He had studied first mathematics and physics and then moved to studying Sanskrit in India, Pune. In a recent interview with Vincent Eltschinger (on April 21 2025) he commented the choice to travel to India as due to his desire not to serve as a soldier —a choice which was deeply important to him. But, whatever the initial motivation, his years-long stay in India was meaningful and influential for his life and he never grew out of his fascination for Indian thought.

The fact that he started studying Sanskrit while in India is key to understand the role of Vyākaraṇa in his first many decades of work, given that Vyākaraṇa (or Sanskrit linguistics) is still studied and lively engaged with in contemporary India in general and in Pune in particular. Vyākaraṇa demands deep and almost complete dedication because of its technical character. One needs to know by heart or at least to be able to navigate all the 4000 aphorisms of Pāṇini’s seminal work for the school, together with their punctual glosses by Kātyāyana and the commentary by Patañjali, and this before even being able to open one’s mouth in a symposium of Vaiyākaraṇas. Bronkhorst has been able to contribute to this very technical field, especially to its perhaps most original thinker, Bhartṛhari, but without being swallowed up by the labyrinth of Vyākaraṇa. In contrast, he learnt from its method and contents, but retained his untameable intellectual curiosity.

For scholars of Bhartṛhari, Bronkhorst’s articles are indispensable. But even the ones among of us who never specialised on Bhartṛhari have probably been influenced by Bronkhorst and by his unique blend of thought-provoking ideas and thorough knowledge of the sources. In fact, Bronkhorst was an avid and fast reader, who read hundreds of pages of both Sanskrit scholarship and contemporary, mainly scientific, papers. His ideas looked at first sight almost too thought-provoking, almost like balons d’essay (trial balloons). However, when one tried to refute them, one was forced to see that Bronkhorst knew the Sanskrit sources of the relevant period thoroughly and that his bold ideas were in fact also well-grounded. (Apologies for not discussing here whether they were also ultimately right and completely so. I want to focus more on what we can learn from him than on correcting the occasional typos or on disagreeing with specific points.)

For instance, in May 2021 Dominik Wujastyk organised a (virtual) conference on the topic of Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha (2007), which possibly remains his most influential book. Bronkhorst himself had been invited as a respondent for talks which all engaged with his hypothesis. I was only in the audience, but was astonished to see how, almost twenty years after the book’s composition, Bronkhorst was still able to discuss each of its aspects and to respond (again, I will let to others to assess whether successfully) to each criticism raised by the speakers, through precise references to the epics and/or to Vedic texts.

Let me know enter into some details about a few of Johannes Bronkhorst’s contributions. Again, let me emphasise that there are too many to discuss even a significant percentage of them and that therefore the choice will be partly whimsical. I will focus on

• a) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the development of Sanskrit philosophy: The Greater Magadha hypothesis, the “discovery of dialogue” and its significance for the history of Sanskrit philosophy
• b) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the role of authors in Sanskrit philosophy: his hypothesis about a unitary Yogaśāstra and dis-unitary Mīmāṃsāsūtra and its importance for how we assess Sanskrit aphoristic texts
• c) His hypothesis about a radical difference between Sanskrit thought and European thought
• d) His general sceptical-scientific methodology

• a) Greater Magadha is one of those books about which we remember a moment before and a moment after. Before the book, scholars and lay people alike took it for granted that there was a single line of development within Indian though and that since the Buddha and his thought postdated early Vedic texts by centuries, these needed to contain the seeds which would have later led to the development of Buddhist thought. The texts which were conceptually closer to ancient Buddhism, namely the Upaniṣads were therefore dated to before the Buddha.

  The Greater Magadha takes the opposite point of view and looks at the evidence available with fresh eyes and notices that they are less uniform than we might think. They thus point to a different line of development, one in which there were different roots for Indian culture, which developed in parallel and not just a single line. On the West, the brāhmaṇic culture produced the Vedic texts. On the East of the Indian subcontinent, around Magadha, the culture he provisionally called “śramaṇic” produced Jainism and Buddhism, as well as key ideas that were later absorbed in the Brahmanic fold, such as karman and rebirth. By the way, the presence of an Eastern border for the Brahmanical culture is also attested by Patañjali’s definition of Āryavarta, which has an Eastern boundary (unlike Manu’s description of the same, only a few centuries later).

