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i
RELIGION IN TRANSLATION
Series Editor
John Nemec, University of Virginia
A Publication Series of
The American Academy of Religion
and
Oxford University Press
First Words,
Last Words
New Theories for Reading Old
Texts in Sixteenth-Century India
z
YIGAL BRONNER AND
LAWRENCE McCREA
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197583470.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
v
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Bibliography 171
Index 181
vi
ix
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
B Babylonian Talmud
BS Brahmasūtra
M Mishnah: Six Orders
MBSBh Madhva, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya
MD Mīmāṃsādarśana
MS Jaimini, Mīmāṃsāsūtra
MSBh Śabara, Mīmāṃsāsūtrabhāṣya
ŚBSBh Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya
xi
1
1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 105.
2. Gino Signoracci, “Hegel on Indian Philosophy: Spinozism, Romanticism, Eurocentrism,”
PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2017, p. 108. As Said and others have shown, this
infantilization of India as part of the “depraved” and “childlike” East was a key justification
for its colonization. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 40.
First Words, Last Words. Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0001
2
philosophy were acknowledged, and while they provided deep inspiration for
many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European thinkers, emphasis was
laid almost entirely on the earliest sources within each knowledge system as
the only locus of real value. Almost the entire later tradition was written off as
mere mechanical exegesis, working over earlier insights in obsessive detail and
descending further and further into minutiae.3 To put it bluntly, innovation
in traditional India was dead on arrival.
Take, for example, the modern study of Indian poetic theory. Here the
contribution of a few writers, most prominently the late first-millennium
Kashmiri thinkers Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta and their theory of
literary suggestion (dhvani), are presented as the one great moment of cre-
ativity, all later writers being dismissed as mere scholiasts. See, for instance,
the entirely typical sweeping dismissal from the pen of S. K. De, one of the
leading twentieth-century scholars of this discipline:
3. For a noteworthy and highly influential example, see Erich Frauwallner’s survey “The Periods
of Indian Philosophy,” in History of Indian Philosophy, trans. V. M. Bedekar (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 3–18. Frauwallner traces the origin of Indian philosophy from
the late Vedic period, out of which emerged the early Brahmanical and Buddhist systems. But
he sees these early systems of knowledge falling into decline in the mid-first millennium: “The
old systems, as if their life-force had been exhausted, begin to decay since the middle of the
first millennium after Christ and vanish mostly from the picture” (p. 10). The decline of these
early systems into stagnation is for him succeeded by a “new revolution” marked by the rise of
the Shiva-and Vishnu-oriented religious systems. But these, too, he sees as falling into stagna-
tion by the sixteenth century: “A new revolution does not arise anymore. . . . There is a pause
and almost a standstill. . . . Only in the last decades a new development begins to usher it-
self. Under the influence of the European culture, which since the establishment of English
rule, has operated on India more and more strongly, Indian circles have got acquainted with
European philosophy and have begun to appropriate it and discuss it” (p. 14). So innovation
from within has become impossible, and it is only the external stimulus of European thought
that can open up a path forward.
4. S. K. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960), vol. 2,
p. 216.
3
The bulk of the history of this tradition, almost a thousand years of constant
intellectual activity, is thereby dismissed as lacking any value, and the study of
this tradition is viewed as “tedious” and “useless.”5
A similar view is often expressed with regard to Sanskrit literature itself, the
object of Sanskrit poetics. Here the key moment is typically identified with
the fourth-or fifth-century ad poet and playwright Kālidāsa. Consider the
titles of the pivotal chapters of A. B. Keith’s Classical Sanskrit Literature: “The
Predecessors of Kālidāsa,” “Kālidāsa,” and “Post-Kālidāsan Epic.”6 As Keith
and others made clear, what led up to Kālidāsa was primitive in nature, and
what followed this brief moment of creativity was immediately and increas-
ingly decadent. Again, De, this time writing with S. N. Dasgupta, provides
the clearest version of this pervasive view:
This widespread view is not limited to the related fields of poetry and poetics.
Indeed, the decline of both is explicitly presented as mirroring a similar pro-
cess in Indian philosophy. As Dasgupta and De go on to argue, “the volubility
of bad poets is a parallel to the prolixity of scholastic pedants.”8
5. Ibid.
6. Berriedale Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920).
7. S. N. Dasgupta, and S. K. De, History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period (Calcutta: Calcutta
University Press, 1947), vol. 1, p. 304.
8. Ibid., p. 312.
4
For Deussen, the Upanishads, works composed in the first millennium bc,
represent the pinnacle and, indeed, the sole moment of genuine philosophical
creativity in India. He dismisses almost everything later as “a long process of
degeneration.”10 Virtually all later philosophical traditions are brushed aside
as misrepresentations of little or no philosophical value. The only system for
which Deussen shows any respect, Nondualist Vedānta, is valued precisely
because it merely replicates what was originally achieved. In short, whatever
departs from the Upanishads is a corruption of their original insight, and
whatever remains faithful to them is essentially repetitive.
