Quantcast
Channel: Bharatkalyan97
Viewing all 10901 articles
Browse latest View live

Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy -- Madhav Deshpande

December 27, 2017, 3:35 pm
$
0
0

Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy


First published Fri Aug 20, 2010

Speculations about the nature and function of language in India can be traced to its earliest period. These speculations are multi-faceted in that one detects many different strands of thought regarding language. Some of these speculations are about what one may call the principle of language, but others are about specific languages or specific uses of these languages. One sees speculations regarding the creation of language as well as the role of language in the creation of the universe. Language appears in relation to gods as well as humans, and occupies the entire width of a spectrum from being a divinity herself to being a means used by gods to create and control the world, and ultimately to being a means in the hands of the human beings to achieve their own religious as well as mundane purposes. Gradually, a whole range of questions are raised about all these various aspects of language in the evolving religious and philosophical traditions in India, traditions which shared some common conceptions, but thrived in full-blooded disagreements on major issues. Such disagreements relate to the ontological nature of language, its communicative role, the nature of meaning, and more specifically the nature of word-meaning and sentence-meaning. On the other hand, certain manifestations of language, whether in the form of specific languages like Sanskrit or particular scriptural texts like the Vedas, became topics of contestation between various philosophical and religious traditions. Finally, one must mention the epistemic role and value of language, its ability or inability to provide veridical knowledge about the world. In what follows, I intend to provide a brief account of these diverse developments in ancient, classical and medieval India. (For an approximate chronology of Indian philosophers, see the supplement.)

1. Pre-systematic conceptions of language in Vedic texts

The Vedic scriptural texts (1500–500 bce) consist of the four ancient collections, i.e., the Ṛgveda, the Sāmaveda, the Yajurveda, and the Atharvaveda. The next layer of Vedic texts, the Brāhmaṇas, consists of prose ritual commentaries that offer procedures, justifications, and explanations. The last two categories of Vedic literature are the Āraṇyakas, “Forest Texts”, and the Upaniṣads, “Secret Mystical Doctrines”.
The word saṃskṛta is not known as a label of a language variety during the Vedic period. The general term used for language in the Vedic texts is vāk, a word historically related to “voice”. The Vedic poet-sages perceived significant differences between their own language and the languages of the outsiders. Similarly, they perceived important differences between their own use of language in mundane contexts and the use of language directed toward Gods. The Gods are generically referred to by the term deva, and the language of the hymns is said to be devī vāk, “divine language.” This language is believed to have been created by the Gods themselves. The language thus created by the Gods is then spoken by the animate world in various forms. The divine language in its ultimate form is so mysterious that three-quarters of it are said to be hidden from the humans who have access only to a quarter of it. The Vedic poet-sages say that this divine language enters into their hearts and that they discover it through mystical introspection. Just as the language used by the Vedic poet-sages is the divine language, the language used by the non-Vedic people is said to be un-godly (adevī) or demonic (asuryā).
In the Vedic literature, one observes the development of mystical and ritual approaches to language. Language was perceived as an essential tool for approaching the gods, invoking them, asking their favors, and thus for the successful completion of a ritual performance. While the Gods were the powers that finally yielded the wishes of their human worshipers, one could legitimately look at the resulting reward as ensuing from the power of the religious language, or the power of the performing priest. This way, the language came to be looked upon as having mysterious creative powers, and as a divine power that needed to be propitiated before it could be successfully used to invoke other gods. This approach to language ultimately led to deification of language and the emergence of the Goddess of Speech (vāk devī), and a number of other gods who are called “Lord of Speech” (brahmaṇaspati, bṛhaspati, vākpati).
In contrast with the valorous deeds of the divine language, the language of the non-Vedic people neither yields fruit nor blossom (Ṛgveda, 10.71.5). “Yielding fruit and blossom” is a phrase indicative of the creative power of speech that produces the rewards for the worshiper. From being a created but divine entity, the speech rises to the heights of being a divinity in her own right and eventually to becoming the substratum of the existence of the whole universe. The deification of speech is seen in hymn 10.125 of the Ṛgveda where the Goddess of Speech sings her own glory. In this hymn, one no longer hears of the creation of the speech, but one begins to see the speech as a primordial divinity that creates and controls other gods, sages, and the human beings. Here the goddess of speech demands worship in her own right, before her powers may be used for other purposes. The mystery of language is comprehensible only to a special class of people, the wise Brāhmaṇas, while the commoners have access to and understanding of only a limited portion of this transcendental phenomenon.

The “Lord of Speech” divinities typically emerge as creator divinities, e.g., Brahmā, Bṛhaspati, and Brahmaṇaspati, and the word brahman which earlier refers, with differing accents, to the creative incantation and the priest, eventually comes to assume in the Upaniṣads the meaning of the creative force behind the entire universe. While the Vedic hymns were looked upon as being crafted by particular poet-sages in the earlier period, gradually a rising perception of their mysterious power and their preservation by the successive generations led to the emergence of a new conception of the scriptural texts. Already in the late parts of the Ṛgveda (10.90.9), we hear that the verses (ṛk), the songs (sāma), and the ritual formulas (yajus) arose from the primordial sacrifice offered by the gods. They arose from the sacrificed body of the cosmic person, the ultimate ground of existence. This tendency of increasingly looking at the scriptural texts as not being produced by any human authors takes many forms in subsequent religious and philosophical materials, finally leading to a wide-spread notion that the Vedas are not authored by any human beings (apauruṣeya), and are in fact uncreated and eternal, beyond the cycles of creation and destruction of the world. In late Vedic texts, we hear the notion that the real Vedas are infinite (ananta) and that the Vedas known to human poet-sages are a mere fraction of the real infinite Vedas.
In the late Vedic traditions of the Brāhmaṇas, we are told that there is perfection of the ritual form (rūpasamṛddhi) when a recited incantation echoes the ritual action that is being performed. This shows a notion that ideally there should be a match between the contents of a ritual formula and the ritual action in which it is recited, further suggesting a notion that language mirrors the external world in some way. In the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads, language acquires importance in different ways. The Upaniṣads, emphasizing the painful nature of cycles of rebirths, point out that the ideal goal should be to put an end to these cycles of birth and rebirth and to find one's permanent identity with the original ground of the universal existence, i.e., Brahman. The term brahman, originally referring to creative ritual chants and the chanters, has now acquired this new meaning, the ultimate creative force behind the universe. As part of the meditative practice, one is asked to focus on the sacred syllable OM, which is the symbolic linguistic representation of Brahman. Here the language, in the form of OM, becomes an important tool for the attainment of one's mystical union with Brahman. The Sanskrit word akṣara refers to a syllable, but it also means “indestructible.” Thus, the word akṣara allowed the meditational use of the holy syllable OM to ultimately lead to one's experiential identity with the indestructible reality of Brahman.

The role of language and scripture in the Upaniṣadic mode of religious life is complicated. Here, the use of language to invoke the Vedic gods becomes a lower form of religious practice. Can Brahman be reached through language? Since Brahman is beyond all characterizations and all modes of human perception, no linguistic expression can properly describe it. Hence all linguistic expressions and all knowledge framed in language are deemed to be inadequate for the purpose of reaching Brahman. In fact, it is silence that characterizes Brahman, and not words. Even so, the use of OM-focused meditation is emphasized, at least in the pre-final stages of Brahman-realization.

By the time we come to the classical philosophical systems in India, one more assumption is made by almost all Hindu systems, i.e., that all the Vedas together form a coherent whole. The human authorship of the Vedic texts has long been rejected, and they are now perceived either as being entirely uncreated and eternal or created by God at the beginning of each cycle of creation. Under the assumption that they are entirely uncreated, their innate ability to convey truthful meaning is unhampered by human limitations. Thus if all the Vedic texts convey truth, there cannot be any internal contradictions. If an omniscient God, who by his very nature is compassionate and beyond human limitations, created the Vedas, one reaches the same conclusion, i.e., there cannot be any internal contradictions. The traditional interpretation of the Vedas proceeds under these assumptions. If there are seeming contradictions in Vedic passages, the burden of finding ways to remove those seeming contradictions is upon the interpreter, but there can be no admission of internal contradictions in the texts themselves.

2. Conception of Language among Sanskrit grammarians

Before the emergence of the formalized philosophical systems or the darśanas, we see a number of philosophical issues relating to language implicitly and explicitly brought out by the early Sanskrit grammarians, namely Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali. Pāṇini (400 bce) composed his grammar of Sanskrit with a certain notion of Sanskrit as an atemporal language. For him, there were regional dialects of Sanskrit, as well as variation of usage in its scriptural (chandas) and contemporary (bhāṣā) domains. All these domains are treated as sub-domains of a unified language, which is not restricted by any temporality.
Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya refers to the views of Vyāḍi and Vājapyāyana on the meaning of words. Vyāḍi argued that words like “cow” denote individual instances of a certain class, while Vājapyāyana argued that words like “cow” denote generic properties or class properties (ākṛti), such as cowness, that are shared by all members of certain classes. Patañjali presents a long debate on the extreme positions in this argument, and finally concludes that both the individual instances and the class property must be included within the range of meaning. The only difference between the two positions is about which aspect, the individual or the class property, is denoted first, and which is understood subsequently. This early debate indicates philosophical positions that get expanded and fully argued in the traditions of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and the Mīmāṃsakas.
The early commentators on Pāṇini's grammar from the late Mauryan and post-Mauryan periods, Kātyāyana and Patañjali (200–100 bce), display a significant reorganization of Brahmanical views in the face of opposition from Jains and Buddhists. For Kātyāyana and Patañjali, the Sanskrit language at large is sacred like the Vedas. The intelligent use of Sanskrit, backed by the explicit understanding of its grammar, leads to prosperity here and in the next world, as do the Vedas. Kātyāyana and Patañjali admit that vernaculars as well as Sanskrit could do the function of communicating meaning. However, only the usage of Sanskrit produces religious merit. This is an indirect criticism of the Jains and the Buddhists, who used vernacular languages for the propagation of their faiths. The grammarians did not accept the religious value of the vernaculars. The vernacular languages, along with the incorrect uses of Sanskrit, are all lumped together by the Sanskrit grammarians under the derogatory terms apaśabda and apabhraṃśa, both of which suggest a view that the vernaculars are degenerate or “fallen” forms of the divine language, i.e., Sanskrit. Kātyāyana says: “While the relationship between words and meanings is established on the basis of the usage of specific words to denote specific meanings in the community of speakers, the science of grammar only makes a regulation concerning the religious merit produced by the linguistic usage, as is commonly done in worldly matters and in Vedic rituals” (first Vārttika on the Aṣṭādhyāyī). Kātyāyana refers to these “degenerate” vernacular usages as being caused by the inability of the low-class speakers to speak proper Sanskrit. The grammarians tell the story of demons that used improper degenerate usages during their ritual and hence were defeated.
The relationship between Sanskrit words and their meanings is said to be established (siddha) and taken as given by the grammarians. Patañjali understands this statement of Kātyāyana to mean that the relationship between Sanskrit words and their meanings is eternal (nitya), not created (kārya) by anyone. Since this eternal relationship, according to these grammarians, exists only for Sanskrit words and their meanings, one cannot accord the same status to the vernaculars, which are born of an inability on the part of their speakers to speak proper Sanskrit.
While Pāṇini uses the term prakṛti to refer to the derivationally original state of a word or expression before changes effected by grammatical operations are applied, Kātyāyana and Patañjali use the term vikṛta to refer to the derivationally transformed segment. However, change and identity are not compatible within more rigid metaphysical frameworks, and this becomes apparent in the following discussion. In his Vārttikas or comments on Pāṇini's grammar, Kātyāyana says that one could have argued that an item partially transformed does not yet lose its identity (Vārttika10 on P. 1.1.56). But such an acceptance would lead to non-eternality (anityatva) of language (Vārttika 11, Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 136), and that is not acceptable. Patañjali asserts that words in reality are eternal (nitya), and that means they must be absolutely free from change or transformation and fixed in their nature. If words are truly eternal, one cannot then say that a word was transformed and is yet the same. This points to the emerging ideological shifts in philosophical traditions, which make their headway into the tradition of grammar, and finally lead to the development of newer conceptions within the tradition of grammar and elsewhere.
In trying to figure out how the emerging doctrine of nityatva (“permanence”, “immutability”) of language causes problems with the notion of transformation (vikāra) and how these problems are eventually answered by developing new concepts, we should note two issues, i.e., temporal fixity or flexibility of individual sounds, and the compatibility of the notion of sequence of sounds, or utterance as a process stretched in time. From within the new paradigm of nityatva or eternality of sounds, Kātyāyana concludes that the true sounds (varṇa) are fixed in their nature in spite of the difference of speed of delivery (Vārttika 5 on P. 1.1.70, Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 181). The speed of delivery (vṛtti) results from the slow or fast utterance of a speaker (vacana), though the true sounds are permanently fixed in their nature. Here, Kātyāyana broaches a doctrine that is later developed further by Patañjali, and more fully by Bhartṛhari. It argues for a dual ontology. There are the fixed true sounds (varṇa), and then there are the uttered sounds (vacana, “utterance”). It is Patañjali who uses, for the first time as far as we know, the term sphoṭa to refer to Kātyāyana's “true sounds which are fixed” (avasthitā varṇāḥ) and the term dhvani (“uttered sounds”). Patañjali adds an important comment to Kātyāyana's discussion. He says that the real sound (śabda) is thus the sphoṭa (“the sound as it initially breaks out into the open”), and the quality [length or speed] of the sound is part of dhvani (“sound as it continues”) (Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 181). The term sphoṭa refers to something like exploding or coming into being in a bang. Thus it refers to the initial production or perception of sound. On the other hand, the stretching of that sound seems to refer to the dimension of continuation. Patañjali means to say that it is the same sound, but it may remain audible for different durations.
This raises the next problem that the grammarians must face: can a word be understood as a sequence or a collection of sounds? Kātyāyana says that one cannot have a sequence or a collection of sounds, because the process of speech proceeds sound-by-sound, and that sounds perish as soon as they are uttered. Thus, one cannot have two sounds co-existing at a given moment to relate to each other. Since the sounds perish as soon as they are uttered, a sound cannot have another co-existent companion (Vārttikas 9 and 10 on P. 1.4.109). Kātyāyana points out all these difficulties, but it is Patañjali who offers a solution to this philosophical dilemma. Patañjali suggests that one can pull together impressions of all the uttered sounds and then think of a sequence in this mentally constructed image of a word (Mahābhaṣya, I, p. 356). Elsewhere, Patañjali says that a word is perceived through the auditory organ, discerned through one's intelligence, and brought into being through its utterance (Mahābhaṣya, I, p. 18). While Patañjali's solution overcomes the transitoriness of the uttered sounds, and the resulting impossibility of a sequence, there is no denial of sequentiality or perhaps of an imprint of sequentiality in the comprehended word, and there is indeed no claim to its absolutely unitary or partless character. Patañjali means to provide a solution to the perception of sequentiality through his ideas of a mental storage of comprehension. But at the same time, this mental storage and the ability to view this mental image allows one to overcome the difficulty of non-simultaneity and construct a word or a linguistic unit as a collection of perceived sounds or words, as the case may be. Kātyāyana and Patañjali specifically admit the notion of samudāya (“collection”) of sounds to represent a word and a collection of words to represent a phrase or a sentence (Vārttika 7 on P. 2.2.29). Thus, while the ontology of physical sounds does not permit their co-existence, their mental images do allow it, and once they can be perceived as components of a collection, one also recognizes the imprint of the sequence in which they were perceived. Neither Kātyāyana nor Patañjali explicitly claim any higher ontological status to these word-images. However, the very acceptance of such word-images opens up numerous explanatory possibilities.
Although Kātyāyana and Patañjali argue that the notion of change or transformation of parts of words was contradictory to the doctrine of nityatva(“permanence”) of language, they were not averse to the notion of substitution. The notion of substitution was understood as a substitution, not of a part of a word by another part, but of a whole word by another word, and this especially as a conceptual rather than an ontological replacement. Thus, in going from “bhavati” to “bhavatu”, Pāṇini prescribes the change of “i” of “ti” to “u” (cf. P.3.4.86: “er uḥ”). Thus, “i” changes to “u”, leading to the change of “ti” to “tu”, and this consequently leads to the change of “bhavati” to “bhavatu”. For Kātyāyana and Patañjali, the above atomistic and transformational understanding of Pāṇini's procedure goes contrary to the doctrine of nityatva (“permanence”) of words. Therefore, they suggest that it is actually the substitution of the whole word “bhavati” by another whole word “bhavatu”, each of these two words being eternal in its own right. Additionally they assert that this is merely a notional change and not an ontological change, i.e., a certain item is found to occur, where one expected something else to occur. There is no change of an item x into an item y, nor does one remove the item x and place y in its place (Vārttikas 12 and 14 on P. 1.1.56). This discussion seems to imply a sort of unitary character to the words, whether notional or otherwise, and this eventually leads to a movement toward a kind of akhaṇḍa-pada-vāda (“the doctrine of partless words”) in the Vākyapadīya of Bhartṛhari. While one must admit that the seeds for such a conception may be traced in these discussions in the Mahābhāṣya, Patañjali is actually not arguing so much against words having parts, as against the notion of change or transformation (Mahābhāṣya on P. 1.2.20, I, p. 75).
Kātyāyana and Patañjali clearly view words as collections of sounds. Besides using the term “samudāya” for such a collection, they also use the word “varṇasaṃghāta” (“collection of sounds”). They argue that words are built by putting together sounds, and that, while the words are meaningful, the component sounds are not meaningful in themselves. The notion of a word as a collection (saṃghāta) applies not only in the sense that it is a collection of sounds, but also in the sense that complex formations are collections of smaller morphological components.
This leads us to consider the philosophical developments in the thought of Bhartṛhari (400 ce), and especially his departures from the conceptions seen in Kātyāyana and Patañjali. Apart from his significant contribution toward an in depth philosophical understanding of issues of the structure and function of language, and issues of phonology, semantics and syntax, Bhartṛhari is well known for his claim that language constitutes the ultimate principle of reality (śabdabrahman). Both the signifier words and the signified entities in the world are perceived to be a transformation (pariṇāma) of the ultimate unified principle of language.
For Kātyāyana and Patañjali, the level of padas (“inflected words”) is the basic level of language for grammar. These words are freely combined by the users to form sentences or phrases. The words are not derived by Kātyāyana and Patañjali by abstracting them from sentences by using the method of anvaya-vyatireka (“concurrent occurrence and concurrent absence”) (Vārttika 9 on P. 1.2.45). On the other hand, they claim that a grammarian first derives stems and affixes by applying the procedure of abstraction to words, and then in turn puts these stems and affixes through the grammatical process of derivation (saṃskāra) to build the words. Here, Kātyāyana and Patañjali do make a distinction between the levels of actual usage (vacana) and technical grammatical analysis and derivation. While full-fledged words (pada) occur at the level of usage, their abstracted morphological components do not occur by themselves at that level. However, they do not seem to suggest that the stems, roots, and affixes are purely imagined (kalpita).
Bhartṛhari has substantially moved beyond Kātyāyana and Patañjali. For him, the linguistically given entity is a sentence. Everything below the level of sentence is derived through a method of abstraction referred to by the term anvaya-vyatireka or apoddhāra. Additionally, for Bhartṛhari, elements abstracted through this procedure have no reality of any kind. They are kalpita (“imagined”) (Vākyapadīya, III, 14, 75–76). Such abstracted items have instructional value for those who do not yet have any intuitive insight into the true nature of speech (Vākyapadīya, II. 238). The true speech unit, the sentence, is an undivided singularity and so is its meaning which is comprehended in an instantaneous cognitive flash (pratibhā), rather than through a deliberative and/or sequential process. Consider the following verse of the Vākyapadīya (II.10):
Just as stems, affixes etc. are abstracted from a given word, so the abstraction of words from a sentence is justified.
Here, the clause introduced by “just as” refers to the older more widely prevalent view seen in the Mahābhāṣya. With the word “so,” Bhartṛhari is proposing an analogical extension of the procedure of abstraction (apoddhāra) to the level of a sentence.
Without mentioning Patañjali or Kātyāyana by name, Bhartṛhari seems to critique their view that the meaning of a sentence, consisting of the interrelations between the meanings of individual words, is essentially not derived from the constituent words themselves, but from the whole sentence as a collection of words. The constituent words convey their meaning first, but their interrelations are not communicated by the words themselves, but by the whole sentence as a unit. This view of Kātyāyana and Patañjali is criticized by Bhartṛhari (Vākyapadīya II.15–16, 41–42). It is clear that Bhartṛhari's ideas do not agree with the views expressed by Kātyāyana and Patañjali, and that the views of these two earlier grammarians are much closer, though not identical, with the views later maintained by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and Mīmāṃsakas. For Bhartṛhari, the sentence as a single partless unit conveys its entire unitary meaning in a flash, and this unitary meaning as well as the unitary sentence are subsequently analyzed by grammarians into their assumed or imagined constituents.
Finally, we should note that Bhartṛhari's views on the unitary character of a sentence and its meaning were found to be generally unacceptable by the schools of Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, as well as by the later grammarian-philosophers like Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa and Nāgeśabhaṭṭa. Their discussion of the comprehension of sentence-meaning is not couched in terms of Bhartṛhari's instantaneous flash of intuition (pratibhā), but in terms of the conditions of ākāṅkṣā (“mutual expectancy”), yogyatā (“compatibility)”, and āsatti (“contiguity of words”). In this sense, the later grammarian-philosophers are somewhat closer to the spirit of Kātyāyana and Patañjali.

3. General philosophical approaches to the status of Vedic scriptures

Early Vedic notions about the authorship of the Vedic hymns are different from philosophical views. Vedic hymns use words like kāru(“craftsman”) to describe the poet, and the act of producing a hymn is described as (Ṛgveda 10.71.2): “Like cleansing barley with a sieve, the wise poets created the speech with their mind”. The poets of the Vedic hymns are also called mantrakṛt (“makers of hymns”). Further, each hymn of the Veda is associated with a specific poet-priest and often with a family of poet-priests. But, already in the Ṛgveda, there are signs of the beginning of an impersonal conception of the origin of the Vedas. For instance, the famous Puruṣa-hymn of the Ṛgveda describes the hymns of the Ṛgveda, the formulae of Yajus and the songs of Sāman as originating from the primordial sacrifice of the cosmic being (Ṛgveda 10.90.9). This trend to ascribe impersonal origin to the Vedas gets further accentuated in the Brāhmaṇas and the Upaniṣads.
Later Hindu notions about the Vedic scriptures and their authority are in part reflections of Hindu responses to the criticisms of the Vedas launched by the Buddhists and the Jains. The early Buddhist critique of the Vedas targets the authors of the Vedic hymns. Vedic sages like Vasiṣṭha, Viśvāmitra, and Bhṛgu are described as the ancient authors of the mantras (porāṇā mantānaṃ kattāro), but they are criticized as being ignorant of the true path to the union with Brahmā (Tevijjasutta; Dīghanikāya; Suttapiṭaka). So the Vedas are depicted as being words of ignorant human beings who do not even recognize their own ignorance. How can one trust such authors or their words? The Buddhist and the Jain traditions also rejected the notion of God, and hence any claim that the Vedas were words of God, and hence authoritative, was not acceptable to them. On the other hand, the Jain and the Buddhist traditions claimed that their leading spiritual teachers like Mahāvīra and Buddha were omniscient (sarvajña) and were compassionate toward humanity at large, and hence their words were claimed to be authoritative.
Beginning around 200 bce, Hindu ritualists (Mīmāṃsakas) and logicians (Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas) began to defend their religious faith in the Vedas and in the Brahmanical religion with specific arguments. Some of these arguments have precursors in the discussions of the early Sanskrit grammarians, Kātyāyana and Patañjali. The Mīmāṃsakas accepted the arguments of the Buddhists and the Jains that one need not accept the notion of a creator-controller God. However, the Mīmāṃsakas attempted to defend the Vedas against the criticism that the ancient human sages who authored the hymns of the Vedas were ignorant, while the figures like the Buddha and Mahāvīra were omniscient. They contested the notion of an omniscient person (sarvajña), and argued that no humans could be omniscient and free from ignorance, passion, and deceit. Therefore, the Buddha and Mahāvīra could not be free from these faults either, and hence their words cannot be trusted. On the other hand, the Vedas were claimed to be eternal and intrinsically meaningful words, uncreated by any human being (apauruṣeya). Since they were not created by human beings, they were free from the limitations and faults of human beings. Yet the Vedas were meaningful, because the relationship between words and meanings was claimed to be innate. The Vedas were ultimately seen as ordaining the performance of sacrifices. The Mīmāṃsakas developed a theory of sentence-meaning which claimed that the meaning of a sentence centers around some specific action denoted by a verb-root and an injunction expressed by the verbal terminations. Thus, language, especially the scriptural language, primarily orders us to engage in appropriate actions.
In this connection, we may note that Mīmāṃsā and other systems of Hindu philosophy developed a notion of linguistic expression as one of the sources of authoritative knowledge (śabdapramāṇa), when other more basic sources of knowledge like sense perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna) are not available. Particularly, in connection with religious duty (dharma), and heaven (svarga) as the promised reward, only the Veda is available as the source of authoritative knowledge. For Mīmāṃsā, the Veda as a source of knowledge is not tainted by negative qualities like ignorance and malice that could affect a normal human speaker.
To understand the Mīmāṃsā doctrine of the eternality of the Vedas, we need to note that eternality implies the absence of both a beginning and an end. In Indian philosophy, two kinds of persistence are distinguished, namely the ever unchanging persistence (kūṭastha-nityatā), like that of a rock, and the continuous and yet incessantly changing existence of a stream like that of a river (pravāha-nityatā). The persistence claimed for the Vedas by the Mīmāṃsakas would appear to be of the kūṭastha (“unchanging persistence”) kind, while its continuous study from time immemorial would be of the pravāha-nitya (“fluid persistence”) kind. Further, the meanings which the words signify are natural to the words, not the result of convention. Mīmāṃsā does not think that the association of a particular meaning with a word is due to conventions among people who introduce and give meanings to the words. Further, words signify only universals. The universals are eternal. Words do not signify particular entities of any kind which come into being and disappear, but the corresponding universals which are eternal and of which the transient individuals are mere instances. Further, not only are the meanings eternal, the words are also eternal. All words are eternal. If one utters the word “chair” ten times, is one uttering the same word ten times? The Mīmāṃsakas say that, if the word is not the same, then it cannot have the same meaning. The word and the meaning both being eternal, the relation between them also is necessarily so. An important argument with which the eternality of the Vedas is secured is that of the eternality of the sounds of a language.
The Mīmāṃsā conceives of an unbroken and beginningless Vedic tradition. No man or God can be considered to be the very first teacher of the Veda or the first receiver of it, because the world is beginningless. It is conceivable that, just as at present, there have always been teachers teaching and students studying the Veda. For the Mīmāṃsakas, the Vedas are not words of God. In this view, they seem to accept the Buddhist and the Jain critique of the notion of God. There is no need to assume God. Not only is there no need to assume that God was the author of the Vedas, there is no need to assume a God at all. God is not required as a Creator, for the universe was never created. Nor is God required as the Dispenser of Justice, for karman brings its own fruits. And one does not need God as the author of the Vedas, since they are eternal and uncreated to begin with. The Ṛṣis, Vedic sages, did not compose the Vedas. They merely saw them, and, therefore, the scriptures are free from the taint of mortality implicit in a human origin. The Mīmāṃsā notion of the authority of the authorless Veda also depends upon their epistemic theory, that claims that all received cognitions are intrinsically valid (svataḥ pramāṇa), unless and until they are falsified by subsequent cognitions of higher order.
The traditions of the Naiyāyikas and the Vaiśeṣikas strongly disagreed with the views of the Mīmāṃsakas and they developed their own distinctive conceptions of language, meaning, and scriptural authority. They agreed with the Mīmāṃsakas that the Vedas were a source of authoritative knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa), and yet they offered a different set of reasons. According to them, only the words of a trustworthy speaker (āpta) are a source of authoritative knowledge. They joined the Mīmāṃsakas in arguing that no humans, including Buddha and Mahāvīra, are free from ignorance, passion, etc., and no humans are omniscient, and therefore the words of no human being could be accepted as infallible. However, they did not agree with the Mīmāṃsakas in their rejection of the notion of God. In the metaphysics of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition, the notion of God plays a central role. In defending the notion of God (as in the Nyāyakusumāñjali of Udayana), they claimed that God was the only being in the universe that was omniscient and free from the faults of ignorance and malice. He was a compassionate being. Therefore, only the words of God could be infallible, and therefore be trusted. For the Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas, the Vedas were words of God, and not the words of human sages about God. The human sages only received the words of God in their meditative trances, but they had no authorship role.
On a different level, this argument came to mean that God only spoke in Sanskrit, and hence Sanskrit alone was the language of God, and that it was the best means to approach God. God willfully established a connection between each Sanskrit word and its meaning, saying “let this word refer to this thing.” Such a connection was not established by God for vernacular languages, which were only fallen forms of Sanskrit, and hence the vernaculars could not become vehicles for religious and spiritual communication. The Naiyāyikas argued that vernacular words did not even have legitimate meanings of their own. They claimed that the vernacular words reminded the listener of the corresponding Sanskrit words that communicated the meaning.

