Category Archives: Vyākaraṇa

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Thinking about Johannes Bronkhorst (UPDATED)

On May 15, Harry Falk announced on the Indology mailing list that Johannes Bronkhorst had “left this world”. In the following weeks the mailing list (and, I am sure, other online forums) has been virtually monopolised by people remembering the man and his endless contributions to Sanskrit studies and connected fields. In fact, Johannes has been extremely prolific (Greater Magadha was written in just one semester!) and his contributions have been impactful with almost no comparison.

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.

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Mapping the territory: Sanskrit cosmopolis, 1500–today

There is a lot to do in the European intellectual history, with, e.g., major theories that await an improved understanding and connections among scholars that have been overseen or understudied. Using a simile, one might say that a lot of the territory between some important peaks (say, the contributions of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Heidegger) is still to be thoroughly investigated.

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!)

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“dadhi and dadhy are two different words”

The case of combination variants like dadhi and dadhy is used by Nyāya authors as an evidence of the fact that words are produced and modified. Mīmāṃsā authors, who think that language is without beginning, need to respond to that and explain therefore that dadhy is not a modification of dadhi, but an alternative word, and both are used in specific phonetic contexts.

Veṅkaṭanātha in his commentary on PMS 1.1.16 elaborates thereon and explains that they are described as archetype and ectype of each other for pedagogical reasons only (in order not to further multiply the number of words to be learnt). At this point, he faces two very different objections.

The first opponent says that the archetype-ectype relation could be reverted according to a different grammatical analysis. This probably means that dadhy could be considered as the archetype and dadhi as the ectype. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that one should choose the grammatical analysis based on its pedagogical merits, and the one suggested by the opponent is not pedagogically easier.

The other opponent says that the ectype-archetype relation is real and based on the similarity between the two. The “similarity” is not further elaborated upon, but we can guess something more about it through Veṅkaṭanātha’s reply. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that if similarity were the ground for real archetype-ectype connections, then there would be no way not to avoid over- and under-extensions. On the one hand, one could over-extend it to other cases of similarities, like yogurt (dadhi) and jasmine flowers, that are similar insofar as they are both white, although they are not considered to be archetype and ectype of each other. On the other hand, cow-dung and beetles are dissimilar, but are considered one the ectype of the other (beetles are believed to be a transformation of cow-dung).

Now, my problem regards a terminological choice. The first opponent says: vyākaraṇāntareṇa prakṛtivikṛtivaiparītyam. In his answer to the second opponent, Veṅkaṭanātha says na ca sādṛśyāt prakṛtivikṛtibhāvaḥ śaṅkhyaḥ, vaiparītyasyāpi prasaṅgāt. However, vaiparītya in the first case seems to be the opposite of what should be the case (the inversion of dadhi and dadhy as archetype and ectype). By contrast, in the second case vaiparītya seems to indicate just a different set of consequences. Comments welcome!

(Cross-posted on the indianphilosophyblog.com)

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Thoughts on Realisms Interlinked by Arindam Chakrabarti/4

This post is part of a series discussing Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked. The previous posts are available here, here and here.

The last chapter (chapter 16) of the second part is a discussion of the Nyāya theories for the existence of the self and it includes also discussions about the no-ownership theory (mental states don’t need to be *of someone*) and against physicalism (pp. 189–191). I especially enjoyed the discussion about the inner sense faculty (manas, already discussed in chapter 13) and its role as a connector among sense faculties. How else could we compare different sense data, given that sense faculties do not have autonomous agency and cannot communicate with each other? However, this seems to be a lot of burden placed on the shoulders of manas.  It seems straightforward to accept a sense-faculty for inner sensations, but how can one justify its extension to other functions? manas seems to grow to incorporate also what Sāṅkhya authors would have called a buddhi ‘intellect’. Can it do so and remain a sense-faculty? Can it really be responsible, e.g., for anuvyavasāya and *still* remain a sense-faculty?

