He had studied first mathematics and physics and then moved to studying Sanskrit in India, Pune. In a recent interview with Vincent Eltschinger (on April 21 2025) he commented the choice to travel to India as due to his desire not to serve as a soldier —a choice which was deeply important to him. But, whatever the initial motivation, his years-long stay in India was meaningful and influential for his life and he never grew out of his fascination for Indian thought.

The fact that he started studying Sanskrit while in India is key to understand the role of Vyākaraṇa in his first many decades of work, given that Vyākaraṇa (or Sanskrit linguistics) is still studied and lively engaged with in contemporary India in general and in Pune in particular. Vyākaraṇa demands deep and almost complete dedication because of its technical character. One needs to know by heart or at least to be able to navigate all the 4000 aphorisms of Pāṇini’s seminal work for the school, together with their punctual glosses by Kātyāyana and the commentary by Patañjali, and this before even being able to open one’s mouth in a symposium of Vaiyākaraṇas. Bronkhorst has been able to contribute to this very technical field, especially to its perhaps most original thinker, Bhartṛhari, but without being swallowed up by the labyrinth of Vyākaraṇa. In contrast, he learnt from its method and contents, but retained his untameable intellectual curiosity.

For scholars of Bhartṛhari, Bronkhorst’s articles are indispensable. But even the ones among of us who never specialised on Bhartṛhari have probably been influenced by Bronkhorst and by his unique blend of thought-provoking ideas and thorough knowledge of the sources. In fact, Bronkhorst was an avid and fast reader, who read hundreds of pages of both Sanskrit scholarship and contemporary, mainly scientific, papers. His ideas looked at first sight almost too thought-provoking, almost like balons d’essay (trial balloons). However, when one tried to refute them, one was forced to see that Bronkhorst knew the Sanskrit sources of the relevant period thoroughly and that his bold ideas were in fact also well-grounded. (Apologies for not discussing here whether they were also ultimately right and completely so. I want to focus more on what we can learn from him than on correcting the occasional typos or on disagreeing with specific points.)

For instance, in May 2021 Dominik Wujastyk organised a (virtual) conference on the topic of Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha (2007), which possibly remains his most influential book. Bronkhorst himself had been invited as a respondent for talks which all engaged with his hypothesis. I was only in the audience, but was astonished to see how, almost twenty years after the book’s composition, Bronkhorst was still able to discuss each of its aspects and to respond (again, I will let to others to assess whether successfully) to each criticism raised by the speakers, through precise references to the epics and/or to Vedic texts.

Let me know enter into some details about a few of Johannes Bronkhorst’s contributions. Again, let me emphasise that there are too many to discuss even a significant percentage of them and that therefore the choice will be partly whimsical. I will focus on

• a) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the development of Sanskrit philosophy: The Greater Magadha hypothesis, the “discovery of dialogue” and its significance for the history of Sanskrit philosophy
• b) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the role of authors in Sanskrit philosophy: his hypothesis about a unitary Yogaśāstra and dis-unitary Mīmāṃsāsūtra and its importance for how we assess Sanskrit aphoristic texts
• c) His hypothesis about a radical difference between Sanskrit thought and European thought
• d) His general sceptical-scientific methodology

• a) Greater Magadha is one of those books about which we remember a moment before and a moment after. Before the book, scholars and lay people alike took it for granted that there was a single line of development within Indian though and that since the Buddha and his thought postdated early Vedic texts by centuries, these needed to contain the seeds which would have later led to the development of Buddhist thought. The texts which were conceptually closer to ancient Buddhism, namely the Upaniṣads were therefore dated to before the Buddha.

  The Greater Magadha takes the opposite point of view and looks at the evidence available with fresh eyes and notices that they are less uniform than we might think. They thus point to a different line of development, one in which there were different roots for Indian culture, which developed in parallel and not just a single line. On the West, the brāhmaṇic culture produced the Vedic texts. On the East of the Indian subcontinent, around Magadha, the culture he provisionally called “śramaṇic” produced Jainism and Buddhism, as well as key ideas that were later absorbed in the Brahmanic fold, such as karman and rebirth. By the way, the presence of an Eastern border for the Brahmanical culture is also attested by Patañjali’s definition of Āryavarta, which has an Eastern boundary (unlike Manu’s description of the same, only a few centuries later).