4. Language and Meaning

The term artha in Sanskrit is used to denote the notion of meaning. However, the meaning of this term ranges from a real object in the external world referred to by the word to a mere concept of an object which may or may not correspond to anything in the external world. The differences regarding what meaning is are argued out by the philosophical schools of Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, various schools of Buddhism, Sanskrit grammar, and poetics. Among these schools, the schools of Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, and Mīmāṃsā have realist ontologies. Mīmāṃsā focuses mainly on interpreting the Vedic scriptures. Buddhist thinkers generally pointed to language as depicting a false picture of reality. Sanskrit grammarians were more interested in language and communication than in ontology, while Sanskrit poetics focused on the poetic dimensions of meaning.
The modern distinction of “sense” versus “reference” is somewhat blurred in the Sanskrit discussions of the notion of meaning. The question Indian philosophers seem to raise is “what does a word communicate?” They were also interested in detecting if there was some sort of sequence in which different aspects of layers of meaning were communicated. Generally, the notion of meaning is further stratified into three or four types. First there is the primary meaning, something that is directly and immediately communicated by a word. If the primary meaning is inappropriate in a given context, then one moves to a secondary meaning, an extension of the primary meaning. Beyond this is the suggested meaning, which may or may not be the same as the meaning intended by the speaker.
The various Indian theories of meaning are closely related to the overall stances taken by the different schools. Among the factors which influence the notion of meaning are the ontological and epistemological views of a school, its views regarding the role of God and scripture, its specific focus on a certain type of discourse, and its ultimate purpose in theorizing.
In the Western literature on the notion of meaning in the Indian tradition, various terms such as “sense,” “reference,” “denotation,” “connotation,” “designatum,” and “intension” have been frequently used to render the Sanskrit term artha. However, these terms carry specific nuances of their own, and no single term adequately conveys the idea of artha. Artha basically refers to the object signified by a word. In numerous contexts, the term stands for an object in the sense of an element of external reality. For instance, Patañjali says that when a word is pronounced, an artha“object” is understood. For example: “bring in a bull”, “eat yogurt”, etc. It is the artha that is brought in and it is also the artha that is eaten.
The schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika set up an ontology containing substances, qualities, actions, relations, generic and particular properties, etc. With this realistic ontology in mind, they argue that if the relation between a word and its artha (“meaning”) were a natural ontological relation, there should be real experiences of burning and cutting in one's mouth after hearing words like “agni” (“fire”) and “asi” (“sword”). Therefore, this relationship must be a conventional relationship (saṃketa), the convention being established by God as part of his initial acts of creation. The relationship between a word and the object it refers to is thought to be the desire of God that such and such a word should refer to such and such an object. It is through this established conventional relationship that a word reminds the listener of its meaning. The school of Mīmāṃsā represents the tradition of the exegesis of the Vedic texts. However, in the course of discussing and perfecting principles of interpretation, this system developed a full-scale theory of ontology and an important theory of meaning. For the Mīmāṃsakas, the primary tenet is that the Vedic scriptural texts are eternal and uncreated, and that they are meaningful. For this orthodox system, which remarkably defends the scripture but dispenses with the notion of God, the relationship between a word and its meaning is an innate eternal relationship. For both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and Mīmāṃsakas, language refers to external states of the world and not just to conceptual constructions.
The tradition of grammarians, beginning with Bhartṛhari, seems to have followed a middle path between the realistic theories of reference (bāhyārthavāda) developed by Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā on the one hand, and the notional/conceptual meaning (vikalpa) of the Buddhists on the other. For the grammarians, the meaning of a word is closely related to the level of understanding. Whether or not things are real, we do have concepts. These concepts form the content of a person's cognitions derived from language. Without necessarily denying or affirming the external reality of objects in the world, grammarians claimed that the meaning of a word is only a projection of intellect (bauddhārtha, buddhipratibhāsa). The examples offered by Sanskrit grammarians such as “śaśaśṛṅga” (“horn of a rabbit”) and “vandhyāsuta” (“son of a barren woman”) remain meaningful within this theory. Sanskrit grammarians are thus not concerned with ontological or truth functional values of linguistic expressions. For them the truth of an expression and its meaningfulness are not to be equated.
By the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era, certain uniformity came about in the technical terminology used by different schools. The prominent schools in this period are the new school of Nyāya initiated by Gaṅgeśa, the schools of Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and Sanskrit grammar. While all these schools are engaged in pitched battles against each other, they seem to accept the terminological lead of the neo-logicians, the Navya-Naiyāyikas. Following the discussion of the term artha by the neo-logician Gadādharabhaṭṭa, we can state the general framework of a semantic theory. Other schools accept this general terminology, with some variations.
It may be said that the term artha (“meaning”) stands for the object or content of a verbal cognition or a cognition that results from hearing a word (śābda-bodha-viṣaya). Such a verbal cognition results from the cognition of a word (śābda-jñāna) on the basis of an awareness of the signification function pertaining to that word (pada-niṣṭha-vṛtti-jñāna). Depending upon the kind of signification function (vṛtti) involved in the emergence of the verbal cognition, the meaning belongs to a distinct type. In general terms:
  1. When a verbal cognition results from the primary signification function (śakti / abhidhāvṛtti / mukhyavṛtti) of a word, the object or content of that verbal cognition is called primary meaning (śakyārtha / vācyārtha / abhidheya).
  2. When a verbal cognition results from the secondary signification function (lakṣaṇāvṛtti / guṇavṛtti) of a word, the object or content of that verbal cognition is called secondary meaning (lakṣyārtha).
  3. When a verbal cognition results from the suggestive signification function (vyañjanāvṛtti) of a word, the object or content of that verbal cognition is called suggested meaning (vyaṅgyārtha / dhvanitārtha).
  4. When a verbal cognition results from the intentional signification function (tātparyavṛtti) of a word, the object or content of that verbal cognition is called intended meaning (tātparyārtha).
Not all the different schools of Indian philosophy accept all of these different kinds of signification functions for words, and they hold substantially different views on the nature of words, meanings, and the relations between words and meanings. However, the above terminology holds true, in general, for most of the medieval schools. Let us note some of the important differences. Mīmāṃsā claims that the sole primary meaning of the word “bull” is the generic property or the class property (jāti) such as bull-ness, while the individual object which possesses this generic property, i.e., a particular bull, is only secondarily and subsequently understood from the word “bull”. The school called Kevalavyaktivāda argues that a particular individual bull is the sole primary meaning of the word “bull,” while the generic property bull-ness is merely a secondary meaning. Nyāya argues that the primary meaning of a word is an individual object qualified by a generic property (jāti-viśiṣṭa-vyakti), both being perceived simultaneously.
Sanskrit grammarians distinguish between various different kinds of meanings (artha). The term artha stands for an external object (vastumātra), as well as for the object that is intended to be signified by a word (abhidheya). The latter, i.e., meaning in a linguistic sense, could be meaning in a technical context (śāstrīya), such as the meaning of an affix or a stem, or it may be meaning as understood by people in actual communication (laukika). Then there is a further difference. Meaning may be something directly intended to be signified by an expression (abhidheya), or it could be something which is inevitably signified (nāntarīyaka) when something else is really the intended meaning. Everything that is understood from a word on the basis of some kind of signification function (vṛtti) is covered by the term artha. Different systems of Indian philosophy differ from each other on whether a given cognition is derived from a word on the basis of a signification function (vṛtti), through inference (anumāna), or presumption (arthāpatti). If a particular item of information is deemed to have been derived through inference or presumption, it is not included in the notion of word-meaning.
The scope of the term artha is actually not limited in Sanskrit texts to what is usually understood as the domain of semantics in the western literature. It covers elements such as gender (liṅga) and number (saṃkhyā). It also covers the semantic-syntactic roles (kāraka) such as agent-ness (kartṛtva) and object-ness (karmatva). Tenses such as the present, past, and future, and the moods such as the imperative and optative are also traditionally included in the arthas signified by a verb root, or an affix. Another aspect of the concept of artha is revealed in the theory of dyotyārtha (“co-signified”) meaning. According to this theory, to put it in simple terms, particles such as ca (“and”) do not have any lexical or primary meaning. They are said to help other words used in construction with them to signify some special aspects of their meaning. For instance, in the phrase “John and Tom”, the meaning of grouping is said to be not directly signified by the word “and”. The theory of dyotyārtha argues that grouping is a specific meaning of the two words “John” and “Tom”, but that these two words are unable to signify this meaning if used by themselves. The word “and” used along with these two words is said to work as a catalyst that enables them to signify this special meaning. The problem of use and mention of words is also handled by Sanskrit grammarians by treating the phonological form of the word itself to be a part of the meaning it signifies. This is a unique way of handling this problem.

6. Different views regarding sentence-meaning

Most schools of Indian philosophy have an atomistic view of meaning and the meaning-bearing linguistic unit. This means that a sentence is put together by combining words and words are put together by combining morphemic elements like stems, roots, and affixes. The same applies to meaning. The word-meaning may be viewed as a fusion of the meanings of stems, roots, and affixes, and the meaning of a sentence may be viewed as a fusion of the meanings of its constituent words. Beyond this generality, different schools have specific proposals. The tradition of PrābhākaraMīmāṃsā proposes that the words of a sentence already convey contextualized inter-connected meanings (anvitābhidhāna) and that the sentence-meaning is not different from a simple addition of these inherently inter-connected word-meanings. On the other hand, the Naiyāyikas and the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsakas propose that words of a sentence taken by themselves convey only uncontextualized unconnected meanings, and that these uncontextualized word-meanings are subsequently brought into a contextualized association with each other (abhihitānvaya). Therefore, the sentence-meaning is different from word-meanings, and is communicated through the concatenation (saṃsarga) of words, rather than by the words themselves. This is also the view of the early grammarians like Kātyāyana and Patañjali.
For the later grammarian-philosopher Bhartṛhari, however, there are no divisions in speech acts and in communicated meanings. He says that only a person ignorant of the real nature of language believes the divisions of sentences into words, stems, roots, and affixes to be real. Such divisions are useful fictions and have an explanatory value in grammatical theory, but have no reality in communication. In reality, there is no sequence in the cognitions of these different components. The sentence-meaning becomes an object or content of a single instance of a flash of cognition (pratibhā).

7. Some important conceptions

The terms śakyatāvacchedaka and pravṛttinimitta signify a property which determines the inclusion of a particular instance within the class of possible entities referred to by a word. It is a property whose possession by an entity is the necessary and sufficient condition for a given word being used to refer to that entity. Thus, the property of potness may be viewed as the śakyatāvacchedaka controlling the use of the word “pot”.
The concept of lakṣaṇā (“secondary signification function”) is invoked in a situation where the primary meaning of an utterance does not appear to make sense in view of the intention behind the utterance, and hence one looks for a secondary meaning. However, the secondary meaning is always something that is related to the primary meaning in some way. For example, the expression gaṅgāyāṃ ghoṣaḥ literally refers to a cowherd-colony on the Ganges. Here, it is argued that one obviously cannot have a cowherd-colony sitting on top of the river Ganges. This would clearly go against the intention of the speaker. Thus, there is both a difficulty of justifying the linkage of word-meanings (anvayānupapatti) and a difficulty of justifying the literal or primary meaning in relation to the intention of the speaker (tātparyānupapatti). These interpretive difficulties nudge one away from the primary meaning of the expression to a secondary meaning, which is related to that primary meaning. Thus, we understand the expression as referring to a cowherd-colony “on the bank of the river Ganges”.
It is the next level of meaning or vyañjanā (“suggestive signification function”) which is analyzed and elaborated more specifically by authors like Ānandavardhana in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics. Consider the following instance of poetic suggestion. With her husband out on a long travel, a lovelorn young wife instructs a visiting young man: “My dear guest, I sleep here and my night-blind mother-in-law sleeps over there. Please make sure you do not stumble at night.” The suggested meaning is an invitation to the young man to come and share her bed. Thus, the poetic language goes well beyond the levels of lexical and metaphorical meanings, and heightens the aesthetic pleasure through such suggestions.

8. Why the differences?

The nuances of these different theories are closely related to the markedly different interests of the schools within which they developed. Sanskrit poetics was interested in the poetic dimensions of meaning. Grammarians were interested in language and cognition, but had little interest in ontological categories per se, except as conceptual structures revealed by the usage of words. For them words and meanings had to be explained irrespective of one's metaphysical views. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas were primarily into logic, epistemology, and ontology, and argued that a valid sentence was a true picture of a state of reality. The foremost goal of Mīmāṃsā was to interpret and defend the Vedic scriptures. Thus, meaning for Mīmāṃsāhad to be eternal, uncreated, and unrelated to the intention of a person, because its word par excellence, the Vedic scripture, was eternal, uncreated, and beyond the authorship of a divine or human person. The scriptural word was there to instruct people on how to perform proper ritual and moral duties, but there was no intention behind it. The Buddhists, on the other hand, aimed at weaning people away from all attachment to the world, and hence at showing the emptiness of everything, including language. They were more interested in demonstrating how language fails to portray reality, than in explaining how it works. The theories of meaning were thus a significant part of the total agenda of each school and need to be understood in their specific context.

Bibliography

  • Bhartṛhari (400/1977). Vākyapadīya. Critical text, Wilhelm, R. (ed.). (Series: Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, XLII, 4). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
  • Bhatt, G. P. (1962). Epistemology of the Bhāṭṭa School of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office.
  • Biardeau, M. (1967). Théorie de la Connaissance et Philosophie de la Parole dans le Brahmanisme Classique. Paris: Mouton and Co.
  • Bilimoria, P. (1988). Śabdapramāṇa: Word and Knowledge. (Series: Studies in Classical India, No. 10). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1966). Indian semantics: I, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 86, 304–311.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1969). Sanskrit Philosophy of Language. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 5: Linguistics in South Asia, (pp. 499–531). The Hague: Mouton and Co., Publishers.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1979a). Oriental ideas on the origin of language. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 99, 1–14.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1979b). The role of meanings in Pāṇini's grammar. Indian Linguistics, 40, 146–157.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1981). Nirukta and Aṣṭādhyāyī: Their Shared Presuppositions. Indo-Iranian Journal, 23, 1–14.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1988). Universals: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1991). Studies on Bhartṛhari, 3, Bhartṛhari on Sphoṭa and Universals. Asiatische Studien, 45, 5–18.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (1992). Pāṇini's view of meaning and its Western counterpart. In M. Stamenov (Ed.), Current Advances in Semantic Theory, pp. 455–464. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Bronkhorst, J. (2004). La grammaire et les débuts de la philosophie indienne. Asiatische Studien, 58, 791–865.
  • Buitenan, J. A. B. van (1988). Studies in Indian Literature and Philosophy, (Collected articles edited by Ludo Rocher), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Cardona, G. (1976). Pāṇini: A Survey of Research. The Hague, Paris: Mouton.
  • Cardona, G. (1988). Pāṇini, His Works and its Traditions, Vol. I., Background and Introduction, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Chatterjee, K. N. (1980). Word and its Meaning—A New Perspective. Varanasi: Chaukhambha Orientalia.
  • Chatterjee, S. C. (1965). The Nyāya Theory of Knowledge. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
  • Coward, H. G. (1980). Sphoṭa Theory of Language. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Coward, H. G. & Raja, K. K. (Eds.). (1990). The Philosophy of the Grammarians. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Datta, D. M. (1972). The Six Ways of Knowing. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
  • Deshpande, M. (1978). Sentence-cognition in Nyāya epistemology. Indo-Iranian Journal, 20, 195–216
  • Deshpande, M. (1979). Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, Inc.
  • Deshpande, M. (1987). Pāṇinian syntax and the changing notion of sentence. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, LXVIII, 55–98.
  • Deshpande, M. (1990). Changing conceptions of the Veda. Adyar Library Bulletin, 54, 1–41.
  • Deshpande, M. (1992a). The Meaning of Nouns: Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Deshpande, M. (1992b). Bhartṛhari. In M. Dascal, D. Gerhardus, & K. Lorenz (Eds.), Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 7.1: Sprachphilosophie (pp. 269–278). Berlin: De Gruyter.
  • Deshpande, M. (1993). Sanskrit & Prakrit Sociolinguistic Issues. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Deshpande, M. (1994). Brahmanism versus Buddhism: a perspective of language attitudes. In N. N. Bhattacharyya (Ed.), Jainism and Prakrit in ancient and medieval India: essays for Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jain (pp. 89–111). New Delhi: Manohar.
  • Deshpande, M. (1997). Building blocks or useful fictions: changing view of morphology in ancient Indian thought. In Dick van der Meij (Ed.), India and beyond: aspects of literature, meaning, ritual and thought; essays in honour of Frits Staal (pp. 71–127). Leiden & Amsterdam: International Institute for Asian Studies.
  • Devasthali, G. V. (1959). Mīmāṃsā: The Vākya-Śāstra of Ancient India. Mumbai: Booksellers' Publishing Company.
  • D'sa, F. X. (1980). Śabdaprāmāṇyam in Śabara and Kumārila: Towards a Study of the Mīmāṃsā Experience of Language. (Series: Publications of the de Nobili Research Library). Vienna: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien.
  • Gächter, O. (1983). Hermeneutics and Language in Pūrvamīmāṃsā. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Ganeri, J. (1999). Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy. (Series: Oxford Philosophical Monographs). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Ganeri, J. (2001). Philosophy in Classical India. London: Routledge.
  • Ganeri, J. (2006). Artha: Meaning. (Series: Foundations of Philosophy in India). Delhi & New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Ganguli, H. K. (1963). Philosophy of Logical Construction. Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar.
  • Gune, J. A. (1978). The Meaning of Tenses and Moods. Pune: Deccan College.
  • Houben, J. E. M. (1993). Who were the Padavādins?. Asiatische Studien, XLVII(1), 155–169.
  • Houben, J. E. M. (1995). Bhartṛhari's perspectivism (2): Bhartṛhari on the primary unit of language. In K. D. Dutz (Ed.), History and Rationality(pp. 29–62). Münster: Nodus Publications.
  • Houben, J. E. M. (2000). Language and thought in the Sanskrit tradition. In S. Auroux (Ed.), History of the Language Sciences (pp. 146–157). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
  • Houben, J. E. M. (2002). Semantics in the history of South Asian thought. In M. Deshpande & P. Hook (Eds.), Indian Linguistic Studies: Festschrift in honor of George Cardona (pp. 202–222). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Houben, J. E. M. (2007). Ṛgveda 1.164.23–24 and Bhartṛhari's philosophy of language. In K. Preisendanz (Ed.), Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass (pp. 711–719). Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
  • Iyer, K. A. S. (1966). Vākyapadīya of Bhartṛhari, with the Vṛtti, and the Paddhati of Vṛṣabhadeva, Kāṇḍa I. (Series: Deccan College Monograph Series, No 32). Pune: Deccan College.
  • Joshi, S. D. (1967). The Sphoṭanirṇaya of Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa, edited with Introduction, Translation, and Critical and Exegetical Notes. (Series: Publications of the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, Class C, No. 2). Pune: University of Pune.
  • Matilal, B. K. (1971). Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
  • Matilal, B. K. (1985). Logic, Language and Reality: an introduction to Indian philosophical studies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Matilal, B. K. (1998). The Character of Logic in India (J. Ganeri & H. Tiwari, Eds.). Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Matilal, B. K. (2002). Mind, Language, and World (J. Ganeri, Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Padoux, A. (1990). Vāc: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras (translated from French by J. Gontier). Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Pandeya, R. C. (1963). The Problem of Meaning in Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Patañjali (Second Century bce/1880–1885/1962–1972). Mahābhāṣya, in 3 volumes (F. Kielhorn, Ed., 1880–1885; K. V. Abhyankar, Ed., 3rd revised edition, 1962–1972). Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
  • Prasad, J. (1956). History of Indian Epistemology. Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal.
  • Raja, K. (1963). Indian Theories of Meaning. (Series: The Adyar Library Series 91). Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre.
  • Rao, V. S. (1969). The Philosophy of a Sentence and its Parts. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
  • Ṛgveda-Saṃhitā, with Sāyaṇa's commentary, in five volumes. (1933–1951, N. S. Sonatakke and C. G. Kashikar, Eds.). Pune: Vaidika Saṃśodhana Maṇḍaḷa.
  • Sastri, G. N. (1959). The Philosophy of Word and Meaning. Calcutta: Sanskrit College.
  • Scharf, P. M. (1996). The denotation of generic terms in ancient Indian philosophy: grammar, Nyāya, and Mīmāṃsā. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 86(3), i-x,1–336.
  • Scharfe, H. (1961). Die Logik im Mahābhāṣya. Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Institut für Orientforschung.
  • Staal, J. F. (1960). Correlations between language and logic in Indian thought. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 23, 109–122.
  • Thieme, P. (1982–3). Meaning and form of the “grammar” of Pāṇini. Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, 8/9, 23–28.

Other Internet Resources

Related Entries

Bhartṛhari | Buddha | Gaṅgeśa | Indian Philosophy (Classical): epistemology | Indian Philosophy (Classical): language and testimony | Indian Philosophy (Classical): logic | Indian Philosophy (Classical): mental causation and consciousness | Indian Philosophy (Classical): perceptual experience and concepts | Indian Philosophy (Classical): self-knowledge | Kumārila | Madhyamaka | Yogācāra
↧
Search
↧

Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy -- Stephen Phillips

December 27, 2017, 3:40 pm
$
0
0

Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy


First published Thu Mar 3, 2011

Theory of knowledge, pramāṇa-śāstra, is a rich genre of Sanskrit literature, spanning almost twenty centuries, carried out in texts belonging to distinct schools of philosophy. Debate across school occurs especially on epistemological issues, but no author writes on knowledge independently of the sort of metaphysical commitment that defines the various classical systems (darśana), realist and idealist, dualist and monist, theist and atheist, and so on. And every one of the dozen or so major schools from early in its history takes a position on knowledge and justification, if only, as with the Buddhist skeptic (Prasaṅgika), to attack the theories of others. There are nevertheless many common epistemological assumptions or attitudes, the most striking of which is a focus on a belief's source in questions of justification. Mainstream classical Indian epistemology is dominated by theories about pedigree, i.e., views about knowledge-generating processes, called pramāṇa, “knowledge sources.” The principal candidates are perception, inference, and testimony. Other processes seem not truth-conducive or reducible to one or more of the widely accepted sources such as perception and inference. However, surprising candidates such as non-perception (for knowledge of absences) and circumstantial implication (defended as distinct from inference) provoke complex arguments especially in the later texts—from about 1000 when the number of Sanskrit philosophical works of some of the schools begins to proliferate almost exponentially. The later texts present more intricate views and arguments than the earlier from which the later authors learned. Classical Indian philosophy is an unbroken tradition of reflection expressed in the pan-Subcontinent intellectual language of Sanskrit. Or, we should say it is comprised of interlocking traditions since there are the distinct schools, all nevertheless using Sanskrit and engaging with the other schools. Later authors expand and carry forward positions and arguments of their predecessors.
Skepticism and the issue of whether knowledge that p entails that you know that you know that p are addressed as well as the question of the usefulness of knowledge not only for the purposes of everyday life but also the religious goal of world-transcendence, about which most of the schools take positions. The authority of testimony, among the candidate sources, is considered by some to have special religious importance. Others view yogic perception and/or meditative experience as crucial for religious knowledge, which is distinguished from the everyday knowledge analyzed in the textbooks of epistemology.

1. Common Presuppositions of Classical Indian Schools

Commonalities in the classical Indian approaches to knowledge and justification frame the arguments and refined positions of the major schools. Central is a focus on occurrent knowledge coupled with a theory of “mental dispositions” called saṃskāra. Epistemic evaluation of memory, and indeed of all standing belief, is seen to depend upon the epistemic status of the occurrent cognition or awareness or awarenesses that formed the memory, i.e., the mental disposition, in the first place. Occurrent knowledge in turn must have a knowledge source, pramāṇa.

1.1 Knowledge and Knowledge Sources

A common failure of translators rendering the technical terms of the Indian epistemological schools into the technical terms, or even not so technical, of English and analytic philosophy, is ignorance of the latter. For example, several words, the most common of which is ‘jñāna’, are standardly rendered with the word ‘knowledge’ in English (e.g., Bhatt 1989). However, proper Sanskrit usage allows “false” jñāna, whereas there is no false knowledge as the words are used in (analytic) English. There is a deeper lesson here than that translators should study Western philosophy, the lesson, namely, that although there may be false jñāna—let us say “cognition”: there are true and false cognition—it is commonly assumed in everyday speech as well as by the Indian epistemologists (with few exceptions, notably, the second-century Buddhist Nāgārjuna and certain followers including Śrīharṣa, the eleventh-century Advaitin) that cognition is ordinarily by nature true or veridical. It is error and falsity that are the deviations from the normal and natural. That is to say, cognition is regarded as knowledge as a kind of conversational default—and so to translate ‘jñāna’ as “knowledge” turns out not to be so bad after all. When the eighth-century Advaitin Śaṅkara says that from the perspective of spiritual knowledge (vidyā) the knowledge we recognize in everyday speech turns out to be illusory, mithyā-jñāna, “false knowledge,” this is supposed to be felt as almost a contradiction in terms (Brahma-sūtra Commentary, preamble).
Now it is argued by practically everyone (save the anti-epistemology group headed by Nāgārjuna) that at least everyday knowledge is proved by our unhesitating action (niṣkampa-prvṛtti) to get what we want and avoid what we want to avoid. We would not so act if we had doubt, guided as we are by our knowledge. Belief, which cognition embeds, is tied to action, and action, in turn, blunts the force of skepticism, it is pointed out in several of the classical schools. Buddhist Yogācāra as well as Mīmāṃsā and (most) Vedānta view knowledge as inherently known to be true. Even Nyāya, a school championing a view of knowledge as unselfconscious of itself as true, subscribes to the epistemological principle of “Innocent until reasonably challenged” (a slight weakening of the “Innocent until proven guilty,” as pointed out, e.g., by Matilal 1986, 314: “Verbal reports … are innocent until proven guilty”). Surprisingly (given the rancor in some exchanges across school), the sixth-century Nyāya philosopher Uddyotakara, who is famous for his attacks on Yogācāra positions, takes a similarly charitable attitude to be a rule applying to other philosophies: “For it is a rule with systems (of philosophy) that a position of another that is not expressly disproved is (to be regarded as) in conformity (with one's own)” (under Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.4: 125).
Knowledge is cognition that has been produced in the right way. Cognitions are moments of consciousness, not species of belief, but we may say that cognitions form beliefs in forming dispositions and that veridical cognitions form true beliefs. A knowledge episode—to speak in the Indian manner—is a cognition generated in the right fashion. Whether this be because it is (as say the realists, Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika) that it has the right origins in fact, or whether it is because it guides successful action in helping us get our desires satisfied (as say Yogācāra idealists and pragmatists), knowledge is cognition that arises in the right way. There are different theories of truth, but everyone sees knowledge as not only indicating the truth but arising from it. Knowledge episodes form non-occurrent knowledge (it is assumed, we may say), and so an examination of what is crucial to the arising of a knowledge episode is crucial to the evaluations of epistemology. Knowledge cannot arise by accident. A lucky guess, though true or veridical, would not count as knowledge because it would not been generated in the right fashion, would not have the right pedigree or etiology. The central notion throughout classical Indian epistemology is the “knowledge source,” pramāṇa, which is a process of veridical-cognition generation.
Now the word ‘pramāṇa’ (“knowledge source”) along with the words used for individual knowledge sources, for perception and so on, are commonly used such that the truth of the resultant cognition is implied. This runs counter to English usage, along with broad philosophic supposition, which is different with the words ‘perception’ and company. For no knowledge source ever generates a false belief. Yogācāra Buddhists—who subscribe to the metaphysical view known as momentariness, which is a presentism (only things existing right now are real)—claim that there is no difference between source and result, process of knowledge and effect, pramāṇa and pramā. Thus there can be no wedge driven between cause and effect such that there could possibly be knowledge by accident. The Vedic schools (Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga) do distinguish knowledge as result and knowledge-producing process but also see the concepts as wedded in that, as indicated, no genuine knowledge source ever produces a false belief. Only pseudo-sources do. That is to say, no non-veridical cognition is knowledge-source-generated. A knowledge source is then not merely a reliable doxastic practice. Being merely reliable does not fit the bill. The concept of a knowledge source has a truth logic, like ‘knowledge’ in English; it is factive. Maybe we should say perception*, inference*, testimony* to render the classical Indian ideas. False testimony, for example, does not count as a knowledge-generator; the Sanskrit word for testimony is used only for what would be termed in English “epistemically successful testimony,” i.e., with a hearer having knowledge in virtue of a speaker telling the truth. A non-veridical perception is not really a perception at all but a “pseudo-perception” (pratyakṣa-ābhāsa), “apparent perception,” a perception imitator. You don't really see an illusory snake; you only think you see one.

