[Obj:] But in this way the Revered one alone, who is the giver of all results, is the one to whom one must take refuge, even in order for surrender in Him to succeed. What is the purpose at this point (in the text) of surrendering to Lakṣmī?

[R:] It is not so. If one ascertained that it is possible to surrender now (i.e., before surrendering to Lakṣmī) to the Revered one, then one would be using (upādā-) that (surrender) in order to [reach] liberation (mokṣa), but this should not be employed in order to achieve that (liberation). If, by contrast, one were not able to ascertain that it is possible [to directly surrender to Nārāyaṇa], then [it would be] even less likely for one to do so.

nanv evaṃ sakalaphalaprado bhagavān eva tatprapattisiddhyartam apy āśrīyatām, kim iha lakṣmīprapadanena? maivam. yadi bhagavatprapadanam idānīṃ śakyam iti niścinuyāt, tadā mokṣārtham eva tad upādadīta. na punas tadarthaṃ tat prayuñjīta. aniścite tu śakyatve natarām. (Intro to v. 1, Aṇṇaṅgarācārya 1940–1: 98).

In other words, in order to surrender, one must be desperate, up to the point of despairing about their possibility to successfully surrender. If one said “I surrender”, while still thinking to be in control one one’s situation, one would not in fact be really surrendering, since surrendering involves giving up the responsibility for one’s salvation (this is technically called bharanyāsa ‘giving up the burden’). Thus, surrendering in order to reach salvation would be an internal contradiction. Still, one’s ability to independently surrender shows that one was indeed free to surrender.

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!)

In Sanskrit intellectual history there is not a single word for “commentary” and several words focus on different aspects (`bhāṣya’ for an extensive commentary spelling out aphorisms (MBh, ŚBh, ŚrīBh…), `vyākhya’ or `vyākhyāna’ literally meaning `explanation’ and often used as a synonym of bhāṣya when writing a subcommentary thereon, `vārttika’ originally for a concise commentary in aphoristic form (Kātyayana’s V), later for texts encompassing such form (NV), or written in verses (ŚV) or encompassing verses (PV, TV), `ṭīkā’ for a subcommentary (Bṛ, NVVTṬ…), `ṭīppaṇī’ for a commentary on only specific points here and there and so on, please read more in Preisendanz 2008 and Ganeri 2010). These plurality of words suggests (like the proverbial case of the many words for ‘snow’ in the Inuits’ language) a long familiarity with the practice of commenting, seen as entailing many different approaches to a text (or texts). (Btw: I am not at all claiming that this is unique to the Sanskrit world, don’t start telling me about many Latin words from glossa onwards).

Typically, these texts tend to focus either on the single text they are commenting on or on it together with the one this was, in turn, a commentary thereon (for instance, Vācaspati’s commentary on the NV, taking into account also the NBh and the NS). Another characteristic of such commentaries is that they will explicitly refer to texts of opposing schools, whereas they will just silently reuse texts of their own school, since they feel them as part of their own history, immediately recognisable to themselves and their audience.

Which kinds of texts would one comment upon?
1. In the standard case in philosophy, texts of one’s own school; but also
2. Authoritative (usually religious) texts that did not belong to one’s own tradition, but that one wanted to gain for one’s own tradition (for instance, Abhinavagupta’s commentary on the Paratriṃśikā).

What is the role of commentary in Sanskrit philosophy? It is the standard way of writing philosophy. There was a small number of aphoristic texts which did not present them as commentaries (but which often evoke other views and quote other authors), and starting possibly with Maṇḍana (8th c.) some monographs were written on specific topics, however, the practice of commentaries remained the standard and most common way of doing philosophy, enabling one to write about many topics. A common misunderstanding to be erased is therefore the equation of commentaries with non-original and pedantic work. This was most of the time not the case with philosophical commentaries.