  The Greater Magadha can explain why karman and rebirth make a sudden entry in the Upaniṣads although they are virtually absent from the preceding Vedic texts. They enter the Brahmanical culture so well-developed and all at once because they had been elaborated for centuries outside of the Brahmanical culture. If Bronkhorst is right, one can stop looking for faint traces of possible forerunners of karman and rebirth in the Vedic Saṃhitās and start focusing on how the theory was already developed in Buddhist texts and then imported into the Upaniṣads. One can also invert the chronology of the Upaniṣads, which post-date the encounter with śramaṇic culture (this does not mean that they need to postdate the life of Siddhartha Gautama, since he was only one exponent of that culture, as is clear through the parallel of Jainism). The same applies to the claim that “Yoga” was practiced by the Buddha. In contrast, the similarities between the PYŚ and the Buddha’s teachings should be. according to Bronkhorst, interpreted as an influence of Buddhism into Yoga.
  

  Although I am here mainly focusing on philosophical issues, let me emphasise again that Bronkhorst’s reconstruction is extremely detailed and covers also aspects like the different funerary practices (round stūpas in the East vs. quadrilateral moulds in the West), the approach to medicine and the conception of a cyclical time, as well as the opposition between a urban (Magadha) and rural (brahmanical) culture. Last, it has the advantage of providing a methodology to identify what is original in the teaching of the Buddha and to explain why asceticism is both endorsed in the Pāli canon and criticised by the Buddha (it was part of his cultural milieu).

• a2) Distinguishing communities and not looking for historical links when they are virtually absent was at the basis of another of Bronkhorst’s contributions, namely the idea that the roots of Indian dialectics should be placed in the Buddhist communities in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent (which might have been influenced by the Greek tradition of public debate in the Indo-Bactrian kingdoms) and that it was useless to consider Upaniṣadic dialogues as the forerunners of the dialectical engagements which became standard in Sanskrit philosophy. Upaniṣadic dialogues are just something different (closer to the instruction by a wise person).
• b) Bronkhorst was (to my knowledge, as always) the first one to propose the idea of a unitary composition for what is known as the Yogasūtra and the Yogabhāṣya He spoke accordingly of a unitary Yogaśāstra. Like in the previous case, the idea is mind-blowing. Up to that point, many scholars had tried to reconstruct the worldview of the Yogasūtra as divided from the Yogabhāṣya and the Sāṅkhya intervention of the latter. If Bronkhorst’s hypothesis is correct, by contrast, the division into sūtra ‘aphorism’ and bhāṣya ‘commentary’ is only a polarity within a single text. This explains what could have otherwise been considered an anomaly, like the complete absence of an autonomous transmission of the Yogasūtra. Like in the Greater Magadha case, one could find alternative explanations, but Bronkhorst’s hypothesis has the advantage of showing a possibility for streamlining explanations and avoiding unnecessary additional steps (in Sanskrit, one would call that kalpanāgaurava). I should add in this connection that Bronkhorst’s hypothesis was presented in just an article (1985), but has thereafter been embraced by Philipp Maas (see especially Maas 2006 and Maas 2013) who found many evidences corroborating it, from manuscripts to the syntax of the sūtra-bhāṣya connecting links.
• b2) A similar case is that of the relation between the so-called Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, also known as Mīmāṃsā Sūtra and Brahma Sūtra. Authors before Bronkhorst had discussed their relation and chronology, Bronkhorst (2007) suggested that the latter imitates the style of the former, though not emerging from the same exegetical milieu.
• c) In the occasion of Ernst Steinkellner’s retirement, a symposium on the topic “Denkt Asien anders?” (Does Asia think differently?) was organised. Bronkhorst’s intervention led to a later book chapter and finally a book on the topic of what is different in Sanskrit thought. Bronkhorst proposed, as usual, a thought-provoking thesis, namely that there is indeed a radical difference, namely the reliance on language by Sanskrit philosophers.
  He explained how the various causation theories within Sanskrit philosophy (from Vaiśeṣika to Vedānta etc.) and the puzzled they involved (such as how could it be possible to bring into existence something that previously did not exist) are all due to thinking about the problem in linguistic terms. Their answers, in other words, were oriented by the Sanskrit form of basic sentences such as “the potter makes a pot”. In fact, how can the pot figure as the object of a sentence, given that it does not exist yet? Bronkhorst thought that this was a linguistic problem, namely one occasioned by the structure of language and not an ontological one. Westerners, according to Bronkhorst, would have immediately labeled the pot as non-existing until it is realised by the potter and would not have paused on its ontological status, whereas Indians never distinguished between linguistic and external reality.
  