  The Greater Magadha can explain why karman and rebirth make a sudden entry in the Upaniṣads although they are virtually absent from the preceding Vedic texts. They enter the Brahmanical culture so well-developed and all at once because they had been elaborated for centuries outside of the Brahmanical culture. If Bronkhorst is right, one can stop looking for faint traces of possible forerunners of karman and rebirth in the Vedic Saṃhitās and start focusing on how the theory was already developed in Buddhist texts and then imported into the Upaniṣads. One can also invert the chronology of the Upaniṣads, which post-date the encounter with śramaṇic culture (this does not mean that they need to postdate the life of Siddhartha Gautama, since he was only one exponent of that culture, as is clear through the parallel of Jainism). The same applies to the claim that “Yoga” was practiced by the Buddha. In contrast, the similarities between the PYŚ and the Buddha’s teachings should be. according to Bronkhorst, interpreted as an influence of Buddhism into Yoga.
  

  Although I am here mainly focusing on philosophical issues, let me emphasise again that Bronkhorst’s reconstruction is extremely detailed and covers also aspects like the different funerary practices (round stūpas in the East vs. quadrilateral moulds in the West), the approach to medicine and the conception of a cyclical time, as well as the opposition between a urban (Magadha) and rural (brahmanical) culture. Last, it has the advantage of providing a methodology to identify what is original in the teaching of the Buddha and to explain why asceticism is both endorsed in the Pāli canon and criticised by the Buddha (it was part of his cultural milieu).

• a2) Distinguishing communities and not looking for historical links when they are virtually absent was at the basis of another of Bronkhorst’s contributions, namely the idea that the roots of Indian dialectics should be placed in the Buddhist communities in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent (which might have been influenced by the Greek tradition of public debate in the Indo-Bactrian kingdoms) and that it was useless to consider Upaniṣadic dialogues as the forerunners of the dialectical engagements which became standard in Sanskrit philosophy. Upaniṣadic dialogues are just something different (closer to the instruction by a wise person).
• b) Bronkhorst was (to my knowledge, as always) the first one to propose the idea of a unitary composition for what is known as the Yogasūtra and the Yogabhāṣya He spoke accordingly of a unitary Yogaśāstra. Like in the previous case, the idea is mind-blowing. Up to that point, many scholars had tried to reconstruct the worldview of the Yogasūtra as divided from the Yogabhāṣya and the Sāṅkhya intervention of the latter. If Bronkhorst’s hypothesis is correct, by contrast, the division into sūtra ‘aphorism’ and bhāṣya ‘commentary’ is only a polarity within a single text. This explains what could have otherwise been considered an anomaly, like the complete absence of an autonomous transmission of the Yogasūtra. Like in the Greater Magadha case, one could find alternative explanations, but Bronkhorst’s hypothesis has the advantage of showing a possibility for streamlining explanations and avoiding unnecessary additional steps (in Sanskrit, one would call that kalpanāgaurava). I should add in this connection that Bronkhorst’s hypothesis was presented in just an article (1985), but has thereafter been embraced by Philipp Maas (see especially Maas 2006 and Maas 2013) who found many evidences corroborating it, from manuscripts to the syntax of the sūtra-bhāṣya connecting links.
• b2) A similar case is that of the relation between the so-called Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, also known as Mīmāṃsā Sūtra and Brahma Sūtra. Authors before Bronkhorst had discussed their relation and chronology, Bronkhorst (2007) suggested that the latter imitates the style of the former, though not emerging from the same exegetical milieu.
• c) In the occasion of Ernst Steinkellner’s retirement, a symposium on the topic “Denkt Asien anders?” (Does Asia think differently?) was organised. Bronkhorst’s intervention led to a later book chapter and finally a book on the topic of what is different in Sanskrit thought. Bronkhorst proposed, as usual, a thought-provoking thesis, namely that there is indeed a radical difference, namely the reliance on language by Sanskrit philosophers.
  He explained how the various causation theories within Sanskrit philosophy (from Vaiśeṣika to Vedānta etc.) and the puzzled they involved (such as how could it be possible to bring into existence something that previously did not exist) are all due to thinking about the problem in linguistic terms. Their answers, in other words, were oriented by the Sanskrit form of basic sentences such as “the potter makes a pot”. In fact, how can the pot figure as the object of a sentence, given that it does not exist yet? Bronkhorst thought that this was a linguistic problem, namely one occasioned by the structure of language and not an ontological one. Westerners, according to Bronkhorst, would have immediately labeled the pot as non-existing until it is realised by the potter and would not have paused on its ontological status, whereas Indians never distinguished between linguistic and external reality.
  
