The Nyāyasūtra proposes a fundamental division of realities into dravya ‘substances’, guṇa ‘qualities’, and karman ‘actions’,¹ with the former as the substrate of the latter two. This leads to two difficulties for Veṅkaṭanātha’s agenda. On the one hand, the radical distinction between substance and attribute means that Nyāya authors imagine liberation to be the end of the connection of the ātman ‘self’ to all attributes, from sufferance to consciousness. By contrast, Veṅkaṭanātha, would never accept consciousness to be separated from the individual soul and even less from God. The other difficulty regards the theology of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. Since the beginnings of Pañcarātra, one of its chief doctrines has been that of the manifestations (vibhūti) of Viṣṇu, which are dependent on Him but co-eternal with Him and in this sense are unexplainable according to the division of substances into eternal and transient.

To that, Veṅkaṭanātha opposes more than one classification, so that it is clear that Veṅkaṭanātha’s main point is addressing the above-mentioned problems with the Nyāya ontology, rather than establishing in full detail a distinct ontology. For an instance of alternative classifications see, e.g., Nyāyasiddhāñjana, jaḍadravyapariccheda:

dvedhā jaḍājaḍatayā pratyak taditaratayāpi vā dravyam | ṣoḍhā triguṇānehojīveśvarabhogabhūtimatibhedāt || dhīkālabhogabhūtīravivakṣitvā guṇādirūpatvāt | jīvātmeśabhidārthaṃ tredhā tattvaṃ viviñcate kecit || (Nyayasiddhanjana 1966, p. 33).

“Substance is of two types, [according to this classification:] inert or alive, or [according to this other classification:] innerly [luminous] or what is its opposite. [Furthermore,] it is of six types, according to the division in [natura naturans having] three qualities, time (anehas) individual souls, God, the ground for [God’s] enjoyment (bhogabhūti) and [His] cognition. Some distinguish reality as of three types, in order to distinguish the Lord, the individual soul, and the self (as the material cause of the universe) because they do not want to include (lit. express) cognition, time and the ground for [God’s] enjoyment, since these have the nature of qualities”.

When do they start being explicitly discussed? And by which kind of authors? I know of Buddhists like Dharmottara (and Yāmari, thanks to Eli Franco) and Vedānta ones.

Within Mīmāṃsā, Kumārila at the beginning of the Ślokavārttika, pratijñā section, speaks of content (viṣaya), purpose (prayojana) and connection (sambandha). The absence of the ideal reader is no suprise, since before the end of the first millennium this is often the case.

Within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Veṅkaṭanātha at the beginning of his Seśvaramīmāṃsā speaks of content, purpose, ideal reader and seemingly not of the connection, although he might be referring to it by speaking of a pravṛttiprakāra. Hence, the group of four was possibly not yet crystallised?

I have myself a few objections (which I signalled in the comment section of each podcast), but am overall very happy that someone is taking Indian philosophy seriously enough while at the same time making it also accessible to lay listeners. In this sense, I cannot but hope that Peter and Jonardon’s attempts are successful.

The series includes also interviews to scholars: Brian Black on the Upaniṣads, Rupert Gethin on Buddhism, Jessica Frazier on “Hinduism” (the quotation marks are mine only), myself on Mīmāṃsā. Further interviews are forthcoming. Criticisms and comments are welcome! (but please avoid commenting on my pronunciation mistakes.)

During Vincent Eltschinger’s Habilitation’s Defence and now at the IABS the topic has been resumed by Eli Franco (Birgit Kellner, Patrick McAllister, Ernst Steinkellner and others have also taken part to the discussion). Franco’s pars destruens regarded the fact that one finds evidences of the Buddha’s omniscience as a distinct philosophical topic already in the Spitzer Manuscript and that the topic has, thus, not been introduced by Dharmakīrti in the Indian debate. As for the sattvānumāna, Franco contends that its formulation by Dharmakīrti and by Bhāviveka is completeley different and that the only common element, namely sattva as a probans is already found in Uddyotakara. McAllister has suggested during the discussion and “on behalf of Helmut” that the inferences are not that different. They are applied to a different locus (pakṣa), but their probans (namely, anityatva in Bhāviveka and kṣaṇikatva in Dharmakīrti) could be the same. In fact, after Dharmakīrti anityatva is considered to be the same as kṣaṇikatva, so that if Bhāviveka lived before Dharmakīrti, the inferences would be different, whereas if he lived after him, they would be equivalent.
Long story short, according to Franco, the similarities between Bhaviveka and Dharmakīrti are far too vague and general: they could have been “ideas in the air”, rather than precise references. And even if there were direct correspondences, there can still have been a third source. We cannot assume that what we have was actually all that there was. In this connection, Birgit Kellner has pointed out the fact that there is no reason to believe that what we have is all that was circulating at that time. If I (EF) am allowed to step in, this is in my opinion an important thing to be kept in mind while looking for the source of an innovative element in an author’s thought (as paradigmatically done by Erich Frauwallner in his attempt to reconstruct the history of Indian philospohy). An example is the case of the development of Kumārila’s thought from vyāpti to niyama discussed here, but the general point regards the fact that while looking for a source, we are left with far too few candidates.

