A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit - Pali - Prakrit. Siegfried Lienhard. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1984. viii + 307 pp. DM 128.

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit–Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India’s traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, (...) written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent. (shrink)

This paper is a critical review of Jonardan Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India.

The history of the Vedanta school is well known since the time of Sankaracarya on, and its prehistory before Sankara is quite obscure. However, from the time of compilation of major Upanisads to Sankara there is a period of thousand years, and the tradition of Upanisads was not lost; there appeared many philosophers and dogmaticians, although their thoughts are not clearly known. The author has made clear the details of the pre-Sankara Vedanta philosophy, utilizing not only Sanskrit materials, (...) but also Pali, Prakrit (Jain), as well as Tibetan and Chinese sources. In this respect this is quite a unique work. For this work the author was awarded the Imperial Prize by the Academy of Japan. Some sections of this work were already published in Indian as well as European and American journals in English. This work is a complete English translation of the entire book. The English translation was done with the financial aid by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the final touch was given by Mr. Trevor Leggett, the British writer, who is well-versed in Sanskrit as well as in Japanese. (shrink)

Description: This is a first-hand study of such original texts as have been found important for this subject. It gives a connected and systematic account of the origin and development of the epistemologic thought in Indian philosophy from the beginning up to modern times. Due to difference of opinions of different commentators, the author directly analyses the interpretations of a number of original Sanskrit texts to bring out the exact philosophical import of these texts. The views held by various (...) schools of Indian philosophy are very critically assessed. The aim of this work has not been only to trace the problems of the theory of knowledge but also to study the epistemological position of important authors as a whole, so as to determine the contribution they made and the relations they stand to one another in the history of the subject. The last chapter of the work is attempted for the first time to synthesise Indian and Western thought. (shrink)

This article tells an intellectual history of Mammaṭa Bhaṭṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa in the Benares-Centered Network of Sanskrit Learning from c. 1600–1750 CE. The core narrative proposed herein is that the discourse on Sanskrit Poetics reaches a bifurcated state by the 1400s and 1500s: the Kāvyaprakāśa commentarial tradition constitutes a distinct domain, wherein commentators debate exclusively among themselves on lower-order issues. This period of normalcy is ruptured by Appayya Dīkṣita, who effectively destabilizes the discourse, overhauling the conventional wisdom via (...) his empiricist polemics and via the importation of a new doxographical methodology from Vedānta in his magnum opus on Sanskrit Poetics, the Citramīmāṃsā. Shortly thereafter, Jayarāma Nyāyapañcānana, the Benares-based Naiyāyika from the East, substantially defends Mammaṭa’s system of poetic ornaments against Appayya’s polemics within his Kāvyaprakāśa commentary, marking the beginning of the bifurcation’s erosion. The tension of how to resolve Appayya’s system with Mammaṭa’s dominates the literature for the ensuing century, and commentators such as Kamalākara Bhaṭṭa, Bhīmasena Dīkṣita, and Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa all champion defenses of the Kāvyaprakāśa’s authoritative and conservative system against Appayya. This tension culminates in the discourse’s last major treatise, the Alaṅkārakaustubha of Viśveśvara Paṇḍita, wherein Viśveśvara situates himself on a continuum with Jayarāma and defends the core contours of Mammaṭa’s system against Appayya and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja. Viśveśvara systematically utilizes the most up-to-date frameworks and positions of Nyāya, entailing radical transformations for the core terminology, standards of debate, and philosophical underpinnings in Sanskrit Poetics. The article concludes by way of contextualizing Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja within this new narrative. (shrink)

The *Kāśyapaparivarta, an early Mahāyāna sūtra, has a complex history. Sanskrit and Tibetan versions, and some of its Chinese translations, have been available to scholars for almost a century, thanks to Staël-Holstein’s 1926 editio princeps. Yet no comprehensive survey of available sources, or critical appraisal of their antecedants, has been published, and most importantly, essential Chinese materials have long been overlooked. The present contribution focuses most centrally on the Chinese translations of the scripture. In addition, the relation of (...) the sūtra to the Mahāratnakūṭa collection of forty-nine texts and the possible Indic origins of the latter are explored. (shrink)