1.2 The Touchstone of Everyday Speech

Everyday patterns of speech (vyavahāra) are taken as a starting point for theorizing in epistemology as in other areas of philosophy. So, for example, perception and inference—more exotic candidate sources, too—are defended as veritable knowledge-generators by the observation that people commonly regard them in that way. People cite a belief's pedigree in questions of justification. Note that even in English we do commonly recognize perception and some of the others as certificational. Thus this seems to be a common human practice, not restricted to classical Indian civilization, for sometimes we say, for instance, “S is indeed over there, since I see him,” and “You couldn't really have perceived S because condition Y does not hold” (“You can't see anyone from this distance”). Habits of speech are reinforced by success in action, classical theorists recognize in accepting the presumptive authority of common opinion. But “a knowledge source” may be thought of as a technical term, one that entails factivity, as we have seen, as a matter of definition. Similarly with justification (prāmāṇya), the having of which, if veritable (or objective), as opposed to the apparent (ābhāsa), means that the justified cognition is true.

1.3 Knowledge and World-Transcendence

There is much controversy over the religious goal of life among the several schools, both among schools accepting Vedic culture (liberation vs. heaven, individual dissolution into the Absolute Brahman, blissful yogic “isolation,” kaivalya, enjoyment of God's presence) and among outsider schools (Buddhist nirvāṇa or becoming a bodhi-sattva or a Jaina arhat as well as Cārvāka's entire rejection of soteriology). But from a distance, we can see common conceptions linking at least many of the Indian views. One is to draw a distinction between everyday and spiritual knowledge and to theorize about their relationship. A prominent position is that thinking about the world is an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment. Another is that proper understanding of the world helps one disengage and to know oneself as separate from material things, and so is an aid to transcendence. The most distinctive form of skepticism in classical Indian thought is that so-called worldly knowledge is not knowledge at all but is a perversion or deformation of consciousness. Who seems a philosophical skeptic is really a saint helping us achieve our truly greatest good of world-transcendence by helping us see the paradoxes and other failures of theory.

2. Skepticism

With an eye to the alleged power of inference to prove the existence of God or personal survival, the Cārvāka materialist school recognizes perception as a knowledge source but not inference nor any other candidate. Inference depends upon generalizations which outstrip perceptual evidence, everything F as a G. No one can know that, Cārvāka claims. Testimony is also no good since it presupposes that any speaker would tell the truth and thus is subject to the same criticism of lack of evidence. And so on through the other candidates (Mādhava, Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha). The standard response is pragmatic. We could not act as we do if we could not rely on inference (etc.) albeit inference does depend on generalization that (often, not invariably) outstrips experience. The skeptic himself relies on such generalizations when he opens his mouth to voice his skepticism, by using words with repeatable meanings (Gaṅgeśa, inference chapter, Tattva-cintā-maṇi).
The Cārvāka argument identifying the problem of induction is turned by both Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers into an argument for fallibilism about inference. What we take to be the result of a genuine inference may turn out to hinge on a fallacy, a hetv-ābhāsa, an apparent but misleading “reason” or sign (see the section below on inference). But to accept that sometimes we reason in ways that mimic but fail to instantiate right forms is not to be a skeptic. Indeed, the very concept of a fallacy (hetv-ābhāsa) presupposes that of the veritable reason or sign (hetu), a veritable prover making us have new knowledge.
A different kind of skepticism is broader in scope, not restricted to inference or other candidate sources. It appears both in Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta, but let us rehearse only the Buddhist version. By discerning absurdities that arise in viewing anything as having an independent existence, one realizes, as Nāgārjuna says, that everything is niḥsvabhāva, “without a reality of its own.” Applying this to oneself, one comes to see the truth of the Buddha's teaching of anātman, “no-self,” which is viewed as a decisive step toward the summum bonum of enlightenment and perfection (prajñā-pāramitā). In particular, Nāgārjuna identifies a problem of a justification regress in the pramāṇa program (Vigraha-vyavārtinī, v. 33), which assumes that process and result can be separated, along with various conundra or paradoxes concerning relations (such as the so-called Bradley problem). The Nyāya-sūtra argues that the Nāgārjunian type of skepticism is self-defeating (4.2.26-36), but many of the problems identified by the Buddhist (and his intellectual inheritors such as Śrīharṣa) occupy the reflections of philosophers for centuries, Buddhist as well as Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā.

3. Knowing That You Know

One of the philosophic problems that Nāgārjuna raised for epistemology has to do with an alleged regress of justification on the assumption that a pramāṇa is required in order to know and that to identify the source of a bit of knowledge is to certify the proposition embedded. Nāgārjuna claims that this is absurd in that it would require an infinite series of pramāṇa, of identification of a more fundamental pramāṇa for every pramāṇa relied on.
Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta philosophers argue that such a threat of regress shows that knowledge is self-certifying, svataḥ prāmāṇya. Vedāntins connect the Upanishadic teaching of a truest or deepest self (ātman) as having “self-illumining awareness” (sva-prakāśa) with a Mīmāṃsā epistemological theory of self-certification: at least in the case of spiritual knowledge (vidyā) awareness is self-aware. From this it follows that only awareness is right concerning all questions about awareness, since only awareness itself has, so to say, access to itself. Awareness itself is the only consideration relevant to any question about awareness itself, its existence or its nature.
Mīmāṃsā defends Vedic truth by claiming that knowledge of it wears its certification on its sleeve like everyday knowledge where the initial credibility of an occurrent cognition seems practically absolute. According to Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā (from the late seventh century), no cognition that in itself purports to be veridical is indeed non-veridical; no cognition is absolutely wrong but at worst a confusion. The same causal nexus that produces a veridical cognition produces knowledge of its veridicality. According to Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā (deriving from Kumārila, Prabhākara's teacher), veridicality is known through the process of inference whereby a cognition itself would be known as having occurred. A cognition, which is an act, produces a feature in the object it cognizes, a “cognizedness,” and then from apprehension of this feature both the original cognition and its veridicality are known. Certification is thus intrinsic to a cognition's being known, that is, with cognitions that are veridical. With respect to knowledge of non-veridicality, extrinsic certification is necessary.
Nyāya takes an extrinsicality view of certification (parataḥ prāmāṇya)—it denies that Kp entails KKp; to know that you know requires apperceptive certification—and so seems vulnerable to the regress charge. The solution involves the notion of “apperception” (anuvyavasāya), which is a second-level cognition that has another cognition as its object without itself being self-aware. Certification, psychologically considered, involves apperception, a seeing that a challenged, target cognition is false or true.
Vātsyāyana (fourth century, whose Nyāya-sūtra commentary is the oldest extant) expressly rebuts the regress charge (we do sometimes certify our claims without having to certify the certifiers) under Nyāya-sūtra 2.1.20 (448-49, translation mine):
If comprehension of perception or another (knowledge source) landed us in infinite regress, then everyday action and discourse would not go on through comprehension of self-consciously known objects and their known causes. (However) everyday action and discourse do proceed for someone comprehending self-consciously known objects and their known causes: when (self-consciously) I grasp by perception an object or I grasp one by inference or I grasp one by analogy or I grasp one by tradition or testimony (the four knowledge sources according to Nyāya), the (apperceptive) cognition that occurs goes like this: “My knowledge is perceptual” or “My knowledge is inferential” or “My knowledge is from analogy” or “My knowledge is testimonial.”
And motivation to seek righteousness (dharma), wealth, pleasure, or liberation proceeds through these comprehensions (whereas if there is doubt, no such goal-directed activity would occur), as likewise motivation to reject their opposites. Everyday discourse and action would cease (to be possible for such a subject) if what is alleged were indeed to hold (justificational regress).
Nyāya's strategy is then (1) to charge the objector with making a “pragmatic contradiction,” (2) to take veridicality as cognitive default, and (3) to certify cognitions by source identification as well as by inference from the success or failure of the activity that they provoke and guide. We assume without checking that our cognition is veridical, but sometimes we need to check. Note that the practical pursuits that Vātsyāyana mentions as guided by second-order, reflective knowledge are: “righteousness (dharma), wealth, pleasure, [and] liberation.”

4. Perception

All the classical schools that advance epistemologies accept perception as a knowledge source although there is much disagreement about its nature, objects, and limitations. Are the objects of perception internal to consciousness or external? Are they restricted to individuals, e.g., a particular cow, or are universals, e.g., cowhood, also perceived? How about relations? Absences or negative facts (Devadatta's not being at home)? Parts or wholes? Both? A self, awareness itself? There are issues about perceptual media such as light and ether, ākāśa, the purported medium of sound, and about what is perceptible yogically (God, the īśvara, the ātman or self, puruṣa). What are the environmental conditions that govern perception, and how do these connect with the different sensory modalities? Are there internal conditions on perception (such as attention or focus, viewed by some as a voluntary act)? Is a recognition, e.g., “This is that Devadatta I saw yesterday,” perceptual? And does it prove the endurance of things over time including the perceiving subject? Do we perceive only fleeting qualities (dharma), as Buddhists tend to say, or qualifiers as qualifying qualificanda (a lotus as qualified by being-blue), as say realist Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā? Does all perception involve a sensory connection with an object that is responsible for providing its content or intentionality (nirākāra-vāda, Nyāya), or is the content of perception internal to itself (sākāra-vāda, Yogācāra)? How do we differentiate veritable perception, which is defined as veridical, and pseudo-perception (illusion), which is non-veridical? How is illusion to be explained? These are some of the outstanding issues and questions that occupy the schools in all periods of their literatures.
Yogācāra subjectivism views perception as “concept-free,” whereas the holist grammarian Bhartṛhari of the third century finds it all to be clothed in language. Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya realists emphasize the “concept-laden” nature of at least the type of perception that is epistemically foundational for observation statements containing basic sensory predicates. To be sure, Mīmāṃsā and later Nyāya also admit concept-free perception. Kumārila Bhaṭṭa mentions the cognition of an infant as an example (Śloka-vārttika commentary on the perception sūtra of the Mīmāṃsā-sūtra, verse 112, p. 94; see also Matilal 1986, 321-322). Phenomenologically humans would seem to have much in common with infants and animals considering this type of perception. But according to the great Mīmāṃsaka, perception does not so much divide into types as form a process with the concept-free as the first stage. Awareness of the object is only quasi-propositional in the first moment, and at the second has its content filled out to become the means whereby an individual is ascertained to have a certain character, to be a certain kind of substance or to possess a universal or an action, etc. (verse 120, p. 96). The object perceived, the lotus (or whatever), is known in the first stage as an individual whole, both in its individuality and as having a character. But the character, the thing's being blue as opposed to red, and its being here right now, are not known without the mediation of concepts which are supplied internally. Seeing is ultimately “seeing as” and is “shot through with words,” to use the expression of Bhartṛhari (Vākyapadīya, ch. 1, verses 123-124, p. 199; see also Matilal 1986, 342). However, the mind or self does not, according to the realists, have any innate ideas (unlike then Yogācāra, which postulates a collective “storehouse consciousness,” ālaya-vijñāna). Concepts are the records of previous experiences.
Yogācāra holds that all predication, including the sensory, depends on ideas of unreal generality. All predication involves repeatable general terms. Thus the realists'“propositional content” is suspicious just because this is not raw perception which alone is capable of presenting the truly real, thesva-lakṣaṇa, “that which is its own mark,” the unique or particular. Classical Indian realists hold that perception is none the worse for being concept-laden in that concepts are features of the world as impressed upon the mind or self. Perception founds true beliefs, and the repeatable predicates and concepts (cowhood) perceptually acquired and re-presented and employed in verbalizations pick out constituents of real objects, things that do re-occur (there are lots of cows in the world). For late Nyāya philosophers, concept-laden perception comes so to dwarf in importance the indeterminate, concept-free variety that the latter becomes problematic. Perception in its epistemological role is concept-laden. Otherwise, it could not be certificational. Perception as a knowledge source is a doxastic, belief-generating process. Beliefs (or anyhow perceptual cognitions and their verbalizations) are dependent on concepts (to believe or say that there is a pot on the floor, one must possess the concepts of “pot” and “floor”).
The Yogācāra Buddhists' best argument for their subjectivism—which one suspects derives more fundamentally from a commitment to the possibility of a universal nirvāṇa experience, although this is not said—is perceptual illusion. Illusion proves that a perception's object is not a feature of the world but is contributed somehow from the side of the subject. A rope can be perceived as a snake, with no difference, from the perspective of the perceiver, between the illusion and a veridical snake perception. Similarly, dreams are the “perceptions” of a dreamer but do not touch reality. (Our world is a dream, say Buddhists, and we should try to become buddha, “Awakened.”)
One way to resist the pull of the illusion argument belongs to Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā which insists that not only is perception invariably veridical but also cognition in general, jñāna. Nyāya philosophers hold in contrast that illusion is a false cognition. Rich debate occurs over Nyāya's “misplacement” view of illusion and a Prābhākara “no-illusion” or “omission” theory (illusion is a failure to cognize of a certain sort, an absence of cognition, for example, an absence of cognition of the difference between a remembering of silver and a perceiving of mother-of-pearl when holding in hand a piece of shell S exclaims, “Silver!”). Here Nyāya agrees with the subjectivists: sometimes a person S apparently perceives a to be F—has an apparently perceptual cognition embedding Fa—when a is not in fact F, while S cannot discern from her own first-person perspective that the cognition is non-veridical. Nevertheless, the predication content, according to Nyāya as also Mīmāṃsā, the presentation or indication of F-hood, originates in things' really being F, through previous veridical experience of F-hood.
Here we touch the heart of classical Indian realism. Snakehood is available to become illusory predication content through previous veridical experience of snakes. It gets fused into a current perception by means of a foul-up in the normal causal process through the arousing of a snakehood memory-disposition (saṃskāra) formed by previous experience. The content or intentionality (viṣayatā, “objecthood”) of an illusion is to be explained causally as generated by real features of real things just as is genuine perception though they are distinct cognitive types. Illusion involves the projection into current (determinate) cognition (which would be pseudo-perception) of predication content preserved in memory. Sometimes the fusion of an element preserved in memory is cross-sensory, tasting sourness, for instance, when perceiving a lemon by sight or smelling a piece of sandalwood which is seen at too far a distance for actual olfactory stimulation. These are cases of veridical perception with an obvious admixture or tinge of memory. Illusion, according to Nyāya, is to be analyzed similarly, but unlike veridical cases of projection illusion involves taking something to be what it is not, a seeing or perceiving it through a “misplaced” qualifier. This means that concept-laden perception is necessarily combinational—a position taken by Gautama himself, the “sūtra-maker,” and much elaborated by Vātsyāyana and the other commentators in text apparently aimed at an early form of Buddhist subjectivism (Nyāya-sūtra 4.2.26-36). The upshot of these sūtras is that, first, the concept of illusion is parasitic on that of veridical experience (not all coins can be counterfeit), and, second, that illusion shows a combinational (propositional) structure: this is a something or other. According to Nyāya, perceptual illusion is right in part, that there is something there, but wrong about what it is.
To fill out the realist account in late Nyāya, thought-laden perception, determinate perception, gets its content not only from the object in connection with the sense organ but also from the classificational power of the mind (or self). With the perceptual cognition, “That's a pot,” for instance, the pot as an individual in connection with a sensory faculty is responsible for the awareness of a property-bearer, for what is called the qualificandum portion of the perception, without admixture of memory. But the sensory connection is not by itself responsible for the qualifier portion, the pothood, that is to say, the thing's classification as a pot. A qualificandum as qualified by a qualifier is perceived all at once (eka-vṛtti-vedya), but a determinate perception's portions have distinct etiologies. Now the classificational power of the mind (or self) is not innate, as pointed out, but is rather the product of presentational experience (anubhava) over the course of a subject's life. Repeatable features of reality get impressed on the mind (or self) in the form of memory dispositions. For most adults, prior determinate cognition is partly responsible for the content predicable of a particular, or a group of things, presented through the senses. That is, in perceiving a as an F, an F-saṃskāra formed by previous knowledge-source-produced bits of occurrent cognition of things F would be a causal factor. The perception's own content includes the repeatable nature of the qualifier through the operation of this factor. We see the tree as a tree.
But sometimes neither a prior determinate cognition nor a memory disposition is at all responsible for the predication content, for example, when a child sees a cow for the very first time. Rather, an “in the raw” perceptual grasping of the qualifier (cowhood) delivers it to an ensuing concept-laden and verbalizable perception. In other words, there are cases of determinate cognition where indeterminate, concept-free perception furnishes the qualifier independently and the ensuing concept-laden perception is not tinged by memory. Normally, saṃskāra, “memory-dispositions,” do play a causal role in determinate perception, according to Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā and indeed epistemologists of all flags. But sometimes an immediately prior concept-free perception of a qualifier plays the role of the saṃskāra, furnishing by itself the concept, the predication content, the qualifier portion of an ensuing determinate, proposition-laden perception, which is the type of cognition that founds our beliefs about the world.
If this were not an “immaculate perception” but itself a grasping of a property through the grasping of another property, we would be faced with an infinite regress and direct perception of the world would be impossible. Concept-free perception need not provide the classifying not only with second and third-time perceptions of something as F but not even, strictly speaking, with a first-time perception, since there could be an intervening cognitive factor (provided, say, by analogy: see below). But with that factor again the question would arise how it gets its content, and so since an indeterminate perception has to be posited at some point to block a regress it might as well be at the start. This is the main argument of Gaṅgeśa, the late Nyāya systematizer, in defense of positing the concept-free as a type or first stage of perception (Phillips 2001).
Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, perception embodies beliefs, according to the realists. More accurately, a perceptual belief is the result of the operation of perception as a knowledge source. Everything that is nameable is knowable and vice-versa. There is nothing that when we attend to it cannot bear a name, for we can make up new names. We can in principle verbalize the indications of our experience, though many of them are not named since we are indifferent (pebbles perceived along the road). Concept-free perception is the classical Indian realist rendering of our ability to form perceptual concepts by attending to perception's phenomenological side. Epistemologically, it plays no role, since it is itself a posit and is unverbalizable and not directly apperceived (A. Chakrabarti 2000 gives this and other reasons for jettisoning the concept from Nyāya's own realist point of view).
As mentioned, Yogācāra takes issue with the realist theory of perception, viewing all perception as concept-free. What is perceived is only the unqualified particular, sva-lakṣaṇa. The realists'“qualifiers” such as cowhood are mental constructions, “convenient fictions.” Various reductio arguments are put forth to show the incoherence of the realists' conception of a qualificandum perceived at once to be qualified by a qualifier (eka-vṛtti-vedya). The different views of the objects of perception feed different views of inference.

5. Inference

Logic is developed in classical India within the traditions of epistemology. Inference is a second knowledge source, a means whereby we can know things not immediately evident through perception. Oetke (2004) finds three roots to the earliest concerns with logic in India: (1) common-sense inference, (2) establishment of doctrines in the frame of scientific treatises (śāstra), and (3) justification of tenets in a debate. The three of these come together (though the latter two are predominant) within the epistemological traditions in an almost universal regard of inference as a knowledge source.
Seeing classical Indian logic as part of epistemology, as explaining how we know facts through the mediation of our knowledge of other facts, makes it easy to understand why both the Buddhist and Vedic schools count a valid but unsound argument as fallacious: no knowledge is generated. Classical Indian philosophers are not focused on logic per se, but rather on a psychological process whereby we come to know things indirectly, by way of a sign, hetu or liṅga, an indication of something currently beyond the range of the senses, whether at a distance spatially or temporally or of a sort (such as with atoms and God or the Buddha mind) that by nature cannot be directly perceived.
The two greatest names for classical Indian logic belong to logicians of the Buddhist Yogācāra school, Dignāga (sixth century) and Dharmakīrti (early seventh century). Dignāga laid out all the possible relationships of inclusion and exclusion for the extensions of two terms called the prover or “sign,” hetu, and the probandum, sādhya, the property “to be proved.” Thereby he revealed the underpinnings of the pramāṇa of inference in terms of sets of particulars, which, according to Yogācāra ontology, are the only reals. Dharmakīrti classified inferences based on the ontological nature of the class-inclusion relationship that underpins all inference as a knowledge source. Earlier philosophers, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, provide examples of everyday reasoning, several of which are abductive in character, informal reasoning to the best explanation, from sight of a swollen river, for example, says Vātsyāyana in his commentary on the inference sūtra (1.1.5) of the Nyāya-sūtra, to the conclusion that it has rained upstream. But there are also instances of inferences comprised of deductive, extrapolative, and sometimes properly inductive reasoning on topics of everyday life as well as philosophy in numerous pre-Dignāga texts of several schools. It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that no one before Dignāga had the notion of an inference-underpinning “pervasion,” vyāpti, of a prover property by a property to be proved. Dignāga does however get the credit for the earliest systematization, which employs three terms, a site or subject of a proposed inference (pakṣa, the mountain in the stock example of an inference from sight of smoke on a mountain to knowledge of fire on the mountain), the prover or prover property (hetu, smokiness), and the probandum (sādhya, fieriness).
Dignāga, it should be stressed, as a nominalist sees inference as proceeding from knowledge of particulars to other knowledge of particulars (avoiding the universals of the realists, as nicely explained by Hayes 1988 with reference to the Buddhist apoha, “exclusion,” theory of concepts). Dignāga formulates a threefold test for a good prover, trairūpya-hetu:
  1. the prover's occurrence in the site of a proposed inference must be known to the subject S
  2. the prover's occurrence at least once together with the probandum must be known to S
  3. no counter-case of a prover occurring without the probandum must be known to S.
Uddyotakara in his Nyāya-sūtra commentary incorporates Dignāga's ideas to formalize many of Vātsyāyana's informal inferences. The Nyāya philosopher owes almost everything to his Buddhist adversaries, as opposed to his Nyāya predecessors, but he does criticize and alter what he sees as the certification conditions of inference as a knowledge source, combining Dignāga's second and third tests into a single requirement, knowledge of pervasion. He also adds a third condition, the subject's having to “reflect” and put the information together, so to say:
  1. pakṣa-dharmatā: the prover has to be known to S as qualifying the inferential subject or site
  2. vyāpti-smaraṇa: the prover's being pervaded by the probandum has to be remembered by S
  3. liṅga-parāmarśa: S must connect by reflection the pervasion with the inferential site.
The upshot of the addition may be interpreted as the recognition that knowledge is not closed under deduction considered in abstraction from the psychological process of “reflection.” But through that process, epistemic warrant—or “certainty,” niścaya—passes from premises to conclusion, and we act unhesitatingly, for example, to put a fire on yonder mountain out.
Things are yet more complicated. Inferential knowledge is defeasible, or, more precisely stated, what a subject takes to be inferential knowledge may turn out to be pseudo, non-genuine, a false cognition imitating a true one, or even in Gettier-style cases an accidentally true cognition masquerading as one genuinely inference-born. Knowledge has a social dimension. Not only would awareness of a counterexample be a defeater, but also if someone were to present a counterinference to a conclusion opposed to ours, no longer would we have inferential knowledge. Awareness of any of several kinds of “blocker” of “reflection” can undermine the generalization on which such reflection depends. There are potential preventers of inferential awareness, “defeaters,” bādhaka, leading to belief relinquishment by someone who has hitherto not noticed a counterexample or the like and who has thus drawn a conclusion erroneously. For these and other reasons, the epistemologists' inference is non-monotonic, as argued by Oetke (1996) and others.
Targeting the relationship of pervasion in Uddyotakara's second condition, vyāpti-smaraṇa, which appears to be the ontological underpinning of Dignāga's conditions (2) and (3), Dharmakīrti divides inferences into three kinds:
  • sva-bhāva (self-nature: “It's a tree because it's a śiṃśapā oak”)
  • tad-utpatti (causality: “Fire is there because smoke is there”)
  • anupalabdhi (non-perception: “There is no pot here because none is perceived”).
Yogācāra holds that with the first type of inference the underpinning pervasion is “internal” (antar-vyāpti). We may think of this as an internal relation between concepts and thus as similar to the a priori of Western philosophy. But it is actually a technical point about whether the term that picks out the inferential subject or subjects—think of the pakṣa as a set—closes it off from being included in the inductive base of the generalization (or extrapolation, according to Ganeri 2001b) that gives us knowledge of a pervasion relationship. Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya rule out this kind of inference as begging the question: we want to know whether the inferential subject possesses the probandum property and so to cite that subject itself, even a part of it, runs counter to the very purpose of inference.
Later Nyāya divides inferences not according to the ontology of pervasion (which is mapped onto the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika ontology and causal theory, sometimes not very successfully) but rather by the way a pervasion is known:
  • anvaya-vyatireka (“positive and negative”): inferences based on positive and negative correlations where both are available, i.e., cases where, for example, smokiness and fieriness have been known to occur together, kitchen hearths, campfires, etc., like (it is claimed) yonder smoky mountain where being-fiery is to be proved, taken along with negative examples such as lakes where the prover as well as the probandum is known not to occur
  • kevala-anvaya (“positive only”): inferences based on positive correlations only, where there are no known examples of an absence of the probandum property, such as would have to be the case with the universally present property, knowability (there is nothing that is not knowable)
  • kevala-vyatireka (“negative only”): inferences based on negative correlations only where outside of the subject or site there are no known cases of the probandum.
Many of the inferences that Buddhists identify as hinging on an “internal pervasion” (antar-vyāpti) Nyāya philosophers see as “negative only” (kevala-vyatireka). Taking a particular śiṃśapā oak as the pakṣa, we have the negative correlation proving it is a tree: whatever is not a tree, is not aśiṃśapā oak, for example, a lotus.
Western interpretations and representations of inference as classically conceived have often missed its unity as a knowledge source. Ganeri (2001b: 20) claims that it is better to understand both the Buddhist and early Nyāya patterns as “not enthymematic,” not skipping a step of generalization and then implicitly using universal instantiation (UI) and modus ponens (MP) in applying the rule to a case at hand. Case-based reasoning need not be interpreted as relying on universal quantifiers, and the representation of Schayer (1933) and others which uses them is misleading. Theirs is indeed misleading, and Ganeri appears to be right with regard to the early theories. But with late Nyāya Schayer's argument form of UI and MP misleads for yet another reason, namely, failing to be sufficiently sensitive to the logic of occurrence and non-occurrence of properties at a location, or qualifying a property-bearer, as Staal (1973) and others have brought out. Furthermore, Ganeri is right that in analyzing the pattern one tends to miss the unity of the causal theory that has one mental state brought about by another. In the Nyāya theory, everything is integrated in the notion of “reflection,” parāmarśa, as an inference's proximate instrumental cause or “trigger,” karaṇa. While not the only necessary condition, this one is the last in place, securing the occurrence of inferential knowledge.
Following Matilal (1998), we can reconstruct such “reflection” as a singular inference:
(K)(SpHa) → (K)Sa
This says that on the condition that a subject knows that H-as-qualified-by-being-pervaded-by-S qualifies a, then the subject knows that Sa. The arrow should be interpreted as depicting causal sufficiency, in line with Uddyotakara and the later tradition. “Reflection” is a complex mental state that is nevertheless a unity, both as a particular cognition that can be a causal factor for the rise of another cognition and as having content, or “objecthood,” expressible in a single sentence. Attempts to find a single rule are in consonance with both of these dimensions of the theory. But a lot of inductive depth is packed into the idea of a pervasion being known, and a lot about it is said that shows that there is generalization, at least in the later Nyāya theory. Knowing a general rule is considered crucial, not just extrapolation to a next case. From Uddyotakara on, Nyāya philosophers treat pervasion as the equivalent of a rule stating that—to use the language of sets and terms—the extension of the probandum term includes that of the prover term, includes it entirely such that there is nothing that locates the pervaded property (the prover) that does not also locate the pervader (the probandum), as argued by Kisor Chakrabarti (1995) among others.
The centralmost issue with inference, to consider the effort of late Nyāya philosophers, is to make plain the logic of pervasion as well as how we know the universalized items, or entire extensions, of the terms figuring in our knowledge of such rules, the items that underpin our knowledge of such inclusions, such naturally necessary pervasions of a prover by a probandum property. There is also lots of work from the earliest on fallacies and inference in the context of formal debate. And there are lots of philosophical inferences advanced in the various schools.

