At this point, Maṇḍana introduces some opponents, mainly one upholding pratibhā.

The term pratibhā is found in Bhartṛhari, whom Maṇḍana extensively quotes in chapter 11 of his Vidhiviveka. It is clear that Maṇḍana suggests the pratibhā as an alternative way of making sense of what motivates people to act. In this sense, pratibhā is a pravartaka `motivator’, something causing one to act. It is the key alternative to Maṇḍana’s own proposal that the knowledge that the enjoined action will lead to a desired result is what causes people to act. The pratibhā theory radically opposes this one.

In fact, Maṇḍana’s theory is primarily cognitive (you act with regard to X because you know something relevant about X), whereas the pratibhā theory is almost behaviourist (you act with regard to X because of the pratibhā inducing you to act).

The Prābhākara opponent within Maṇḍana will later appropriate this theory and join it with their own deontological understanding, according to which we act primarily because we are enjoined to do so, thus adding a deontological nuance which was absent in Bhartṛhari’s view of pratibhā.

But what is pratibhā before its Prābhākara reinterpretation? A key passage for the understanding of the pratibhā theory in Maṇḍana before its Prābhākara appropriation is the very sentence introducing it, at the beginning of section 11.3. There, the opponent suggests pratibhā as the thing causing one to undertake an action. An uttarapakṣin asks which kind of artha this is and the answer is at first sight surprising: It is no artha at all (na kaścit). What is it then? It is a cognitive event (prajñā) leading to action.

The point seems to be that there is no mental content, but only the urge towards acting. The pratibhā is a mental state without intentional content.

A further hint is found at the beginning of 11.5, where Maṇḍana responds to the paradox that the pratibhā cognition has no object, but it causes activity. This results, says Maṇḍana, in an undesirable consequence. In fact, if in the case of pratibhā the cognition of the connection between word and meaning plays no role, because the pratibhā has no intentional content, a person hearing a prescription should act independently of any cognition of the meaning.

But can we have purely agentive mental states? Can there be incitement to action without any content?

I am grateful to Hugo David for an inspiring talk on pratibhā back in 2018. This interpretation should, however, not be blamed on him. Similarly, I am always grateful to Elliot Stern for his edition of the Vidhiviveka and for the work we shared in the last 12 months.

Hugo David’s review is (to my knowledge) the only one in French. It is encouraging that great work is still done in languages other than English, but I will allow myself some longer summaries of it, for the sake of readers who may not know French. (I beg the reader’s pardon for my translations, which do not convey the elegance of David’s original French).

First of all, the review is part of a longer essay on “new developments in the study of Mīmāṃsā”, which discusses also James Benson’s edition and translation of the Mīmāṃsānyāyasaṅgraha and Kei Kataoka’s edition, translation and study of the codanā portion of the Ślokavārttika. I cannot but be pleased to be among these brilliant colleagues (whose works I listed in my annotated bibliography of Mīmāṃsā in 15 titles and I have myself reviewed, see here for Kataoka’s, and here for Benson’s).

David states almost at the outset that

No effort has been avoided in order to facilitate to the reader the access to philosophical and linguistic theories which are often very complex and to which almost no previous study had been dedicated. (p. 406)

This points to one of my leading ideas, namely the attempt to communicate what I understand. I am sure that some readers might be annoyed by my attempts to make the life of the reader easier and to demystify Sanskrit Philosophy: they are warned!

This concern is also the reason for my choice, rightly noted by David, “to generally priviledge systematicity over chronology” (which is very true, given that I use also the late Mīmāṃsānyāyaprakāśa to explain this or that concept). David is further right in noting that the only part of the book in which the history of ideas becomes predominant is the chapter regarding the evolution in the classification of prescriptions.

More importantly, David disagrees with my interpretation of the role of desire in Mīmāṃsā. Interested readers can read his alternative explanation in a recent article on the Journal of Value Inquiry, the beginning of which can be read here.

Being a learned reader and scholar of Mīmāṃsā and of Sanskrit theories of language in general, David engages also with the details of the Tantrarahasya‘s translation. He suggests (p. 405, n. 21) to understand tantradvaya, ‘the two tantras’ Rāmānujācārya announces to be his topic, as the Mīmāṃsāsūtra and the Vedāntasūtra, on the basis of the fact that the alternative understanding I suggested (the two schools of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā) is not usually attested for tantra. This may well be true, and this suggestion is intriguing, since elsewhere in his work Rāmānujācārya reveals to be a Viśiṣṭādvaitavedāntin. However, the Vedāntasūtras are never mentioned in the Tantrarahasya, so that their mention as the topic of the whole text would be at least misleading.

