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Viśiṣṭādvaitins speaking of Advaitins

The following passage is from Yāmuna’s Ātmasiddhi and it is a description of the Advaita position about the brahman as being tantamount to consciousness:

ato ‘syā na meyaḥ kaścid api dharmo ‘sti. ato nirdhūtanikhilabhedavikalpanirdharmaprakāśamātraikarasā kūṭasthanityā saṃvid evātmā paramātmā ca. yathāha yānubhūtir ajāmeyānantātmā iti. saiva ca vedāntavākyatātparyabhūmir iti (ĀS, pp. 29–30 of the 1942 edition)

Therefore this (consciousness) has no characteristic as its knowable content. Therefore, this very consciousness is eternal, uniform and it consists of light-only, without characteristics, in which all conceptualisations of difference have been dissolved. This consciousness alone is the self (ultimately identical with the single brahman, but illusory identified as one’s own self) and the supreme self (i.e., the brahman). As it has been said: ”That experience (i.e., consciousness) is unborn, cannot become a knowledge content, it is endless, it is the self”*. And this alone is the ultimate meaning (tātparya) of the Upaniṣads’ sentences.

The quote within the passage (yānubhūtir ajāmeyānantātmā) could be from Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭasiddhi (1.1: yānubhūtir ajāmeyānantānandātmavigrahā |
mahadādijaganmāyācitrabhittiṃ namāmi tām ||).*

Yāmuna’s description seems fair to me. Do readers more expert in Advaita agree?

*I am grateful to Anand Venkatkrishnan for his help in identifying this quote.

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Is anything at all understood out of false sentences?

Before answering that you do obviously understand something out of false sentences, too, consider that this would lead to:

—distinguishing between understanding the meaning of a sentence and knowing it to be true

—assuming a non-committal understanding of the meaning of a sentence

—understanding fitness as a requirement for the sentence meaning (yogyatā) as limited to the lack of obvious inconsistencies and not as regarding truth

—(possibly) assuming that the meaning of a sentence is not an entity out there (since there is no out-there entity in the case of false sentences), but rather a mental one

 

If you are now inclined to say that Indian authors on a whole could not answer yes to the question in the title, read the following sentence by Veṅkaṭanātha:

śaśaviṣāṇavākyād api bodho jāyata eva

Also out of the sentence claiming that hares have horns (e.g., out of an obviously false sentence), an awareness does indeed arise (SM ad 1.1.25, 1971 edition p. 114).

 

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Śyena reinterpreted: You can kill your enemy, if he is about to kill you

The Śyena sacrifice is a sacrifice aiming at the death of one’s enemy. The usual interpretation of the Śyena sacrifice is that you just don’t perform it, because it is violent and violence is prohibited (unless it is performed as an element of a rite, e.g., in the Agnīṣomīya). Here comes, however, a novel interpretation:

“For Mīmāṃsā, it is not the case that violence in itself is the cause for pāpa (evil karman), only prohibited violence is. The killing of the sacrificial animal performed within the Jyotiṣṭoma is [just] effecting that the sacrifice is complete with all its elements.
Out of the result of the Śyena sacrifice anartha is produced. Out of this result, which consists in the killing of one’s enemy, there is anartha in the form o reaching suffering, i.e., hell. [For] the killing of one’s enemy, which is the result of the Śyena sacrifice, is not known through a prescription. However, If the enemy is already ready to kill (ātatāyin), then his killing is prescribed. Since in that case violence is prescribed, the Śyena sacrifice does not produce anartha. Therefore, it is established that the Śyena sacrifice does not in itself lead to anartha as result.”
(p. 25 of Rāmaśaṅkara Bhaṭṭācārya’s commentary (called Jyotiṣmatī) on Sāṃkhyatattvakaumudī)

The author of this work, Dr. Ram Shankar Bhattacharya (1927-1996), was a scholar of international repute, well-known for his ground-breaking works in the field of Indological scholarship in general and Sanskrit in particular. He was a pupil of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and then of his successor, Dharmamegha Āraṇya. He has at least 30 works and hundreds of articles in various languages (English, Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit) dealing with Purāṇas, Sānkhya and Yoga philosophies, Sanskrit grammar, Indian History, etc. to his credit. He co-edited (along with Prof. Gerald James Larson) the volumes on Sānkhya and Yoga philosophies of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophies series, published under the general editorship of Karl H. Potter, by M/S Motilal Banarsidass. He also served as the scholar-in-residence (sabhāpaṇḍita) of His Royal Highness, the King of Benaras, and the editor of the bi-annual multi-language journal, Purāṇam, published by the All-India Kashiraj Trust, for years, which contains innumerable research articles from his pen. Besides, he also edited four Purāṇas (Agni, Vāmana, Kūrma and Garuḍa) for the same institution.

