaughter of Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who had stolen the Vedas, and the slaughter of the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu. As for the latter, according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, after years of ascesis, the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu had obtained from Brahmā a boon of his choice and asked for immortality, but Brahmā refused. Therefore, Hiraṇyakaśipu asked to be killed neither by a human being nor by an animal, nor by a demon, nor by a God. He is at last killed by Viṣṇu in the form of Narasiṃha, who is neither a human being, nor an animal, nor a God. The request by Hayagrīva seems very similar.

It may be objected that once one does not accept the Purāṇic versions of the story, it is difficult to make sense of Viṣṇu’s horse head. In fact, this might be due to either an ancient (Vedic or perhaps Indoeuropean) attribute of a deity, linking it to the horse because of the latter’s importance in the Vedic mythology or the inclusion of a pre-existing deity in the Smārta pantheon through the device of turning it into an avatāra of Viṣṇu.

Thus, in my opinion Hayagrīva is a (perhaps Vedic) deity, perhaps assimilated to Viṣṇu or always identical with him, and the horse head is linked to the importance of the horse in the Vedic culture. The same importance has led to the invention of several demons with horse attributes, until someone conflated the two stories into one, with added details from other demons’ slaughters (Madhu and Kaiṭabha and Hiraṇyakaśipu).

On Hayagrīva see also this post (about the Hayaśīrśa Saṃhitā) and this one (about Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta texts on him).

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…

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.

In fact, most of us learnt in their early years of study of Classical Indology (broadly construed, so that it should cover the intellectual production of South Asia, from Śrī Laṅkā to Tibet, from Pāli to Sanskrit, Classical Tamil, Classical Tibetan, etc.) that Buddhism had become influential in Tamil Nadu, at least from the time of Amaravati onwards. When one looks closer at the data, however, the findings are less clear.
Concerning the timeline of Buddhism in Tamil Nadu:

• First of all, the findings appear to indicate clearly a decline and then disappearance of Buddhism in the early second millennium AD (see this post).
• I could not find any information concerning clear evidences of an institutional presence of Buddhism before the 4th c. AD. This does not exclude that there might have been people who considered themselves Buddhists, but they did not leave trace of their belief.

Concerning the type of Buddhism,

• Petra Kieffer-Pülz (see her comment here) showed us evidence of the presence of Theravāda Buddhists using Pali as medium in Tamil Nadu from an earlier (perhaps already 3rd c.) until a late age (13th c.). Further evidences about their presence can be found also in Schalk’s work (see the same post).
• Schalk (see the same post) gathered informations regarding syncretic Buddhism.
• The Maṇimēkalai (see above) reuses materials from the early Pramāṇavāda school.

Thus, it lies beyond question that there were Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhists in Tamil Nadu, at least from the 4th c. until their decline in the 12th–13th c.

But what do the Maṇimēkalai and the place of birth of Dharmakīrti (or of Bodhidharma) tell us about the fortune of Pramāṇavāda in Tamil Nadu? Not so much, I think. In fact, even if Dharmakīrti were really born in Tamil Nadu (in order to assert this with safety we should be able to determine that Tibetan historians clearly meant Tamil Nadu when they spoke of, e.g., yul lho phyogs), he left his place of origin very early in his life and does not seem to have left anything comparable to Nalanda in Tamil Nadu.

As for the Maṇimēkalai, the fact that it reuses a relatively easy manual on Buddhist logic does not seem to me to mean anything more than that the Nyāyapraveśa was easy enough to be used by a wide number of readers (and it was in fact used by Jaina and even “Hindu” authors, see Tachikawa 1971).

Once again, I am sorry to admit that I do not read Tamil. Thus, on the Manimekalai I rely entirely on secondary literature (especially Anne Monius, Paula Richman and the contributions in the volume edited by Peter Schalk, A Buddhist woman’s path to enlightenment).

]]> https://elisafreschi.com/2014/10/10/buddhism-in-tamil-nadu-until-the-end-of-the-first-millennium-ad/feed/ 2 1106 https://elisafreschi.com/2014/10/06/the-end-of-buddhism-in-precolonial-south-india/ https://elisafreschi.com/2014/10/06/the-end-of-buddhism-in-precolonial-south-india/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:35:20 +0000 elisa freschi http://elisafreschi.com/?p=1077 When did Buddhism finally disappear from Tamil Nadu? And which kind of Buddhism was active in Tamil Nadu until its disappearance?