Because the History of Philosophy is a branch of both History and Philosophy, it faces tasks which are Historical, tasks which are Philosophical, and tasks which overlap both. As Philosophy typically flourishes by incorporating and assimilating ideas and bodies of text which have either not previously been part of its stock in trade or have been forgotten, the main task facing the History of Philosophy today is that of developing serious scholarship in areas that have been largely (...) neglected, such as Philosophy in Arabic and Persian as well as in Sanskrit and Chinese. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Early Vedānta Philosophy, Part TwoAndrew O. FortA History of Early Vedānta Philosophy, Part Two. By Hajime Nakamura. Translated by Hajime Nakamura, Trevor Leggett, et al.. Edited by Sengaku Mayeda. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004. Pp. xxi + 842. Hardcover $58.95.First, to address the exact nature of this volume: the bulk of A History of Early Vedānta Philosophy, Part Twoby Hajime Nakamura was part (...) of Nakamura's doctoral thesis submitted to Tokyo University in 1942, with, as the front flap states, "many additions and revisions done by the author himself." Part 1 was published by Motilal Banarsidass in 1976. For those interested, that first volume includes four parts: the chronology and significance of early Vedānta philosophy, early Vedānta philosophy as seen by other Indian (particularly Buddhist) thinkers and schools, scholars before the Brahmasūtra, and the nature and content of the Brahmasūtraitself. Part 2 is thus rather overdue, although various portions of this volume were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Hence, we should be grateful that the English-speaking world finally has more of the vast erudition of this titan of scholarship on Hindu thought, yet acknowledge that this is as much a pioneering historical document in Advaita research as a contribution to current knowledge.Despite this reservation, let us begin with fulsome praise: how many scholars in any discipline from any period can rival Hajime Nakamura? Even in his dissertation, he shows wide familiarity with Hindu and Buddhist thought, having consulted sources in Sanskrit, Pāli, Prakrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, English, German, and probably others. Who, ever again, would have the courage, or the linguistic skills, to attempt a book called Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples?Truly this was a jñānasāgara!Still, one must say that the present volume has shortcomings beyond age: it is not particularly well-organized or "user-friendly," not always well-focused, and sometimes repetitious. The translations, while clear, are generally not graceful. And in the decades since the bulk of this was written, much additional scholarship on key figures and texts discussed therein has been published, and new theoretical conceptualizations have arisen to aid our understandings. Depending on one's view, this text reveals the notable absence of (or freedom from) contemporary scholarly currents of postcolonial, postmodern, or feminist critique, nor does it reflect the move to greater social history often apparent today. It is also surprisingly noncomparative, given the author's later work. This, then, is mostly a traditional history of the development of ideas by one of the pitāmahasof classical Indian scholarship.The book is divided into four basic sections. First are remarks on the life, works, and ideas of post- Brahmasūtrabut pre-Śaṅkara thinkers such as Upavarṣa, Bodhāyana (who influenced Rāmānuja), and Bhartṛprapañca (whom Śaṅkara and Sureśvara opposed, particularly on jñānakarma-samuccaya), with frequent comparisons of their thinking with that of Śaṅkara. This section well traces the basic time and lineage of key thinkers, and nicely unpacks their views and later influence. [End Page 480]Next is an extended consideration of Gauḍapāda's Māṇḍükyakārikās, which is probably the most important pre-Śaṅkara Advaita work. Nakamura describes and offers extensive analysis of each chapter (prakaraṇa)and its characteristics separately, particularly the thought (on consciousness states, māyā, ajātivāda, and Buddhist ideas, respectively) and practices ( ommeditation, Self-realization, asparśayoga, etc.) distinctive to each. He clearly shows the differences in doctrine and application among the chapters, and between them and the Māndūkya Upaniṣad. Nakamura raises the questions of the text's authorship, sacrality, unity, and extent of Buddhist influence, which had already been debated by many scholars at that time, and yet this section shows its age; while even-handedly summarizing the discussion to that point, and offering his own judiciously reasoned conclusions (most importantly, that they are four independently composed treatises), his conclusions are neither groundbreaking nor today near to the last word. In fact, I was reminded of reading through those debates as I was... (shrink)