What remains to be researched, is what it means for an enemy to be ātatāyin (lit. `with one’s bow stretched’, i.e., ready to shoot). Should the enemy be literally about to kill one? If so, there would be no time to perform a Śyena sacrifice. So, either Rāmaśaṅkara Bhaṭṭācārya thinks of preventive actions against people who are known to be about to kill someone or his is just a theoretical discussion.

In order to partly solve this problem, we checked the definition of ātatāyin in the Śabdakalpadruma (a famous Skt-Skt dictionary). This states `ready to kill’ and then quotes a verse from the commentary of Śrīdhara on the BhG discussing six types of such villains: people who are about to set something on fire, poisoners, people with a sword or a knife (śastra) in their hands, robbers, people taking away one’s wife or fields (perhaps: the products of one’s fields?). Śrīdhara then concludes: “There is no flaw in killing an ātatāyin”.

The Vācaspatyam (Skt-Skt) dictionary has a much longer entry. I am still not sure whether someone can be defined an ātatāyin for just plotting a killing —something which would allow one to prepare and perform the Śyena sacrifice.
Sudipta thinks that plotting should be included, since otherwise it might be too late to take action against the ātatāyin and the prescription about killing an ātatāyin found in Dharmaśāstra would be futile. Sudipta accordingly thinks that the Śyena is not prohibited in the case of preventing, e.g., a terrorist attack and that it is only prohibited if performed for one’s own sake, as an offensive action.

(This post has been jointly discussed by EF and Sudipta Munsi, who kindly showed me the quote mentioned above.)

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Does anything exist according to Advaita Vedānta?

Not substances, not qualities, perhaps not even the brahman?

The authors of Advaita Vedānta maintain that God, the impersonal brahman, is the only reality and that each hint of dualism or pluralism is due to māyā ‘illusion’. In other words, the absolute, the brahman, is the only reality and everything else (including the material world and the conscious beings within it) only seems to exist, due to māyā, but is not ultimately real. Due to the the Advaita Vedānta’s absolute monism, the brahman cannot have any quality, as any quality would introduce a duality in the singular nature of the brahman. Thus, given that the brahman is the only reality and that it is absolutely simple (since any complexity would entail plurality) it cannot contain any intentional knowledge*, since any such knowledge would be necessary articulated according to the distinction between a knowing subject and the objects it knows and exactly such distinction is considered illusory by Advaita Vedānta authors.

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What shall one avoid in the case of eye-diseases?

A problem with polysemy

Veṅkaṭanātha discusses in his commentary on PMS 1.1.9 the case of words having multiple meanings. On the one hand, there are words which have multiple meanings and whose meaning can be fixed only due to the proximity to other words. On the other, there are words which have one prevalent meaning, but which can assume a different meaning due to the proximity of other words. Therefore, the proximity of other words is not in itself a disambiguating factor. The Nyāya objector takes advantage of that to suggest that one needs to resort to convention.

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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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The Natural Relation in Mīmāṃsā

Mīmāṃsā authors refute the Nyāya and Buddhist theory of a conventional relation and try to prove that nobody would ever be able to establish a linguistic convention without words, since any convention-maker would in turn need words to explain that a certain word X is to be connected with a certain meaning. It follows that, in order to avoid a circular regress, at some point one necessarily needs words whose relation with their meanings is not conventional. Later Nyāya authors introduce here the idea of a God who creates words with an embedded conventional relation, but this thesis implies, according to Mīmāṃsā authors, far too many unwarranted assumptions. Mīmāṃsakas rather stick to common experience, in which language is a given.
Mīmāṃsā authors also dedicate much energy to the explanation of the process through which one learns a language, first understanding the meaning of basic sentences and then the meaning of their constituent words.