6. Testimony

Vaiśeṣika among the Vedic schools along with Buddhists who of course impugn the “testimony” of the Veda reject testimony as an independent knowledge source, pramāṇa. Buddhists claim that their religious teachings are founded on nothing other than reasoning and experience, albeit mystical experience, the nirvāṇa experience that makes a Buddha an expert about spiritual matters. As with memory, whose correctness is dependent on the veridicality or non-veridicality of the cognition that forms the saṃskāra memory-impression, the veridicality of testimony depends on the knowledge of the testifier (or of an original testifier in a chain of testimony) whose source has to be other than testimony, namely, perception or inference. Vaiśeṣika and Yogācāra join together in seeing a hearer H's knowledge that p which other philosophers see as flowing from testimony as really resulting from an inference having as one premise that the speaker S is trustworthy and as another that S has said p, to conclude that p is true. Nyāya resists such as inferentialist account from the earliest, in the sūtras of Gautama, claiming that the inferentialist conflates inferential certification of the truth of p with testimonial knowledge that p at a first or unreflective level (as nicely explained by Mohanty 1994). Vātsyāyana and others argue (under Nyāya-sūtra 2.1.52) that the certification conditions are different for the two knowledge sources. The eighth-century Jayanta Bhaṭṭa writes (Nyāya-mañjarī 322): “The conditions that determine inferential knowledge and those that determine verbal knowledge are not the same.” The Nyāya position is that comprehension and acceptance are normally fused such that (normally) we do get knowledge immediately (non-inferentially) from being told. Here they join Mīmāṃsā, though there is also much controversy on this matter between the two Vedic schools.
Gautama provides a definition at Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.7: “Testimony is the (true) statement of an expert (āpta).” An “expert,” āpta, is a trustworthy authority such that “expert” is not entirely adequate as a translation. Vātsyāyana in defining the term outlines a moral dimension. An āpta is a person who not only knows the truth but who wants to communicate it without deception (Vātsyāyana's commentary under Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.7). The commentator also brings out a certain egalitarianism in the workings of the knowledge source. Contra the privilege afforded the priestly caste in matters of Vedic interpretation, he says that even foreigners—“barbarians,” mleccha—can be the experts whose statements convey to us testimonial knowledge, provided, as always, they know the truth and want to communicate without deception.
The process of generating testimonial knowledge begins with a speaker S who knows a proposition p by perception, inference, or testimony (chains of testimony are okay) and who has a desire to communicate p to someone or other. A hearer H gains knowledge through a speech act of S communicating p to H, who has to be competent in the language in which p is expressed, to know the words and grammatical forms, which H has learned, on most accounts, also chiefly through testimony but also in other ways such as analogy (according to some).
Mīmāṃsā, whose leaders Kumārila and Prabhākara are followed by many Vedāntins and by some Nyāya philosophers, comes to the debate about testimony with an axe to grind, namely, to defend Vedic authority. The words of the Veda are not spoken by anyone originally. Speakers are subject to error but not the Veda, whose verses are not originally composed (apauruṣeya). Vedāntic theists, in the main, along with almost all Nyāya philosophers, take the position that like all sentences, those of the Veda should be understood as spoken (or composed, etc.) by someone with the intention to communicate. Thus God, īśvara, is the author of the Veda (the best or only candidate, according to Udayana, eleventh century, Nyāya-kusumāñjalī). Mīmāṃsā, however, is atheistic, viewing the Veda as primordial, resounding in the ether that surrounds the universe, heard and memorized (in this cycle of creation) by the great rishis in their pellucid consciousness (not cluttered by ordinary thought). Thus according to Mīmāṃsā, sentences can be meaningful without having a speaker with an intention to communicate. Vedāntin and Nyāya theists generalize from the everyday to assume that, no, statements and sentences require a speaker, a composer, who, in the case of S's knowledge passing to H, must be anāpta expert, i.e., someone who knows the truth and wants to tell it without a desire to deceive. God is this speaker in the case of the Veda, it is inferred by some.
The Prābhākara takes the view that everyday testimonial knowledge wears, like all knowledge, its truth on its sleeve; similarly Vedic knowledge. Speaker's intention is irrelevant. A parrot can make us know something like a tape-recorder. And even a liar (S) deceived into believing p can communicate ¬p trying to deceive H who nevertheless learns the truth through S's statement. Nyāya, in contrast, champions speaker's intention,tātparya, as epistemically relevant. According to the later writers, speaker's intention is not the trigger of testimonial knowledge on H's part (which is instead the transmitting sentence under the interpretation of H), but is a slightly upstream causal factor relevant for certification. If we knew it were a parrot or a liar who was responsible for the statement, we would no longer believe. It is true that H has to understand something in the case of the parrot, etc. Otherwise, there would be nothing to check in finding out that the parrot's speaking is a case of “apparent testimony,” śabda-ābhāsa (e.g., Gaṅgeśa, Tattva-cintā-maṇi, testimony chapter, 329). But discerning speaker's intention is championed as necessary for disambiguation in some cases of testimony and as relevant to triggering figurative speech according to many including writers in the aesthetics literature called alaṅkāra-śāstra.
Testimonial knowledge is a matter of comprehending a statement, a transmitting sentence, and to be a transmitting sentence certain conditions must be met. The following three necessary conditions for a meaningful statement are proposed and discussed throughout the philosophical and grammatical literatures (Kunjunni Raja 1969: 149-169).
  1. grammatical “expectancy,” ākāṅkṣā
  2. semantic “fittingness,” yogyatā
  3. proper presentation (pronunciation and the like), āsatti
The words in a sentence have their grammatical “expectancy” mutually satisfied in the completion of the sentence as a string of words. This and the third condition are pretty obviously required for sentential meaning, but not the second, at least not to philosophers of language in the West, although the notion seems related to the a priori as understood in early modern philosophy. In any case, semantic “fittingness” is connected to a theory of figurative meaning throughout the schools including the aesthetics literature. A stock negative example is “The gardener is watering the plants with fire” (agninā siñcati). Watering cannot be done with fire, and so the meanings of the words do not fit together except possibly figuratively. Some define yogyatā in a positive fashion, but it seems easy to find counterexamples (Kunjunni Raja 1969: 164-166). Language has to be flexible so that we can report novelties. Furthermore, we understand something when we understand a false statement. Otherwise, again, we would not know where to look to determine its falsity, or truth, for that matter. Gaṅgeśa says explicitly that false statements as well as statements of doubt meet the requirement of semantic fittingness (Tattva-cintā-maṇi, testimony chapter, 372-373). Even statements that are not just false but that we know are false can pass the semantic-fittingness test, as, for example, (in the quip by A. Chakrabarti 1994) the views of one's opponents! For these and other reasons, Gaṅgeśa, for one, defines yogyatā negatively as “absence of knowledge of a blocker (of testimonial knowledge)” (Tattva-cintā-maṇi, testimony chapter, Sanskrit, IV.iii.6, p. 136). This shows a coherence tie. We cannot even understand testimony way out of whack with what we know already.
Two Mīmāṃsā views compete to explain sentential unity, along with a third, a sentence holism belonging to the grammarian Bhartṛhari (third century), who holds that words have no meaning outside the context of the sentence, which is the basic semantic unit. Words are abstractions from sentences, and a sentence is understood holistically “in a flash” (sphoṭa; Bhartṛhari's theory is called sphoṭa-vāda). This is an easy target for the Mīmāṃsākas, who point to our abilities to use the same words in different sentences. But the one camp, the Prābhākara, agrees with the grammarian that words do not convey meaning apart from the full sentence being understood, that is to say, apart from the full fact indicated being known “in a flash,” as it were. The other camp, the Bhāṭṭa, whose theory comes to be taken over by Nyāya, claims that individual words have reference in isolation, and that in understanding a sentence we understand the meaning of the individual semantic units which get combined by the sentence, by the fulfillment of all the syntactic expectancy along with the meaning of the words, to mean the things denoted in relation. These two views are termed in Sanskrit anvita-abhidhāna-vāda, “reference of the connected,” which Siderits (1991) translates as the “related designation view,” and abhihita-anvaya-vāda, “connection of the referents,” which Siderits translates as the “words-plus-relation view.”
The latter rendering may be a little misleading. The relation is not just an additional element: it's not words-plus-relation. There are only a few purely logical and syntactically binding words in Sanskrit, only a few (mainly connectives) that are just syncategorematic, since every other word is inflected and there is no need for prepositions, etc. Alternatively, we could say that every word is unsaturated because no word, no single semantic unit, conveys the meaning of a sentence by itself alone independently of its relation to at least one other unit. The main difference between the two Mīmāṃsā views is that the former insists that only a sentence successfully refers, not the individual words of which a sentence is composed, whose meanings have to be connected to one another in order for there to be reference (abhidhā, the primary mode or power, śakti, of language); whereas the latter holds that words do have reference individually but not to the connection of the things mentioned, which is given by the sentence as a whole. In both cases, the fact or object known by way of a sentence has constituents. On the second view, the fact is the relatedness of the words' referents as they are in the world, a relatedness (anvaya) not indicated by a semantic unit. The connection is to one another of the things referred to, a connection in the world which we become aware of because of the order and connectedness (anvaya) of the words. Gopikamohan Bhattacharya writes apropos (seventeenth-century) Annambhaṭṭa's discussion of the Bhāṭṭa theory (Annambhaṭṭa: 301-302): “It comes to this then that the understanding of a statement, i.e., of what is signified by the constituent terms in relation to one another, depends among other things on the presentation of the terms in the required order. But the order of arrangement of the terms is not itself a term of the sentence, so that it cannot be said that this order has its own śakti like the terms.”
Just what a word refers to is sometimes ambiguous not just apart from sentential context but within it. Still we know what the word means. We know that a speaker wants salt when S asks for it even though in Sanskrit the word used for salt, ‘saindhava’, is a homonym with a word that means horse. S's intention to communicate p is in such a case crucial to disambiguation in that S speaks in a context (prakaraṇa). Ordinarily, the overall context need not be taken into account, according to New Nyāya philosophers, to ascertain the meaning of a sentence, which has to meet only the three conditions of grammaticality, semantic fittingness, and proper pronunciation. But we do have to take into account the overall context—let us say “speaker's intention,” tātparya—it is stressed (e.g., by Annambhaṭṭa: 294-295), in some cases of ambiguity as also of figurative speech, which involves a second power of words, the power (śakti) to express meaning indirectly.
However, we have to be able to understand a spoken sentence to be able to determine a speaker's intention, which we infer from what is said supplemented sometimes by contextual cues. Thus knowing the intention is not an invariable antecedent of testimonial knowledge. Understanding S's intention is not a fourth condition on a statement's meaningfulness from the perspective of H—except in some cases of ambiguity and indirect, figurative speech. But in those cases it is indeed crucial, and there is no way to get around the need to make it out in order to fix the meaning, which cannot be gathered at, so to say, a first pass.
But on a second pass, we are able to gather not only indirect, secondary meaning but also more information through inference. In this way, Annambhaṭṭa would explain what others see as the results of the activation of a third power of words, namely, dhvani, also called vyañjana, “suggestion” (289-293). In other words, if a sentence contains an ambiguous word or indirect, figurative meaning (admitted as a bona fide second power of words, śakti), there may well be no way to tell what it means without considering S's intention. Now advocates of the third power analyze the stock example of indirect speech where a village is said to be in the Gaṅgā as suggesting that the village is cool and purified by association with the Gaṅgā. The whole point, they argue, of poetic use of indirect, figurative speech is to release the third power of suggestion. Why otherwise not simply say that the village is on the river bank? The speaker uses the figurative speech to suggest the attributes of coolness and purification. Annambhaṭṭa responds that if one understands from the statement these attributes then the indirect, figurative meaning (lakṣaṇā) of “in the Gaṅgā” is not just being on the bank of the river but on a bank that lends coolness and fosters purification. This is then just a more complex case of lakṣaṇā, which is indeed a second power of words (but there is no third), indicating a cool and purifying location on the indicated bank.
Finally we might mention that with veridical testimonial knowledge not involving figurative meaning where all three sentential conditions are met, we do not notice the grammaticality, etc., of the transmitting sentence or sentences. These factors have to be present, but we do not have to be aware of them. For figurative meaning, in contrast, we have to notice a blocker (Uddyotakara under Nyāya-sūtra 2.2.59), which paradigmatically may be thought of as a violation of semantic fittingness (Kunjunni Raja 1969: 166), though this is not precisely correct according to several theorists who provide examples of figures where semantic fittingness is not violated. Examples of less severe misfit occur than to water with fire. Violating yogyatā is not the only way to trigger the second power of words. Yet further exploration of figurative meaning and of “suggestion” (dhvani) would carry us outside of the epistemological into the aesthetics and grammatical literatures.

7. Analogy and Other Candidate Sources

7.1 Analogy and Similarity

Briefly we may consider the more exotic candidate sources proposed in the classical literature mainly within Mīmāṃsā (often elaborated by Vedāntins), beginning with analogy, which is viewed as the pramāṇa for knowledge of similarity in Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta but is rejected by the other schools, Vedic and non-Vedic alike, except for Nyāya which however provides a radical reinterpretation. To provide a hermeneutics of Vedic injunctions to make them suitable for practice in actual performances, the Mīmāṃsā exegetes need to be able to designate substitutes, of one type of grain for another, for example, or one animal for another, depending upon availability in the first place but upon similarity in the second place. In Vedānta, analogy is useful for understanding the Upanishads which make comparisons between spiritual or yogic experience and the experiences of ordinary humans, as pointed out by Kumar (1980: 110). Yogācāra, Jaina, and Nyāya logicians find similarity—or relevant similarity—to figure in inference as a knowledge-generating process. It is through cognizing similarity and dissimilarity that we arrive at knowledge of pervasion as required for inferential knowledge. A kitchen hearth counts as an “example” in the stock inference because of its relevant similarity to the mountain which is the center of inquiry. It is part of what is called the sapakṣa, the set of positive correlations, that make us know an inference-underpinning pervasion. Knowledge of similarity is not viewed in Nyāya (or Yogācāra, etc.) as the result of analogy as a knowledge source—for Nyāya, analogy is restricted to a subject's learning the meaning of a word (and Yogācāra does not countenance it as a separate pramāṇa). But pervasion is known through generalization from cases or even a single case, presupposing knowledge of relevant similarity which can be a matter of perception.
Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā philosophers, who take similarity to be a special object known through this special source, give examples different from the stock scenario provided by Gautama and elaborated by Vātsyāyana (under Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.8) who limit the scope of analogy to learning the meaning of a word. But for brevity's sake, let us take up only the Nyāya theory. A subject S inquires of a forester about a gavaya, which is a kind of buffalo, having heard the word ‘gavaya’ used among his schoolmates but not knowing what it means, i.e., not knowing what a gavaya is. Questioned by S, the forester replies that a gavaya is like a cow mentioning certain specifics as also some dissimilarities. To simplify, Nyāya philosophers say that the forester makes an analogical statement (“A gavaya is like a cow”), whereby our subject S now knows in general (sāmānyataḥ) what the word means, according to Gaṅgeśa and followers (Tattva-cintā-maṇi, analogy chapter). But S does not yet know how it is used, does not know its reference, which is deemed a word's primary meaning. Later encountering a gavaya buffalo, S says, “This, which is similar to a cow, is the meaning of the word ‘gavaya’,” a statement which expresses S's new analogical knowledge. The knowledge has been generated by analogy, its “knowledge source,” pramāṇa.
The ontology of similarity is controversial. Several different theories are proposed, one of the best of which belongs to Gaṅgeśa, who sees it as a relational property supervening on other properties and defined as something's having a lot of the same properties as something else. It is not a universal, he argues, for similarity relates a correlate (the gavaya buffalo) and a countercorrelate (the cow), whereas a universal, in contrast, rests as a unity in, for example, with cowhood, all individual cows. In this way it is like contact, samyoga, but there are also rather obvious differences. It is not reducible to any single category among the traditional seven (substance, quality, motion, universal, individualizer, inherence, and absence), for some substances are like one another as are certain qualities and actions. But similarity also is not, pace the Prābhākara, a category over and above the recognized seven. Gaṅgeśa's main argument there is that similarity is not uniform. It is to an extent a property that is mind-imposed in that the counterpositive (the cow) is supplied from our side. Moreover, it supervenes on other properties.

7.2 “Circumstantial Implication” (arthāpatti)

Another candidate source championed by Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta philosophers but rejected by everyone else as an independent pramāṇa isarthāpatti, a kind of reasoning to the best explanation which Nyāya views as the same as “negative-only” inference (see above). A stock example: from the premise, “Fat Devadatta does not eat during the day” (known by perception and/or testimony), the conclusion is known (by arthāpatti), “He eats at night.” For Nyāya, the inference (which is no special source) can be reconstructed where F = “is fat but does not eat during the day” and G = “eats at night”: Whoso F, that person G; what is not so (F) is not so (G), like Maitra (who eats during the day and not at night). This would be a “negative-only” inference so long as not only has Devadatta not been observed to eat at night but also there is no one else known to be like him in being fat and having been observed to eat only at night. We do know that he eats at night (though this has not been observed), and our inductive base is comprised only of negative correlations.

7.3 “Non-cognition” (anupalabdhi)

How do we know absences? I know that my glasses are not on the table but how? Dharmakīrti would answer, “By inference,” inferential knowledge of an absence being one of three fundamental types identified by the Yogācārin (see above). “If an elephant were in the room, I (S) would perceive it. I (S) do not perceive an elephant. Therefore, there is no elephant in the room”—similarly for my glasses not being on the table (presuming the table is not so cluttered that they could be concealed). Gautama and Vātsyāyana, without elaborating, agree that absences are known inferentially (Nyāya-sūtra 2.2.2). But Uddyotakara and the later tradition argue that we know absences sometimes perceptually. I cognize immediately my glasses' absence when I look for them on the table.
Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā says no, there is operative here a special knowledge source called “non-cognition” or “non-perception,” anupalabdhi. The main arguments center on the sufficiency of perception, or inference, to make known such negative facts, which clearly we do know. The Bhāṭṭa argues, for example, that perception makes known only presences. Indeed, Nyāya has a difficult time assimilating such knowledge to its theory of perception, in particular since the difficulty widens into what is known in analytic philosophy as the generality problem. Nyāya recognizes that an absence has a peculiar relational structure, namely, to relate a locus (the table) to an absentee (my glasses) and that the absentee is furnished by the cognizer entirely from memory. If memory can have such a crucial role in a type of perception, how then to draw the limits on what is perceptible? The Nyāya project threatens to spin out of control. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is a large literature on absence and its epistemology.

7.4 Gesture and Rumor

We learn some things from gesture (ceṣṭā), such as to come when beckoned by a conventionalized movement of the hand. Gaṅgeśa says this is a form of testimonial knowledge, and devotes a section to its assimilation (Tattva-cintā-maṇi, testimony chapter, 922-926). Rumor (aitihya) is defined by Vātsyāyana (under Nyāya-sūtra 2.2.1) as a testimony chain whose originator is unknown. The Nyāya attitude is to regard even it as presumptively veridical in consonance with the school's overall theory of testimony.

8. “Suppositional Reasoning” (tarka)

Many classical Indian philosophers held that apparent certification may not be enough to warrant belief in some instances. Even if our beliefs/cognitions have indeed been generated by processes that would be counted knowledge sources did they not face counterconsiderations, in facing counterconsiderations—in being reasonably challenged—they are not trustworthy and do not guide unhesitating effort and action. There is a social dimension to knowledge, where reasoning reigns resolving controversy in ways over and above the sources. These are the ways of tarka, “hypothetical” or “suppositional reasoning.” Paradigmatically, tarka is called for in order to establish a presumption of truth in favor of one thesis that has putative source support against a rival thesis that also has putative source support, a thesis and a counterthesis both backed up by, for example, apparently genuine inferences (the most common situation) or by competing perceptual or testimonial evidence. By supposing the truth of the rival thesis and (in Socratic style) showing how it leads to unacceptable consequences or breaks another intellectual norm, one repossesses a presumption of truth, provided—the classical epistemologists never tire of emphasizing—provided one's own thesis does indeed have at least the appearance of a knowledge source in its corner. The consensus across schools is that such arguments are not in themselves knowledge-generators, but they can swing the balance concerning what it is rational to believe.
Suppositional reasoning is what a philosopher is good at, drawing out of implications of opposed views and testing them against mutually accepted positions, according to, broadly speaking, criteria of coherence but also of simplicity. Here we come to the vital center of the life of a classical philosopher, which is reflected in honorific appellations and book titles, dozens of which use ‘tarka’ as in “Crest Jewel of Reasoning” (tarka-śiro-maṇi).
Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century) appears to inherit a sixfold division of tarka according to the nature of the error in an opponent's position, and expressly lists five types (a sixth, “contradiction” or “opposition,” either being assumed as the most common variety, or subsumed under Udayana's fifth type, “unwanted consequence”). Philosophers from other schools present distinct but overlapping lists. The Nyāya textbook-writer, Viśvanātha, of the early seventeenth century, mentions ten, Udayana's five plus five more, many of which are used by the Advaitin Śrīharṣa (probably Udayana's younger contemporary) among other reasoners. They are: (1) self-dependence (begging the question), (2) mutual dependence (mutual presupposition), (3) circularity (reasoning in a circle), (4) infinite regress, and (5) unwanted consequence (including contradiction presumably)—Udayana's five—plus (6) being presupposed by the other, the first established (a form of “favorable” suppositional reasoning), (7) (hasty) generalization, (8) differentiation failure, (9) theoretic lightness, and (10) theoretic heaviness.
It is tarka that establishes a presumption against skepticism. Gaṅgeśa (fourteenth century): “Were a person P, who has ascertained thoroughgoing positive correlations (F wherever G) and negative correlations (wherever no G, no F), to doubt that an effect might arise without a cause, then—to take up the example of smoke and fire—why should P, as he does, resort to fire for smoke (in the case, say, of a desire to get rid of mosquitoes)? (Similarly) to food to allay hunger, and to speech to communicate to another person?” (Translation from Phillips 1995:160-161, slightly modified.) The argument, which is found in the Nyāya-sūtra and other works (e.g., Vātsyāyana, preamble to Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.1), is that without the confidence that presupposes knowledge, we would not act as we do.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

  • Annambhaṭṭa. Tarka-saṃgraha, Tr. Gopinath Bhattacharya. 1976. Tarkasaṃgraha-dīpikā on Tarkasaṃgraha by Annambhaṭṭa. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers.
  • Bhartṛhari, Vākyapadīya,, chapter 1. Tr. Joseph Ouseparampil. Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya Kāṇḍa 1. 2005. Pune: Indian Institute of Indology.
  • Dharmakīrti. Nyāya-bindu. Tr. Alex Wayman. In A Millennium of Buddhist Logic, vol. 1, ed. Alex Wayman. 1999. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • –––. Pramāṇa-vārttika (with the commentary of Manorathanandin). Ed. Dvarikadas Sastri. Varanasi: Bauddha Bharati, 1968.
  • –––. Pramāṇa-viniścaya, perception chapter. Tr. (from the Tibetan) Tillmann Vetter. 1966. Sitzungsberichte der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften 250, Band 3. Vienna: Bohlaus.
  • –––. Vāda-nyāya. Tr. Pradeep P. Gokhale. 1993. Vādanyāya of Dharmakīrti: The Logic of Debate. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
  • Dharmarāja Adhvarin. Vedānta-paribhāṣā. Tr. S.S. Suryanarayana Sastri. 1971. Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre.
  • Dignāga. Pramāṇa-samuccaya, perception chapter. Tr. Masaaki Hattori. 1968. Dignāga on Perception. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Gaṅgeśa. Tattva-cintā-maṇi, the perception chapter. Tr. S. Phillips and N.S. Ramanuja Tatacharya. 2004. Epistemology of Perception. New York: American Institute for Buddhist Studies. Tattva-cintā-maṇi, the inference chapter (translated in part, piecemeal, by several scholars). Sanskrit text: ed. Kamakhyanath Tarkavagish. 1884-1901 (reprint 1991). 2 vols. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society. Tattva-cintā-maṇi, the anology chapter. Tr. S. Phillips (forthcoming).Tattva-cintā-maṇi, the testimony chapter. Tr. V.P. Bhatta. 2005. 2 vols. Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers.
  • Gautama. Nyāya-sūtra, (with commentaries by Vātsyāyana, Uddyotakara, and Vācaspati Miśra). Nyāyadarśanam,, ed. A.M. Tarkatirtha, Taranatha Nyayatarkatirtha, and H.K. Tarkatirtha. Calcutta Sanskrit Series 18. 1936-1944. Reprint, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1985. Tr. (with commentaries by Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara) Ganganatha Jha. 1912-1919. 4 vols. Reprint, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Jayanta Bhaṭṭa. Nyāya-mañjarī. Tr. J.V. Bhattacharyya. 1978. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Jayarāśi. Tattvopaplavasiṃha. Tr. Eli Franco. 1987. Perception, Knowledge and Disbelief: A Study of Jayarāśi's Scepticism. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
  • Kumārila. Śloka-vārttika, commentary on the Mīmāṃsā-sūtra, the perception chapter. Tr. John Taber. 2005. A Hindu Critique of Buddhist Epistemology: The “Determination of Perception” Chapter of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa's Ślokavārttika. London: Routledge. Other chapters: tr. Ganganatha Jha. Ślokavārtika. 1900, 1908. Reprint, Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
  • Mādhava. Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha. Tr. E.B. Cowell and A.E. Gough. 1906. The Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha: Review of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy by Mādhava Āchārya. Reprint, Delhi: Cosmo Publications.
  • Nāgārjuna. Vigraha-vyāvartinī. Tr. Kamaleshwar Bhattacharya. 1978. The Dialectical Method of Nāgārjuna. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Śaṅkara. Brahma-sūtra Commentary. Tr. Georg Thibaut. Dover.
  • Śrīharṣa. Khaṇḍana-khaṇḍa-khādya. Tr. Ganganatha Jha. 1986 (reprint). Khaṇḍana-khaṇḍa-khādya of Śrīharṣa. Delhi: Sri Satguru.
  • Udayana. Nyāya-kusumāñjalī. Ed. Mahaprabhulal Goswami. 1972. Mithila Institite Ancient Texts Series 23. Darbhanga: Mithila Research Institute.