  This is an interesting insight, and in fact there are several elements suggesting (as Karl Potter maintained) that the “linguistic turn” occurred in India much earlier than in Europe (note that I am saying the same thing Bronkhorst said, but looking at it from a more favourable perspective), such as the insistence on the analysis of linguistic data in order to solve epistemological or ontological issues (cf. the insistence on the linguistic use śabdaṃ kṛ- within the debate about the ontological status of śabda).
• d) Bronkhorst was a convinced asserter of the scientific approach. This does not mean that he was an a-priori believer in natural sciences. Rather, he thought that the scientific method is based on a healthy form of scepticism and thus can never lead to fanatical beliefs nor to any form of “scientific traditionalism” (if correctly applied). For this very reason, he also thought that the scientific method was not “Western”, it had proven to work because of its ability to ask questions and thus to be universal. He took seriously Yoga and meditation techniques and thought that they could be analysed with the scientific method and possibly lead to new discoveries.
• d2) Similarly, Bronkhorst clearly looked down on blind believers and thus praised Sanskrit philosophers for their ability to distinguish myths from arguments. In “What did Indian philosophers believe?” (2010) he noted that Sanskrit philosophers did not attack each other based on myths (although, one may add, some Buddhist philosophers did have fun at criticising some passages of the Veda and Kumārila made fun of the walls-speaking argument), but rather their arguments (“These philosophers, while criticising each others’ views, never attacked each others’ myths. Yet these myths would have been easy targets, if they had been seriously believed in”). In short, the reliance on the scientific method meant a radical openness to defeasibility of one’s beliefs and to a data-based approach.

Let me add a few words about Johannes Bronkhorst as a human being. The Indology list was full of “Bronkhorst stories” and therefore I will not need to take too much of your time with them (you can read them on the Indology archives). Let me just point out how Bronkhorst was generous and supportive with younger scholars and even students, but in a very unique way. I still remember our first meeting. I was an undergraduate student and he immediately asked me which were my key interests (I was unable to give a specific answer, at that point I was just busy learning Sanskrit and reading as much as possible of any text my professors read). I read or hear similar stories from others, all pointing to how Bronkhorst took people seriously, even young people. He was supportive, but not patronising. He was interested in one’s opinion, but would not refrain from saying that it was wrong if he thought so, according to the scientific method discussed above. He would not mince words to attack a view, but not so when coming to the person holding it, and I have seen him greeting warmly people with whom he had had violent disagreements on specific issues.

1. It is true that the early commentaries refer to the YS-YBh complex
2. It is also true that Vedavyāsa is mentioned as author of the YBh only relatively late, possibly for the first time in Vācaspati’s Tattvavaiśāradī
3. Furthermore, it is only with Mādhava’s Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha that people start distinguishing Patañjali’s from Vyāsa’s authorships.
4. Nonetheless, Maas’ argument is too dependent on the manuscript tradition, which has the two texts together, but is extremely recent (for Maas’ reply that recent manuscripts must depend on earlier models, see this post).
5. Squarcini also mentions in a footnote that Vyāsa himself mentions the name of Patañjali (but see a further post on this blog for D. Wujastyk’s answer thereon).
6. After having, in his opinion, weakened Maas’ arguments, Squarcini lies down his own one in favour of the existence of a separate YS: The text is highly and consistently structured and locates itself within a net of intertextual references, which the author of the YBh partly ignores. Squarcini claims to have identified the deep structure of the YS and distinguishes several subtopics within the main topics, signalling them as such in the Sanskrit text and in the translation. Accordingly, Squarcini highlights some key sūtras of the YS which work as if they were adhikaraṇasūtras.
7. Accordingly, Squarcini’s translation does not need to borrow words from the commentaries, as most other translations.

The forelast point is the most relevant one and it is substantiated in the first hundred pages of Squarcini’s introductory study. I will highlight here some of the elements which struck as most interesting. Readers are alerted that this is nothing but my summary, not (yet) validated by F. Squarcini.