As for the pars construens of his argument, Franco stressed the silence by Xuanzang, that by Candrakīrti and then silence of Jain authors. The first Jain who refers to Dharmakīrti is in fact Akalaṅka (720–780). All of that has been explained by Krasser as the result of the suppression of Dharmakīrti’s thought from the curricula at Nalanda. But, Franco noticed, we have no evidence neither of this suppression, nor of the later rediscovery of Dharmakīrti in Nalanda. Ernst Steinkellner observed in this connection that curricula are, even nowadays, slow to be updated and Dharmakīrti’s thought was very complex. It might thus be that he could find his place in the curricula only after a generation of commentaries which had clarified his innovations (incidentally, this “softer” explanation is not what Krasser had thought and claimed to have been the case).

A last point: Moving Dharmakīrti back would have a great impact on the chronology of Indian philosophy. For instance, we now know more or less for sure that Dharmakīrti influenced Kumārila, who was influenced by Dignāga. Establishing independently Kumārila’s date would thus lead one to important conclusions regarding Dharmakīrti’s date, too (and vice versa).

For further thoughts on Bhāviveka and Dharmakīrti’s dates and relation, see this post. For some elements towards a date of Kumārila, see this post. This post is a part of a series on the IABS. For the others, see here. Please remember that these are only my first impressions and that all mistakes are mine and not the speakers’ ones.
Full disclosure: I might be implicitly biased in favour of Helmut Krasser, because he was a friend, my former boss and because he is no longer there to defend himself.

• In fact, the first speaker, Shoryu Katsura, has focused on the Fangbianxinlun, attributed to Nagarjuna.
  The Fangbianxinlun (together with a text attributed to Vasubandhu) has been one of the two only texts on logic until Xuanzang introduced Dignaga’s New Buddhist Logic.

  The Fangbianxinlun is the Chinese translation of a no longer extant text whose title has been rendered as *Upayahrdaya (Tucci) or *Prayogasara (Frauwallner). After proposing a third alternative, namey *Prayogahrdaya, Katsura has shown that the first Chinese character is used only twice in the text itself, once with the meaning of upaya and the second time with the meaning of prayoga ‘formal representation of a syllogism’, so that we have no way to settle the issue. As for the authorship, due to the usage of dilemmas and prasanga-argumentation, Katsura agrees with the attribution to Nagarjuna or to his school.
  At the very beginning of the text, an objector states that people engage in debate because they are motivated by arrogance and hatred, so that it is better to avoid debates altogether. The author justifies himself by saying that he is only explaining the rules of debate because he needs to protect the truth of the Buddha’s teaching (cf. the similar arguments about jati and vitanda, which should have the same protective function, in the Nyayasutra), and not out of personal pride.

  As for its significance for the purpose of reconstructing the history of Indian philosophy, the Fangbianxinlun (henceforth *UH) encompasses 8 topics, which remind one of the 8 sadhanas in the Hetuvidya section of the Yogacarabhumi. There are also correspondences with the 44 elements of debate mentioned in the Carakasamhita. The *UH recognises 4 pramanas (pratyaksa, anumana —said to be purvavat, sesavat and samanyatodrsta— sabda/aptagama and upamana). In a list of schools, Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools are mentioned, and among the latter are Vaisesikas and Jains. Katsura has suggested that the omission of Nyaya might mean that the text predates the Nyayasutra.
  In this regard, Birgit Kellner has suggested that the absence of the Nyayasutra does not mean that there was no Nyaya school. According to Franco, the final redation of the NS occurred short before Vatsyayana, in the first half of the 5th c.

  Long story short, Katsura’s talk nicely served the panel’s purpose of creating a common field of Indo-Sinic Buddhist studies.

• The same applies to Dan Lusthaus’ talk (on Friday morning), which was dedicated to the Chinese versions of Dharmapala’s commentary on the Alambanapariksa, and to the general topic of the presence of a Hetuvidya tradition in China which is independent of Dharmakirti (“as if there were a tradition of Greek Philosophy influenced by Plato but which has never known Aristotle”, Franco summarised).

Are times ripe for “Indo-Sinic Buddhism”? What are we expecting from this field of study?

This post is a part of a series on the IABS. For its first day, see here. For the first part of the second day, see here. For the second part of the second day, see here. For the third part of the second day, see here. Please remember that these are only my first impressions and that all mistakes are mine and not the speakers’ ones

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.

Thus, periodisation is a risky enterprise. However, it is hard to avoid it, since one needs some structure while approaching the clumsy mass of uninterpreted historical events.