Next, the third part (“Other subjects”) starts. In this third part, the book’s title (“Realisms interlinked”) increasingly looses its cogency and the book is more and more about “objects, subjects and other subjects”, including also less closely connected topics, such as the brilliant article on the ontology of shadows and Arindam’s theory of śabdapramāṇa —but Arindam waves them together nicely, e.g., by discussing how śabdapramāṇa is part of our acknowledging the existence of epistemic others, i.e., others we can learn from.

To be honest, I enjoyed the first part, but I enjoy even more this latter part, since it is more experimental and draws from more sources (whereas the first part was closer to keeping the Anglo-Analytic and Nyāya paradigms). For instance, the wonderful chapter 18, on the vocative reminded me of Martin Buber’s masterpiece, “I and Thou” and how relating to one by addressing them is different than discussing about them. The latter way to speak reifies them, the former means entering into a relation. Thus, whereas it is contradictory to say “I am now talking to God. I do not know whether They exist”, it is not meaningless to address God asking for faith, because addressing is not about existence, but about relation. 

As hinted at above, Arindam follows different philosophical inspirations in this part, starting with Abhinavagupta, whom, as discussed in a previous post, is also responsible for his moving beyond realism. We had already seen this influence at play, for instance in chapter 12, and within the third part again in chapter 17, while discussing how it is possible to know about the existence of others. The whole chapter discusses the arguments by analogy in Dharmakīrti and its critique by Strawson, which Arindam labels as “devastating”. Why so? The argument by analogy is, according to Arindam’s reading of Strawson, an induction. But how weak is an induction, if it is based on a single case? Moreover, according to Strawson, there is strictly speaking not even a single case the induction can be based on. In fact, predicates such as “happy” or “depressed” are completely different if they are experienced from within and attributed from the outside to other alleged subjects. And in which sense is a predicate a predicate if it is not predicable of others? Thus, for predicates to be predicates, they need to be applicable to more than one person, even if in one case through direct access and in the other through behaviour-observation. At this point, Abhinavagupta is ready to step in. But before getting to his solution as understood by Arindam, let me pause a little longer on why following Abhinavagupta.

Why would Arindam be ready to sacrifice direct realism and follow Abhinavagupta on this dangerous path? Because Arindam likes intelligent thinkers, but also because Abhinava allows for a rich conception of the ātman, which is dynamically evolving (against the permanent self of Nyāya and Vedānta), and can therefore be an agent and a knower of intentional contents (the Sāṅkhya and Advaita Vedānta subject could be aware, but of no contents, the Nyāya subject had knowledge as an additional quality). 

Thus, while holding Abhinavagupta’s hand, Arindam ends up coming out of the plains of naïve realism and ends up in transcendental idealism or panpsychism. And here comes the solution for the problem of the existence of other subjects. In Arindam’s words:

“Post-Cartesian Western thought finds the problem of the Other Mind challenging and the very presence of the Other existentially constraining and self-annihilating. Abhinavagupta, on the other hand, finds the You to be a foundational middle-reality between the pure Self and the apparent non-Self, in contrast and continuity with which the Self discovers its own playful knower-hood” (p. 202).

Next come chapters 19 and 20, which discuss the epistemology of testimony. Arindam is here preaching to the convert when it comes to me, but let me repeat that unless we accept testimony, we have no way to ensure knowledge of basic facts, like our name and date of birth. Arindam also convincingly shows that testimony cannot be reduced to inference (pp. 217–8). Can the Nyāya theory of śabdapramāṇa, which is based on descriptive language, work also in the case of prescriptive language. As a Mīmāṃsaka, I am biased against it, but also Arindam’s reconstruction seems to allow for some doubts (“You are a person who is qualified by the agency to do X” does not seem tantamount to “do X!” —the prescriptive character appears to be just missing).

