It struck me today that there is a duality between the way in which open-source programmers work and the way in which philosophy and theology was done in classical India. (This might seem like a strange duality to bring up, but I do it because people frequently make misleading analogies between computer programming and Sanskrit grammar and other Indian disciplines. Also, because it’s my blog, so there!)
The point of open-source programming is that everyone can edit the source code. You fork a Github repository, make your changes, push them, and perhaps they might get accepted into the main code repository itself. Of course, it’s important that you (broadly) use the same sort of compiler/interpreter that the project is intended to work with, otherwise your code may not quite work the same way on others’ machines.
In short, for open-source software, the rule is:
The structure of classical Indian thought is the precise opposite of this. Most of the oldest philosophical texts were written in laconic, even ambiguous, sūtras. Later philosophers then came to write commentaries on these texts, while their disciples wrote super-commentaries on the commentaries, while their disciples wrote super-super-commentaries on the super-commentaries on the commentaries on the sūtras, and so on.
(Lest you think I am joking, here are just two examples:
In short, for classical Indian intellectuals, the rule is:
The point of open-source programming is that everyone can edit the source code. You fork a Github repository, make your changes, push them, and perhaps they might get accepted into the main code repository itself. Of course, it’s important that you (broadly) use the same sort of compiler/interpreter that the project is intended to work with, otherwise your code may not quite work the same way on others’ machines.
In short, for open-source software, the rule is:
change the source, keep the interpreter ( / compiler / whathaveyou).
The structure of classical Indian thought is the precise opposite of this. Most of the oldest philosophical texts were written in laconic, even ambiguous, sūtras. Later philosophers then came to write commentaries on these texts, while their disciples wrote super-commentaries on the commentaries, while their disciples wrote super-super-commentaries on the super-commentaries on the commentaries on the sūtras, and so on.
(Lest you think I am joking, here are just two examples:
- The foundational text of the Nyāya tradition is the Nyāya-sūtra of Gautama. This gathered the following tower of commentaries:
- Vātsyāyana’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya
- Uddyotakara’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika
- Vācaspati Miśra’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā
- Udayana’s Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā-pariśuddhi
- The foundational text of all Vedāntic schools is the Brahma-sūtra or Vedānta-sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, sometimes also called Vyāsa. If we look just at one branch of commentaries on this foundational text, the Advaita branch, we get the following picture:
- Śaṅkara’s Advaita Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya
- Vācaspati Miśra’s Bhāmatī
- Amalānanda’s Vedānta-kalpa-taru
- Appayya Dīkṣita’s Vedānta-kalpa-taru-parimala
- Lakṣmīnṛsiṃha’s Ābhoga
- Akhaṇḍānanda’s Ṛju-prakāśikā
- Padmapada’s Pañcapādikā
- Prakāśātman’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa
- Citsukha’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-tātparya-dīpikā
- Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-prakāśikā
- Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s Vedānta-ratnakośa)
The thing to keep in mind is that each of these commentators took the exact wording of his predecessors extremely seriously. And yet we obtain these complex forking interpretations of these texts, often at loggerheads with each other. The purpose of a commentary was ostensibly to elucidate the meaning of the base-text it commented on—but more often than not, it was to show that the base-text could be read to yield the conclusion you knew it had to yield.
In short, for classical Indian intellectuals, the rule is:
keep the source, change the interpreter.