Secondary Literature

  • Bagchi, Sitansusekhar. 1953. Inductive Reasoning: A Study of tarka and Its Role in Indian Logic. Calcutta: Munishchandra Sinha.
  • Bhatt, Govardhan P. 1989. The Basic Ways of Knowing, 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Bhattacharyya, Sibajiban. 1987. Doubt, Belief and Knowledge. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
  • Chakrabarti, Arindam. 1994. “Telling as Letting Know.” In A. Chakrabarti and B.K. Matilal, eds., 1994.
  • –––. 2000. “Against Immaculate Perception: Seven Reasons for Eliminating nirvikalpaka Perception from Nyāya.” Philosophy East and West, 50 (1): 1–8.
  • Chakrabarti, Arindam and B. K. Matilal, eds. 1994. Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Chakrabarti, Kisor. 1995. Definition and Induction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  • –––. 1999. Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Dreyfus, Georges B.J. 1997. Recognizing Reality: Dharmakīrti's Philosophy and Its Tibetan Interpretations. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Ganeri, Jonardon. 1999. Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical India. Oxford: Clarendon.
  • –––. 2001a. Philosophy, in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. London: Routledge.
  • ––– (ed.). 2001b. Logic in India: A Reader. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.
  • Gupta, Bina. 1998. The Disinterested Witness: A Fragment of Advaita Vedānta Phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
  • Hamblin, C.L. 1970. Fallacies. London: Methuen.
  • Hayes, Richard P. 1988. Dignāga on the Interpretation of Signs. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Ingalls, Daniel H.H. 1951. Materials for the Study of Navya-Nyāya Logic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Jha, Ganganatha. 1978 (reprint). The Prābhākara School of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Kumar, Shiv. 1980. Upamāna in Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers.
  • Lindtner, Christian. 1986. Nāgārjuna. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
  • Matilal, B.K. 1986. Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • –––. 1998. The Character of Logic in India. Ed. Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Matilal, B.K. and R.D. Evans, eds. 1986. Buddhist Logic and Epistemology. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Mohanty, J.N. 1992. Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought. Oxford: Clarenden.
  • –––. 1994. “Is There an Irreducible Mode of Word-Generated Knowledge?” In A. Chakrabarti and B.K. Matilal (eds.), 1994.
  • –––. 2000. Classical Indian Philosophy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Oetke, Claus. 1996. “Ancient Indian Logic as a Theory of Non-Monotonic Reasoning.” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 24: 447–539.
  • –––. 2004. “The Role of the Example in Ancient Indian Logic.” In The Role of the Example (dṛṣṭānta) in Classical Indian Logic. Ed. Shoryu Katsura and Ernst Steinkellner. Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien.
  • Phillips, Stephen H. 1995. Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of “New Logic.” Chicago: Open Court.
  • –––. 2001.“There's Nothing Wrong with Raw Perception,” Philosophy East and West, 51 (1): 104–13.
  • –––. (Forthcoming) 2011. Epistemology in Classical India: The Knowledge Sources of the Nyāya School. London: Routledge.
  • Potter, Karl H. (ed.). 1983+. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies. 12 vols. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas.
  • Potter, Karl H. 1984. “Does Indian Epistemology Concern Justified True Belief.” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 12 (4): 307–328.
  • Prasad, Rajendra. 2002. Dharmakīrti's Theory of Inference. New Delhi: Oxford.
  • Raja, K. Kunjunni. 1969. Indian Theories of Meaning. 2nd edition. Madras: Adyar.
  • Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. 2002. Advaita Metaphysics and Epistemology. London: Routledge Curzon.
  • Rao, Srinivasa. 1998. Perceptual Error: The Indian Theories. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  • Ruegg, David Seyfort. “Does the Madhyamika Have a Thesis and Philosophical Position.” In Matilal and Evans 1986.
  • Saha, Sukharanjan. 1991. Meaning, Truth and Predication: A Reconstruction of Nyāya Semantics. Calcutta: Jadavpur University and K.P. Bagchi and Company.
  • –––. 2000. Epistemology in Pracīna and Navya Nyāya. Jadavpur Studies in Philosophy. Kolkata: Jadavpur University.
  • Schayer, Stanislaw. 1933. “Studies in Indian Logic.” In Ganeri 2001b.
  • Siderits, Mark. 1991. Indian Philosophy of Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Solomon, Ester. 1976. Indian Dialectics, 2 volumes. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vidya Sabha.
  • Staal, J.F. 1973. “The Concept of Pakṣa in Indian Logic.” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2 (2): 156–167; reprinted in Ganeri 2001b.
  • Steinkellner, Ernst. 1991. “On the Interpretation of the svabhāvahetu, in Dharmakīrti's Vādanyāya.” In Studies in the Buddhist Epistemological Tradition, ed. E. Steinkellner. Proceedings of the Second International Dharmakīrti Conference, Vienna, 1989. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
  • Tillemans, Tom J.F. 1999. Scripture, Logic, Language: Essays on Dharmakīrti and his Tibetan Successors. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Academic Tools

sep man iconHow to cite this entry.
sep man iconPreview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society.
inpho iconLook up this entry topic at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
phil papers iconEnhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

  • Bibliography, Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, by Karl Potter (U. Washington).

Related Entries

analogy and analogical reasoning | Bhartṛhari | certainty | concepts | contradiction | Dharmakīrti | dispositions | Early Modern India, analytic philosophy in | epistemology | Gaṅgeśa | God: concepts of | Indian Philosophy (Classical): language and testimony | individuals and individuation |induction: problem of | intentionality | knowledge: analysis of | Kumārila | memory | Nāgārjuna | perception: the problem of | predication |presupposition | properties | reasons for action: justification vs. explanation | reference | skepticism | Śrīharṣa | substance | truth | Yogācāra

Acknowledgments

Portions of the present entry were taken from the author's Epistemology in Classical India, London: Routledge, 2011.
↧

Bhāratīya sprachbund of Sarasvati Civilization, an early word for metals manufactory is फड phaḍa of Indus Script

December 28, 2017, 8:42 pm
$
0
0
https://tinyurl.com/y8343pq2

फड phaḍa 'metals manufactory; I suggest that the semantic cognates are: Ta. paṭṭaṭai, paṭṭaṟai anvil, smithy, forge. Ka. paṭṭaḍe, paṭṭaḍi anvil, workshop. Te. paṭṭika, paṭṭeḍa anvil; paṭṭaḍa workshop.(DEDR 3865)పట్టడ paṭṭaḍa paṭṭaḍu. [Tel.] n. A smithy, a shop. కుమ్మరి వడ్లంగి మొదలగువారు పనిచేయు చోటు. 


The lexical entry of Kannada is significant.

Since the semantic cognate is 'metals manufactory, account register' (Marathi), the DEDR 3865 entries should be seen as part of Bhāratīya sprachbund (speech union) as cognate with फड phaḍa m ( H) A place of public business or public resort; as a court of justice, an exchange, a mart, a counting-house, a custom-house, an auction-room: also, in an ill-sense, as खेळण्या- चा फड A gambling-house, नाचण्याचा फड A nachhouse, गाण्याचा or ख्यालीखुशालीचा फड A singingshop or merriment shop. The word expresses freely Gymnasium or arena, circus, club-room, debating-room, house or room or stand for idlers, newsmongers, gossips, scamps &c. 2 The spot to which field-produce is brought, that the crop may be ascertained and the tax fixed; the depot at which the Government-revenue in kind is delivered; a place in general where goods in quantity are exposed for inspection or sale. 3 Any office or place of extensive business or work,--as a factory, manufactory, arsenal, dock-yard, printing-office &c. 4 A plantation or field (as of ऊस, वांग्या, मिरच्या, खरबुजे &c.): also a standing crop of such produce. 5 fig. Full and vigorous operation or proceeding, the going on with high animation and bustle (of business in general). v चाल, पड, घाल, मांड. 6 A company, a troop, a band or set (as of actors, showmen, dancers &c.) 7 The stand of a great gun. फड पडणें g. of s. To be in full and active operation. 2 To come under brisk discussion. फड मारणें- राखणें-संभाळणें To save appearances, फड मारणें or संपादणें To cut a dash; to make a display (upon an occasion). फडाच्या मापानें With full tale; in flowing measure. फडास येणें To come before the public; to come under general discussion. (Marathi) फडणिशी or सी  phaḍaṇiśī or sī & फडणीस Preferably फडनिशी or सी & फडनीस. फडनिशी or सी (p. 313) phaḍaniśī or sī f The office or business of फडनीस.  फडनीस phaḍanīsa m ( H) A public officer,--the keeper of the registers &c. By him were issued all grants, commissions, and orders; and to him were rendered all accounts from the other departments. He answers to Deputy auditor and accountant. Formerly the head Kárkún of a district-cutcherry who had charge of the accounts &c. was called फडनीस. (Marathi)

I submit that the Kannada phonetic form paṭṭaḍi is likely to be earlier than Tamil form paṭṭaṟai. The suffix -aṟai signifies 'room'. The suffix -aḍi signifies 'anvil' and hence an indictor of metals manufactory or workshop. Yes, language speculation, on my part, of early meanings of the early form फड which is retained even today in Marathi language. This early form फड is consistent with the rebus words and semantics: फड 'cobra hood' (Marathi) Ta. patam cobra's hood. Ma. paṭam id. Ka. peḍe id. Te. paḍaga id. Go. (S.) paṛge, (Mu.) baṛak, (Ma.) baṛki, (F-H.) biṛki hood of serpent (Voc. 2154). / Turner, CDIAL, no. 9040, Skt. (s)phaṭa-, sphaṭā- a serpent's expanded hood, Pkt. phaḍā- id. For IE etymology, see Burrow, The Problem of Shwa in Sanskrit, p. 45. (DEDR 47) Note the Pkt. form. This phaḍā is likely to the early phonetic form in the lingua franca. Hence, I submit that फड is the early form of paṭṭaḍe 'smithy, forge, anvil, workshop'(Kannada).

It is likely that even the expression अक्ष--पटल n. court of law; depository of legal document 
​(
राजतरंगिणी
​)
Dancing gaṇa, Badami caves. kharva, 'dwarf' rebus: karba 'iron'.

Image result for phada gana kailasanatha dance ganesa
I think 
gaṇeśa is shown dancing in the फड with gaṇa --नाचण्याचा फड A nachhouse-- on Kanchipuram Kailasanatha mandiram frieze. karibha, ibha'elephant' rebus: karba, ib'iron'. tridhātu, 'three elements, minerals' is an attribute of 'Gaṇeśa'.

A good example of फड phaḍa in Harappa (Hariyūpiyā -- R̥gveda). It is likely that each circular platform is a hut for artisans working in smithy/forge and the cluster is likely to be पणि 'a market'.

Working platforms for artisans of Sarasvati Civilization (Harappa evidence)
Image result for working platforms harappaImage result for working platforms harappaImage result for working platforms harappaInline image 1

These are three clinchers from Sanchi, Amaravati and Bharhut to explain the semantics of फड phaḍa 'cobra hood' shown together with a fire-altar (a signifier of a smithy/forge) or fiery skambha of a yajña kuṇḍa or smelter. In the bottom register, camasa, wooden ladles of Veda culture are also shown.

Inline image 1
 Fiery skambha of a yajña kuṇḍa Plus Ta. paṭam instep. Ma. paṭam flat part of the hand or foot. Pe. paṭa key palm of hand. Manḍ. paṭa kiy id.; paṭa kāl sole of foot. Kuwi. (Su.) paṭa naki palm of hand. (DEDR 3843) rebus: फड phaḍa'metals manufactory' PLUS khambhaṛā'fish-fin' rebus: kammaṭa'mint'.
Image result for bharhut nagaHieroglyph: kuṭi 'tree' Rebus: kuṭhi 'smelter' (smithy)
​
↧

What is virtual money like Bit Coins. Min. of Finance compares VCs to Ponzi schemes

December 28, 2017, 11:49 pm
$
0
0
Ministry of Finance

Government Cautions People Against Risks in Investing in Virtual ‘Currencies’; Says VCs are like Ponzi Schemes 


Posted On: 29 DEC 2017 9:55AM by PIB Delhi

The Ministry of Finance has issued the following statement today on Virtual ‘Currencies’.


“There has been a phenomenal increase in recent times in the price of Virtual ‘Currencies’ (VCs) including Bitcoin, in India and globally. The VCs don’t have any intrinsic value and are not backed by any kind of assets. The price of Bitcoin and other VCs therefore is entirely a matter of mere speculation resulting in spurt and volatility in their prices. There is a real and heightened risk of investment bubble of the type seen in ponzi schemes which can result in sudden and prolonged crash exposing investors, especially retail consumers losing their hard-earned money. Consumers need to be alert and extremely cautious as to avoid getting trapped in such Ponzi schemes. VCs are stored in digital/electronic format, making them vulnerable to hacking, loss of password, malware attack etc. which may also result in permanent loss of money. As transactions of VCs are encrypted they are also likely being used to carry out illegal/subversive activities, such as, terror-funding, smuggling, drug trafficking and other money-laundering Acts.

VCs are not backed by Government fiat. These are also not legal tender. Hence, VCs are not currencies. These are also being described as ‘Coins’. There is however no physical attribute to these coins. Therefore, Virtual ‘Currencies’ (VCs) are neither currencies nor coins. The Government or Reserve Bank of India has not authorised any VCs as a medium of exchange. Further, the Government or any other regulator in India has not given license to any agency for working as exchange or any other kind of intermediary for any VC. Persons dealing in them must consider these facts and beware of the risks involved in dealing in VCs.

The users, holders and traders of VCs have already been cautioned three times, in December, 2013, February, 2017 and December, 2017, by Reserve Bank of India about the potential financial, operational, legal, customer protection and security related risks that they are exposing themselves to by investing in Bitcoin and/ or other VCs. RBI has also clarified that it has not given any licence/ authorization to any entity/ company to operate such schemes or deal with Bitcoin or any virtual currency. The Government also makes it clear that VCs are not legal tender and such VCs do not have any regulatory permission or protection in India. The investors and other participants therefore deal with these VCs entirely at their risk and should best avoid participating therein.”


http://www.pib.nic.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1514568

↧

Four ANE seals with Indus Script hypertexts are metalwork wealth accounting ledgers

December 29, 2017, 2:40 pm
$
0
0
https://tinyurl.com/yagsj38j

Some Indus Script hieroglyphs/hypertexts on four ancient near eastern cylinder seals presented in this note can be read as Meluhha words in Indus Script cipher:

1. scorpion bicha'scorpion' rebus:; bica'haematite, ferrite ore'
2. plough மேழி mēḻi , n. cf. mēdhi. [T. K. M. mēḍi.] 1. Plough; கலப்பை. வினைப்பக டேற்ற மேழி (புறநா. 388). Rebus: meḍ'iron' (Ho.Mu.)
 
 मेंढा [ mēṇḍhā ] A crook or curved end (of a stick, horn &c.) Rebus: meḍ 'iron' (Ho.Mu.)


3. weapons, quiver khaṇḍa'implements, weapons'; bhāthɔ,bhātɔ, bhāthṛɔ m. ʻ quiver ʼ (whence bhāthī m. ʻ warrior ʼ); M. bhātā m. ʻ leathern bag, bellows, quiver ʼ, bhātaḍ n. ʻ bellows, quiver  Furnace: bhráṣṭra n. ʻ frying pan, gridiron ʼ MaitrS. [√bhrajj]
Pk. bhaṭṭha -- m.n. ʻ gridiron ʼ; K. büṭhü f. ʻ level surface by kitchen fireplace on which vessels are put when taken off fire ʼ; S. baṭhu m. ʻ large pot in which grain is parched, large cooking fire ʼ, baṭhī f. ʻ distilling furnace ʼ; L. bhaṭṭh m. ʻ grain -- parcher's oven ʼ, bhaṭṭhī f. ʻ kiln, distillery ʼ, awāṇ. bhaṭh; P. bhaṭṭh m., °ṭhī f. ʻ furnace ʼ, bhaṭṭhā m. ʻ kiln ʼ; N. bhāṭi ʻ oven or vessel in which clothes are steamed for washing ʼ; A. bhaṭā ʻ brick -- or lime -- kiln ʼ; B. bhāṭi ʻ kiln ʼ; Or. bhāṭi ʻ brick -- kiln, distilling pot ʼ; Mth. bhaṭhī, bhaṭṭī ʻ brick -- kiln, furnace, still ʼ; Aw.lakh. bhāṭhā ʻ kiln ʼ; H. bhaṭṭhā m. ʻ kiln ʼ, bhaṭ f. ʻ kiln, oven, fireplace ʼ; M. bhaṭṭā m. ʻ pot of fire ʼ, bhaṭṭī f. ʻ forge ʼ. -- X bhástrā -- q.v.(CDIAL 9656)

4. bull PLUS perched bird poḷa'zebu' rebus: poḷa'magnetite, ferrite ore' PLUS poḷaḍu'black drongo bird' rebus: poḷaḍ'steel'
5. lion PLUS eagle arye'lion' rebus: āra'brass'
6, Water flowing out of vessel kaṇḍa'water' rebus: khaṇḍa'implements'
7. Raised hand eraka'raised hand' rebus: eraka'molten cast, copper'arka'copper'
8. kid (young goat) karaḍū'a kid, young antelope' Rebus: karaḍā 'hard metal alloy'.
9. boar baḍhia = a castrated boar, a hog (Santali) baḍhi 'a caste who work both in iron
10. cob of corn kolom 'cob'; kolmo'seedling, rice (paddy) plant' (Munda.) kolma hoṛo = a variety of the paddy plant (Desi)(Santali.) kolmo'rice plant' (Mu.) Rebus: kolami'furnace,smithy' (Telugu) 
11. goat mlekh 'goat' (Br.); mr̤eka (Te.); mēṭam (Ta.); meṣam (Skt.) Rebus: milakkhu 'copper'(Pali)

11 June 2001, New York
The Surena Collection of Ancient Near Eastern Cylinder Seals

AN AKKADIAN DARK GREEN SERPENTINE CYLINDER SEAL 
Circa 2334-2154 B.C. 
With a plowing scene: a god working a plow pulled by a lion while a goddess fills the funnel with seed, the god in a horned tiara capped with a star, wearing a long creased robe open at the front, a goddess with maces rising from her shoulders, wearing a long flounced robe, a worshipper to the right in a fringed robe, pouring a libation from a slender vessel, his left hand raised, with several fillers including a standing woman in a long robe with one arm raised, a bull with a bird on its back, a bird on the wing, a reed fence, and a scorpion, all above, and a dog seated on its haunches, an oval and a staff, all below
37 x 25 mm 
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/an-akkadian-dark-green-serpentine-cylinder-seal-2067197-details.aspx (For a variant reading of this seal, see 
https://www.academia.edu/7439251/A_HAPPY_2018_WITH_INANNA_AND_DUMUZID )
Akkadian green serpentine cylinder seal
Lot 429, an Akkadian green serpentine cylinder seal, circa 2334-2154 B.C., 40 by 26 mm
A slightly bigger Akkadian seal from the same period is Lot 429, shown above, has the following catalogue description:
"Boldly carved with fine detail with Nissaba, the goddess of barley and writing, seated to the right wearing a horned tiara, a necklace and a loung flounced robe, her hair falling in a long plait with a curl at the end, with three ears of barley sprouting from her shoulders, holding an ear of barley in her right hand and a tablet in her left, a bearded deity standing before Nissaba extending both hands toward her, wearing a horned tiara and a long robe with a zig-zag pattern, with plant-shoots projecting from his body, behind him a bearded figure carrying a plow in both hands, wearing a horned tiara and a long creased robe, behind the goddess her spouse Haya stands wearing a horned headdress and a long fringed robe, with a long beard and a plait of hair with a curl at the end, with many ears of barley sprouting from the sides of his body, the terminal a small figure of a worshspper wearing a log fringed robe, with short hair and heard, holding a kid over one shoulder, one arm raised."
This 40 by 24 mm seal had an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000 and sold for $127,000.
Akkadian black serpentine cylinder seal
Lot 433, an Akkadian black serpentine cylinder seal, circa 2334-2154 B.C., 35 by 24 mm
Lot 433, shown above, is another Akkadian seal, 35 by 24 mm, from the same period is also quite extraordinary for its details and composition. The catalogue provides the following description and commentary:
"The scene divided into three parts, one part composed of two dogs seated on their haunches looking up at an eagle in the sky carrying a man, a large pot between the dogs and a spouted vessel above the dog to the right, a man to the left wearing a kilt, standing with his right arm extending forward and his left arm raised, further to the left another scene with a standing shepherd, carrying a vessel on a rod over his shoulder, guiding three goats with whip in his right hand, between them a tripod from which hangs an oblong object, and the third scene above the goats consisting of two men engaged in a task involving an uncertain object, the two surrounded by circular objects, the terminal in the form of a fence...The man being carried by the eagle is Etana, thirteenth king of Kish. Etana had no son and prayed daily to Shamash, the sun god, to grant him a child. Shamash directed him to an eagle caught in a pit, where it had been trapped by a serpent, having eaten the young of the snake. Etana freed the eagle who, in gratitutde, carried the king on his back to heaven. Upon his arriven in heaven, Etana was brought to the throne of Ishtar where he begged the goddess or a son, since his queen was barren. She gave him the plant of birth which he had to eat together with his wife...."
This seal measures 35 by 24 mm and was estimated at only $10,000 to $15,000 and sold for $11,750.
Graeco-Persian chalcedony cylinder seal
Lot 550, a Graeco-Persian Chalcedony cylinder seal, circa 5th-4th Century B.C., 26.5 by 12 mm
One of the later, or more recent, seals is Lot 550, shown above, a Graeco-Persian chalcedony cylinder seal, circa 5th-4th Century B.C. It depicts a Persian man spearing an charging boar. It was estimated at $12,000 to $18,000 and sold for $14,100.


S. Kalyanaraman

Sarasvati Research Center

December 30, 217

↧
↧

NaMo, National Water Grid 24x7 water to every farm, home

December 29, 2017, 4:28 pm
$
0
0
A push for jobs and farm sector, announcement of National Water Grid, interlink lakes, 24x7 water to every farm, every village, employ millions in all 707 districts and panchayats. Mitigate annual Brahmaputra Kosi flood damages. Provide water to drought-prone areas



↧

Significance of snake as crown Indus Script metaphor of paṭṭaṭaiyār public officer फडकरी in Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple

December 29, 2017, 7:32 pm
$
0
0

https://tinyurl.com/y9cvauqh

"Rajendra Chola-I (1012-1044 A.D) son of the Great Rajaraja-I, established this temple after his great victorious march to river Ganges on Northern India. He was originally called Madurantakan. He assumed the title of Rajendra during his coronation and continued to rule along with his father Rajaraja-I for a while. He achieved the supreme title of Cholas called Parakesari .Rajendran-I, a great warrior and assisted his father, is numerous expeditions to elevate the Cholas to supreme power. The various expeditions, he conducted, were : Gangetic expedition, eastern/western Chalukyas, war against Cheras/Pandyas, Ceylon expedition, Kadaram (currently called as Burma) expedition etc.,His empire extended the whole of southern India to river Thungabathra in the north India, for administrative and strategic purpose he built another capital and named Gangaikondacholapuram. The Gangaikondacholapuram temple, he constructed consists of 3 stories and surrounded by a huge fort like wall." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangaikonda_Cholapuram

The puṣkariṇī, temple tank is called Chola Ganga in celebration of Rajendra Chola's expedition to Ganga. He reportedly brought Ganga Water and merged it with the Kaveri waters reaching the temple tank.

This memory is celebrated in a spectacular sculptural narrative of Somaskanda anointing Rajendra Chola with a crown of Cobra hood taken from Somaskanda, Śiva's neck ornament called பட்டடை paṭṭaṭai. Thus, Rajendra Chola becomes फडकरी or பட்டடையார் paṭṭaṭaiyār or public officer celebrated by Somaskanda.
.

The sculptural frieze in the temple signifies Somaskanda anointing the king (Gangaikonda Chola) with a crown. The crown is the winding snake from Śiva's neck.

This neck ornament is பட்டடை² paṭṭaṭai, n. < T. paṭṭeḍa. Neck-ornament; கழுத்தணி. Loc.

I suggest that the Indus Script metaphor ir reminisced in this sculptural metaphor.

Hieroglyph: फडा (p. 313) phaḍā f (फटा S) The hood of Coluber Nága &c. Ta. patam cobra's hood. Ma. paṭam id. Ka. peḍe id. Te. paḍaga id. Go. (S.) paṛge, (Mu.) baṛak, (Ma.) baṛki, (F-H.) biṛki hood of serpent (Voc. 2154). / Turner, CDIAL, no. 9040, Skt. (s)phaṭa-, sphaṭā- a serpent's expanded hood, Pkt. phaḍā- id. For IE etymology, see Burrow, The Problem of Shwa in Sanskrit, p. 45.(DEDR 47) Rebus: phaḍa फड ‘manufactory, company, guild, public office’, keeper of all accounts, registers.

फड (p. 313) phaḍa m ( H) A place of public business or public resort; as a court of justice, an exchange, a mart, a counting-house, a custom-house, an auction-room: also, in an ill-sense, as खेळण्या- चा फड A gambling-house, नाचण्याचा फड A nach house, गाण्याचा or ख्यालीखुशालीचा फड A singing shop or merriment shop. The word expresses freely Gymnasium or arena, circus, club-room, debating-room, house or room or stand for idlers, newsmongers, gossips, scamps &c. 2 The spot to which field-produce is brought, that the crop may be ascertained and the tax fixed; the depot at which the Government-revenue in kind is delivered; a place in general where goods in quantity are exposed for inspection or sale. 3 Any office or place of extensive business or work, as a factory, manufactory, arsenal, dock-yard, printing-office &c. 4 A plantation or field (as of ऊस, वांग्या, मिरच्या, खरबुजे &c.): also a standing crop of such produce. 5 fig. Full and vigorous operation or proceeding, the going on with high animation and bustle (of business in general). v चाल, पड, घाल, मांड. 6 A company, a troop, a band or set (as of actors, showmen, dancers &c.) 7 The stand of a great gun. फड पडणें g. of s. To be in full and active operation. 2 To come under brisk discussion. फड मारणें- राखणें-संभाळणें To save appearances, फड मारणें or संपादणें To cut a dash; to make a display (upon an occasion). फडाच्या मापानें With full tale; in flowing measure. फडास येणें To come before the public; to come under general discussion. 

The anointing of the king with cobra hood is a signifier of the role of the king as a pre-eminent public officer, फडकरी = பட்டடையார் paṭṭaṭaiyār , n. < id. (W. G.) 1. Master of a shop; கடையின் எசமானர். 2. Overseer; மேற்பார்ப்போர்.

Thus, paṭṭaṭaiyār is a superintendent or master of a फड or public place.