Recognizing newness is a difficult task in any intellectual history, and different cultures have gauged and evaluated novelty in different ways. In this paper we ponder the status of innovation in the context of the somewhat unusual history of one Sanskrit knowledge system, that of poetics, and try to define what in the methodology, views, style, and self-awareness of Sanskrit literary theorists in the early modern period was new. The paper focuses primarily on one thinker, Jagannātha (...) Paṇḍitarāja, the most famous and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīkṣita. We discuss Jagannātha’s complex system of labeling of ideas as “new” and “old,” the new essay style that he used to chart the evolution of ideas in his tradition, his notion of himself as an independent thinker capable of improving the system created by his predecessors in order to protect its essential assets, and the reasons his critique of Appayya was so harsh. For both scholars what emerges as new is not so much their opinions on particular topics as the new ways in which they position themselves in relation to their system. (shrink)

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book (...) relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory. (shrink)

The study of philosophical terms and doctrines in the Mahābhārata touches not only on important aspects of the contents, composition and the historical contexts of the epic, but also on the historiography of Indian philosophy. General ideas about the textual history of the epic and the distinction between “didactic” and “narrative” parts have influenced the study of epic philosophy no less than academic discussions about what is philosophy in India and how it developed. This results in different evaluations of (...) the place of philosophical texts in the epic and their relationship to the history of Indian philosophy. While some scholars have suggested that there is a “philosophy of the epic” its composers wished to propagate, others have argued that “philosophy” is included in the epic either in a “proto” form or in a variety of doctrines they deemed relevant. The article discusses these views and some of the heuristic assumptions on which they are based. It proposes to widen the scope of analysis by paying more attention to the interplay of narrative and didactic passages, the various ways in which philosophy is presented in the epic, and its connection to a larger spectrum of the reception of philosophy in textual genres and by audiences outside the expert circles of the philosophical schools. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the etymology and semantic connotations of Sanskrit terms: sat, bhāva, sambhava, bhavitṛ, bhavya, bhavat, bhūti, bhūta, sarvabhūta, bhavaka, sattva, sattā, saṃvṛtti, jāstāmātā sampatti, vartamāna, āvitta, āvinna as lexical representatives of the conceptosphere of being in the Sanskrit-English dictionary of Monier-Williams. The method of conceptual analysis is implemented based on the assumption of the determining influence of language culture on the content and nature of philosophical creativity. This study is only the (...) first stage of the project to reveal the way of interpreting "being" in the history of Indian philosophy. The key semantic connotations of this concept in the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary are revealed. The semantic connection of the concept of "being" with the concepts: "life" and "time" is defined. In this context, "to live" is to be "someone" in order to embrace "one's place" and play "one's role" that can provide "possession" for "subsistence", and the relationship between "being" and "time" is the concreteness of the existing event that is happening or has happened and belonging to the future that is about to happen. Although we do not trace a transparent connection between the concepts of "being" and "space" in Sanskrit, there are reasons to believe that the first of all, the etymology of the terms of our chosen conceptosphere clearly presents the interpretation of being as a long and a spatially defined location. Noticeable is the fact that the connection between the interpretation of the concept of "being" in Sanskrit and the ethical concept of "good" and aesthetic "beauty" we trace only in terms derived from as and bhū, and at the same time only the terms sat and bhava can be translated as "truth", and the meaning of "essence" we find only in the translation of the terms sat and sattva. This explains the fact why the term sat is considered as close as possible to the "Western" interpretation of the concept of "being". It has been suggested that the polysemy of lexical representatives of the concept of being in Sanskrit and the complexity and variability of the grammar compliance of this language can be interpreted as an obstacle to the extreme problematization of this concept. (shrink)