As we detail below, things have changed since the interventions of Deussen,
De, and Dasgupta. But it should be noted that the basic presuppositions that
they and their colleagues have laid down continued to guide scholarship in
the field for many decades. Scholars have tended to focus on the earlier, non-
commentarial contributions in each discipline, and, when they approached
the later exegetical treatises, they typically viewed them as interpretive aids
for understanding the root texts rather than as serious intellectual works in
their own right. Moreover, the lingering assumption, even if seldom stated
9. Paul Deussen, Outlines of Indian Philosophy with an Appendix on the Philosophy of the
Vedānta in Its Relations to Occidental Metaphysics (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1907), p. 35.
10. Ibid., p. 38.
5
as in previous generations, was that the great breakthroughs were still lim-
ited to the earlier strata of each tradition. Take, for instance, Jean-Marie
Verpoorten’s overview of Mīmāṃsā, a key philosophical system that is at the
heart of this book. Verpoorten labels the period from the sixth to seventh
century ad as “the golden age of the Mīmāṃsā” and describes the entire later
history of this tradition, from the eighth century to the present, as “the age
of the subcommentators.”11 In Nondualist Vedānta, another discipline that
this book closely explores and which has been one of the dominant strands
of thought in the second millennium ad, the lingering approach is that later
thinkers, if they were valued at all, were valued for their skill as compilers and
systematizers of the insights of earlier geniuses.12 Additional recent examples
of this approach can be easily supplied for the fields of literature, poetics, and
other philosophical inquiries.
One important exception has been the study of navyanyāya, or “new
logic.” This was a key movement in Indian epistemology and reasoning of
the second millennium ad, which in time came be labeled—both by its own
proponents and by their colleagues from other disciplines—with the adjective
“new.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that this branch of Indian thought was
recognized as a site of significant innovation, even in a scholarly climate where
novelty was rarely acknowledged. Still, the serious study of navyanyāya begins
only in the second half of the twentieth century, pioneered by Daniel Ingalls
and his student B. K. Matilal. Both of them saw in the daunting formalism of
navyanyāya a counterpart to modern Western logic and sought to investigate
these parallels. Both also viewed the vast literature of the new logicians as
worthy of extensive study in its own right. But even Ingalls often found in the
new writers on logic an excessive deference to the older authorities, one that
blunted the possibilities of innovation within the field. As Ingalls puts it in
the introduction to his important book on the topic: “I do not wish to exag-
gerate the virtues of Navya-nyāya. Certainly it has its faults. Much, however,
that will seem to the modern logician perverse or foolish in the following
pages, is Navya-nyāya’s inheritance from the Old School, and is accepted by
11. Jean-Marie Verpoorten, Mīmāṃsā Literature, in A History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan
Gonda (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz, 1987), vol. 6, fasc. 5. The relevant sections are found
on pp. 22–37, 38–53, respectively.
12. Karl Potter, Presuppositions of Indian Philosophies (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India, 1963),
p. 181. See also S. N. Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy (reprinted, Cambridge: Cambridge
Press, 1952), vol. 2, p. 53. Both passages are discussed in Christopher Minkowski, “Advaita
Vedānta in Early Modern History,” South Asian History and Culture 2.2 (2011): 205–231.
6
13. D. H. H. Ingalls, Materials for the Study of Navya-nyāya Logic, Harvard Oriental Series 40
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 2.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15. Noteworthy examples include Christian Wedemeyer, Making Sense of Tantric
Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013); John Nemec, “Innovation and Social Change in the Vale of Kashmir,
circa 900–1250 c.e.,” in Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honour of Alexis G. J.
S. Sanderson, ed. Dominic Goodall, Shaman Hatley, Harunaga Isaacson, and Srilata Raman,
Gonda Indological Studies, no. 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 283–320; Christopher Minkowski,
“Astronomers and Their Reasons: Working Paper on Jyotiḥśāstra,” Journal of Indian Philosophy
30.5 (2002): 495–514; Dominik Wujastyk, “Change and Creativity in Early Modern Indian
Medical Thought,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 33 (2005): 95–118; Andrew Nicholson, Unifying
Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010); and Elaine Fisher, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in
Early Modern South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
7
16. Sheldon Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,” Indian Economic and
Social History Review 38.1 (2001): 5.
17. Ibid., p. 12.
18. Ibid., p. 13.
19. Ibid., p. 14.
20. Ibid., p. 23.
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Lasta lä stuores koh Snjeratscha pelje.
Karhun laulu.
10.
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Taite jīčene čuoču (?) ālit
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Kaipauksen kantaja.
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