  This is an interesting insight, and in fact there are several elements suggesting (as Karl Potter maintained) that the “linguistic turn” occurred in India much earlier than in Europe (note that I am saying the same thing Bronkhorst said, but looking at it from a more favourable perspective), such as the insistence on the analysis of linguistic data in order to solve epistemological or ontological issues (cf. the insistence on the linguistic use śabdaṃ kṛ- within the debate about the ontological status of śabda).
• d) Bronkhorst was a convinced asserter of the scientific approach. This does not mean that he was an a-priori believer in natural sciences. Rather, he thought that the scientific method is based on a healthy form of scepticism and thus can never lead to fanatical beliefs nor to any form of “scientific traditionalism” (if correctly applied). For this very reason, he also thought that the scientific method was not “Western”, it had proven to work because of its ability to ask questions and thus to be universal. He took seriously Yoga and meditation techniques and thought that they could be analysed with the scientific method and possibly lead to new discoveries.
• d2) Similarly, Bronkhorst clearly looked down on blind believers and thus praised Sanskrit philosophers for their ability to distinguish myths from arguments. In “What did Indian philosophers believe?” (2010) he noted that Sanskrit philosophers did not attack each other based on myths (although, one may add, some Buddhist philosophers did have fun at criticising some passages of the Veda and Kumārila made fun of the walls-speaking argument), but rather their arguments (“These philosophers, while criticising each others’ views, never attacked each others’ myths. Yet these myths would have been easy targets, if they had been seriously believed in”). In short, the reliance on the scientific method meant a radical openness to defeasibility of one’s beliefs and to a data-based approach.

Let me add a few words about Johannes Bronkhorst as a human being. The Indology list was full of “Bronkhorst stories” and therefore I will not need to take too much of your time with them (you can read them on the Indology archives). Let me just point out how Bronkhorst was generous and supportive with younger scholars and even students, but in a very unique way. I still remember our first meeting. I was an undergraduate student and he immediately asked me which were my key interests (I was unable to give a specific answer, at that point I was just busy learning Sanskrit and reading as much as possible of any text my professors read). I read or hear similar stories from others, all pointing to how Bronkhorst took people seriously, even young people. He was supportive, but not patronising. He was interested in one’s opinion, but would not refrain from saying that it was wrong if he thought so, according to the scientific method discussed above. He would not mince words to attack a view, but not so when coming to the person holding it, and I have seen him greeting warmly people with whom he had had violent disagreements on specific issues.

A non-intelligible entity cannot be conceived to exist. But, if the world needs to be known in order to exist, we need to postulate a non-partial perspective out of which it can be known. Since the perspectives of all human beings (as well as those of other animals, I would add) are necessarily partial and cannot be reconciled (how could one reconcile our perspective of the world with that of a bat?), this perspective needs to be God.

The above is my summary of Michael Dummett’s (somehow idealistic) position in God and the World, a position which prompted Arindam Chakrabarti to host a three-days workshop on “Realism/Anti-Realism, Omniscience, God/no-God”. During these three days, we discussed the nature of omniscience (in fact, a more complex context than one might think), of God (as above) and of whether they are needed for a realist position. The most striking feature of the workshop was the constant philosophical dialogue flowing through the various presentations and connecting them to the global enterprise of philosophy.

Let me now enter into some detail. First, omniscience. The workshop has shown that this concept is multi-faceted in Indian philosophy, possibly even more than in the history of European philosophy and in contemporary mainstream philosophy.
Sara McClintock started the workshop with a discussion, inspired by her 2007 book Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason, on the various ways to understand “omniscience” (sarvajñatva), ranging from “dharmic omniscience” to “total omniscience” —according to whether the “omni-” (sarva ‘all’) is understood as meaning ‘every single entity’ or ‘all that is relevant’ (for a certain purpose). This second meaning might seem less convincing, but please consider the same word in compounds such as “omni-vore”. One would not expect an “omnivore” to be eating all (including stones, shampoo, triangles and logical formulas), would one? In this sense, the Buddha can be said to be omniscient, although he does not need to know exactly all, but he knows the four noble truths and whatever is relevant for liberation. As for the general topic of the workshop, however, this kind of omniscience has no bearing as a guarantee of the world’s reality or of its being as it appears to human beings. In fact, one should also bear in mind that Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Buddhists think that the world as it appears to conscious beings is illusory. An accomplished Buddha would see that it is in fact devoid of substantiality.

