Tag Archives: Jayanta

Posted on

Cognition of the self

How does one know about the self, according to the three main schools discussed in my last post?

Buddhist Epistemological School (Dharmakīrti): the self does not exist. The only thing that exists is a stream (santāna) of causally linked momentary cognitions. Cognitions are self-aware of themselves qua cognitions (svasaṃvedana). This is not contradictory, because each cognition has a perceiver and a perceived aspect (grāhaka and grāhya-ākāra respectively).
Nyāya: the self is known only through inference (Vātsyāyana, Jayanta); it is known also through perception (Uddyotakara, Udayana)*
Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā (Kumārila): we have direct access to our self through ahampratyaya `cognition of the I’. No need to infer it, since perception trumps inference and Mīmāṃsā authors require novelty as a criterion for knowledge, so that repeating what is already known through ahampratyaya would not count as knowledge.

The first Nyāya position might lead to problems if connected with the acceptance of yogic perception. Yogins can indeed perceive the self, according to all Naiyāyikas. Why not all other beings, given that perception requires a conjunction of self+manas+sense faculties, that the self is pervasive (vibhu) and that spatial limits are not needed for perception, as shown by the case of absence? Jayanta explains that the self is partless and that a partless thing cannot simultaneously be perceiver and perceived (cf. Kumārila’s argument against the Buddhist idea of cognitions’ having a perceiver and a perceived aspect and Kumārila’s claiming that this does not apply to the self, which is complex and not partless).

The Mīmāṃsā position requires the joint work of intrinsic validity and falsification: some I-cognitions are not about the ātman, since they are indeed falsified (e.g., “I am thin”, which only refers to the body).
Other I-cognitions are not, e.g., cognising ourselves qua knowers and recognising ourselves as the same knower who knew something in the past.

*I am grateful to Alex Watson for discussing the topic with me per email, on top of his decades of work on the topic!

Posted on

Intro to Sanskrit philosophy

Background: This year I taught again a class on Sanskrit philosophy (for the first time since 2021). I only had 12 meetings, of three hours each, hence I had do made drastic choices. The following is the result of these choices (alternative choices could have been possible, e.g., focusing on the Upaniṣads and their commentaries). Comments, as usual welcome!

There is a time within Sanskrit philosophy, approximately around 500 to 1000 CE, without which all later discussions do not make sense (whereas one can understand later discussions without referring to, e.g., the Brāhmaṇas, the Pāli canon etc.).
I am thinking of this core of Sanskrit philosophy as the period of time in which philosophers interacted with each other in a dialectical way, learning from each other and being compelled by each other’s points. In other words, as the time in which philosophy was constrained by the need to give reasons for each claim. In this sense, I am not focusing on the Pāli Canon or on the Upaniṣads.

At the core of this period lies the interaction between three schools, namely Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Buddhist epistemological school. No matter the topic, the interaction among these three is always at the center and always needs to be taken into account. According to the various topics, further schools might need to be taken into account. For instance, discussions about atomism will need to take into account the Vaiśeṣika school, discussions about language need to take into account the Vyākaraṇa school.

At the center of this core moment are discussions about epistemology and philosophy of language. It is interesting to note that ontology does not necessarily logically precede epistemology and that the opposite can be the case, especially in the case of Mīmāṃsā. This is particularly evident in the case of discussions about prāmāṇya `validity’.

Sanskrit philosophy developed through debates among thinkers commenting and responding to each other. In this way, they showed that ‘novelty’ is overestimated as a criterion to assess philosophical value and its consistent presence among the criteria reviewers of grants and projects are asked to assess is more the result of a fashion than of inner-philosophical reasons.

This does not mean that individual authors did not deliver substantial contribution to philosophy. Philosophy develops through its history and its history is made by individual thinkers. Nonetheless, these individual thinkers contribute under the garb of a school, downplaying their disagreements with their predecessors and often enveloping them within a commentary on a predecessor’s text, which is meant not just to explain it, but also to enfold all its potential meaning. Some scholars did move from one school to the other (e.g., possibly Vasubandhu or Maṇḍana), others just introduced in one school the elements of the other school they more strongly agreed with (e.g., Jayanta).