• by Taisei Shida on Vol. 31 of Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism. Saṃbhāṣā (2014), pp. 84-87.
• by Andrew Ollett on Vol. 65.2 of Philosophy East and West (2015), pp. 632–636 (see here)
• by Gavin Flood on Vol. 8.3 of Journal of Hindu Studies (2015), pp. 326–328, (the beginning is accessible here)
• by Hugo David on the vol. 99 of BEFEO (2012-13), pp. 395-408 (you can read the beginning here)

I am extremely grateful to the reviewers (I could not have hoped for better ones!) for their careful and stimulating analyses and for their praising my attempts to make the text as understandable as possible and to locate sources and parallels in the apparatus. In fact, as a small token of gratitude for the time they spent on my book, I will dedicate a post to each one of their reviews, where I discuss their corrections and suggestions. The first one in this series will appear next Friday.

This semester, I will be teaching about linguistics and philosophy of language* in classical India. The topic is too vaste, so I will need to make some drastic choices. The following are the elements of the narrative I will be following:

The philosophical arena in classical** India has three main protagonists, which are constantly responding to each other, namely Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and the Buddhist Epistemological School. In the case of linguistics, two further schools enter the debate. On the one hand, Nyāya and even more so Mīmāṃsā have to answer to the challenges of the Vyākaraṇa (‘Grammar’) school which first focused on linguistic analyses of morphemes, but after Bhartṛhari (5th c.?) offered comprehensive accounts of the way language conveys knowledge. On the other hand, the school of Poetics (alaṅkāraśāstra) reused elements of the Mīmāṃsā and of the Nyāya theories and elaborated them further (see two recent articles by Hugo David and Andrew Ollett).

As for the main contents of the debate, a core concern is the identification of three elements, namely the identity of the signifier (vācaka), of the signified (vācya) and of their relation (sambandha). As for the first, does the vācaka consist of the phonemes? If so, of them collectively or one by one? Of their phonic form or of their essential characters? If not, does it consist of the words? Of the sentences? Or of something being manifested by words, but not identical with them, like the Grammarians’ sphoṭa?
As for the vācya, discussants argued for its identification with individuals or with universals, with a mental idea or with the exclusion of anything else.
Last, as for the sambandha, the Mīmāṃsakas believe it to be intrinsic and not available to human beings. Naiyāyikas, by contrast, consider it to be conventional. Experts of poetics will combine at different times Mīmāṃsā elements (such as the theory of bhāvanā, see again the two articles mentioned above) with the Naiyāyikas’ openness to the creativity of single authors. Grammarians, in turn, agree with Mīmāṃsā on the intrinsic relation between signifier and signified, but identify the former with the sphoṭa, thus violating the Mīmāṃsā’s commitment to what Westerners call the Ockham’s razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem).

* I am forced to use two terms due to the lack of correspondence between Western and Indian categories.
** The situation was different before the first centuries AD and changed after the first millennium.

Long-time readers might remember that this is one of my pet topics (see this book). Probably due to the complex technicalities involved, apart from Jim Benson, not many people have been working on this topic, but in the last few days I had the pleasure to get in touch with Sharon Ben-Dor (who worked on paribhāṣās, more on his articles in a future topic) and then to receive the following invitation:

Doing things another way: Bhartṛhari on “substitutes” (pratinidhi)
Time: Friday, 17. October 2014, Beginn: 15:00 c.t.
Place: Institut für Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, Seminarraum 1, Apostelgasse 23, 1030 Wien
Speakers: Vincenzo Vergiani and Hugo David (Cambridge)

Topic
Specialists of Vedic ritual call “substitutes” (pratinidhi) those ritual elements (sacrificial substances, etc.) introduced in the liturgical procedure in case the prescribed items are not available at the moment of the sacrifice (e.g. barley can, in certain circumstan­ces, become a substitute for rice). This category, first theorized in Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā­sūtras (6.3.11-41), plays an important role in the Brahmanical conception of the ritual, answering many practical issues and securing the adaptability of essentially “Vedic” rites to a variety of material contexts. At the same time, it constitutes a major challenge for linguistic and philosophical analysis: how far can an action accomplished by different means still be referred to as the “same” action? In this lecture, we will analyse the treatment of this topic by the 5th-century grammarian Bhartṛhari who develops, in various parts of his Vākyapadīya, a full-fledged theory of (ritual) substitution, without any clear equivalent in contemporary Mīmāṃsaka literature. Besides giving an outline of this theory, we will try to understand the reasons that incited Bhartṛhari to engage with a problem pertaining mostly to the science of ritual, and the consequences it had for his conception of language as expressive of a specified, though unitary action.

Speakers
Dr. Vincenzo Vergiani is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge (UK) and director of the project “Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge”. His main areas of research are the Sanskrit grammatical traditions and the history of linguistic ideas in pre-modern South Asia.
Dr. Hugo David is a Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK). His main focus of interest is the history of Brahmanical systems of philosophy and exegesis. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 2012 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), dealt with theories of language in classical Advaita-Vedānta.

You can find further infos here: http://www.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/Events/vergiani+david

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.