• The question of the alleged YS-YBh unity has an impact also on the alleged proximity of the Sāṅkhya and Yoga systems. Squarcini argues against it on the strength of texts more or less coeval to the YS (e.g., Milinsapañha, Visuddhimagga, Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā, see p. lxxviiff), including the Nyāyasūtra, which ignores Sāṅkhya but discusses at length Yoga.
• Notwithstanding some affinities, e.g., the use of the words puruṣa, prakṛti and kaivalya, the YS understands them very differently than, say, the Sāṅkhyakārikā (pp. lxxxi–lxxxii).
• The dualism of the YS is, unlike that of Sāṅkhya and also (although Squarcini does not spell this out explicitely) of the YBh, is not an ultimate dualism. pusuṣa and prakṛti will not remain distinct until the end. Rather, the dualism of the YS is an “eliminative dualism” (the label is by Paul M. Churchland). Squarcini here elaborates on hints which can be found in Adolf Janacek (1951) and in L.W. Pflueger’s Dueling with Dualism. Revisioning the Paradox of Puruṣa and Prakṛti (see pp. lxxxvii–cxi)

Federico Squarcini recently disputed this claim on the basis of the fact that it is too much dependent on the manuscript transmission, which is not so meaningful, given that all manuscripts are centuries later than the YS–YBh:

La maggior parte di quelli datati fra essi (manoscritti dello YS–YBh) è del XIX secolo. […] non si conoscono manoscritti degli Yogasūtra più antichi del XVI secolo d.C (Squarcini 2015, cxii).

Squarcini also mentions as an evidence in favour of the distinction of the two texts, text-passages such as the following of the YBh:

iti patañjaliḥ etat svarūpam ity uktam (YBh ad YS 3.44)

Here, the author or the YBh seems to quote from the YS as a work by someone different from himself, called Patañjali.

If you read Squarcini, Bronkhorst and Maas, which arguments convince you more?

On Maas 2013 and Maas’ view on the single author of YS and YBh, see here.

• Esther Solomon, Indian Dialectics. Methods of Philosophical Discussion (Ahmedabad: B.J. Institute of Learning and Research) 1976;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Modes of debate and refutation of adversaries in classical and medieval India: a preliminary investigation”, Antiquorum Philosophia 1 (2007), 269-280;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Does India think differently?”, in Denkt Asien anders? Reflexionen zu Buddhismus und Konfizianismus in Indien, Tibet, China und Japan, edited by Birgit Kellner and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2009), 45–54;
• Sung Yong Kang, Die Debatte im alten Indien. Untersuchungen in der Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna 8.15-28 (Reinbeck: Wezler 2003);
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate in the Context of Indian Medical History: Towards a Critical Edition of the Carakasaṃhitā”, in Encyclopedia of Indian Wisdom. Prof. Satya Vrat Shastri felicitation volume, edited by Rāma Karaṇa Śarmā (Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan 2005), 394-403;
• Bimal Krishna Matilal, “Debate and Dialectic in Ancient India”, in Philosophical Essays. Professor Anantalal Thakur Felicitation Volume, edited by Ramaranjan Mukherji (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1987), 53-66;
• Gerhard Oberhammer, “Ein Beitrag zu den Vāda-Traditionen Indiens”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Süd- und Ost-Asiens 7 (1963), 63-103;
• Karin Preisendanz, “Debate and Independent Reasoning vs. Tradition: On the Precarious Position of Early Nyāya”, in Harānandalaharī. Volume in Honour of Professor Minoru Hara on his Seventieth Birthday edited by Ryutaro Tsuchida and Albrecht Wezler (Reibeck: Wezler 2000), 221-251;
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate, Proof and Counter-Proof in the Early Indian Dialectical Tradition”, Studia Indologiczne 7 (2000), 369-382;
• Ernst Prets “Futile and False Rejoinders, Sophistical Arguments and Early Indian Logic”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 29.5 (2001), 545-558;
• Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Solomon’s book is a classic, although somewhat outdated reference book on the topic of dialectics in Nyāya and in other schools.
Among the other authors, Bronkhorst suggests that the roots of Indian dialectics should be placed in the Buddhist communities in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent (which might have been influenced by the Greek tradition of public debate in the Indo-Bactrian kingdoms). Kang and Prets (“Theories of Debate”) focus on the (indigenous) roots of dialectics in the medical tradition, where a discussion (called sambhāṣā ‘conversation’) among practitioners was meant to establish the truth about the patient’s condition through the evidence at hand (their symptoms), whereas the term vāda meant a hostile debate and included the subgroups of jalpa and vitaṇḍā). Oberhammer, Preisendanz, Prets and Nicholson focus on the early history of vāda and its more technical elements.
All of these scholars agree on the presence of hostile (‘agonistic’ in Nicholson’s book) and collaborative (‘non-agonistic’) forms of dialogue in pre-Classical and Classical Indian Philosophy, with the latter possibly having developed out of the former (see the Conclusions in Nicholson’s book).
B.K. Matilal (1935–1991), himself an analytic philosopher and a scholar of Indian logic and philosophy in general, performed a move similar to that of Daya Krishna, insofar as he focused on the epistemological potential of vāda (although, differently from Daya Krishna, he did not exploit the creativity of this concept in different contexts).