Key authors to be kept in mind:
• Dignāga (Buddhist epistemological school), introduced the threefold check, later accepted by all thinkers
• Kumārila (Mīmāṃsā), introduced the concept of intrinsic validity, explained that cognitions are not self-aware, challenged the Dignāga framework, systematised the discussions about absence and the other sources of knowledge (found already in his predecessor, Śabara).
• Dharmakīrti (Buddhist epistemological school), younger contemporary of Kumārila, adjusted the apoha theory and several other epistemological points in the light of Kumārila’s cricitism.
• Jayanta (Nyāya), modified the Nyāya epistemology in the light of Kumārila’s criticism, explained that cognitions are intrinsically doubtful, unless proven right, but that this does not lead to a paralysis, because one can act based on doubt.

Posted on

Can you guess what manuscripts say?

A debate on sphoṭa

I am editing a portion of the Seśvaramīmāṃsā on a linguistic controversy about what is the vehicle of meaning. As often the case in Indian philosophy, an upholder of the sphoṭa theory speaks and says that the sphoṭa is the vehicle of the meaning, as hinted at by our own intuition that we understand a meaning śabdāt, i.e., from a unitary linguistic unit, not from various phonemes. The opponent replies saying that no independent sphoṭa exists independently and above the single phonemes, like no unitary assembly (pariṣad) exists independently of the single people composing it. The Sphoṭavādin replies that phonemes are unable to convey the meaning either one by one or collectively (because they never exist as a collective entity, given that they disappear right after having been pronounced.

Posted on

Maṇḍana on the Śyena

We already discussed (here, on November the 30th 2017) Jayanta’s position on the Śyena sacrifice. In this post we will observe that Jayanta was in fact inspired by Maṇḍana and, perhaps, by Maṇḍana’s commentator Vācaspati (it is still unsure whether Vācaspati was inspired by Jayanta or the other way around).

According to Maṇḍana, there are two kinds of Vedic prescriptions, the ones regarding the person (puruṣārtha) and the ones regarding the sacrifice (kratvartha).

In the case of puruṣārtha actions, the Vedic prescriptions do not motivate people to undertake them, since one would undertake them anyway because thery lead to happiness (prīti).
Rather, the Vedic prescriptions motivate people to undertake these actions with a certain set of auxiliaries. Similarly, in the case of the Śyena, the prescription about it does not promote it, since it is in itself puruṣārtha. The Śyena remains an anartha. (Vidhiviveka, p. 279, Goswami edition)

(ef and Sudipta Munsi)

Posted on

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

Posted on

What is a commentary? UPDATED

And how the Nyāyamañjarī and the Seśvaramīmāṃsā do (not) fit the definition

What makes a text a “commentary”? The question is naif enough to allow for a complicated answer. First of all, let me note the obvious: There is not a single word for “commentary” in Sanskrit, where one needs to distinguish between bhāṣyas, vārttikas, ṭippanīs, etc., often bearing poetical names, evoking Moons, mirrors and the like.

Posted on

Basic bibliography for Bhaṭṭa Jayanta

Suppose you want to undertake the study of Indian Philosophy and you want to read primary sources? Where should you start? I argued (in my contribution to Open Pages in South Asian Studies) that Bhaṭṭa Jayanta is a great starting point,

  1. Because he is a philosopher
  2. Because he deals with texts of other schools and thus aims at being understandable
  3. Because he is a talented writer
Posted on

Can one understand a sentence without believing its content to be the case?

Well, yes… isn’t it?
The problem is less easy than it may look like and amounts to the problem of non-committal understanding. Is it the normal attitude while listening to a speaker or just an exception or an a posteriori withdrawal of belief once one notices that the speaker is in any way non reliable?

Posted on

pada-vākya-pramāṇa… Since when?

If you have read post-Classical śāstra, you will have certainly encountered the formulation above, describing the three foundational disciplines as focusing on
words (pada), i.e., grammatical analysis in Vyākaraṇa
sentences (vākya), i.e., textual linguistics in Mīmāṃsā
means of knowledge (pramāṇa), i.e., epistemology in Nyāya

Posted on

Principle of non contradiction in Mīmāṃsā (and other Sanskrit schools) UPDATED

Again as part of my collaboration with (Western) logicians (about which you can read this post and the further ones linked from it), I was confronted with the question of whether Classical (Aristotelian) Logic applies to Mīmāṃsā. For the ones of you who have stopped studying logic long ago, this amounts to ask whether Mīmāṃsā authors would agree that at each given time, either A or “non-A” is true (and, as a consequence, that there is no middle way between these two alternatives, or tertium non datur).