However, the circumstances change with time (as to be expected) and if we look at commentaries post 13th c. the situation looks different.
I will focus on especially two aspects:

1. 1. the relation between text and commentary
2. 2. the relation between commentary and its sources

Concerning 1., many commentaries become increasingly not just about a single text (or a sequence of texts), but interact more with a network of texts (as I have discussed elsewhere in the case of Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā, see Freschi 2018).
A very noteworthy case is that of the relation between the Advaitasiddhi and the Nyāyāmṛta. The latter is a very influential text of the Dvaita Vedānta school by Vyāsatīrtha, in some sense we could say that it is the text through which the Dvaita Vedānta becomes part of the mainstream philosophical discourse. How could this happen? Because Vyāsatīrtha took up Madhva’s (the founder of Dvaita Vedānta) central theses, but stripped them of Madhva’s idiosyncratic style and “repackaged” them in the powerful argumentative style of Navya Nyāya. Form is not only a matter of style when it comes to philosophical discourse and this change meant that Madhva’s core ideas and intuitions were now formulated in a strongly inferential form and made a really compelling case for their validity.

At this point, the Advaita Vedānta school could not continue to ignore Dvaita Vedānta. An Advaita Vedānta champion, Madhusūdana, took up the challenge and wrote a detailed response to the Nyāyāmṛta in the form of a detailed commentary (almost line-by-line) to it. This was not the kind of appropriation commentary I discussed above but rather a close rejoinder. At the same time, Madhusūdana needed to invoke his own set of authorities to join the discussion, thus contributing to the network-isaiton of the commentary.

Concerning 2., something I noticed in Veṅkaṭanātha’s commentaries is that they (against what I described above and in Freschi 2014) quote and mention people of Veṅkaṭanātha’s school and silently reuse opponents. Why so? It seems that quotations and reuse have shifted into a way to give prestige and authority to one’s position as part of the school, in a way that the reuse of opponents’ names and direct quotes would not be able to do.

Yāmuna is not strictly speaking a Vedāntin, at least not in all his works. Nonetheless, the extant portion of his Saṃvitsiddhi (henceforth SSi) starts with a typically Vedānta concern, namely the exegesis of some Upaniṣadic statements, and especially of the word advaita within them.

The presence of an Upaniṣadic, and, therefore authoritative, starting point does not mean that there is no space for argumentation. By contrast, Yāmuna discusses at length various possible interpretations, so that the quotes open rather than closing the discussion. In this sense, the Upaniṣadic quotes have the same role of controversial sacrificial issues in Pūrva Mīmāṃsā: the discussion is prompted by the problem they raise. The structure of the first pages of the SSi is the same found at times in Veṅkaṭanātha’s philosophical works such as the Seśvaramīmāṃsā insofar as the opinions of several different schools are briefly examined and refuted. However, in these pages of the SSi the opponents have only one chance to speak out their opinion, the discussion does not involve a single speaker at length, and after one has been defeated, Yāmuna moves swiftly to the next one. The situation changes, even within the same SSi, once Yāmuna moves to a topic which has metaphysical and not only hermeneutical relevance, namely whether there is only one saṃvit ‘cognition’, or whether this is differentiated according to its various intentional contents. Here, the discussion turns into an engaging succession of objections and replies.

Yāmuna at times lets some space for sarcasm. An interesting case contrasts Yāmuna’s point of view to that of “believer” Vedāntins (the opponents are identified immediately before as brahmavidaḥ ‘knowers of brahman’. The context is that of the denial of any difference, so that one can postulate that these are Advaita Vedāntins):

Enough! This teaching about brahman suits [only] believers. We are not believers and resort to reason.

hanta! brahmopadeśo ’yaṃ śraddadhāneṣu śobhate. vayam aśraddadhānās ’smo ye yuktiṃ prārthayāmahe. (SSi 1942 p. 131).

The latest issue of the Buddhist Studies Review (33.1—2, 2016) has been published online. The printed issue will follow soon.

The core of the issue is constituted by a collection of articles on the topic of “Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts” and edited by Elisa Freschi together with Cathy Cantwell and Jowita Kramer. Please scroll down for the table of contents.

I would be happy to receive any feedback on the project of dealing with reuse and intertextuality within the specific subfield of Buddhist texts. The Introduction is available OA on Academia.edu.

P.S. the TOC below replaces the wrong one which was erroneously sent out on Monday the 23rd.

Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts

Guest edited by Elisa Freschi, Cathy Cantwell and Jowita Kramer

Table of Contents

—Introduction: Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts [Open Access]
Elisa Freschi, Cathy Cantwell 1-7

Reuse in Buddhist śāstric texts

—Reuse of Text in Pāli Legal Commentaries
Petra Kieffer-Pulz 9-45
—Some Remarks on Sthiramati and his Putative Authorship of the Madhyāntavibhāgaṭīkā, the *Sūtrālaṃkāravṛttibhāṣya and the Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya
Jowita Kramer 47-63
—Veṅkaṭanātha’s Engagement with Buddhist Opponents in the Buddhist Texts he Reused
Elisa Freschi 65-99

Reuse in Buddhist narrative literature

—Walking the Deckle Edge: Scribe or Author? Jayamuni and the Creation of the Nepalese Avadānamālā Literature
Camillo A. Formigatti 101-140

Reuse in Buddhist canonical literature

—Intertextuality, Contradiction, and Confusion in the Prasādanīya-sūtra, Sampasādanīya-sutta, and 自歡喜經 (Zì huānxǐ jīng)
Charles DiSimone 141-162
—Re-making, Re-marking, or Re-using? Hermeneutical Strategies and Challenges in the Guhyasamāja Commentarial Literature
Paul G. Hackett 163-179

Reuse in Tibetan Buddhist texts

—Re-presenting a Famous Revelation: Dudjom Rinpoche’s Work on the ‘Ultra Secret Razor Lifeforce Vajrakīlaya’ (yang gsang srog gi spu gri) of Pema Lingpa (padma gling pa, 1450–1521)
Cathy Cantwell 181-202
—Rewritten or Reused? Originality, Intertextuality, and Reuse in the Writings of a Buddhist Visionary in Contemporary Tibet
Antonio Terrone 203-231

Final Reflections

—Thoughts on Originality, Reuse, and Intertextuality in Buddhist Literature Derived from the Contributions to the Volume
Vesna A. Wallace

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.

*These dates are based on Potter’s online bibliography, previously printed as Potter 1995.

The context is that of a discussion about substance. Veṅkaṭanātha feels the need to respond to the (no longer actual) criticisms of some Buddhist opponents from long ago and tries to establish the persistence of substance through time on the basis of the fact that we can, for instance, touch what we had previously seen, a phenomenon which would be unexplainable if one were to seize only qualia without substrate. The Buddhist point of view is presented as the pūrvapakṣa one needs to defeat:

evam āhur vaibhāṣikāḥ—

nirādhārā nirdharmakāś ca rūpādayaś catvāraḥ padārthāḥ. te cakṣurādyekaikendriyagrāhyāḥ iti. (SS ad TMK 1.8)

So said the Vaibhāṣikas:

“The categories are four, beginning with the visible, [and] they are without support and without characteristics. They are perceivable by only one sense-faculty [respectively], beginning with the sight (for the visible) and so on.”

This is somewhat surprising, since I do not know of Vaibhāṣikas upholding the existence of four instead of five skandhas. Anyway, the reference to rūpa makes one think of the group rūpa-vedanā-saṃjñā-saṃskāra-vijñāna, perhaps in the form of the classification rūpa-citta-caitta-cittaviprayukta found in Vasubandhu’s AKBh.

Immediately thereafter, however, comes the verse about Vātsīputrīyas, which reads as follows:

vātsīputrās tu śabdādīn pañca vaibhāṣikā viduḥ |

śabdātmānaś caturṣv eva kecid ity apare ‘bruvan ||

Here, the reference to śabda brings one back to śabda-sparśa-gandha-rasa-rūpa classification.

I am not sure I can translate the verse correctly, but due to the preceding one, I would try something like:

Others say, by contrast, that the Vātsīputra Vaibhāṣikas know five [categories] beginning with śabda [and] that [these categories] consist in śabda [etc.], instead of only four [categories] (as maintained above).

Does it mean that the Vatsīputrīyas recognised the substances usually acknowledged in “Hindu” systems?