A last word on chapter 21, which is one of the best pieces of writing by Arindam in general and which allows me to go back to a point I discussed in the second post of this series, namely Arindam’s way of doing philosophy through a dialogue with other authors. In chapter 21 Arindam mentions a sentence by Wittgenstein. The interesting point is that the sentence looks trivially true. It says: “In paintings darkness *can* also be depicted as black”. No source is given, and I don’t know Wittgenstein good enough to be able to identify and reproduce the original German and check whether there is any additional shade of meaning, but as it stands, the sentence looks banal. However, Arindam is able to go deeper and disagree with the ontological theory about shade it presupposes. The key point that became clear to me only at this point is that Arindam is a great philosopher because (or also because) he is a great interpreter. He is able to let sentences by Nyāya philosophers (or by Leonardo, Turner or Goethe) disquiet him, and then keeps on thinking about them until he can identify what they implicitly presuppose, spell it out, and continue thinking philosophically about them until he can elaborate a theory that answers all the objections he has contemplated and taken seriously.

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Why do people respond to commands?

Why do people obey to commands? Because they are immediately inclined, in a behaviourist way, to obey? Or because they realise that the action commanded is an instrument to the realisation of a coveted goal? Or are there further explanations?

This question has been debated at length in Sanskrit philosophy, oscillating especially among three main positions. I discussed these positions with some accuracy in previous posts, but this time I would like to try a bird-eye view about what is at stake.

On the one side, Maṇḍana claimed that the only motivator for undertaking actions is the awareness of the fact that the action to be undertaken is the means to obtain a desired goal. On the other, Prabhākara’s followers claimed that we immediately obey to commands because we feel enjoined, and only later analyse what is being asked and why. The role of the mention of the listener’s desire in commands such as “If you want to lose weight, try this shake!” is not meant to say that the enjoined action is an instrument to realise the desired output. Rather, the mention of the desire is meant for the listener to understand that they are the person addressed by the prescription. It picks up the person, who immediately relates with their own desires, but does not describe the existence of an instrumental relation between enjoined action and result. The last position can be connected to Bhartṛhari’s pratibhā theory. As depicted by Maṇḍana, this is a general theory about meaning, which includes both commands and descriptive sentence. According to it, human as well as non-human animals have innate inclinations which make it possible for them to perform activities they could have never learnt but are still able to perform, such as swimming or breastfeeding in the case of a baby. The pratibhā theory can be extended to commands which one would respond to because of an innate inclination.

Maṇḍana’s theory has the clear advantage of being a reductionist theory. By following it, one does no longer need an ad hoc semantic theory for commands, which can be reduced to descriptive sentences explaining the relation between the action enjoined and the expected output. Similarly, Maṇḍana provides a single theory covering all aspects of motivation to act, both in the case of commands and in the case of autonomous undertakings of action. In all cases, one is motivated to act because one thinks that the action is the instrument to get to the expected result. What are the disadvantages of this theory? First of all, Prābhākaras have a point when they describe our first response to commands. We immediately feel enjoined even before starting to analyse the action we have been required to perform. Secondly, Maṇḍana’s theory might have problems when it comes to people who know what would be best for them, but still don’t act. Can this all be explained just in terms of desires and instruments?

As declared at the beginning, the above is my attempt to give a short overview of the debate. Comments are welcome!

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Genitive compounds and brahmajijñāsā (or dharmajijñāsā)

All commentators on the Brahmasūtra starts by dealing with the wording of the first sūtra, namely

athāto brahmajijñāsā
Now, after that, there is the desire to know the brahman.

Several topics are discussed in this connection, namely:

  • What does “Now” (atha) exactly mean?
  • What does “after that” (ataḥ) mean? What does it refer to?
  • How should one interpret the compound brahmajijñāsā ‘desire to know the brahman’?
  • Why the desiderative in jijñāsā `desire to know’?
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nitya and eternality

During the three days of this workshop on philosophy of language in South Asia I have been repeatedly asked why I would want to “remove” the aspect of eternality from the concept of nitya. In fact, I think the situation is rather the opposite.