However, DESHPANDE’s essay, dedicated to Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, just like Bronkhorst’s and Candotti’s, is further away. Similarly, the two essays on the Pratyabhijñā school (one by Yohei Kawajiri and the other by Raffaele Torella) are several hundreds of pages apart. Why so? A Festschrift, like the proceedings of a conference, might include many different topics, nonetheless, is not it always possible to structure them along some leitmotivs? Is not it always possible to detect an order? A (IMHO) “virtuous” example in this sense is the sequence of articles in the volume in honour of Wilhelm Halbfass edited by F. Squarcini in 2002, since Squarcini managed to find a rational sequence for diverse articles. The same applies to another volume dedicated to Halbfass, namely Expanding and Merging Horizons, edited by Karin Preisendanz (you can download the TOC free of charge here).

What is the advantage of the alphabetic order in the sequence of essays of a book? Do the editors think that in this way they are not deciding that X is more important than Y and should therefore come before Y? Or are there other reasons I am overlooking?

Other authors tend to think that there were several trends of Yoga prior to a given point (usually identified with the Yogasūtra (YS) if you agree with Chapple, etc., or with the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (PYŚ) if you agree with Bronkhorst, Maas, etc.) and that they have been unified into a single system by the author of one or the other text. A long time after that, the same authors claim, new tendencies developed out of this unitary Yoga, much like in the way described by the authors of the fist group.

A minority group of authors contests the idea of a unitary Yoga at all and says that between the various things called Yoga in Classical and Post-Classical India there are at most family resemblances and at least nothing common at all. For these authors, it does not really make sense to host a conference on Yoga with people discussing Buddhist Tantric Yoga, Pāñcarātra Yoga, the Yogasūtra’s, contemporary Yoga practices and so on.

Who is right? Difficult to say. The point is that what we have are only fragments of the whole picture and that our interpretation of it will make us interpret some scattered pieces as belonging to the same puzzle or not. Accordingly, if we assume the first perspective, we will consider a form of Yoga which is far away from Patañjali’s YS (or PYŚ) as still somehow connected with it and detect slight similarities. If we assume the third perspective, we will rather notice the differences between the two.

Similar differences in approach can be detected in the case of Sāṅkhya (where the first scenario is ruled out by the data and scholars either subscribe to the second or to the third approach), Buddhism, the two Mīmāṃsās (Parpola embraces the first scenario, Bronkhorst the third one, there are no clear data in favour of the second one), the two schools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and so on. In the latter case, in fact, I only know scholars subscribing to the first scenario. Mumme (1988) is aware of the fact that there were differences between the two schools even before the official split, but still calls them both Śrī Vaiṣṇava and says that they were “complementary”.

Am I forgetting some further example or some further approach? And which approach do you subscribe to in the cases mentioned?

Tiziana Pontillo signalled me the conference mentioned in the title. You can download the flyer here.

From the point of view of methodology, let me praise T. Pontillo for the fact that she will give two joint papers. Let us all learn from each other and dare more cooperative work (if we enjoy it)!

For instance, Indians argued for centuries, according to Bronkhorst, about the ontological status of a linguistic object which is linguistically present before its actual existence, such as a pot in “the potter makes the pot”. Westerners would have immediately labeled the pot as non-existing until it is realised by the potter and would not have not paused on its ontology, whereas Indians never distinguished between linguistic and external reality.

This is an interesting insight, and in fact there are several elements suggesting (as Karl Potter maintained) that the “linguistic turn” occurred in India much earlier than in Europe (note that I am saying the same thing Bronkhorst said, but looking at it from a more favourable perspective), such as the insistence on the analysis of linguistic data in order to solve epistemological or ontological issues (cf. the insistence on the linguistic use śabdaṃ kṛ- within the debate about the ontological status of śabda).

However, many Buddhist schools seem to aptly distinguish between the two (e.g., insofar as language is vikalpa and only the ultimate particular, which escapes language, is real). The same applies, as far as my knowledge reaches, at least also to Mīmāṃsakas. For instance, Rāmānujācārya speaks of karman (the linguistic object) and kriyāphala (the result of the action, as an ontological reality) as two distinct realities (cf. Tantrarahasya, IV §3.13.2: kriyāphalaśali karma).

What do you think? Which evidences for or against the self-assumed equivalence of language and thought did you encounter?

(Cross-posted, with minor differences, 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.