In the history of Sanskrit literary theory Bhaṭṭanāyaka occupies an influential yet mysterious position. Abhinavagupta clearly owes a great debt to him, but since Bhaṭṭanāyaka’s works themselves have been lost, it has proven difficult to understand exactly what that debt is. The common understanding is that Bhaṭṭanāyaka was a Mīmāṃsaka and that he applied the principles of Vedic hermeneutics to literature. But this actually doesn’t fit well with much of what Abhinavagupta tells us about Bhaṭṭanāyaka, and upon closer (...) inspection it becomes clear that in fact Abhinavagupta presents him as someone who was thoroughly interested in ideas drawn from non-dual Vedānta. This article reexamines the depictions of Bhaṭṭanāyaka in Abhinavagupta’s works and shows that while the evidence for a Mīmāṃsā connection is quite thin, the evidence for a similar connection to Vedānta is quite strong. Taking this connection seriously helps us develop a much clearer picture of Bhaṭṭanāyaka’s ideas, and it also helps us understand various details of Abhinavagupta’s response to Bhaṭṭanāyaka that would otherwise remain obscure. (shrink)

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

This paper addresses the near impossibility of writing the social history of knowledge production in India. It also considers the question of the historicity of Sanskrit traditions. It concludes with pointing at a major lacuna in the SKS project, namely the examination or ritual and religious knowledge.

This paper addresses the near impossibility of writing the social history of knowledge production in India. It also considers the question of the historicity of Sanskrit traditions. It concludes with pointing at a major lacuna in the SKS project, namely the examination or ritual and religious knowledge.

This article, divided into two parts, traces and discusses two pairs of analogies invoked in Sanskrit literature to articulate the paradox of God’s oneness and multiplicity vis-à-vis the souls and the manifest world, reflecting the philosophical positions of pariṇāmavāda and vivartavāda. These are, respectively, the analogies of fire in wood and dairy products in milk, and moon/sun in pools of water and space in pots. In Part I, having introduced prevalent ideas about the status of the supreme principle vis-à-vis (...) creation in Śaivism, Sāṅkhya, and Vedānta, I investigate instances of the first pair of analogies in multiple textual genres, and especially in Śaiva literature from South and Southeast Asia, to highlight the influence of pariṇāma-Vedānta on the Śaiva textual corpus. Arguing that the distribution of the two pairs of analogies may cast some light on the relationship between different strands of dualistic and non-dualistic scriptures, I propose that the first pair could be traced back to the “formative” period of Śaivism—that is, prior to the emergence of the fully dualistic Śaiva Saiddhāntika corpus known to us. (shrink)

This article, divided into two parts, traces and discusses two pairs of analogies invoked in Sanskrit literature to articulate the paradox of God’s oneness and multiplicity vis-à-vis the souls and the manifest world, reflecting the philosophical positions of pariṇāmavāda and vivartavāda. These are, respectively, the analogies of fire in wood and dairy products in milk, and moon/sun in pools of water and space in pots. Having introduced prevalent ideas about the status of the supreme principle vis-à-vis the souls and (...) creation in Śaivism, Sāṅkhya, and Vedānta, and having investigated instances of the first pair of analogies in multiple textual genres in Part I, here I turn to the discussion of the second set of analogies. Having proposed that the first set reflects the influence of pariṇāma-Vedānta on an early strand of the Śaiva textual corpus, I argue that the second set, attested prevalently in relatively late sources, betrays a Śaṅkarian origin, thereby suggesting a vivartavāda-Advaita Vedānta influence on the Śaiva corpus after the 9th or 10th century. (shrink)

A prevailing view among specialists is that Indian philosophy "proper" can only be philosophy written in Sanskrit and a few other Prakrits (any of the several Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars formerly spoken in India), in a doxographical style, and along more or less clearly drawn scholastic lines. As such, it encompasses the entirety of speculative and systematic thought in India up to the advent of British colonial rule in the 19th Century. Minds Without Fear challenges this dominant view of the (...) history of Indian philosophy, arguing that Indian philosophy produced in English during the Raj does not mark a radical departure from its indigenous cultural forms so much as their appropriation in the service of intercultural philosophy. While necessarily politically fraught (given the status of English as the language of colonial power), the new vernacular becomes a vehicle for Enlightenment ideas of rationality and scientific progress, and serves as a new "scholarly metalanguage" in the formation of a modern Indian philosophical canon. (shrink)

This article argues that in early Mīmāṃsā the view was current that there are objects in the world corresponding to all words of the Sanskrit language. Evidence to that effect is primarily found in passages from Bhartṛhari’s works, and in some classical Nyāya texts. Interestingly, Śabara’s classical work on Mīmāṃsā has abandoned this position, apparently for an entirely non-philosophical reason: the distaste felt for the newly arising group of Brahmanical temple-priests.