I am not an expert on this topic, thus, here I only would like to discuss with readers about what I found out in secondary literature and the seeming problems the secondary literature entails.

• The most comprehensive resource I could locate are the books and articles edited or authored by Peter Schalk, who appears to be the major expert on Buddhism in Tamil Nadu and claims to have examined all possible primary sources on Buddhism in that country. Through a cross-examination of coins, inscriptions, artefacts, texts on Buddhists and texts of Buddhists, Schalk could conclude that “none is before the 4th and none after the 14th century” (Schalk in Deeg et al., 2011, section 8). More in detail, the last Tamiḷ Buddhist document (an inscription displaying a syncretic form of Buddhism and Śaivism, see Āḷvāppiḷḷai Vēluppiḷḷai 2002, section 5.7) is dated to the 13th c.
• Buddhism, was, moreover, never supported by royal patronage in Tamil Nadu, unlike Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism and in part also Jainism. Thus, it lacked the protection it could enjoy in other parts of South Asia and in Śrī Laṅkā (Schalk 2011, section 10). This, together with the pressure from Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism are probably the causes of the Buddhist decline described as early as in 600 AD (in the Mattavilāsa prahasana, see Schalk, 2013, p. 30).
• The lack of importance of Buddhism in the intellectual arena of Tamil Nadu is also testified by the fact that Jainas are much more frequently attacked and criticised by Śaiva and Buddhist authors (see Schalk 2013, p. 33).
• In fact, even before the 14th c., Buddhism in Tamil Nadu had evolved into a form of Buddhism-Śaiva syncretism, so that:
  

  This “freedom’s” strenght was also its weakness: without an authoritative textual base it was soon assimilated with Caivam [=Śaivism] and finally eliminated in the 14th century” (2011, section 1).

  This open and syncretic nature of Tamil Buddhism is also evident in the fact that, as shown again by Schalk (2011), it did not possess a proper canon.

• A further interesting resource is Anne Monius’ 2001 book, which focuses on the problems entailed in the study of the Buddhist community in South India through texts which only imagine it, such as the poem Maṇimēkalai. I will not focus on her text here, since my main concern is with a later period (1000-1500).

What else can we say about what Buddhists in Tamil Nadu read or listened to, and believed?

1. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (ca. 602–664) speaks of a large community and that it belonged to the Great Vehicle. However, Schalk convincingly shows that Xuanzang was speaking from hearsay and is not fully reliable (2011, section 11).
2. There is a widespread tradition (of which I could not locate the primary source and I ask for help from learned readers) saying that in 1236 a group of bhikkus from Kañci left for Śrī Laṅkā to re-establish there a Theravāda ordination line.
3. The Jaina Tamil text Nīlakēci seems to target a Abhidharma-like kind of Buddhism (see Āḷvāppiḷḷai Vēluppiḷḷai 2002, section 5.4, especially 5.4.8; for the identification of the Nīlakēci‘s polemical target with Mahāyāna, see Kandaswamy 1999, to which Shalk 2002, section 1.4.2, polemically replies).
4. The vīracōḷiyam treatise (written during the reign of Vīrarājēndracōḷa, 1063–1070, and commented upon in the 12th c.) is a Buddhist text on Grammar. I wonder whether it could be connected to the flourishing of Buddhist Grammars in Pāli countries (see Ruiz-Falqués’ studies thereon, here) or rather only to the Cāndravyākraṇa.

Point No. 2 might seem to slightly clash with the evidence of the Theravāda ordination line in Śrī Laṅkā being re-established by monks from Pagan (Burma). Nonetheless, it is not impossible that the ordination line was interrupted again and one needed again bhikkus from abroad. These bhikkus most probably did not belong to the syncretic Buddhism described above. In fact, Schalk explicitly acknowledges the presence of Pāli ācariyas (ācārya) in Tamil Nadu, although he adds that

We know that they were also endured in Nākapaṭṭiṇam during the Cōḷa period, but they were evidently secluded, because they left no traces in the documents produced by the Cōḷa establishment (Schalk, 2002, section 5.1.1).

Now, a last question: Do you know whether Buddhist texts were preserved in Jaina institutions in Tamil Nadu, as it happened in North India? This could account for the presence of Buddhist texts even when an institutionalised Buddhist community was absent…

If you are wondering why I am interested in the topic, you can read this post of mine on Veṅkaṭanātha’s (Tamil Nadu, 1269–1370) Buddhist quotes.

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