Similarly, Andrew Nicholson elucidated the supernormal powers (vibhūtis) in the third chapter of the Yogasūtra by drawing on other first millennium texts, such as the Mokṣadharma Parvan of the Mahābhārata and Kauṇḍinya’s commentary on the Pāśupata Sūtras. Omniscience, he argued, is understood in these traditions as one among the supernormal powers, not as the highest (for instance, Kauṇḍinya suggests that a yogin who merely possesses omniscience without commensurate powers of action (kriyā-śaktis) would be like a lame man). Though Pāśupata and Pātañjala yogins are realists, omniscience is not presented by them as a guarantee of the world’s reality. One could argue in favour of direct realism due to the fact that the world needs to agree (saṃvāda) with the perception yogins have of it, but accomplished yogins seem to have remained rather an exceptional case and not the foundation of any school’s epistemology or ontology. A further interesting point is that for Patañjali, omniscience is not an indication that the yogin has achieved the highest state (as it is of God in some traditions—could one conceive a Christian God who is not omniscient?). A yogin should eventually go beyond the vibhūti of omniscience (sarvajñātṛtva, YS 3.49) to reach the vibhūti of final liberation (kaivalya, YS 3.50). In Arindam Chakrabarti’s words, omniscience is “the last temptation of the yogin”.

Arindam Chakrabarti, in his final talk, has highlighted ten types of omniscience. Apart from the three referred to above, he pointed out 1. the Buddhist idea of knowing all in the sense of knowing that all is insubstantial, 2. the (comparable) Advaita Vedānta idea of knowing all in the sense of knowing that all is brahman, 3. the Jaina idea of innate omniscience of all, which is only blocked by our karman, etc., 4. the Nyāya-based idea that by knowing universal generalities, one should be able to know all (just like one knows all starfish by having known the starfish-universal), and the (generally theist) concepts of 5. a God who needs to know the elements out of which He creates the world, 6. a God who is the maximum of what precedes Him, therefore also the maximum level of knowledge.*
Can any of these concepts help guraranteeing the world’s reality? 1 and 2 point to a world much different than how we perceive it. 3 could work —although I do not know whether any Jain author has argued in this way. 4, 5 and 6 might look more promising. One might imagine an author arguing that the world needs to be as we perceive it, because this is how God knows it as well. However, this depends on how one understands God. If He is nothing but one out of the many perspectives hinted at at the beginning of this post, there is no reason to think that His perspective could guarantee the world’s reality, since it is not a priviledged perspective, just like that of a bat or of a human being.

Thus, the discussion on omniscience leads one to an analysis of the schools’ concepts of God (see part 2 of these notes, here).

*Careful readers will have noticed that 6+3=9 and not 10. This is because I have not been able to understand what Arindam meant by his 9th concept of omniscience, described as sarvākārajñāna.
Even more careful readers might ask why I resumed posting about conferences. This is because (as in the case of this conference) organisers and participants of philosophpical conferences appear to be happy of me posting about them.

SMALL UPDATE: Many thanks are due to Andrew Nicholson and Sara McClintock for helping me improving the post.

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

Further information is available here: http://www.soas.ac.uk/registry/scholarships/elap-scholarship.html

Topic

During the workshop, we will translate and analyse the section dedicated to Linguistic Communication as an instrument of knowledge of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s (6th c.?) Ślokavārttika. The text offers the uncommon advantage of discussing the topic from the point of view of several philosophical schools, whose philosopical positions will also be analysed and debated. Particular attention will be dedicated to the topic of the independent validity of Linguistic Communication as an instrument of knowledge, both as worldly communication and as Sacred Texts.

Detailed Contents

Ślokavārttika, śabdapariccheda,

v. 1 (Introduction)

v. 3–4 (Definition of Linguistic Communication)

v. 15 (Introduction to the position of Sāṅkhya philosophers)

vv. 35–56 (Dissussion of Buddhist and Inner-Mīmāṃsā Objections)

vv. 57ab, 62cd (Content communicated by words and sentences) [we will not read vv. 57cd–62ab, since they discuss a linguistic issue]

vv. 63–111 (Discussion of Buddhist Objections)

Commentaries to be read: Pārthasārathi’s one (as basis) and Uṃveka’s one (for further thoughts on the topic)

X-copies of the texts will be distributed during the workshop. Please email the organiser if you want to receive them in advance.

For organisative purposes, you are kindly invited to announce your partecipation with an email at elisa.freschi@oeaw.ac.at.

The present workshop is the ideal continuation of this one. For a pathway in the Śabdapariccheda see this post.
 

