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Is the monologue also a dialogue?

No, taught Martin Buber, since a monologue lacks the dimension of Otherness. He was so adamant about that, that he even applied it to the case of God. Maurice Friedman (Martin Buber. The Life of Dialogue, p. 82) describes the relation of God and each single human being as follows:

If God did not need man, if man were simply dependant and nothing else, there would be no meaning to man’s life or to the world. ‘The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny’.

Martin Buber’s own words (I and Thou, p. 82) are even more direct:

You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know too that God needs you—in the fullness of His eternity needs you? […] You need God, in order to be—and God needs you, for the very meaning of life.

Somehow, I am not surprised that Maurice Friedman participated in one of Daya Krishna’s saṃvādas (one can read the transcripts in Intercultural Dialogue and the Human image, Maurice Friedman at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

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4 years Senior Lecturer of Sanskrit at Soas

Senior Lector in Sanskrit
Vacancy Number 001051
Location London
Campus Russell Square
Post Class Teaching and Scholarship
Department / Centre Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia
Contract Type Fixed Term
Closing date for applications 19 April 2016
Salary: £34,336 – £40,448 per annum pro rata inclusive of London allowance

Part time post – 0.5 FTE

Daya Krishna on the risks of comparatism

‘Comparative studies’, thus, meant in effect the comparison of all other societies and cultures in terms of the standards provided by the Western societies and cultures, both in cognitive and non cognitive domains. The scholars belonging to these other societies and cultures, instead of looking at Western society and culture from their own perspectives, accepted the norms provided by Western scholars and tried to show that the achievements in various fields within their cultures paralleled those in the West”.

From: Daya Krishna, “Comparative Philosophy: What It Is and What It Ought to Be”, in Interpreting across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, edited by Gerald Larson and Eliot Deutsch (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass 1989), 71-83.

The reason for gender-unbalanceness? Often just carelessness

…and the fact that we think that being a man is the norm and women are an exception or a subcategory, just like “Italians”, “green-tea lovers” or “plumbers”.
For an interesting study on this topic, see this summary on the Washington Post about dialogues in movies: It turns out that women speak way less than men. Not because of the lack of heroines, but rather because whenever one adds a less relevant character (such as a shopkeeper), one is inclined to add a “normal” human being, a man (you would not want to add an Italian shopkeeper to your movie unless you had a special reason to do so, would you?).
Seems to be a good reason to ponder about the people we invite to conferences, collected volumes and the like: It might be that we also invite more men than women at first, since men are instinctively felt to be the more normal kind of scholars. For more on this topic, check this post (by me and Malcolm Keating).

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Again on the existence of a separate Yogasūtra

As most readers know, Philipp Maas (elaborating on a short article by Johannes Bronkhorst) has claimed that it is highly probable that an independent Yogasūtra never existed and that we should therefore only speak of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, a work including what is known as Yogasūtra and what is known as Yogabhāṣya. He notices that the Yogasūtra is not independently transmitted, that all quotes until the 11th c. refer to either the YS or the YBh in the same way, as if they were the same work. For more details, see section 2 of his article in Franco 2013 (available here) and his article in Bronkhorst 2010 (available here).

Federico Squarcini recently disputed this claim

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Why does the inference about the self and nature in the Sāṅkhyakārikā not hold?

Veṅkaṭanātha/Vedānta Deśika claims that the well-known inference found in SK 17 about the separation from self and nature (prakṛti) does not work. First the inference:

saṃhataparārthatvāt triguṇādiviparyayād adhiṣṭhānāt |
puruṣo ‘sti bhoktṛbhāvāt kaivalyārthapravṛtteś ca ||

Since the assemblage of sensible objects is for another’s use; since the converse of that which has the three qualities with other properties (before mentioned) must exist; since there must be superintendencel since there must be one to enjoy, since there is a tendency to abstraction; therefore soul is. (Colebrook’s edition and translation)

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Superimposing bodily qualities on the self: āropa in Vedānta Deśika

In his Seśvaramīmāṃsā, Veṅkaṭanātha/Vedānta Deśika discusses the self (ātman) and claims it is different from the body, sense-organs, intellect, mind, etc. However, he also claims that the self is what we know when we grasp ourselves as an “I”. Thus, an easy objection is that we sometimes refer to our body with the word “I” (e.g., in “I am a woman”). Veṅkaṭanātha’s answer is that this is only due to superimposition (āropa) and that one does not seize the difference only because of karman:

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Professorship in Buddhist Studies, Heidelberg

The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg invites applications for a W3 professorship in Buddhist Studies.
The professorship is part of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) which has originated from the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”.

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Against non Italian scholars studying Latin and non Greek scholars studying ancient Greek

Consider the following:

Italy is now a unified country and no longer dominated by Austrian, Spanish or French rulers. Why do we need only more foreigners to supervise Latin publishing and translations?

Or:

Greece is now a unified country and no longer dominated by Turk rulers. Why do we need only more foreigners to supervise ancient Greek publishing and translations?

What do you think? I, for one, would answer that the more and the better scholars engage with these world’s treasures, the better. I am not sure that having an Italian passports makes me a priori a better candidate.

Now, you might consider that I am also not an ideal candidate, since I do not share the same set of beliefs of Cicero or Catullus. However, I am not sure one needs to believe in Aphrodites in order to understand Catullus’ desperate love for Lesbia, nor does one need to believe in Zeus to understand Cicero’s quest for justice. One might say that I am allowed to study Catullus, etc., because no believers of his religion are left but that the principle of “insiders only” still applies in case of religions/political systems/langauges/… of which there is still a living tradition.

This is a legitimate point of view, but one needs to be aware of the fact that it leads to isolationism. One would only be allowed to study people whose religion/language/set of beliefs… she or he shares, with no adhikāra to look beyond his or her field. Moreover, I wonder how one would be able to look critically at his or her field, if she or he had had no chance to learn about how different the world can be.

Long story short: I am still a believer in the enriching power of saṃvāda, ‘dialogue’.