elisa freschiJayanta – elisa freschi

Cognition of the self

elisa freschi — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:59:55 +0000

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!

Intro to Sanskrit philosophy

elisa freschi — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 16:04:20 +0000

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.

Can you guess what manuscripts say?

elisa freschi — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 09:41:29 +0000

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.
Readers will recognise a sequence of arguments found also, e.g., in Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī, book 6.

Nonetheless, I am unable to reconstruct a reading I found in the manuscripts. Here comes the passage as found in the editio princeps (1902), which often just silently emends the text of the manuscript the editor had in front of him, and my preliminary translation of it:

kathaṃ vāyogyam upalabdham. pratyekasamudāyayaugapadyādivikalpanānupapatyā varṇānām± vācakatvāsiddhau gatyabhāvāt tadatiriktaḥ kaścid artthaḥ pratyayahetuḥ kalpyata iti cet

[Opponent:] Alternatively, how is something not fit (to be perceived) (like, according to you, the sphoṭa), perceived?

[Sphoṭavādin:] Given that the phonemes [can]not be established as the expressing elements, because all the alternatives, namely that [they are seized] one by one or as a group, simultaneously etc. (i.e., sequentially) are not viable, there is no way (gati) [to make the signification work]. Therefore, one needs to postulate a cause for the notion of the meaning which is different from them (phonemes).

And here comes the text as found in two manuscripts (1748 and 2242, GOML Madras):

kathaṃ vāyogyam upalabdham ata ity ārttha pratyekasamudāyakam± yaugapadyādivikalpanānupapatyā varṇānām± vācakatvāsiddhau gatyabhāvāt tadatiriktaḥ kaścid artthaḥ pratyayahetuḥ kalpyata iti cet

And in a further one (70054 Adyar, usually better than the above two):

kathaṃ vāyogyam upalabdha{m±}nta ity ārttha pratyekasamudāyakramayaugapadyādivikalpanānupapatyā varṇānām± vācakatvāsiddhau gatyabhāvāt tadatiriktaḥ kaścid artthaḥ pratyayahetuḥ kalpyata iti cet

Do readers have an intuition about what this ata/ta ity ārttha means?

(I will not discuss it here the other variant right after pratyekasamudāya. I am inclined to think that the variant found in 70054 makes sense).

Maṇḍana on the Śyena

elisa freschi — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:02:59 +0000

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)

From word meanings to sentence meaning: A workshop in Cambridge

elisa freschi — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 14:36:26 +0000

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

Venue: Room 213, Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge

Convenors: Vincenzo Vergiani and Shishir Saxena

9:45-10:30 am: Maria Piera Candotti, Université de Lausanne/Università di Cagliari (Visiting Scholar)

Bhartṛhari and the basic meaning unit: innovation or restauration

10:30-11:15 am: Daniele Cuneo, Universiteit Leiden

When words do not suffice: the polymorphic concept of bādha

11:15-11:30 am: Tea / Coffee Break

11:30-12:15 pm: Hugo David, École française d’Extrême-Orient

‘vākyārtha eva padārthaḥ‘: On the reappropriation of an old Mīmāṃsā principle in a Vedāntic framework

12:15-1:00 pm: Elisa Freschi, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

From authorless words to Vedic prescriptions: The Mīmāṃsaka journey from the subject-independent nature of language to the prescriptive nature of language

1:00-2:00 pm: Lunch

2:00-2:45 pm: Kei Kataoka, Kyushu University

How to paraphrase a sentence? Bādari vs Jaimini

2:45-3:30 pm: Tiziana Pontillo, Università di Cagliari

The general samartha-constraint of word-formation rules in the Pāṇinian tradition

3:30-4:15 pm: Akane Saito, Kyushu University

Phonemes as the Conveyors of Sentence Meaning for Kumārila, Śālikanātha, Vācaspati, and Jayanta

4:15-4:30 pm: Tea / Coffee Break

4:30-5:15 pm: Shishir Saxena, University of Cambridge

Kumārila on why śabda cannot be classified as anumāna on the basis of āptavādāvisaṃvāda, as argued in the Śabdapariccheda & Vākyādhikaraṇa of the Ślokavārttika

5:15-6:00 pm: Vincenzo Vergiani, University of Cambridge

Of the unitary nature of complex sentences: Bhartṛhari’s remarks in the second kāṇḍa of the Vākyapadīya

What is a commentary? UPDATED

elisa freschi — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 13:25:38 +0000

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.