A similar case is that of the interpretation of the history of a given philosophical school. It is fascinating to look at Kumārila’s and Prabhākara’s main philosophical innovations as replies to Dignāga (as does McCrea 2013), and we as scholars need to have and to provide some interpretative cues unless we want to end up in a Babel’s library, where the critical edition of each 20th c. school’s paper counts as that of a crucial manuscript for the history of Nyāya. However, great theses are also dangerous, insofar as we tend to cling at them and to become blind to other hypotheses (cf. on this point Andrew’s commentary on this post).

Remember that relative who would not listen to your revolutionary ideas and would just say “You think like that because you are young, but you will change your mind in ten years”? Do you remember hating his frame of mind which did not allow for any other possible explanation? I, for one, do not want to exercise the same kind of violence on the texts I read. Nor do I want to read texts only in order to find confirmations of my theory (and to have to disregard blatant counter examples).

Long story short: we need interpretative frames as orienteering tools and because otherwise we would just fall prey of an even more dangerous implicit methodology. But, if you ask me, I think that all such interpretative schemes should be constantly revised. Let us attempt great theories, general periodisations and classifications of authors and ideas, but if and only if we are then not only willing, but also ready to question them. The great interpretative frame is not a goal to be reached once and forever. It is “always to be revised”.

When did the Middle Ages (or Antiquity, or the Modern Age…) “end” according to your school teachers? And according to your grown-up you? And, did you ever radically change your interpretation of something?

On implicit methodologies, see this post. On various hypotheses for a periodisation of Indian philosophy, see this post and its comments, where also Franco 2013 (where the papers by Lipner and by McCrea mentioned above are found) is discussed.

(cross-posted also on the Indian Philosophy Blog).

Bronkhorst suggested that the Yogasūtras have been assembled by the author of the Bhāṣya (“the sūtras were brought together by the author of the Yogabhāṣya“, p. 17), who might have added further sūtras to the lore of transmitted ones and mentions among his evidences the fact that the YS 1.21–23 have an unforced interpretation which has been violated by the author of the Bhāṣya (who, then, evidently took pre-existing sūtras and provided them with a new context and a new interpretation). Accordingly, Bronkhorst suggests that “the available evidence points to two persons, Patañjali [as author of the YS] and Vindhyavāsin [as author of the Bhāṣya]” (p. 18). A large part of Bronkhorst 1985, in fact, points to the reconstruction of the theoretical background of YS and YBh and connects it with Sāṅkhya teachings.

Maas, seems to push the thesis further and maintains that the only text whose existence can be reconstructed is the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (henceforth PYŚ, as in Maas 2013), already including sūtra and bhāṣya (to be understood not as “different literary genres but compositional elements of scholarly works (śāstra)”, p. 65). In the case of YS 1.2, 1.41 and 2.23, Maas suggests that the fact that they are introduced with the perfect tense pravavṛte instead of the usual present passive might be a hint of the fact that these sūtras were older. Noteworthy is also the fact that Maas uses a different set of arguments than the ones used by Bronkhorst 1985. In harmony with his textual critical interests, Maas picks out manuscript evidences, such as the lack of an independent transmission of the YS, which are only transmitted together with the YBh, the lack of a consistent marking of the sūtras in the manuscripts, and the colophons, which are not present separately for the YS part and which mention the “YBh” of Vyāsa only “in a few manuscripts of limited stemmatic relevance” (p. 58).

A very interesting way to validate Maas’ arguments would be, thus, to test them against the evidence of the other philosophical sūtras. Are not they also only transmitted within their Bhāṣya? And how do their colophons look like? Are the sūtras marked in manuscripts? I only know a little bit about the Mīmāṃsā– and Nyāyasūtra and have no information about their colophons.

Have you ever read Madeleine Biardeau’s Theory of knowledge and philosophy of language in Classical Brahmanism (the original is written in French, 1964)? I have a very positive opinion about it, but one must say that it presents the philosophical systems as if they had always existed, i.e., devoid of an inner development, as pure systems. Eli Franco, in his introduction (called On the Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy) of the volume he recently edited, Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, individuates this attitude and blames for it the influence of an only emic approach, i.e., the adherence to the Indian ahistorical model.
More interestingly, however, Gérard Colas in “Histoire, Oralité, Structure. À propos d’un tournant dans l’oeuvre de Madeleine Biardeau” (Journal Asiatique 2012), reconstructs the cultural milieu in which Biardeau was working and recognises the influence of French structuralism, as shown by Biardeau’s own words in Biardeau 1964, where she declares that she wants to formulate “a structural study of the Indian thought”.
In other words, there is more than just the emic vs. etic contraposition, since even within the West (if this category at all makes any sense) different trends have developed and historicism was only one among them. Although historicism was perhaps the dominant trend in the German cultural milieu, the situation was completely different in France, where historicism has never be the rule (and, I will argue in future posts, in the UK, Italy, etc.).