பட்டடை¹ paṭṭaṭai, n. prob. படு¹- + அடை¹-. 1. [T. paṭṭika, K. paṭṭaḍe.] Anvil; அடைகல். (பிங்.) சீரிடங்காணி னெறிதற்குப் பட்ட டை (குறள், 821). 2. [K. paṭṭaḍi.] Smithy, forge; கொல்லன் களரி. 3. Stock, heap, pile, as of straw, firewood or timber; குவியல். (W.) 4. Corn-rick, enclosure of straw for grain, wattle and daub, granary; தானியவுறை. (W.) 5. Layer or bed of olas for grain; தானியமிடுற்கு ஓலைகளாலமைத்த படுக்கை. (W.) 6. Anything held against another, as a support in driving a nail; prop to keep a thing from falling or moving; ஆணி முதலியன செல்லுதற்கு அடியிலிருந்து தாங்குங் கருவி. (W.) 7. Frame of timbers to place under a dhoney when ashore, to keep it from the ground; கரையிலிருக்கும்போது பூமி யிற் பதியாதபடி அடியில் வைக்குந் தோணிதாங்கி. (W.) 8. Support for the head in place of a pillow; தலையணையாக உதவும் மணை. (W.) 9. Piece of board temporarily used as a seat; உட் காரும் பலகை. (W.) 10. Plank used for crossing a channel; கால்வாய் கடத்தற்கு உதவும் பலகை. (W.) 11. The platform of the car that carries the idol; வாகனத்தட்டு. Loc. 12. Block of wood provided with iron-tubes for explosion of gun-powder; அதிர்வேட்டுக் குழாய்கள் பதிக்கப்பட்ட கட்டை. Loc. 13. Repeated explosion of gun-powder stuffed in iron-tubes; தொடர்ந்து வெடிக்கும் அதிர்வேட்டு. 14. A layer or course of earthwork, as in raising mud-wall; சுவரிலிடும் மண்படை. Loc. 15. Portion allowed to ploughmen from the proceeds of a harvest; குடிவாரம். Loc. 16. Cultivation, irrigation; சாகுபடி செய்கை. பட்டடைக்குத் தண்ணீர் இறைக்க. (W.) 17. Plot of wet land cultivated mainly by lift-irrigation; இறைப்புப் பாசனமுள்ள நன் செய்த் தாக்கு. Loc. 18. (Mus.) The fifth note of the gamut; ஐந்தாம் சுரமாகிய இளியிசை. வண்ணப் பட்டடை யாழ்மேல் வைத்து (சிலப். 3, 63). 19. One of the movements in playing a lute; ஓர் இசைக்கரணம். (குறள், 573, அடிக்குறிப்பு.)

फडपूस (p. 313) phaḍapūsa f (फड & पुसणें) Public or open inquiry. फडफरमाश or स (p. 313) phaḍapharamāśa or sa f ( H & P) Fruit, vegetables &c. furnished on occasions to Rajas and public officers, on the authority of their order upon the villages; any petty article or trifling work exacted from the Ryots by Government or a public officer. 

फडनिविशी or सी (p. 313) phaḍaniviśī or sī & फडनिवीस Commonly फड- निशी & फडनीस. फडनीस (p. 313) phaḍanīsa m ( H) A public officer,--the keeper of the registers &c. By him were issued all grants, commissions, and orders; and to him were rendered all accounts from the other departments. He answers to Deputy auditor and accountant. Formerly the head Kárkún of a district-cutcherry who had charge of the accounts &c. was called फडनीस. 


फडकरी (p. 313) phaḍakarī m A man belonging to a company or band (of players, showmen &c.) 2 A superintendent or master of a फड or public place. See under फड. 3 A retail-dealer (esp. in grain). 

↧

kole.l 'smithy, forge''temple' on Yaudheya coin and Sohgaura copper plate

December 29, 2017, 8:27 pm
$
0
0
Image result for temple ancient indian coinsTemple between hill symbols and elephant coin of the Pandyas Sri Lanka 1st century British Museum. karba, ibha 'elephant' rebus: karba, ib 'iron' ḍang 'hill range' rebus: dhangar 'blacksmith'.kole.l 'temple' rebus: kole.l 'smithy, forge'.

Compare with PremauryanSohgaura copper plate which shows two koṭṭha detailed in Brahmi inscription. kole.l 'smithy, forge' is kole.l 'temple' (Kota language). Smithy shown on Yaudheya coin is kole.l the temple. kole·l smithy, temple in Kota village; kolimi furnace (DEDR 2133)

Thus, the smithy/forge is the temple.

Image result for sohgaura copper plate
temples-on-yaudheya-coins
The Curious Case of Temples depicted on Yaudheya Coins
Coins of India, , , , , , , 
Old and tarnished, small pieces of metal were how Yaudheya coins were found  for the first time by some canal digger way back in early 1800’s in Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh). After which numerous hoards of tribal coins were found from Western U.P. Rajasthan and all over India and also present day Pakistan. Yaudheya coins caught the attention of great numismatist James Prinsep; but as there was no information available at that time he wrongly assigned these coins to Indo-Greek kings. Later after further research in Indian numismatics the coins were rightly assigned to ‘Yaudheya’ the warrior tribe. A new enchanting chapter of Tribal coins found its place in Ancient Indian History where there is depiction of temples on Yaudheya coins.
Yaudheya were the rulers of South-Eastern Punjab and Rajasthan. Like many other tribes they declared their independence after the death of Pushyamitra Sunga in the middle of the second century B.C.E. Yaudheya clan has also been mentioned in Ashtadhyayi of Panini as well as in Ganapatha. They have also been referred in Mahabharata, Brihatsamhita and Puranas. From about 200 BCE to 400 CE they were at the peak of their power. The existence of this powerful clan has come to light from their coins and coin-moulds found in large number in Sutlej, Multan, Bhatner, Sirsa, Hansi and Panipat. Most of these coins depicted the god Karttikeya or also known as Brahmanyadeva. Yaudheya as we know it were an ancient republican city state or tribe of traders and warriors. The name ‘Yudha’ itself means a proficient fighter. Yaudheyas claim that they descended from Yudhishthira. Many ancient texts have mentioned this tribe; also historians of Alexander wrote about people ‘living in exceedingly fertile territory and good at agriculture and brave in war’. Yaudheya had a high social and political status; thus surviving the longest reign. Yaudheya’s were probably at the height of their power and glory during the period extending from circa mid-second century BCE to the fourth century CE when they struck coins as well.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

Coinage
Though coins are small in size they open up window various aspects of culture, political life, economic progress, trade and commerce of people. Especially the coins of ancient cultures where there are barely any other evidences available. The movement of various tribes can be traced from its coin. The Yaudheya issued their earliest coinage in copper, bronze and potin with the brahmi legend ‘Yoaudheyanam’.  Karttikeya being the warrior god was the main deity in temples on Yaudheya coins and also peacock is widely depicted (vehicle of the war-god karttikeya).

Allan extensively studies coins from Indian subcontinent and has segregated the Yaudheya coinage in 6 broad categories. Of which one category is described as the obverse having six-headed Karttikeya with brahmi legend ‘Bhagavata-svamino Brahmanya’ and reverse contains different marks with a deer and the shape of the temple.

The fabric of these coins is very crude so the symbols on the coins are not very clear. The Shadananda-Deer types were struck for a long time from about the close to the first century BCE or the beginning of the next for nearly two centuries. The coins even though with crude fabric had various different varieties of temple like structures were minted on them.

Below are the details of some of the structures with illustrations to help understand the structures.

First among the temples on Yaudheya coins is a structure with a dome shaped roof was found from the coin; having probably a square plan. It stood on an elevated adhishthana (basement) consisting of four molding. As the depiction of these temples on the flan of the coin is in most cases on the side, it is difficult to make out whether they have moldings or any decorative features. The object of worship may have lay in the center but nothing except the outer row of pillar is shown. On right side there are some steps to reach the floor; the pillar supporting the rectangular shaped pillar beams which carried the hemispherical dome. The dome can be interesting feature exhibited by the structure is the existence of smaller second done over the first. The second dome supported the finial which seems there may have been single domed temples standing on an elaborate adhisthanaof multiple moudings.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

The temple depicted on Yaudheya coins has a dome marked by vertical divisions. This is possible in case of wooden beams forming the roof of the sanctum. A double or triple structure having square plan reveals that the domes were encased by slanting slabs giving spire a triangular look.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

There are quite a few good examples of double domed temples. That this type of temples was popular with the Yaudheyas is evidenced by some other coins also.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

There are examples of even triple domed temples built on perhaps on basement of different heights and mouldings. The construction of multiple domes was perhaps not possible heights and mouldings. The construction of multiple domes was perhaps not possible on stones or brick temples at that time and suggests the perishable nature of the structures.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

A coin confirms this feature though the depiction of the double dome differs slightly and the temple is located on an elaborate basement.
One specimen indicates that the structure enshrined shiva-linga. The existence of Shaiva shrines is confirmed by a pillared domed structure surmounted by a trident, the emblem of Shiva.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

Trident atop another four-pillared double domed structure also confirms the shaivite affiliation of such shrines.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

One coin shows the sloping concave sides of the superstructure indicating the continuity of the tradition noticed on an Audambara coin.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

One of the coins shows the construction of a hut-like shrine on round plan also. Earlier a similar coin was published but a close examination of the Yaudheya coin of this class illustrated by him reveals that the façade was topped with a vajra ‘thunderbolt’ – like motif. The coin is more likely to incline towards the worship of Indra.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

The illustrated temples on Yaudheya coins if acceptable it would indicate the existence of shrines dedicated to kubera who is called Nara-vahana also. Stone image of kubera riding a human figure are also known to us. One specimen shows the human figure surmounteing a squat-domed structure also betraying that the worship of deities was not restricted to particular types of shrines-forms.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

The vaulted roof supported on pillars in a temple betraying folk influence reveals three circular holes, to serve as gavakshas ‘air hole’ or window to admit air and light perhaps.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

One coin shows a temple standing on four pillars with a superstructure consisting of a larger (with almost sloping sides) and smaller rectangular forms surmounted by a circular emblem. The round emblem may either be the solar disc or the chakra of the Vishnu or Krishna, thus indicating the solar or vaishnavite affiliation of the shrine.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

It seems to provide evidence of what Somadeva Suri has recorded later – that the Yaudheya soldiers were devoted to Kartikeya and farmers worshipped Krishna.
Temples on Yaudheya coins that are dedicated to Siva have been depicted in other styles also. Some coins show a water-channel flowing from beneath the basement of a four-pillared domed temple.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

There are quite a few examples of the structures being capped by a parasol and they may have been Chhatresvara Siva temples. These temples obviously had siva linga enshrines in them. That so called chaitya figures of different number of arches were religious structures is indicated by the Yaudheya coins. There are numerous coins showing symbols generally called as three- or six- or multiple arched hill or chaitya in front of the deer.

temples-on-yaudheya-coins

Inference
After the decline of the Kushana power, the Yaudheya continued to strike finely executed coins for circulation in the hilly region. We, thus see that various types of temples having domed, vaulted or wagon-shaped, flat or triangular spires, dedicated to different deities like Siva, Indra, Kubera, Surya or Vishnu, etc. have been depicted to these Yaudheya coins of Shadanana deer type of the first-second century. Though the Yaudheya worshipped Karttikeya as their tutelary deity, they worshiped other Hindu gods also this amply evidenced by the predominance of Shaiva temples as noted above. There were simple hut-shaped shrines as well as multiple-storied ones. They had domed, vaulted, arched, curvilinear and triangular spires. The multiplicity of forms of temples and spires on these coins, however, is simply bewildering in the absence of actual remains of early temples before the Gupta period. The perishable feature of these shrines as indicated above, and also perhaps the tendency of utilizing the material of the crumbled or destroyed structure by later people, may have been responsible for the absence of their remains. The Yaudheya coins thus open a new vista of knowledge and add a new chapter to the study of temple architecture in India.
Apart from “Yaudheya” many tribal coins have temples featured on them.

https://www.mintageworld.com/blog/temples-on-yaudheya-coins/
↧
Search

Constitution of India, work of art, handcrafted, 1950

December 31, 2017, 5:53 pm
$
0
0
The original Constitution of India, adopted on 26 January 1950, was not a printed document. It was entirely handcrafted by the artists of Shantiniketanunder the guidance of Acharya Nandalal Bose, with the calligraphy texts done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in Delhi. This document is now preserved in a special helium-filled case in the library of the Parliament of India.
2016-01-24-1453674505-841342-1.jpg

2016-01-24-1453661302-9662025-originalconstitutionofindia_Page_3.jpg
Shantiniketan and the Constitution of India
The original handcrafted Constitution of India was exquisitely designed and executed. The fine calligraphy in the book was done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada using a holder and nib (nib no. 303). He did not charge any fee for this work.
In Shantiniketan, along with his students, Nandalal Bose completed the art work. The "Preamble" page was done by Beohar Rammanohar Sinha. Another Kala Bhavan artist associated with the artwork was Kripal Singh Shekhawat from Rajasthan, who after returning to his home state, subsequently went on to revive Jaipur blue pottery from near extinction.
Many pages of the Constitution are embellished with highly stylised decorative borders, headers and backdrops. The complex patterns in the borders and in the front and back covers, embossed in gold on leather, are reminiscent of the Ajanta murals.
2016-01-24-1453675845-311601-originalconstitutionofindia_Page_4.jpg
2016-01-24-1453675678-5729857-15.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668446-7498661-211.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668482-2738431-219.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668557-4137858-215.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668620-9415315-471.jpg
At the beginning of each part of the Constitution, Nandalal Bose has depicted a phase or scene from India's national experience and history. The artwork and illustrations (22 in all), rendered largely in the miniature style, represent vignettes from the different periods of history of the Indian subcontinent, ranging from Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley, the Vedic period, the Gupta and Maurya empires and the Mughal era to the national freedom movement. By doing so, Nandalal Bose has taken us through a veritable pictorial journey across 4000 years of rich history, tradition and culture of the Indian subcontinent.
2016-01-24-1453668688-3368428-62.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668745-757787-7.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668786-5469509-8.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668816-2398909-92.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668889-1879549-12.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668918-1741431-14.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668967-5081473-18.jpg
2016-01-24-1453668998-6855656-19.jpg
The Vedic period is represented by a scene of gurukula (forest hermitage school) and the epic period by images from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Then there are depictions of the lives of the Buddha and Mahavira, followed by scenes from the courts of Ashoka and Vikramaditya. There is a beautiful line drawing of the Nataraja from the Chola bronze tradition.
Other important figures from India's history include Akbar, Shivaji, Guru Gobind Singh, Tipu Sultan, and Lakshmibai. The freedom movement is depicted by Mahatma Gandhi's Dandi march and his tour of Noakhali as the great peacemaker; Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose makes an appearance too. Scenes of the Himalayas, the desert and the ocean are also included.
2016-01-24-1453669117-8023136-21.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669155-1718632-22.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669201-993844-24.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669240-4625846-25.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669274-9485753-26.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669316-9456938-28.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669364-768703-215.jpg
The illustrations and the decorative borders are quintessential of the Shantiniketan/Kala Bhavan style, which in turn was greatly influenced by the cave paintings of Ajanta and Bagh. In many ways, the original handcrafted Constitution of India, as a work of exquisite aesthetic expression, represents one of the triumphs of Shantiniketan and Kala Bhavan.
2016-01-24-1453669487-3317424-27.jpg
2016-01-24-1453669567-4285361-215.jpg
2016-01-24-1453675736-7004635-369.jpg
Source of Constitution images: World Digital Library
https://dl.wdl.org/2672/service/2672.pdf
 28/01/2016 

The Constitution Of India As A Work Of Art

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/shumon-sengupta/the-constitution-of-india_b_7123326.html


1950 :: Lord Shiva as Nataraja and Swastik Symbol In Original Copy of Constitution of India
1950 :: Portrait of Emperor Akbar and Mughal Architecture In Original Copy of Constitution of India

Scene From Mahatma Buddha's Life In Original Copy of Constitution of India

1950 :: Descent of Ganga and Penance of Bhagirath In Original Copy of Indian Constitution

Portrait of Queen Lakshmi Bai and Tipu Sultan In Original Copy of Constitution of India

Portrait of Shivaji Maharaj and Guru Gobind Singh Ji In Original Copy of Constitution of India

Bhagwan Mahaveer in constitution of India
1950 :: Image of Lord Krishna Having Conversation With Arjuna During Mahabharata War In Original Copy of Constitution of India
1950 :: Photo of Lord Rama , Goddess Sita and Laxmana In Original Copy of Indian Constitution



↧
↧

Gulf of Khambat marine archaeologiy side scan image structural features

December 31, 2017, 10:23 pm
$
0
0
https://tinyurl.com/ybgfn8ge

I suggest that the Khambat in the expression Gulf of Khambat is relatedto the Indus Script hypertext: Hieoglyph: khambhaṛā'fish-fin'  rebus: Ta. kampaṭṭam coinage, coin. Ma. kammaṭṭam, kammiṭṭam coinage, mint. Ka. kammaṭa id.; kammaṭi a coiner.(DEDR 1236)

கம்பட்டக்காரன் kampaṭṭa-k-kāraṉ , n. < கம்பட்டம் +. Coiner; நாணயம்செய்வோன். (W.) கம்பட்டக்கூடம் kampaṭṭa-k-kūṭam , n. < id. +. Mint; நாணயசாலை. (W.) கம்பட்டம் kampaṭṭam , n. [K. kammaṭa, M. kammṭṭam.] Coinage, coin; நாணயம். (W.) கம்பட்டமுளை kampaṭṭa-muḷai , n. < id. +. Die, coining stamp; நாணயமுத்திரை. (W.)
కమ్మరము  kammaramu ...కమ్మరవాడు, కమ్మరి or కమ్మరీడు kammara-vāḍu. n. An iron-smith or blacksmith. బైటికమ్మరవాడు an itinerant blacksmith. (Telugu)
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Centre
January 1, 2017
See: 


↧

English medium education weakens India, the PISA test proved it -- Maria Wirth

January 1, 2018, 1:49 am
$
0
0

ENGLISH MEDIUM EDUCATION WEAKENS INDIA. THE PISA TEST PROVED IT

January 1, 2018 · by  
It is no secret why the British replaced the indigenous education system and Sanskrit gurukuls with English education. They wanted to create a class of Indians who think like the British and in this way weaken India. Sanskrit culture und Vedic knowledge were the backbone of Indians. This backbone had to be broken. English medium education did it to a great extent. Indians were cut off from their precious tradition, and they had to study in a completely foreign language, as if this was an easy thing to do. Somehow, the children of the tiny elite managed. They were motivated to make it into colonial government jobs and English was the only gateway. Naturally, these westernised students and their offspring, who had no roots anymore in their own culture, influenced the future of independent India in a big way.
So it is no surprise that even after Independence, English medium in higher education and in the ‘better schools’ which were often run by missionaries continued with the argument that English is the necessary link-language between the states. It was in the interest of this elite and the Churches to continue with the status quo, where jobs at the top require fluency in English, as for this tiny minority, English is their mother tongue. They are not fluent in the language of the region where they were born. And they are still successful in convincing the policy makers that English medium is the way to go in education – to the detriment of India.
There is no doubt that Indian children are intelligent – in all likelihood more intelligent than their western counterparts. An NRI based in Seattle and Gurugram, Sankrant Sanu, tested the intelligence of Indian and American children via a non-verbal IQ test. Village children (from Haryana) came out on top. They outperformed their peers in Delhi and in the US. In one village over 30 per cent scored over 90th percentile which means that out of 100 Indian children over 30 were as intelligent as the topmost 10 out of 100 American children. It was an extraordinary result.
Yet in 2009, India got a severe shock, which should have woken her up, but this wake-up call was not heeded. For the first time, India took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretariat (OECD). Around half a million 15- year old students from 74 countries were tested for two hours in maths, science and reading skills. Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu students were chosen to take part, as these states were doing well in education.
When the results were out, there was celebration in Asia. Asian countries were leading the list and had much higher ranks than Europe or USA – with one shocking exception: India came on rank 73 – second last, beating only Kyrgyzstan. The best Himachal kids were 100 points lower than their average peers in Singapore and 250 points lower than the top performers. It was a huge embarrassment. Indian experts explained that the students faced ‘language difficulty’. It was true. The problem was the language. The tests were held in the mother tongue of the respective countries: German in Germany, Japanese in Japan, but English in India. Yet there was no serious introspection.
Ever since, India did not take part in the 3-yearly PISA test, but in 2021 Kendra Vidyalayas are expected to take part – again students in English medium. There is probably the hope that those students will do better, as their parents, being in government service, are likely to speak good English. Yet is this representative for India? Is it not cheating India?
Being German, I know that fluency in English doesn’t come easy. But when I sometimes advocated that Indians should study in their mother tongue including in higher education, there was always opposition from Indians fluent in English. They don’t seem to get the difference between studying in English medium and studying English as a subject. Nobody advocates not learning English. But having to read textbooks, question papers, and write essays in an alien language is too much for students and the PISA study proved the obvious.
If we need more proof, we only need to look to certain European countries today to realise that students don’t do well if they don’t understand the language. Sweden and Germany had a significant drop in their ranking in the latest PISA test in 2015, and I dare to predict that Germany will drop even further in 2018. The reason is simple: even after a year of intensive German language classes for migrant children, these children don’t speak German well enough to be good in their studies.
These migrant children at least attend German lessons for one year before they can join the regular classes. In India, children from homes where parents don’t speak any English are put into English medium schools with no preparation whatsoever. This is a disaster. I really wonder how this can be allowed. It should be obvious that it is a huge blunder. Yet it is not only allowed but was even encouraged: Under the previous government, millions of students changed from government schools to third-rate, private ‘English’ schools, which popped up everywhere. This craze for ‘English schools’ may have been deliberately fanned by interests who don’t want a strong India, for example the Church. Parents, who do not know English, were made to believe that “English school” is the best for their children.
It is not the best but the worst. Where in the world would children be sent to a school where the teachers speak in a foreign language? Just imagine the plight of the kids. They learn to spell and can read after a while, but they don’t know the meaning of what they read. They will be left in a limbo: they are neither good in English, nor in their mother tongue. And they will dread going to schools. Forget about a happy childhood where it is fun to learn. It is a perfect recipe for teaching in vain, because no learning happens.
Any surprise that even in 5th standard, kids cannot form simple English sentences and just stare at their textbooks when their parents tell them ‘to study’. They may not miss much if they don’t understand their social study or history books, because the content is often not worth learning. But the situation is serious when it gets to maths and science. Kids cannot solve even the simplest of tasks in maths like: “put the numbers in ascending order”. The textbook authors cannot imagine that the instruction is not clear, but if you don’t know English: put, number, order, ascending… all this is a mystery. Naturally the children lose self-confidence.
Yet India is huge and the majority of people managed to keep their culture and India’s strength alive and their innate intelligence and competence intact. Their children went to schools where mother tongue was the medium of instruction. They understood what they read and could freely express themselves.
It would be interesting to find out, how many ISRO scientists, or generally students in the science and maths stream had studied till 12th class in their mother tongue. It may well be the majority. It would also be interesting to find out how students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, who attend vernacular schools, fare in the PISA test. They surely would not be at the bottom of the ranking list.
Indians have brains and the world knows it. But in English medium their great potential is suppressed and not tapped. Except for the tiny minority who speak English at home, the great majority of Indian students are at a huge disadvantage compared to students in other countries. It is a huge disadvantage also for India.
Isn’t it about time to phase out this colonial hangover of English medium schools? The argument that English is needed as link language is no argument in favour of English MEDIUM. Why can’t Indian students learn English like students all over the world do – as a subject? Sanskrit, too, needs to be revived in a big way to open up the treasure that is hidden in the Vedic texts. The value of Sanskrit is recognised all over the world. It is the most perfect language, and especially suitable in fields like IT. It has strength, dignity, beauty. It develops the brain and improves the character. Indians have a great advantage here, as their regional languages are connected with Sanskrit and it is much easier for them to learn it. It is truly incomprehensible why Sanskrit was sidelined – of all places in India.
Even Sanskrit medium education would be much easier than English medium and far more beneficial for an all-round development of the students. It would be worthwhile to find out whether in the long run, Sanskrit can be introduced as the medium in education. It is not yet too late to give Sanskrit another chance.
Imagine if India had IITs and IIMs in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi… The technical terms could be sourced from Sanskrit and would be the same all over India. Students would have an advantage in many fields, for example in artificial intelligence, which is an important issue today. They would be free from the burden of English textbooks, and could freely express themselves. There is a lot of talk about “the right to freedom of expression”.  Yet the greatest curb on freedom of expression is ignored. It happens in English medium education all over India. Students cannot say what they want to say, because they lack the vocabulary. Those, who have a natural talent for languages, can become translators, and translation apps, too, can be used to facilitate communication.
Committees have been instituted, who look into improving the education, yet they deal mostly with the content. But what is the use of good content when the students don’t understand it? The most important issue is the language issue. This needs to be sorted out first. Suggestions exist, for example in “The English Medium Myth”, which are worth considering. The result of the PISA test, too, must be analysed honestly and consequences be drawn.
Before Muslim invaders destroyed the centers of learning, India was known as a knowledge hub. She was the Vishwaguru. To reach this status again, common sense demands that students need to understand what they are taught. It means they need to study in their mother tongue. Further, Sanskrit should be taught right from the start as it optimally develops the child’s potential.
Let there also be some international schools and courses at universities in English medium for expats or those who want to go abroad, like in European countries.
If even tiny Denmark and Israel manage to teach higher education in their mother tongue, surely the big Indian states will be capable to do this and translate the existing syllabus or even better, source new material including for higher studies. Only then justice is done to the great potential of Indian youth. Only then India will truly shine.
By Maria Wirth
Alka·  · Reply→
Ma’am , agree with u whole heartedly. Importance of English is and should be as a medium of communication, as the imperialism has made that a common language the world over and therefore as u have said English needs to continue as a subject.
↧

Rama Setu -- Science Channel report on an ancient land bridge linking India and Sri Lanka (5 min.)

January 1, 2018, 3:35 pm
↧

The history of India in one exhibition. Zebu is an Indus Script hypertext signifies pōḷa 'magnetite ore'

January 1, 2018, 5:57 pm
$
0
0

https://tinyurl.com/y7elpkrl


A note on the zebu, bos indicus: This is an Indus Script hypertext to signifyपोळ pōḷa, 'Zebu, bos indicus' rebus: पोळ pōḷa, 'magnetite, ferrite ore.'


Many examples from 8000+ inscriptions of Sarasvati Civilization at
 


S. Kalyanaramaan, Sarasvati Research Centre

The history of India in one exhibition

  • 1 January 2018

An ancient Indian stone tool shaped like tear drop that dates back more than a million yearsImage copyrightSHARMA CENTRE FOR HERITAGE EDUCATION, CHENNAI
Image captionThis hand axe is more than a million years old and one of the oldest stone tools found in Tamil Nadu state

A rare collection spanning two million years of history is on display in an exhibition in the Indian city of Mumbai.
The India and the World: A History in Nine Stories exhibition is chronologically divided into nine sections that together account for 228 artefacts, from sculptures and pottery to portraits and drawings.
It opened on 11 November at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai's biggest museum. It will run until 18 February 2018, after which it is expected to travel to the capital Delhi.
Its aim, according to CSMVS director Sabyasachi Mukherjee, is "to explore connections and comparisons between India and the rest of the world".
The collection contains more than 100 artefacts from museums and private collections in India that capture key moments in the subcontinent's history.
These are displayed in connection with what was happening elsewhere in the world at the time. The exhibition also includes 124 objects on loan from The British Museum in London, many of which have never travelled beyond the museum until now.

A terracotta pot with a bull and other animals on it, 3500–2800 BCImage copyrightTAPI COLLECTION OF PRAFUL AND SHILPA SHAH, SURAT

The "Balochistan Pot" (3500BC-2800BC) is made of terracotta. It was found in Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Balochistan province in what is now Pakistan.
Like other vessels found in the region, it is painted in multiple colours - a technique known as polychromy that was common in ancient cultures. The pottery reveals a knowledge of pigments derived from various metal oxides.
These pots were used for cooking and storage but also served a ceremonial purpose since they were found in graves as well.