Sanskrit authors, thus, had in mind a widely different set of texts which we all bring back to the seemingly single category of “commentary”. Some of them are chiefly line-by-line or word-by-word explanations (an illustrious example is Manorathanandin’s commentary on Dharmakīrti’s PV). Others entail elaborate philosophical disquisitions (such as Vācaspati’s Nyāyakaṇikā on Maṇḍana’s Vidhiviveka). Still others just comment on a few words or sentences every 10 pages or so (such as Cakradhara’s Granthibhaṅga on Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī).
Some of them are part of a longer history, that they fully embrace. This is especially true in the case of the philosophical sūtras and of their first Bhāṣya-commentary, which tends to be fused in a single text. This last sentence could also be interpreted as saying that a sūtra-part was only later extracted out of the respective Bhāṣya.
Vācaspati’s commentary of the Nyāyasūtra, for instance, embeds comments also on its Bhāṣya by Vātsyāyana, but typically also on the Vārttika thereon. Others focus only on one text and neglect the successive history. Śrīprapāduka’s commentary on the same Nyāyasūtra, for instance, explicitly focuses only on it.
What is constant in all these cases is that a commentary is in close dialogue with a root text (with or without its commentaries), which remain(s) its main interlocutor(s).
This makes the definition wide enough to encompass texts such as the Nyāyamañjarī itself, which comments extensively on some selected Nyāyasūtras (Graheli 2016 contains an appendix with the sūtra numbers and the impressive amount of pages dedicated to each of them). Similarly, Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments anew the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, programmatically neglecting the commentary by Śabara.
Thus, we could sum up the relation “A is a commentary of B” as “B is the main interlocutor of A”. **UPDATE: The relation of “being the main interlocutor” can be more loosely understood if A and B belong to the same śāstric tradition, whereas it needs to entail a very close (e.g., page-by-page or line-by-line) dialogue in order to consider A, which is polemical about B, a commentary of it.**
However, the picture may become still more complicated, because a text A apparently commenting on B may have in fact in view most of all B’s other commentary, C, so that C, though never mentioned, is A’s main interlocutor.
Coming back to the example mentioned above, the Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments on the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, but while having constantly in view the Śabara’s Bhāṣya thereon and, more strikingly, Rāmānuja’s Bhāṣya on a different sūtra, namely the Brahmasūtra. One ends up with a net of main interlocutors rather than a single one.

**I thank Amod Lele for the discussion in the comments on the same post at the Indian Philosophy blog.

Basic bibliography for Bhaṭṭa Jayanta

elisa freschi — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 10:21:37 +0000

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,

Because he is a philosopher
Because he deals with texts of other schools and thus aims at being understandable
Because he is a talented writer

But what should you read in order to better understand Jayanta?

Graheli 2012 (OA on JIPh) gives you a comprehensive overview of the manuscript sources. Graheli 2011 (RSO) and his forthcoming book further elaborate on which manuscripts and editions you can rely upon.
Kei Kataoka has published (mostly alone, but in a few cases together with other scholars, such as Alex Watson and myself) an impressive list of editions, (English and Japanese) translations and studies on various parts of the Nyāyamañjarī. You can find them all listed on his blog. Most of them can also be downloaded from there.
Jonardon Ganeri has dedicated various articles (see, e.g., Ganeri 1996 on JIPh) on the issue of meaning in the Nyāyamañjarī.*
Similarly, P.K. Sen dedicated several interesting essays to the philosophy of language of Jayanta, see especially Sen 2005 and, if you can read Bengali, his 2008 translation of the fifth book.
For a historical overview on Jayanta, you can read Slaje 1986 and the introduction of Dezső 2005 (Clay Sanskrit Library), which is an enjoyable translation of a philosophical drama by Jayanta.
Should you be able to read Gujaratī, Nagin Shah’s translation of the Nyāyamañjarī is the best one, so far (in my opinion) (Shah 1975–1992). English readers can get some sense of it through Shah’s book-long study (1992–1997).

*By the way, should you need some foundations on Indian theories of language, you can think of reading Chakrabarti’s short Introduction to this topic (JIPh 1989) and then Matilal and Sen 1988.

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

elisa freschi — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 21:37:05 +0000

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?

In Classical Indian philosophy, Naiyāyika authors should uphold the possibility of a non-committal understanding of sentence-meanings, since they are convinced that cognitions need to be proved to be valid in order to be such and that such validation comes from outside (in the case of testimony, typically out of the reliability of the speaker). Mīmāṃsā authors, by contrast, would claim that belief is withdrawn but that the default understanding of a sentence implies the belief that it states something true.