Pali Literature, including the Canonical Literature in Prakrit and Sanskrit of all the Hinayana Schools. K. R. Norman. Vol.VII, fasc.2, of A History of Indian Literature ed. Jan Gonda. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1983. X + 210pp. DM 98.

This article investigates the origin and the earliest, formative period of one of the major concepts in post-classical Chinese medicine, the concept of phlegm, tan 痰. It is the first study that examines both Chinese- and Sanskrit-language sources in seeking to answer the question whether the development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine is owed to Indic influences. Following traditional Chinese scholarship, it argues that the initial emergence of the substance tan 痰, which later was to become (...) “phlegm,” should be understood as an indigenous development from the fluid yin 飲. The subsequent formation and development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine, however, was influenced by Āyurveda. The influence hinges on the coincidence of Indic and Chinese intuitions about digestion. Previous scholarship on early Chinese Buddhist translations of Indic terms for phlegm and the tridoṣa has either claimed that variations in the terminology betrayed the Chinese translators’ poor understanding of Āyurvedic concepts or that the translators creatively manipulated the terminology with a view to the cultural background of their intended audiences. By contrast, this article argues that the early terminology the Chinese translators crafted was highly accurate and faithful to their Indic source texts. It shows, by going back to the Indic classics, that the variations in Chinese terminology reflect an ancient and long-forgotten temporal shift in the perception of humors in India itself. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, studies on Sanskrit intellectual history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries have produced a body of scholarship that has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the period. Yet, despite significant advances in the understanding of the social-historical circumstances of authors and disciplines as well as success in elucidating major features of intellectual thought, a main point of difficultly has been in combining both the intellectuality and sociality of Sanskrit scholars. By examining a debate (...) within the discipline of nyāya during the seventeenth century about how one cognizes the universal property ‘Brahman-ness ’ and by connecting it with a social debate that is found in available historical documents of the period, this essay attempts to combine the sociality of the Brahman scholarly community in Vārāṇasī with their intellectuality and offer a larger analysis of nyāya intellectual history for this period. The essay concludes by considering the ways in which the social world impinged upon nyāya argumentation and nyāya argumentation upon the social world. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to (...) have its own aims and methodology. (shrink)

Festschrift in honor of V.N. Jha, b. 1946, Indologist; comprises contributed papers on various aspects of Vedic literature and philosophy.

The Vedas are said to be not a human creation (apauruṣeya), but Revelation imparted to the Vedic sages who have put it down in inspired verses. Vedas’ words are therefore divine and eternal, and thus extensively praised. Vāc, the Vedic word, is eulogised in several hymns, among which Vāk Sūkta (X.125) is by far the most illustrative of all. In some teachings of the Upanishads, Vāc is equated to Brahman alongside other interpretations. When analysing the nature of the word, centuries (...) later, philosophers and grammarians refer to it as śabda, and no longer as Vāc, the latter remains somehow confined to a rather poetical and mystical reality. Yet, the idea of the eternal and divine character of the scriptures is superimposed on the Sanskrit language also, despite certain historical change remarks on the grammarians' side. In the 5th century CE, Bhartṛhari displays a genuine linguistic and philosophical thought of the folding and unfolding of Reality and its understanding as Word-Principle (brahman śabda-tattva). From an auxiliary science of preserving the correct forms of the Vedas, Sanskrit grammar acquires a hermeneutical role and empowers itself as a way to salvation, an idea supported by previous evidence of grammar's role in producing celestial happiness (abhyudaya), merit and righteousness (dharma). I seek in this paper to analyse and point out the strongholds that underpin Sanskrit as a divine language and how continuity and change coexist to support over millennia this undaunted approach. (shrink)