A humped bull with gold horns made of banded agate and gold, Harappan period, About 1800 BC, Pur village, Bhiwani Khera, Haryana, IndiaImage copyrightHARYANA STATE ARCHAEOLOGY AND MUSEUMS

The humped bull with gold horns (1800BC) is from the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation, which thrived in parts of northern India and Pakistan.
The bull was discovered in the north Indian state of Haryana. The gold horns were also common in west Asia, while the agate was quarried in western India.

An edict of Emperor Ashoka, Basalt, Mauryan dynasty, , NallasoparaImage copyrightCSMVS

This inscription on basalt rock (250BC) carries the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, who ruled one of the largest empires in ancient India, including most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Ashoka was believed to have renounced war and violence in favour of a more peaceful path. He spread his philosophy through inscriptions, which were put up across the Mauryan empire. The above fragment is from the ancient port of Sopara near Mumbai.

A sculpture of a Kushan king made of spotted red sandstoneImage copyrightNATIONAL MUSEUM, NEW DELHI

This sculpture (AD150), made of spotted red sandstone, is believed to be that of a Kushan king. The Kushans ruled most of northern India and parts of central Asia in the first century AD. It likely belonged to a large statue originally.
Many of these sculptures were found near Mathura, a town in northern India that was the capital of the Kushan empire.

A sandstone statue of a tirthankara or teacher in Jainism, an ancient Indian religion.Image copyrightBIHAR MUSEUM, PATNA

This sandstone statue (200BC-AD100) is thought to be one of the earliest known images of a tirthankara (teacher) in Jainism, an ancient Indian religion.
It was found in Patna, the capital of India's Bihar state, which was the seat of many powerful Indian empires.
This statue would have served as a focus for meditation because the arms hang by the sides in a familiar Jain "posture of detachment", known as kayotsarga.

A bronze Buddha statue with a flame on top of the head that symbolises wisdom.Image copyrightCSMVS, MUMBAI

The bronze Buddha (AD900-AD1000) comes from a port town in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The town was a major centre of production for Buddhist imagery during the Chola dynasty, which ruled large parts of the country's south.
The flame on top of the Buddha's head is symbolic of his wisdom. The iconography of the flame influenced images of the Buddha in Sri Lanka and South East Asia.

A portrait of Mughal emperor Jahangir holding a small image of the Virgin Mary made with watercolour and gold on paper.Image copyrightNATIONAL MUSEUM, NEW DELHI

The portrait (AD1620) of Mughal emperor Jahangir holding a small image of the Virgin Mary is made from watercolours and gold on paper. It comes from the part of the northern India state of Uttar Pradesh that was the capital of the Mughal empire.
Poetic inscriptions that surround the smaller portrait ask for strength and protection for Jahangir so he can rise to the challenges of kingship.
The Virgin Mary, known as Maryam in the Quran, occupies a prominent place among women in the holy book and became an epithet for Mughal queens.

A drawing on paper of Mughal Emperor Jahangir receiving an officer by Dutch artist Rembrandt.Image copyrightTHE BRITISH MUSEUM

The drawing of Mughal Emperor Jahangir (AD1656-AD1661) is by Dutch artist Rembrandt. He was fascinated by the courtly life that was often the subject of Mughal miniature paintings.
Many Mughal miniatures reached Europe through Dutch trade and Rembrandt is known to have owned several of them and used them as inspiration for his own work.

A wooden charkha or spinning wheelImage copyrightMANI BHAVAN GANDHI SANGRAHALAYA, MUMBAI

The wooden charkha, or spinning wheel, (1915-1948) became a powerful symbol of civil resistance in India's fight for independence from Britain.
It was adopted by Mahatma Gandhi to promote self-reliance among Indians. He encouraged people to spin for half an hour every day, arguing that swaraj, or self-rule, was only possible if people rejected British goods, including the cloth spun in mills overseas. Instead, he urged Indians to weave and wear only what was made in India.
This charkha comes from Mani Bhavan in Mumbai, which was the "headquarters" of Gandhi's political movement for 17 years.
The exhibition is a collaboration between CSMVS, Mumbai, The National Museum, Delhi and The British Museum, London.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42408564
↧
↧

Israeli archaeologists find 2,700 year old 'governor of Jerusalem' seal impression

January 1, 2018, 7:32 pm
$
0
0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2qzA15Z52Y

Israeli archaeologists find 2,700 year old 'governor of Jerusalem' seal impression


Published on Jan 1, 2018


Israeli archaeologists unveiled on Monday a 2,700-year-old clay seal impression which they said belonged to a biblical governor of Jerusalem. The artifact, inscribed in an ancient Hebrew script as "belonging to the governor of the city", was likely attached to a shipment or sent as a souvenir on behalf of the governor, the most prominent local position held in Jerusalem at the time, the Israel Antiquities Authority said. The impression, the size of a small coin, depicts two standing men, facing each other in a mirror-like manner and wearing striped garments reaching down to their knees. It was unearthed near the plaza of Judaism's Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.

↧

Revisiting 'Chatrams': The Indic dormitories that were more than just that -- Aravindan Neelakandan

January 1, 2018, 8:46 pm
$
0
0

Revisiting ‘Chatrams’: The Indic Dormitories That Were More Than Just That

by 
An entrance to a Chatram
Snapshot
  • It is time to realise the cultural capital, actively pursue the cause of the endangered cultural assets that Chatrams are and if possible make them functional again.
There is a general belief that the institution of social welfare is a European contribution to India. Colonial studies of Indian culture and society repeatedly stereotyped traditional Hinduism as inward-looking, life-negating and hence lacking a social conscience. For almost two centuries colonialists and missionaries indulged in crude stereotyping of Hindus as uncaring for the fellow human beings. This view was further reinforced by scholarly missionary workers like Dr Albert Schweitzer. For him, Hinduism and Buddhism because of their doctrines of Karma and Maya negate life and this world. According to Dr Schweitzer, on the other hand, Christianity affirms the reality of the world along with the human situation in it, which in turn makes social service an ethical obligation for Christendom.
Evangelical propaganda: Christianity alone cares for fellow humanity.Evangelical propaganda: Christianity alone cares for fellow humanity.
To this day many Indians, intellectuals included, have internalised these views. There are also ideological vested interests – Hindu-phobia that forms part of the academic and political discourse in post-independent India has its roots in colonial aversion to Hinduism and Indian culture. So, while the Vivekananda-Gandhi school rejected and resisted the negative stereotyping of Hindu culture and spirituality by the colonial-evangelical school of social studies, in post-independent India, the dominant Nehruvian-Marxist school, which has a stranglehold on the academic and political narrative, embraced and reinforced the stereotyping for decades.
From the fabricated image of Theresa of Calcutta caring for those dying on the streets of Calcutta, flashed across international media, to movies of Kollywood and Bollywood showing Christian institutions as the only place of solace and hope for the downtrodden victims, the concept of Hindu deficiency in social service has been reinforced again and again.
So what is the truth? For this writer at least, the moment of truth came while reading an obscure ‘Sthala purana’ – the puranic history of a sacred place, of what is now an ordinary village in Tamil Nadu but still the place of a traditional Saivite Math – Thiruvaavaduthurai. The name, in Tamil, means the place where the Goddess Parvati in the form of a cow, made reparations and became one with Siva. The Stala Purana was written in Tamil by a Saivaite seer-poet Swaminatha Munivar, 250-300 years ago. The Sthala purana itself is based on the ‘Go-Mukthi-Kshetra-Mahatmyam’ in the Rudra Samhita of Skanda Purana.
The Sthala Purana has quite a few verses which showcase the way the poet looked at how an ideal society and state should function. In these verses, the poet mentions the kind of social services that should be rendered by both individuals as well as institutions. Here are a few:
Easing the sufferings of those struck with poverty or those who chant the Vedas, those in prison, and religious people of the diverse six sects; feeding the cow; cremating the unclaimed the corpses (or helping those who are too poor to even afford a cremation); providing medical care for unsupported pregnant women; nurturing the children who have no mothers; donating milk; providing ocular medications; providing people with medicine, palm leaves, oil and glasses; helping others to execute their duties; helping marriage ceremonies; running water donation points; creation of ponds; creating forests; laying of good roads; installing stones in which milch cows can rub their back; providing food for animals; donating dresses; giving butchers the just money and liberating the animals which they hold for slaughtering;installing chatrams; taking care of the welfare of washermen and barbers; donating good dishes to the (poor) who may desire to taste them; ...
When I first read these verses, I considered them as just poetic hyperbole – the product of the imagination of an ideal charity-based society. Even as imagination, the caring for those who in jail, caring for the welfare of the barbers and washermen etc. struck one as very noble deeds, far ahead of the time, not only in India but anywhere in the world. Even more puzzling was the mention of ocular medication. Ophthalmologists – eye doctors in a utopian imagination? That is a bit too much.
But the records of the Thanjore Marathas did speak of ophthalmologists and paediatricians rendering medical services. There were medical professionals stationed in the Chatrams, which were famous in the Chola province that was then under the Marathas, three hundred years ago.
In other words, the poet was not only describing an ideal vision but was also approximating his vision with the day-to-day reality of his times.
In the popular imagination, ‘Chatrams’ are just inn-like service providers to pilgrims. Often they fed the pilgrims free of cost and gave them a place to rest. However, as one looks inside the Chatrams, they turn out to be something far more than just pilgrim inns. They were also centres of learning of various arts and sciences for local students – both Brahmins and non-Brahmins. Chatrams also provided medical services. Primarily, they provided shelter to pilgrims, and also acted as centres where the local people interacted with the pilgrims. Chatrams were thus educational and cultural networks across the pilgrim highway of Thanjavur – the old Chola capital. The highway itself led to Rameswaram – one amongst the most famous pilgrim destinations for Indians.
Though the exhaustive records available to us come from the Thanjavur Maratha period, the concept of Chatrams in Tamil Nadu itself was very old; inscriptions speak of social service institutions like ‘Athula Salai’ or medicine houses for all people from the times of the imperial Cholas.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, dynasty intrigues and infighting made it possible for the British and Arcot Nawab to exert humiliating control over Thanjavur. By 1776, the kingdom under Thuljaji Bhonsle (1738–1787) had become a vassal of the British. Through the records, one can see how the British progressively choked the Chatrams. By 1799, the British resident-in-charge was reassigning the revenues for the Chatrams, often drastically reducing the financial support and hence the activities. By 1801, Thanjavur king Serfoji II Bhonsle (1777-1832) was writing a letter to the Resident requesting him to permit them to run the Chatrams. The letter provides an extraordinary insight into the manifold welfare activities that the Chatrams were undertaking. Here are a few excerpts from the letter:
I will now explain to you the nature and extent of the Charities dispensed by them - all travelers from the Bramin to the Paraiar inclusive, Pilgrims of every description, including Jogues, Jungums, Ateets and Byragies are fed with boiled Rice, those who do not chuse to eat the boiled Rice receive it unboiled with spices & c, these distributions continue till midnight when a bell rung and proclamation made requiring all those who have not been fed to appear and take the Rice prepared for them. ... In each Chetrum a teacher to each of the four vedums is appointed and a Schoolmaster, and Doctors, skillfiull in the cure of diseases, swellings and the poison of reptiles; all the orphans of strangers, who may come to the Chetrum are placed under the care of the Schoolmaster - they are also fed three times a day, and once in four days, they are annointed with oil - they receive medicine when they require it., cloths are also given to them and the utmost attention paid to them. They are instructed in the sciences to which they may express a preference, and after having obtained a competent knowledge of them the expences of their marriage are defrayed.
Letter Of Serfoji II Dated 20-1-1801 To Benjamin Torin The British Resident:in ‘Proceedings Of The Board Of Revenue’ (2.2.1801)
A stone elephant in the Mukthalambal Chatram built by Serfoji IIA stone elephant in the Mukthalambal Chatram built by Serfoji II
Even the educational institutions which were run, show a remarkable degree of egalitarianism compared to their counterparts anywhere in the world. For example in the 'Sarva Vidhyalaya' which was run at Thanjavur (which became Nava Vidhya Kalanidhi Sala in 1807) we know, that in 1785, there were 85 Brahmins who learned Vedic chanting whereas 385 other students studied six languages. The school also employed at least one woman - Chengamma who taught painting and was earning monthly income of four chakras. Later according to another document of the 129 students studying in this residential school there were 20 Brahmins, 27 were from the royal house, six were children of Sepoys, seven Shudras and 46 Maratha boys. The hostel had ten cooks, one accountant, one washerman and one barber. This school was located in, what is today called, the Saraswati Mahal.
The chatrams, this residential school as well as the Saraswati Mahal had many functional relations. For example, an 1827 document records that, 501 inscribing pen tools were sent from one chatram to Saraswati Mahal. Similarly books were lent to the schools run in the chatrams from the Saraswati Mahal.
When I decided to visit a chatram, as part of Swarajya Heritage documentation, I chose the Muktambal Chatram. Muktambal was the lover of Sarfoji II. They were in a live-in relation and she gave birth to two children, both of whom died during child birth. She too was not of good health and died at a very young age. As her last wish, she requested the king that a chatram be created in her name to serve people. By then, the decline of the chatrams had already begun.
But, even then, this chatram served society in diverse ways. This is evidenced by the fact that when the British resident John Fyfe visited this chatram in 1825, he recorded that there were five educational institutions attached to it. There were 641 students studying there and 4020 persons were fed thrice a day. Nine thousand rupees was spent every month for the salaries of those employed by the chatram. English too was part of the curriculum at the chatrams. According to records, a Vellala from Thirunelveli came to this chatram and finished his English studies. He was given Rs 10 when he went back home after his studies. Books from Saraswati Mahal in Thanjavur were lent to this chatram on a regular basis.
Instructions for the management of the chatrams given by Neelakanda Rao Anandha Rao Jadav - one of the ceremonial military officials, in 1838 shows how the chatrams were experiencing increasing financial constraints. Yet, the stress on service to society still remains. Here are the excerpts:
Do only needful expenses. Keep quarter of the revenue for maintenance. If you could not keep quarter of the revenue even then try to save money as much possible. The following categories should be fed at the Chatram: those who are destitute, who are not physically strong to earn a living, blind men, strangers to the place, travellers, handicapped, children, and old men. If any of the travelers became sick they should be treated with the physician in the Chatram and they should be given the prescribed food. ... Care should be taken not to feed the local lazy guys.
Prof. K.M. Venkataramaiah, Administration And Social Life Under The Maratha Rulers Of Thanjavur, Tamil University, 1984
As one travels from Kumbhakonam to where the Mukthambal chatram stands at Orathanadu, one passes through a small village called Thirupalathurai. Inside the Siva temple here, we find a unique structure which is ‘protected’. A board erected by the Tamil Nadu archaeology department says that the structure is a granary of older centuries. It was built by Raghunatha Nayakar (1600-1634) who ruled Thanjavur before the Marathas. The granary has the capacity of 3000 kalams (1 kalam = 96 padi and 1 padi = 14,400 rice grains).
Vishnu incarnated as a fish worshipping ShivaVishnu incarnated as a fish worshipping Shiva
As one passes through the serpentine roads that lead to the main road to Thanjavur, there is a small blink-and-you-miss village, Thiruchelur. As legend goes, Vishnu, in his first incarnation as a fish, worshiped Siva. A small Ganesha temple at the entrance to the village informs us that the temple had a historical connection to the Cholas and for centuries the villagers used to donate curd to any needy person during the summer months. The Ganesa is called ‘Dharma Ganesa’ and the Mandapam is called ‘Thayir Mandapam’ (or the curd Mandapam’).
From the time of the Cholas, they served the strangers with dignity - this small village. From the time of the Cholas, they served the strangers with dignity - this small village.
As one reaches the high way that connects to Thanjavur one finds an intriguing scene. This is a route commonly used by tourists and pilgrims. But those that choose to halt and refresh themselves have nothing but the trees lining the highways for shelter. There is nowhere else they can rest or refresh themselves.
If you are a pilgrim and cannot afford a hotel to stay, then you end up eating on the sides of the highway. What a fall from the <i>chatram</i> days!If you are a pilgrim and cannot afford a hotel to stay, then you end up eating on the sides of the highway. What a fall from the chatram days!
The historic irony unfolds further as one moves a little forward, as you see a ruined structure along a small water body - a dilapidated chatram. With some input and intelligent care, this beautiful chatram can still serve its original purpose as effectively as it did in the times in which it was built.
Not a temple but a ruined entrance to the ChatramNot a temple but a ruined entrance to the Chatram
Inside the ChatramInside the Chatram
A traditional water body by the side of the Chatram.A traditional water body by the side of the Chatram.
Chatram sculpture,Thanjavur: Churning of the milk ocean Chatram sculpture,Thanjavur: Churning of the milk ocean
Though there is today a separate department under the district collector for the upkeep of these chatrams, most of them have been encroached upon with their cultural capital left to erode and vanish.

At the entrance of Thanjavur too, one finds what should have been a chatram, but has sadly been encroached upon. Beautiful depictions like that of the samudram-manthan or the churning of the ocean for nectar being churned, have been left to meeth thier fate thanks to neglect and lack of maintenance. On the way from Thanjavur to Muktalambal Chatram one finds many such chatrams which are becoming extinct right in front of our eyes. And we are answerable to both our ancestors as well as posterity for what we have let happen to them.
Another ruined Chatram on the way to Mukthalambal ChatramAnother ruined Chatram on the way to Mukthalambal Chatram
Two more Chatrams on the way to Mukthambal Chatram, Oratha Nadu. All are in various states of ruin and neglect.Two more Chatrams on the way to Mukthambal Chatram, Oratha Nadu. All are in various states of ruin and neglect.
As we arrive at the Muktambal chatram, what strikes one first, is the care taken to build it. There is a lot of love and attention here - not just for the deceased beloved of the king but for the Dharmic activities that would go in her name. The king may have wanted to see the love for his beloved resonate in the form of gratitude in every beneficiary of the chatram. The memory of his beloved was honoured with the thankfulness and the happiness of every student who obtained knowledge here, every hungry person who received a meal here.

For a moment, one cannot help but think about that monument which has been flaunted as the symbol of love. But to digress on this tangent would be a 'secular' taboo. So let us stay with the Chatram here.
A pale ghost of its past grandeur: Mukthambal Chatram - a real gift of love to benefit humanity !A pale ghost of its past grandeur: Mukthambal Chatram - a real gift of love to benefit humanity !
Today, a private polytechnic institution is running some classes inside. A ghost of what it was intended to be, it shows the slow degradation that traditional institutions underwent under the British and the present regime. A good part of the Chatram is in ruins, what with party flags, left over liquor bottles strewn around and and roofs falling down. But, none of these can destroy the majestic beauty enshrined in the Chatram.
The Chatram is built like a chariot drawn by horsemen.The Chatram is built like a chariot drawn by horsemen.
Just two centuries ago, students came here to quench their thirst for knowledge and travellers came here to be freed of hunger.Just two centuries ago, students came here to quench their thirst for knowledge and travellers came here to be freed of hunger.
Chariot of serviceChariot of service
This chatram, this chariot of education, food security and medical services was not run by the steam of surplus created through colonial extermination of other people. It was pulled by the hard work and honestly-earned-money of the local farmers and other communities.
It is interesting to note that while the colonial discourse made Indian culture look like it is otherworldly and hence lacking in social conscience, actual observations by early East India Company officials differed. Here is what Dr John Howison (1797-1859) a high officer associated with East India Company, who had his own cultural prejudices against Hindus, recorded about the Chatram-type institutions in India.
In every part of India are to be found monuments of the munificence and charity of private individuals, in the shape of reservoirs for water, pagodas, wells, or caravanseras; but of whatever description these may be, they are invariably intended for the benefit of mankind. He who expends thousands in the formation of a tank which shall supply with water thousands of his fellow-creatures, who would otherwise be liable to suffer greatest extremities from drought, surely deserves the name of a benefactor of the human race; as also does he that builds a house for the shelter and convenience of travellers in some desolate spot where no other accomodation is to be found. Works of public charity are so much esteemed by the Hindoos, that those who cannot accomplish them on a large scale, will sometimes hire a person to sit under a tree by the road-side with vessels of cool water for the supply of thirsty passengers; or will monthly, on a particular day, give a quantity of grain to every mendicant who may present himself at their doors. Yet the detractors of the Hindoos do not hesitate to assert that all their acts of this kind proceed from ostentation. I will reply yo this only by remarking, that it would be well if a similar spirit of ostentation could be introduced into Europe, since it is attended with such happy effects in Hindostan. But a man may travel from the southern extremity of European continent to the polar regions without observing one monument of charity or utility which has been devised or erected by private munificence.
European Colonies, In Various Parts Of The World: Viewed In Their Social, Moral And Physical Condition,1834
Charm of the Chatram, a sculpture found in Mukthambal ChatramCharm of the Chatram, a sculpture found in Mukthambal Chatram
Chatram institutions show that India not only created institutional social service but created an innovative model that never asked for any obligation, physical or spiritual in return nor did the model depend on surplus created through colonialism. Christian charity, on the other hand, was created through colonial surplus and the rendering of charity enforced on the beneficiaries through theological colonialism. In other words, Hindu social service is totally rooted in this world, aimed at removing the misery and increasing the welfare of humanity (and also all life) in this world. Yet, thanks to the strong propaganda and tyranny of institutional discourse, Hindus too tend to believe that their religion is deficient in ethics and social conscience.
Dr. Edmund Weber, Professor of Comparative Religion at Goethe-University Frankfurt rightly observes:
It is indeed a horrible falsification of history what happened to the Hindu traditional charity. The propaganda of the colonial missionaries and churches didn’t want to admit the vast charitable activities, customs and institutions of Hindu seva. They wanted to show that only their Christianity is able to do charitable work, following the rule of nara seva while the Hindus had in mind only narayana seva, serving God. This propaganda was very successful so that even Hindus educated in Christian schools and coming from less poor background believed that prejudice.
Charity Of Religions With Special Reference To Hinduism, Islam And Christianity An Inter-Religious Perspective (Journal Of Religious Culture, No.213, 2016)
It is understandable that the British slowly and steadily choked the chatram institutions. It served their colonial and evangelical purposes. In distant Assam again, the network of Sattra has been the backbone of Asom culture. The Sattram institutions came to Assam with the Vaishnavism of Srimanta Sankara Deva (1449-1568). In later Vaishnavaite literature, Baikunthanatha Bhattadeva defined Sattra as the place where the devotee-pilgrims perform religious rites and practice nine-fold devotion. We find that throughout the national freedom movement, from the Bengal partition to the 'Quit India' movement, the Sattra institutions and the trustees of the Sattras, the Sattrathikaris helped the freedom movement dynamically. Assamese historian Dr Sagar Barua writes:
Accompanied by Krishnachandra Dev Goswami, the Deka Sattradikar of Garmur Sattra, Sri Sri Pitambaradeva himself visited neighbouring villages including the Mising inhabited areas, propagating Gandhiji’s message and enrolling Congress volunteers. When the Congress leaders were arrested Sri Sri Pitambaradeva took the leading part of the Congress in Jorhat. The active participation of the Sattradhikar of Garmur Sattra was a cause of alarm for the Government and hence it immediately imposed restrictions on the movement of Sri Sri Pitambardeva, confining him to the Sattra. ... In protest against it, Krishnachandra Dev Goswami of Deka Sattra came out to the streets and addressed large gatherings and advised people to make the (Quit India) movement a success. .... The Sattradhikar was put in jail and was detained for two years. ... The arrest of Sri Sri Pitambaradeva Goswami produced an unprecedented situation. The disciples of the Sattradhikar and people of the neighbouring villages took our processions holding flags and singing Viswa Bijayee Nam Japan.
‘Role Of Sattras In Indian Freedom Movement’, In , ‘Glimpses Of The Sattra Institution Of Asom’ , Vivekananda Kendra Institute Of Culture, Guwahati, 2006
Srimanta Sankara Deva and Sattras in AssamSrimanta Sankara Deva and Sattras in Assam
One can even say that the British averted a lot of trouble for them by weakening the chatrams in Tamil Nadu, though their optimal functioning could have prevented the death of millions of Indians during the great famine of 1877. But what baffles one is, the continuous ruthless destruction of these wonderful cultural and social assets in Independent India.
Perhaps such destruction is necessitated by the present Nehruvian-Marxist-Dravidian cabal that continues the colonial-evangelical legacy in our academic, political and cultural spheres. So it becomes important for all those who love India and who belong to the legacy of India's fight for independence to preserve these endangered cultural assets and if possible make them functional again realising their cultural capital.
PS: I thank Prof Balasubramaniam, who worked in the rare manuscripts section of Saraswati Mahal and also Sri Kannan of Kumbhakonam, without whose help and inputs this trip would not have happened.
↧
Search

National Water Grid for Bhārat, Rebirth of Vedic Sarasvati Doordarshan interview (31:17)

January 2, 2018, 5:13 am
↧

A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect"

January 2, 2018, 4:03 pm
$
0
0

A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect"

MRI scans show that memorizing ancient mantras increases the size of brain regions associated with cognitive function 

By  on A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect"


A hundred dhoti-clad young men sat cross-legged on the floor in facing rows, chatting amongst themselves. At a sign from their teacher the hall went quiet. Then they began the recitation. Without pause or error, entirely from memory, one side of the room intoned one line of the text, then the other side of the room answered with the next line. Bass and baritone voices filled the hall with sonorous prosody, every word distinctly heard, their right arms moving together to mark pitch and accent. The effect was hypnotic, ancient sound reverberating through the room, saturating brain and body. After 20 minutes they halted, in unison. It was just a demonstration. The full recitation of one of India´s most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Shukla Yajurveda, takes six hours.
I spent many years studying and translating Sanskrit, and became fascinated by its apparent impact on mind and memory. In India's ancient learning methods textual memorization is standard: traditional scholars, or pandits, master many different types of Sanskrit poetry and prose texts; and the tradition holds that exactly memorizing and reciting the ancient words and phrases, known as mantras, enhances both memory and thinking.