Why am I asking these questions? Because —no matter how sophisticated our discussions of specific topics of philosophy can be— one still encounters these prejudices in secondary literature…and consequently also in the writings of many colleagues who do not have access to direct sources. They cannot be blamed for that, but I hope that they will be grateful to receive some advice concerning what they believe on the basis of surpassed or unreliable sources. The last example for me was a collection of notes on Academia.edu. Its author starts with the good intention “I’ve had enough of ignorance about Indian philosophy” and overall he sounds engaged and interesting. Unfortunately, however, he has received bad advices and/or chose badly among them. The result is a short summary of the usual suspects, with a strong bias in favour of Advaita Vedānta mistaken to be “Indian Philosophy” sic et simpliciter (bold passages are the author’s ones, followed by my comments):

1. “‘See the Self’ is the keynote of all schools of Indian philosophy. And this is the reason why most of the schools are also religious sects” (p. 1). I thought that B.K. Matilal had done enough to defeat this prejudice, but this seems not to be the case. Thus, I am afraid I will not be able to defeat it myself. Let me just note that this is a short summary of what some schools of Vedānta could be said to do but it has little or nothing to do with the vast majority of Indian philosophers. There is no “religious sect” called “Mīmāṃsā” or “Nyāya” or “Vaiśeṣika” and so on. Not to speak of Buddhist schools of philosophy, who tend to be anātmavādin `deniers of the existence of a [permanent] Self’.
2. Self-forgetful service of others is a Christian, not a Hindu idea (p. 1). Well, one might argue that self-forgetful service of others is difficult to attain for human beings. And one is reminded of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s concept of morality. Moreover, self-forgetful service of others is exactly the Bodhisattva ideal —which the author himself mentions at p. 9.
3. (Evidently all the life-denying aspects of Indian tradition, as well as the superstitious and degrading religious practices, proceed largely from the caste system, its lack of dynamism, its oppressive structure, its eternal unchangingness. A society that worships Hanuman the monkey and Sabbala the cow, that countenances the burning of wives after their husband’s death, is an inhuman one, in which man is subjugated both by the earth and especially by a caste-structured povert) (pp.1–2). My personal position is not consistent with strict Marxism as for the idea that philosophy were only a superstructure of economic relationships. But in any case, I am strongly suspicious about such summaries highlighting an a-historical laundry list of shameful acts of Indians (not Indian philosophers) without any effort to understand (worshipping Hanuman is not like worshipping a monkey, just like believing in St. Mary does not amount to beliving that virginal births are possible in general).
4. Hegel, Hegel, Hegel (except for the mysticism) (p.3). No, thanks. Again, the author is speaking of Advaita Vedānta and thinks of “Indian Philosophy” as if Advaita Vedānta were its only representative. In fact, Advaita Vedānta, as discussed by Daya Krishna (Three Myths of Indian Philosophy), is virtually absent from the philosophical arena until almost the end of the first Millennium AD. And, one might add, its role in the second Millennium AD has been possibly overemphasised by well-known activists of Advaita Vedānta such as Vivekānanda who looked at Indian Philosophy through these lenses.
5. Hinayana, a religion without a God, emphasizes self-help […]. Mahayana, on the other hand, is less egoistic and negative […]. In this sect Buddha is transformed into God and worshipped as such. […] The Mahayana religion has more missionary zeal than the Hinayana; it is more progressive and dynamic (p. 9). “Hinayana” is already a bad start, since it is a pejorative term (literally meaning ‘deminished* vehicle’, opposed to Mahāyāna ‘big vehicle’) applied by Mahāyāna Buddhists to their forerunners. “God” seems to me here a misleading category. If one thinks at the Western and Indian concept of God as creator of the world, dispenser of mercy, etc., then the Buddha is surely not a God, not even in Mahāyāna. And so on.
6. The original teachings of Buddha were not incompatible with the Upanishads—for instance, he emphasized Atman, the Great Self, and encouraged people to act under the light of that Self, to seek union with it—but his early Hinayana disciples (of the Sarvastivada, or Vaibhasika, school) changed that (p. 9). This is a neo-Vedāntic interpretation of Buddhism, which uses a fundamentalistic device (“the origins were good, the successors mixed all up”) in order to suggest that the Buddha was in fact a crypto Vedāntin.
7. Idealism is obviously the philosophy of choice for most Indian thinkers (p. 10). This is not so, and surely not “obviously” so. Which schools would one count among the Idealist ones? I can only think of Advaita Vedānta, Yogācāra and perhaps some trends of Pratyabhijñā philosophy. Which schools are closer to Realism, Representationalism, etc.? Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Śaivasiddhānta, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Dvaita Vedānta… (all of them are never mentioned in the “Notes”), Nyāya, Yoga, both schools of Jaina philosophy, most schools of Buddhist Philosophy, Cārvākas, and so on.