Now, the problem with the non-committal understanding is that it seemse to have been theorised (and called śābdabodha) as such only in Navya Nyāya. Taber (1996) discusses the possibility of such a hypothesis already in the 10th c. Jayanta, but his arguments are critically analysed in Graheli (2015, forthcoming in Kervan).

By chance I read of a similar discussion in the Port Royal Logique in this post, where the problem is also how to account for the distinction between understanding a sentence and believing that its content is the case. The post is highly recommended!

pada-vākya-pramāṇa… Since when?

elisa freschi — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 19:26:21 +0000

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

The tripartition is handy and catchy, but clearly post-classical, also since the idea of distinguishing schools according to their “forte” and studying each of them in a technical way is probably itself post-classical. Thus, when did the tripartition originate, and by whom? When and where did it become standard?
As for the first question, until now, I have encountered it in Jayanta (10th c. Kashmīr), in a non-standard form, so that it may be thought that Jayanta lies just before its standardization.
As for the last question, in the following quote by Veṅkaṭanātha (13th c. Tamil Nadu) the standardisation seems complete:

The knowers of the śāstra divide the śāstra into three, according to the division into words, sentences and means of knowledge.

(padavākyapramāṇabhedena hi tredhā vibhajanti śāstraṃ śāstravidaḥ)

When and wher did you encounter this tripartition first?

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

elisa freschi — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 11:09:32 +0000

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).

My first reaction to the question was that Mīmāṃsā authors obviously comply to the principle of non contradiction. First of all, because the Mīmāṃsā school is straightforwardly empiricist and refutes the Jain (and Mādhyamika) attempts to make mutually contradictory statements look as both true at the same time.

Furthermore, as Tillemans (2013) has argued, it is very hard to find any school of Indian philosophy which did not accept it, and even in the Buddhist Mādhyamika (which has been at times identified as upholding some form of dialethism, see again Tillemans 1009 on Yasuo Deguchi, Jay Garfield, and Graham Priest) one finds clear statements about the fact that violating the principle of mutual contradiction (parasparavirodha) is a fatal fallacy:

But if the opponent did not desist even when confronted with a
contradiction (virodha) in his own position, then, too, as he would
have no shame, he would not desist at all even because of a logical
reason and example. Now, as it is said, for us there is no debate
with someone who is out of his mind. (Candrakīrti, Prasannapadā 1.2)

Furthermore, Mīmāṃsā authors recognise inference (anumāna) as an instrument of knowledge and although the Mīmāṃsā inference is slightly different from the better-known Nyāya one, it still presupposes that one can infer from an invariable concomitance either the presence or the absence of something, e.g., the presence of fire on a smoky mountain or the absence of it in a pond (thus, no intermediate possibility is accepted).

When directly confronted with an objection concerning the principle of non contradiction Mīmāṃsā authors do not deny its validity and as an aside describe it:

As for what has been said [by the Buddhist opponents], namely that “It is illogical that in a single real entity (vastu) two contradictory aspects (rūpa) simultaneously occur”, this is also wrong.

Also, in the case [of our theory] there is no mutual contradiction, because no [such contradiction] is grasped |
[In fact,] it is not the case that one knows the one once the other is excluded, like it would be the case with mother-of-pearl and silver (where a shiny object can either be an instance of silver or of mother-of-pearl) ||

When there is a contradiction, at the denial of one [alternative], the other is known [to be true]. But in the topic under consideration is it not so, hence, what would be the contradiction?

(yad apy abhihitam “itaretaraviruddharūpasamāveśa ekatra vastuni nopapadyate” iti, tad api na samyak. parasparavirodho ‘pi nāstīha tadavedanāt | ekabādhena nānyatra dhīḥ śuktirajatādivat || yatra virodho bhavati, tatraikatararūpopamardena rūpāntaram upalabhyate. prakṛte tu naivam iti ko virodhārthaḥ (Mīmāṃsā answer within Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī 5, section 3.1, Kataoka 2010, p. 193).

This appears to confirm my initial impression about the applicability of Classical Logic to Mīmāṃsā. Please note, however, that Buddhist Pramāṇavādins are much stricter than Mīmāṃsā authors when it comes to applying logic to reality. For Mīmāṃsā authors, reality is the ultimate litmus test for each cognition, so that one cannot decide of the truth of an abstract proposition about the world in a way that contrasts what we directly perceive. In other words, Buddhist Pramāṇavādins are ready to say that “Everything that exists is momentary” and to conclude that our perception of lasting things is illusory. Mīmāṃsā authors, by contrast, contend that the Buddhist syllogism about momentariness must be wrong, since it clashes with our perceptions.