I had also noticed that the more Sanskrit I studied and translated, the better my verbal memory seemed to become. Fellow students and teachers often remarked on my ability to exactly repeat lecturers’ own sentences when asking them questions in class. Other translators of Sanskrit told me of similar cognitive shifts. So I was curious: was there actually a language-specific “Sanskrit effect” as claimed by the tradition?
When I entered the cognitive neuroscience doctoral program at the University of Trento (Italy) in 2011, I had the opportunity to start investigating this question. India's Vedic Sanskrit pandits train for years to orally memorize and exactly recite 3,000-year old oral texts ranging from 40,000 to over 100,000 words. We wanted to find out how such intense verbal memory training affects the physical structure of their brains. Through the India-Trento Partnership for Advanced Research (ITPAR), we recruited professional Vedic pandits from several government-sponsored schools in the Delhi region; then we used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at India’s National Brain Research Center to scan the brains of pandits and controls matched for age, gender, handedness, eye-dominance and multilingualism.
What we discovered from the structural MRI scanning was remarkable. Numerous regions in the brains of the pandits were dramatically larger than those of controls, with over 10 percent more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres, and substantial increases in cortical thickness. Although the exact cellular underpinnings of gray matter and cortical thickness measures are still under investigation, increases in these metrics consistently correlate with enhanced cognitive function.
Most interestingly for verbal memory was that the pandits' right hippocampus—a region of the brain that plays a vital role in both short and long-term memory—had more gray matter than controls across nearly 75 percent of this subcortical structure. Our brains have two hippocampi, one on the left and one on the right, and without them we cannot record any new information. Many memory functions are shared by the two hippocampi. The right is, however, more specialized for patterns, whether sound, spatial or visual, so the large gray matter increases we found in the pandits’ right hippocampus made sense: accurate recitation requires highly precise sound pattern encoding and reproduction. The pandits also showed substantially thickening of right temporal cortex regions that are associated with speech prosody and voice identity.
Our study was a first foray into imaging the brains of professionally trained Sanskrit pandits in India. Although this initial research, focused on intergroup comparison of brain structure, could not directly address the Sanskrit effect question (that requires detailed functional studies with cross-language memorization comparisons, for which we are currently seeking funding), we found something specific about intensive verbal memory training. Does the pandits’ substantial increase in the gray matter of critical verbal memory organs mean they are less prone to devastating memory pathologies such as Alzheimer's? We don't know yet, though anecdotal reports from India's Ayurvedic doctors suggest this may be the case. If so, this raises the possibility that verbal memory “exercising‘ or training might help elderly people at risk of mild cognitive impairment retard or, even more radically, prevent its onset.
If so, the training might need to be exact. One day I was filming four senior pandit teachers demonstrating the different recitation speeds. Partway into one session all four suddenly stopped. “What’s wrong?‘ I asked. “One of us made a slight error," came the response. "I don’t mind," I said. "Yes, but we do," and they restarted the entire recitation from the beginning. 
James Hartzell
James Hartzell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, in Spain; a Guest Researcher at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at University of Trento, in Italy, and a Consultant for the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, in New York.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-neuroscientist-explores-the-sanskrit-effect/?wt.mc=SA_Twitter-Share
↧
↧

The spirit of Hindu Law - Donald R. Davis (2010)

January 2, 2018, 4:27 pm
$
0
0
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/77046/frontmatter/9780521877046_frontmatter.pdf
The spirit of Hindu Law - Donald R. Davis (2010, Cambridge Univ. Press)

Law is too often perceived solely as state-based rules and institutions that provide a rational alternative to religious rites and ancestral customs. The Spirit of Hindu Law uses the Hindu legal tradition as a heuristic tool to question this view and reveal the close linkage between law and religion. Emphasizing the household, the family, and everyday relationships as additional social locations of law, it contends that law itself can be understood as a theology of ordinary life. An introduction to traditional Hindu law and jurisprudence, this book is structured around key legal concepts such as the sources of law and authority, the laws of persons and things, procedure, punishment and legal practice. It combines investigation of key themes from Sanskrit legal texts with discussion of Hindu theology and ethics, as well as thorough examination of broader comparative issues in law and religion. donald r. davis, jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Contents

List of tables page vi 
 Preface vii 
 Acknowledgments ix 
 List of abbreviations xi Introduction (dharmaśāstra) 1
1 Sources and theologies (pramāa) 25 
 2 Hermeneutics and ethics (mīmāmsā) 47 
 3 Debt and meaning ( a) 70 
 4 Persons and things (svatva) 89 
 5 Doubts and disputes (vyavahāra) 108 
 6 Rectitude and rehabilitation (da a) 128 
 7 Law and practice (ācāra) 144 
 Conclusion 166 
 Bibliography 180 
 Index 190 C

Tables

1 The three sources of dharma page 27 
2 Dharmas of the castes, showing the subordinate place of political rulership 34 
3 Technical scheme of how law is parallel to ritual 62 
4 The eighteen titles of law in Hindu jurisprudence (MDh) 77 
5 Property and the dharma of castes and life-stages 104 
6 Dharma as the integration of the transcendental, historical, and political 127 
7 Relationship of text and practice in Hindu law 147

Preface

A book with this title was supposed to have been written by my teacher, Richard Lariviere, in the University of Georgia’s “Spirit of the Laws” series. His higher calling into academic administration left a gap in the series that I always lamented. When I approached Richard and, through him and with his permission, Alan Watson, who edited the series, it became clear that there was no hope of placing one more volume in the old series. To my great delight, Cambridge agreed to publish the book, which is certainly very different from what Richard would have done, though still inspired by his ideas and still very much in line with the series’ intention to provide basic surveys of law and religion in the major traditions of the world. There are three audiences for the book: Indologists and scholars of Religious Studies and Legal Studies. Indologists will find a certain amount of technical investigation of key discussions from the Sanskrit texts, though not as much as some may like and much of it in the notes rather than in the main text. Where possible, I use standard translations of the Hindu legal texts and do not provide the Sanskrit original there. In most cases, I give my own translations, especially of the medieval commentaries, in which case I also provide the original text in a note. Some of the Indological discussions attempt an original contribution to the field, while others simply restate the results of older work. Scholars of religion should expect discussions of Hindu theology and ethics, though in (often legal) terms that they may not be quite used to. In many ways, this book is a further elaboration of my earlier thesis about the pivotal, indeed definitional, role of dharma in the Sanskrit legal texts within Hinduism. I am increasingly convinced that Hindu studies have become overly focused on mythological, philosophical, and ritual issues at the expense of other fundamental religious elements, including law. Finally, scholars of law will find first an ambitious argument about law itself and its intimate connection to religion, especially theology, and to ordinary life. Within this argument, however, I try also to demonstrate important insights into persistent problems in legal and religious studies generally through an examination of the Hindu law materials. Here I primarily suggest lines of thought that might enable Hindu law to find a more secure and productive place within comparative legal studies and legal history. My great hope for the book is that scholars in each group will find both something familiar and sound from their disciplinary perspective and something fresh and attractive about my use of disciplinary approaches and ideas that are new to them. I have brought these fields together in the hope of creating something innovative and useful for each of them, while acknowledging the risk of displeasing those who may not find such interdisciplinarity as persuasive and helpful as I do. Throughout the book, I have tried to restate complicated arguments in plain language and make use of everyday analogies in order bridge the disciplinary divides that have for too long prevented a more productive confluence of approaches to law and religion. 

Abbreviations

BDh Baudhāyana-Dharmasūtra 
DhK Dharma-Kośa 
GDh Gautama-Dharmasūtra 
KA Kaundnīya-Arthaśāstra 
MDh Mānava-Dharmaśāstra Medh Manubhāya of Medhātithi 
MNP Mīmāsānyāyaprakāśa 
NS Nārada-Sm ti PMādh Parāśara-Mādhavīya 
PMS Pūrva-Mīmā sā-Sūtras 
SC Sm ticandrikā 
VaDh Vasi ha-Dharmasūtra YS Yājñavalkya-Sm ti 

Timothy Lubin et al., Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (2010).

http://cal.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cal/article/view/26448/19627

Source: Critical Analysis of Law Vol 3, No 1 (2016)

The Varieties of Ancient Legal History Today Clifford Ando* 

Abstract 

The article surveys, contextualizes and explicates the arguments of the eight papers featured in the forum on “The New Ancient Legal History” in 3:1 Critical Analysis of Law (2016).
↧

Continuum of Sarasvati Civilization in Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) culture from ca. 1200 BCE

January 2, 2018, 7:48 pm
$
0
0
https://tinyurl.com/y9a2fgmt

I do not know what functions these Pu-Cu (Lead-copper) alloy tokens from ca. 1200 BCE signify. Could they be calling cards to signify the metalsmithy artisans' competence to create alloys -- a continuum of Sarasvati Civilization Tin-Bronze Age from 4th millennium BCE?

Pb-Cu alloy tokens.


Nothern Black Polished Ware layer found at Maner, near Old Pataliputra

Could these be examples of continuation of the specialisation of alloying metals by artisans who documente their wealth-creating metalwork on Indus Script hypertexts from ca. 3300 BCE?

NBPW sites
"The Northern Black Polished Ware culture (abbreviated NBPW or NBP) is an urban Iron Age culture of the Indian Subcontinent, lasting c. 700–200 BCE, succeeding the Painted Grey Ware culture and Black and red ware culture. It developed beginning around 700 BC, in the late Vedic period, and peaked from c. 500–300 BC, coinciding with the emergence of 16 great states or mahajanapadas in Northern India, and the subsequent rise of the Mauryan Empire...The diagnostic artifact and namesake of this culture is the Northern Black Polished Ware, a luxury style of burnished pottery used by elites. This period is associated with the emergence of South Asia's first large cities since the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization; this re-urbanization was accompanied by massive embankments and fortifications, significant population growth, increased social stratification, wide-ranging trade networks, specialized craft industries (e.g., carving of ivory, conch shells, and semi-precious stones), a system of weights, punch-marked coins, and writing (in the form of Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, including inscribed stamp seals)...Some notable NBPW sites, associated with the mahajanapadas, are as follows:
Other sites where Northern Black Polished Ware have been found are Mahasthangarh, Chandraketugarh, Wari-Bateshwar, Bangarh and Mangalkot (all in Bangladeshand West Bengal, India).
A number of ancient sites where the NBPW has been found, such as Ayodhya and Sringaverapura, are mentioned in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana...After recent excavations at Gotihwa in Nepal, archaeologist Giovanni Verardi by radiocarbon datings says that proto-NBPW is at least from 900 BC. Excavations in India at Ayodhya, Juafardih near Nalanda, and Kolhua near Vaisali, show even earlier radiocarbon datings around 1200 BC. Based on this, historian Carlos Aramayo proposes the following chronology: Proto-NBPW (1200–800 BC); Early NBPW (800–300 BC); and Late NBPW (300–100 BC)."https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/IndiaArchaeology/conversations/messages/14786

Fragment of Northern Black Polished Ware, 500-100 BCE, Sonkh, Uttar Pradesh. Government Museum, Mathura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Black_Polished_Ware

S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
January 3, 2018
↧

Indus Script hypertext, dot + circles = dāya 'one in dice' + vaṭṭa 'circle' rebus dhā̆vaḍ 'smelter'

January 2, 2018, 8:45 pm
$
0
0
https://tinyurl.com/y8h49x4t
 32 minutes ago
A Harappan button. Note how they had an instrument to precisely mark small circles of various radii
Button tablet. Harappa. Dotted circles. 

File:Musée GR de Saint-Romain-en-Gal 27 07 2011 13 Des et jetons.jpg
Dices and chips in bone, Roman time. Gallo-Roman Museum of Saint-Romain-en-Gal-Vienne. 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mus%C3%A9e_GR_de_Saint-Romain-en-Gal_27_07_2011_13_Des_et_jetons.jpg


Indus Script hypertext/hieroglyph: Dotted circle: दाय 1 [p= 474,2] dāya n. game , play Pan5cad.; mfn. ( Pa1n2. 3-1 , 139 ; 141) giving , presenting (cf. शत- , गो-); m. handing over , delivery Mn. viii , 165 (Monier-Williams)

தாயம் tāyam :Number one in the game of dice; கவறுருட்ட விழும் ஒன்று என்னும் எண். Colloq. (Tamil)

rebus: dhāˊtu n. ʻ substance ʼ RV., m. ʻ element ʼ MBh., ʻ metal, mineral, ore (esp. of a red colour) ʼ Mn., ʻ ashes of the dead ʼ lex., ʻ *strand of rope ʼ (cf. tridhāˊtu -- ʻ threefold ʼ RV., ayugdhātu -- ʻ having an uneven number of strands ʼ KātyŚr.). [√dhā]Pa. dhātu -- m. ʻ element, ashes of the dead, relic ʼ; KharI. dhatu ʻ relic ʼ; Pk. dhāu -- m. ʻ metal, red chalk ʼ; N. dhāu ʻ ore (esp. of copper) ʼ; Or. ḍhāu ʻ red chalk, red ochre ʼ (whence ḍhāuā ʻ reddish ʼ; M. dhāū, dhāv m.f. ʻ a partic. soft red stone ʼ(whence dhā̆vaḍ m. ʻ a caste of iron -- smelters ʼ, dhāvḍī ʻ composed of or relating to iron ʼ); -- Si. dā ʻrelic ʼ; -- S. dhāī f. ʻ wisp of fibres added from time to time to a rope that is being twisted ʼ, L. dhāī˜ f.(CDIAL 6773)  धाव (p. 250) dhāva m f A certain soft, red stone. Baboons are said to draw it from the bottom of brooks, and to besmear their faces with it. धावड (p. 250) dhāvaḍa m A class or an individual of it. They are smelters of iron. In these parts they are Muhammadans. धावडी (p. 250) dhāvaḍī a Relating to the class धावड. Hence 2 Composed of or relating to iron. (Marathi).

PLUS

Hieroglyph: vaṭṭa'circle'. 

Thus, together, the hypertext reads rebus dhā̆vaḍ'smelter'

The dotted circle hypertexts link with 1. iron workers called धावड (p. 250) dhāvaḍa and 2. miners of  Mosonszentjános, Hungary; 3. Gonur Tepe metalworkers, metal traders and 4. the tradition of  अक्ष-- पटल [p= 3,2] n. court of law; depository of legal document Ra1jat. Thus, अक्ष on Indus Script Corpora signify documents, wealth accounting ledgers of metal work with three red ores. Akkha2 [Vedic akṣa, prob. to akṣi & Lat. oculus, "that which has eyes" i. e. a die; cp. also Lat. ālea game at dice (fr.* asclea?)] a die D i.6 (but expld at DA i.86 as ball -- game: guḷakīḷa); S i.149 = A v.171 = Sn 659 (appamatto ayaŋ kali yo akkhesu dhanaparājayo); J i.379 (kūṭ˚ a false player, sharper, cheat) anakkha one who is not a gambler J v.116 (C.: ajūtakara). Cp. also accha3.   -- dassa (cp. Sk. akṣadarśaka) one who looks at (i. e. examines) the dice, an umpire, a judge Vin iii.47; Miln 114, 327, 343 (dhamma -- nagare). -- dhutta one who has the vice of gambling D ii.348; iii.183; M iii.170; Sn 106 (+ itthidhutta & surādhutta). -- vāṭa fence round an arena for wrestling J iv.81. (? read akka -- ).

దాయము (p. 588) dāyamu dāyamu. [Skt.] n. Heritage. పంచుకొనదగినతంత్రిసొమ్ము. Kinship, heirsh జ్ఞాతిత్వము. A gift, ఈవి. దాయము, దాయలు or దాయాలు dāyamu. [Tel.] n. A certain game among girls. గవ్వలాట; గవ్వలు పాచికలు మొదలగువాని సంఖ్య. (Telugu)
ஏர்த்தாயம் ēr-t-tāyam , n. < id. +. Ploughing in season; பருவகாலத்துழவு. (W.)காணித்தாயவழக்கு kāṇi-t-tāya-vaḻakku, n. < id. +. Dispute between coparceners about hereditary land; பங்காளிகளின் நிலவழக்கு. (J.)தர்மதாயம் tarma-tāyam , n. < id. + dāya. Charitable inams; தருமத்துக்கு விடப்பட்ட மானியம். (G. Sm. D. I, ii, 55.)தாயம் tāyam 

, n. < dāya. 1. Patrimony, inheritance, wealth of an ancestor capable of inheritance and partition (R. F.); பாகத்திற்குரிய பிதிரார்ச்சிதப்பொருள். 2. Share; பங்கு. (யாழ். அக.) 3. Paternal relationship; தந்தைவழிச் சுற்றம். (யாழ். அக.) 4. A fall of the dice; கவறுருட்ட விழும் விருத்தம். முற்பட இடுகின்ற தாயம் (கலித். 136, உரை). 5. Cubical pieces in dice-play; கவறு. (யாழ். அக.) 6. Number one in the game of dice; கவறுருட்ட விழும் ஒன்று என்னும் எண். Colloq. 7. Gift, donation; கொடை. (யாழ். அக.) 8. Good opportunity; சமயவாய்ப்பு. (யாழ். அக.) 9. Affliction, distress; துன்பம். (யாழ். அக.) 10. Delay, stop; தாக்காட்டு. (W.) 11. A child's game played with seeds or shells on the ground; குழந்தை விளையாட்டுவகை. 12. Excellence, superiority; மேன்மை. தாயமாம் பதுமினிக்கு (கொக்கோ. 1, 28).தாயப்பதி tāya-p-pati 


 n. < id. +. City or town got by inheritance; தனக்கு உரிமையாகக் கிடைத்துள்ள வாழிடம்  


அல்லது 


 ஊர். தாயப்பதிகள் தலைச்சிறந் தெங்கெங்கும் (திவ். திருவாய். 8, 6, 9).தாயபாகம் tāya-pākam

, n. < dāyabhāga. 1. Division of an estate among heirs; ஞாதிகள் தம்முள் பிரித்துக்கொள்ளும் உரிமைப்பங்கு. 2. A treatise on the Hindu law of inheritance by Jīmūtavākaṉa; பாகப்பிரிவினையைப்பற்றி ஜீமூத வாகனர் இயற்றிய நூல். 3. Chapter on the law of inheritance in the Mitākṣara of Vijñāṉēšvara, 12th c. (R. F.); பன்னிரண்டாம் நூற்றாண்டில் விஞ் ஞானேசுரர் இயற்றிய மிதாக்ஷரத்தில் தாயவுரிமை யைப்பற்றிக் கூறும் பகுதி.தாயம் tāyam, n. < dāya. 1. Patrimony, inheritance, wealth of an ancestor capable of inheritance and partition (R. F.); பாகத்திற்குரிய பிதிரார்ச்சிதப்பொருள். 2. Share; பங்கு. (யாழ். அக.) 3. Paternal relationship; தந்தைவழிச் சுற்றம். (யாழ். அக.) 4. A fall of the dice; கவறுருட்ட விழும் விருத்தம். முற்பட இடுகின்ற தாயம் (கலித். 136, உரை). 5. Cubical pieces in dice-play; கவறு. (யாழ். அக.) 6. Number one in the game of dice; கவறுருட்ட விழும் ஒன்று என்னும் எண். Colloq. 7. Gift, donation; கொடை. (யாழ். அக.) 8. Good opportunity; சமயவாய்ப்பு. (யாழ். அக.) 9. Affliction, distress; துன்பம். (யாழ். அக.) 10. Delay, stop; தாக்காட்டு. (W.) 11. A child's game played with seeds or shells on the ground; குழந்தை விளையாட்டுவகை. 12. Excellence, superiority; மேன்மை. தாயமாம் பதுமினிக்கு (கொக்கோ. 1, 28).


 See the dotted circle hieroglyph on the bottom of the sacred device, sangaḍa
Kot Diji type seals with concentric circles from (a,b) Taraqai Qila (Trq-2 &3, after CISI 2: 414), (c,d) Harappa(H-638 after CISI 2: 304, H-1535 after CISI 3.1:211), and (e) Mohenjo-daro (M-1259, aftr CISI 2: 158). (From Fig. 7 Parpola, 2013).

Distribution of geometrical seals in Greater Indus Valley during the early and *Mature Harappan periods (c. 3000 - 2000 BCE). After Uesugi 2011, Development of the Inter-regional interaction system in the Indus valley and beyond: a hypothetical view towards the formation of the urban society' in: Cultural relagions betwen the Indus and the Iranian plateau during the 3rd millennium BCE, ed. Toshiki Osada & Michael Witzel. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora 7. Pp. 359-380. Cambridge, MA: Dept of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University: fig.7

Dotted circles and three lines on the obverse of many Failaka/Dilmun seals are read rebus as hieroglyphs: 


Hieroglyph: ḍāv m. ʻdice-throwʼ rebus: dhāu 'ore'; dã̄u ʻtyingʼ, ḍāv m. ʻdice-throwʼ read rebus: dhāu 'ore' in the context of glosses: dhā̆vaḍ m. ʻa caste of iron -smelters', dhāvḍī ʻcomposed of or relating to ironʼ. Thus, three dotted circles signify: tri-dhāu, tri-dhātu 'three ores' (copper, tin, iron).


A (गोटा) gōṭā Spherical or spheroidal, pebble-form. (Marathi) Rebus: khoṭā ʻalloyedʼ (metal) (Marathi) खोट [khōṭa] f A mass of metal (unwrought or of old metal melted down); an ingot or wedge (Marathi). P. khoṭ  m. ʻalloyʼ  (CDIAL 3931) goTa 'laterite ferrite ore'.











 m0352 cdef

The + glyph of Sibri evidence is comparable to the large-sized 'dot', dotted circles and + glyph shown on this Mohenjo-daro seal m0352 with dotted circles repeated on 5 sides A to F. Mohenjo-daro Seal m0352 shows dotted circles in the four corners of a fire-altar and at the centre of the altar together with four raised 'bun' ingot-type rounded features. Rebus readings of m0352 hieroglyphs:



dhātu 'layer, strand'; dhāv 'strand, string' Rebus: dhāu, dhātu 'ore'


1. Round dot like a blob -- . Glyph: raised large-sized dot -- (gōṭī ‘round pebble);goTa 'laterite (ferrite ore)

2. Dotted circle khaṇḍa ‘A piece, bit, fragment, portion’; kandi ‘bead’;

3. A + shaped structure where the glyphs  1 and 2 are infixed.  The + shaped structure is kaṇḍ  ‘a fire-altar’ (which is associated with glyphs 1 and 2)..

Rebus readings are: 1. khoṭ m. ʻalloyʼgoTa 'laterite (ferrite ore); 2. khaṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans and metal-ware’; 3. kaṇḍ ‘furnace, fire-altar, consecrated fire’.


Four ‘round spot’; glyphs around the ‘dotted circle’ in the center of the composition: gōṭī ‘round pebble; Rebus 1: goTa 'laterite (ferrite ore); Rebus 2:L. khoṭf ʻalloy, impurityʼ, °ṭā ʻalloyedʼ, awāṇ. khoṭā  ʻforgedʼ; P. khoṭ m. ʻbase, alloyʼ  M.khoṭā  ʻalloyedʼ (CDIAL 3931) Rebus 3: kōṭhī ] f (कोष्ट S) A granary, garner, storehouse, warehouse, treasury, factory, bank. khoṭā ʻalloyedʼ metal is produced from kaṇḍ ‘furnace, fire-altar’ yielding khaṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans and metal-ware’. This word khaṇḍā is denoted by the dotted circles.

Circular seal, of steatite, from Bahrein, found at Lothal.A Stamp seal and its impression from the Harappan site of Lothal north of Bombay, of the type also found in the contemporary cultures of southern Iraq and the Persian Gulf Area. http://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/archaeology-in-india/

http://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/shipping-and-maritime-trade-of-the-indus-people/

See: 

Dotted circles, tulips and tin-bronze revolution of 4th millennium BCE documented in Harappa Script 

http://tinyurl.com/z3x7zev 

These powerful narratives are also validated -- archaeologically attested -- by the discovery of Mohenjo-daro priest wearing  (on his forehead and on the right shoulder) fillets of a dotted circle tied to a string and with a uttarīyam decorated with one, two, three dotted circles. The fillet is an Indus Script hypertext which reads: dhã̄i 'strand' PLUS vaṭa 'string' rebus: dhāvaḍ 'smelter'. The same dotted circles enseemble is also shown as a sacred hieroglyph on the bases of Śivalingas found in Mohenjo-dar. The dotted circles are painted with red pigment, the same way as Mosonszentjanos dice are painted with red iron oxide pigment.



वट [p= 914,3] m. (perhaps Prakrit for वृत , " surrounded , covered " ; cf. न्यग्-रोध) the Banyan or Indian fig. tree (Ficus Indica) MBh.Ka1v. &c RTL. 337 (also said to be n.); a pawn (in chess) L. (Monier-Williams) Ta. vaṭam cable, large rope, cord, bowstring, strands of a garland, chains of a necklace; vaṭi rope; vaṭṭi (-pp-, -tt-) to tie. Ma. vaṭam rope, a rope of cowhide (in plough), dancing rope, thick rope for dragging timber. Ka. vaṭa, vaṭara, vaṭi string, rope, tie. Te. vaṭi rope, cord. Go. (Mu.) vaṭiya strong rope made of paddy straw (Voc. 3150). Cf. 3184 Ta. tār̤vaṭam. / Cf. Skt. vaṭa- string, rope, tie; vaṭāraka-, vaṭākara-, varāṭaka- cord,string; Turner, CDIAL, no. 11212. (CDIAL 5220)vaṭa2 ʻ string ʼ lex. [Prob. ← Drav. Tam. vaṭam, Kan. vaṭi, vaṭara, &c. DED 4268] N. bariyo ʻ cord, rope ʼ; Bi. barah ʻ rope working irrigation lever ʼ, barhā ʻ thick well -- rope ʼ, Mth. barahā ʻ rope ʼ. (CDIAL 11212).

See: https://tinyurl.com/y85goask Wealth of a nation...

Trefoil decorated bull; traces of red pigment remain inside the trefoils. Steatite statue fragment. Mohenjo-daro (Sd 767). After Ardeleanu-Jansen, 1989: 196, fig. 1; cf.  Parpola, 1994, p. 213. Trefoils painted on steatite beads. Harappa (After Vats. Pl. CXXXIII, Fig. 2) Trefoil on the shawl of the priest. Mohenjodaro. The discovery of the King Priest acclaimed by Sir John Marshall as “the finest piece of statuary that has been found at Moenjodaro….draped in an elaborate shawl with corded or rolled over edge, worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm. This shawl is decorated all over with a design of trefoils in relief interspersed occasionally with small circles, the interiors of which are filled with a red pigment “. Gold fillet with ‘standard device’ hieroglyph. Glyph ‘hole’: pottar, பொத்தல் pottal, n. < id. [Ka.poṭṭare, Ma. pottu, Tu.potre.] trika, a group of three (Skt.) The occurrence of a three-fold depiction on a trefoil may thus be a phonetic determinant, a suffix to potṛ  as in potṛka.


Rebus reading of the hieroglyph: potti ‘temple-priest’ (Ma.)  potR `" Purifier "'N. of one of the 16 officiating priests at a sacrifice (the assistant of the Brahman), यज्ञस्य शोधयिट्रि (Vedic) Rebus reading is: potri ‘priest’; poTri ‘worship, venerate’. Language is Meluhha (Mleccha) an integral component of Indian sprachbund (linguistic area or language union). The trefoil is decoded and read as: potr(i).

Steatite statue fragment; Mohenjodaro (Sd 767); trefoil-decorated bull; traces of red pigment remain inside the trefoils. After Ardeleanu-Jansen 1989: 196, fig. 1; Parpola, 1994, p. 213.




S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
January 3, 2018





↧
Viewing all 10901 articles
Browse latest View live
More Pages to Explore .....
Search

Latest Images

Eco Data 4/26/24

Eco Data 4/26/24

April 25, 2024, 5:00 pm
‘Pay day every day’ may become Shangri-La Group, BPOs’ secret to happy employees

‘Pay day every day’ may become Shangri-La Group, BPOs’ secret to happy employees

April 25, 2024, 5:51 am
Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

April 23, 2024, 7:00 am
New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo...

New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo...

April 22, 2024, 6:00 am
Ukraine bans military from online gambling amid addiction concerns

Ukraine bans military from online gambling amid addiction concerns

April 22, 2024, 5:17 am
ಮಂಡ್ಯದಿಂದ ಸುಮಲತಾ ದೂರ; ಹೆಚ್‌ಡಿಕೆ ಪರ ಪ್ರಚಾರಕ್ಕಿಳಿಯದ ಸಂಸದೆ –ಬರ್ತಾರೆ ನೋಡೋಣ ಎಂದ...

ಮಂಡ್ಯದಿಂದ ಸುಮಲತಾ ದೂರ; ಹೆಚ್‌ಡಿಕೆ ಪರ ಪ್ರಚಾರಕ್ಕಿಳಿಯದ ಸಂಸದೆ –ಬರ್ತಾರೆ ನೋಡೋಣ ಎಂದ...

April 20, 2024, 8:08 pm
OCBC Bank Singapore Offers Up to 2.8% p.a. Fixed Deposit Promotion from 21...

OCBC Bank Singapore Offers Up to 2.8% p.a. Fixed Deposit Promotion from 21...

April 20, 2024, 12:38 pm
National Poetry Month 2024: Maxine Starr

National Poetry Month 2024: Maxine Starr

April 19, 2024, 9:56 am
Vegan Chicken Pot Pie

Vegan Chicken Pot Pie

April 19, 2024, 9:18 am
Firefox UX: On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement

Firefox UX: On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement

April 19, 2024, 7:03 am