“Eternality” is a later overinterpretation of a term which, in my opinion, originally did not mean that, and continued not to have eternality as its primary meaning throughout its history.

nitya (as shown by Minoru Hara, JAOS 79.2) is etymologically adjective meaning ‘inherent’. This meaning is completely in harmony with its use in the same semantic field as siddha, autpattika, apauruṣeya and svābhāvika in Vyākaraṇa and Mīmāṃsā, as well as dhruva.*

So, how comes that one starts speaking about temporality in connection with nitya? In my hypothesis, there are three steps:

  1. In connection with the Mīmāṃsā vs Nyāya controversy, Mīmāṃsā authors insist on the apauruṣeya aspect of language, whereas Nyāya authors insist on language as pauruṣeya. Since language is pauruṣeya, it is not nitya in the sense of being kṛtaka ‘made up’, ‘artificial’. Thus, once again, nitya is not opposed to ‘temporal’ but to ‘artificial’, once again pointing to an opposition which does not have “eternality” as its primary focus.
  2. The Mīmāṃsā vs Nyāya controversy evolved also into a Mīmāṃsā vs Buddhist Epistemology controversy. For Buddhist epistemologists, whatever is kṛtaka is also kṣaṇika. Here temporality comes into the picture. Still, the point is not about “eternality” vs, “temporality”, but rather about “fixed/permanent/ummovable” vs “ephemeral”, as shown by the examples mentioned (mountains and rivers are said to be respectively kūṭastha– and pravāhanitya).
  3. Euro-American interpreters are used to the topic of temporality and to the concept of eternality, which plays a big role in the Graeco-Roman and in the Judaeo-Christian worldviews. Thus, they are inclined to interpret concepts in this sense, just like it happens with concepts like “Scripture”, “God”, “letter” and the like, which have been introduced uncritically in the Indian debate.

*Yes, you might find nitya also in connection to anādi ‘beginningless’, which might be interpreted temporally (I rather think it just means “for which no beginning can be proved”). But this is just one among the many terms used in juxtaposition with nitya (see above for several others).

P.S. I recently wrote an article on nitya. You can read the pre-print version here.

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The semantic development of tantra and prasaṅga

A review of Freschi Pontillo 2013

A review of our 2013 book on the evolution of the semantics of tantra and prasaṅga by Émilie Aussant can be read on the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (link here).

Many thanks are due to Dr. Aussant for her ability to explain in a few sentences the broad context (the Sanskrit śāstra tradition and its ability to encode as many aspects of life as possible), the narrow one (metarules for the interpretation of sūtras) and the specific topic of tantra and prasaṅga.

You can read more on tantra and prasaṅga in my previous blog, here and here. A short version of the book is available on Academia.edu, here.

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How does language work?

Meanings of Words and Sentences in Mīmāṃsā

Mīmāṃsakas subscribe to the idea that words convey word-meanings, and thus refute the Bhartṛharian holism. The relation between a word as meaningful unit and its meaning is fixed, as it is proved by our common experience of words, and it cannot be denied in favour of a view focusing on the text as a whole and rejecting without compelling reasons our prima facie experience of words as meaningful units.

Given that one can thus establish that words are meaningful, what exactly do they convey?

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From word meanings to sentence meaning: A workshop in Cambridge

From Word Meanings to Sentence Meaning:

Different Perspectives in Indian Philosophy of Language

The reflection on language and its structures was a major component of the Sanskritic intellectual horizon, intimately connected with the broader epistemological and soteriological concerns of different schools. This led to the emergence of various conflicting philosophical views on the nature of the cognition obtained from language (śābdabodha). In this respect, a pivotal issue is how padārthas (the meanings/referents of words) relate to vākyārtha (the meaning/referent of the sentence). During this one-day colloquium, the focus will especially be on the views set forth by the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā philosophers (Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara), the Buddhists, the Grammarians, and the theoreticians of Alaṃkāraśāstra, and on the reconstruction of the debate as it developed in the course of the first millennium CE.

 

Date: November 11, 2016

Time: 9:30 am – 6:00 pm