Long story short: Perhaps we have really to do something to spread some better-funded knowledge on Indian Philosophy (and perhaps interested scholars should make some efforts in selecting their sources). Which misconceptions do you encounter more frequently?

*translation improved thanks to Jayarava’s comment (see below).

Should you have arrived here for the first time: Please read this page about the purposes of this blog before feeling offended. I want to initiate discussions, not to offend anyone.

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…

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.

जैनप्रत्यक्षजिज्ञासायाम्, श्रीमत्याः अान् क्लावेल् (Anne Clavel) प्रकरणम् एतस्मिन् पुस्तके पठितव्यम् ।

This Friday, I read the Foreword of Vincent Eltschinger’s and Helmut Krasser’s Scriptural Authority, Reason and Action. Proceedings of a Panel at the 14th World Sanskrit Conference, Kyoto, September 1st–5th 2009 (please note the unfashionable acknowledgement of the papers’ origin). They consistently opted for the first option, limiting themselves to a summary of the papers that follow and describing how they programmatically left as much freedom as possible to the contributors.*

While summarising the papers, however, they designed a chronological (and thematic) path through them. The great protagonist of the book —so interpreted— is the Buddhist dialectical relation of reason and authority. Eltschinger and Krasser start by commenting on Peter Skilling‘s and on Joseph Walser‘s articles. These discuss pre-Pramāṇavāda material, i.e., Buddhist material related to the question of authority but belonging to milieus in which the philosophical problem of the authority of the Buddhist Sacred Texts had still not become a distinct topic of investigation. Instead, both articles discuss how the Buddha becomes an authority through physical elements, i.e., through an external validation. This can assume the form of the Buddha’s supernaturally long tongue (Skilling) or of the fact of promoting Buddhist teaching from thrones and daises (Walser). Next comes the Pramāṇavāda time, with Eltschinger‘s contribution working as a bridge towards it. Four contributions focus on Pramāṇavāda (Eltschinger, Krasser, Moriyama and McClintock). Next comes a discussion of the controversy between Pramāṇavāda and Mīmāṃsā by Kataoka and a paper dwelling further on (Pūrva and Uttara) Mīmāṃsā by Hugo David. This is particularly interesting to me at the moment, because it highlights Maṇḍana Miśra’s strategy of interpreting Vedic prescriptions to do X as if they were descriptions of the fact that X is the means to achieve some desired result. According to David, this interpretation is part of Maṇḍana’s Vedāntic agenda, since it enables him to overcome the difference between vidhis (Vedic prescriptions, of independent value) and arthavādas (commendatory statements, of only subordinate value). This distinction had been implemented by Pūrva Mīmāṃsā authors to many descriptive statements of the Upaniṣads, which were thus thought to be subordinate to a prescription. Maṇḍana’s attempt, instead, negates the distinction and, with it, the lower hierarchical status of the Upaniṣads.
After Buddhism, Jainism is introduced by Eltschinger and Krasser as the other target of Mīmāṃsā critics and in fact Balcerowicz‘ contribution deals with Jaina attempts to establish the omniscience of the Jina and the validity of the Jaina canon.
The volume is closed by two contributions (by Ratié and by Torella) dedicated to the Śaiva Pratyabhijñā school, again seen under the perspective of its debate with the Buddhist Pramāṇavāda. Torella sees Kumārila as the main critical target of the Pratyabhijñā concept of an all-pervasive prasiddhi (akin to Bhartṛhari’s śabdatattva). Ratié shows that this omnipervasive principle is tantamount to Śiva’s self-manifestation and that this informs of itself all Sacred Texts. All Sacred Texts are just in some way valid, although only the Śaiva ones are completely so, insofar as the others contain only a partial manifestation of Śiva who instead revealed himself completely in the Śaiva scriptures.

What would you do while editing a book? And on a different level, what would you add about the relation reason-authority in the schools you are more familiar with?

*This also means that they refused to uniform the bibliographic style and the conventions of the contributions, “as long as these have been consistent”. To do so programmatically is a welcome innovation in an era in which we risk to correct footnote positions and oversee what is really at stake in an editorial enterprise.