Open-source software vs open-source religion

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:

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:

1. 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
2. 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.

On imagination, meditation, and bringing-into-being

In this fascinating interview, Tanya Luhrmann addresses the tremendous importance of imagination in religious traditions such as American evangelism. The idea that religion is “belief”, the affirmation of the truth-value of some proposition, is a particularly Western, Protestant, understanding of religion, and is profoundly different from the religious experiences of people from, say, the dharmic traditions. (Or for that matter, from the experiences of Orthodox Christians.) Luhrmann says about kataphatic prayer:

It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good.

The obvious response of the outsider to something like this is to describe it as clearly false, or “merely” imagined. And in a certain sense, the outsider is right: it is the believer who has imagined a particular religious experience into being, for which there is most likely no objective correlate. But Luhrmann argues that this attitude misses the heart of the experience as the insider experiences it: as something real, indeed as something more than real—because they create a new reality for the insider. It makes the insider more likely to feel loved, and thus to become more loving. Luhrmann thinks that something like this may even help reverse the erosion of social ties that people complain about today.

A number of Luhrmann's ideas squarely fit in with late medieval South Indian Hindu thought as is described in More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India by David D. Shulman.

Shulman focuses on the importance given in medieval South India to the force of imagination: to the fact that human being are at their core imaginative creatures, who shape reality by imagining it together. 

• Sometimes this imagination is internal to the person: Shulman tells the story of an impoverished devotee of Śiva who constructs in his mind a temple so beautiful that Śiva prefers to dwell there instead of in the vast granite temple that a king has built for him (said to be the Kailāsanātha temple of Kanchipuram). 
• At other times, this imagination is intersubjective: Shulman describes in great detail a performance from the Kūḍiyāṭṭam dance-drama tradition of Kerala, in which a solitary skilled dancer transforms an empty, prop-less stage into a story-universe through the combination of his gestures and through the shared imaginations of the entire audience. 

Worship is imagined in the same way—by imagining our iṣṭa-devatās in our minds and by that very act bringing them into being. The word used for bringing-into-being is bhāvanā, a word borrowed from Mīmāṃsā ritual hermeneutics that refers to the power of a sacrifice to bring into being its fruit.[*]

Shulman points out that the philosophical and theological systems in which these systems developed in South India were staunch defenders of ontological realism, but of course not of physicalist, materialist reductionism. (Paradoxically, it was Advaita Vedānta that was fairly skeptical of the positive power of imagination.) He writes, comparing 16th-century India and Europe:

In Europe, the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter hardened into a fully desubjectified theory, or evolving set of theories, about the status of objects within an external, natural world. In India, the dichotomy is itself questionable, and the metaphysics of inner and outer took another course. Broadly speaking, in one conceptual system the imagination became increasingly associated with pathology, while in the other it tended to be understood as therapeutic. (p. 278)

Suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to think about what's going on here (at least in the Indian context; it may well hold for Luhrmann's evangelicals). We don’t lie to ourselves about something being there when it isn’t; we construct it with our mental acts—and by doing so, we make it real.

And towards the end of the book, Shulman also touches very briefly upon Ibn ‘Arabī, in whose vast work khayāl, “imagination”, is profoundly related to the structure of the universe and to the relationship between man and God.


[*] This explains the use of words like bhāvayāmi in much devotional Carnatic music. The singer-devotee is trying to actualize the deity in the minds of all those present at the performance. 

Appayya Dīkṣita on figurative language

(This post is a draft, and I will likely edit my translations below, multiple times.)

In his Vṛttivārttika (“An Explication of Linguistic Operations”), Appayya Dīkṣita briefly outlines his theory of semantics, focusing on the processes by which words give rise to different meanings. As befits a good ālaṅkārika, literary theorist, in the post-Ānandavardhana universe, he accepts three such operations: 

• abhidhā, “denotation”,
• lakṣaṇā, “figuration” or something similar, and 
• vyañjanā, “suggestion”. 

This work of his, though, only defines abhidhā and lakṣaṇā. Does that mean the Vṛttivārttika is incomplete? Or is it the case that Appayya wanted to focus only on these two, postponing discussion of the often-problematic vyañjanā? Things are unclear, but what we do know is that in his other works (see the many articles by Yigal Bronner on Appayya) Appayya wants to reduce the role taken up by dhvani in poetics, and it is possible that this also means he wants to give abhidhā and lakṣaṇā more importance than post-Mammaṭa alaṅkāraśāstra permits.

Now, Appayya Dīkṣita argues that there are seven subtypes of lakṣaṇā. (This is one more than Mukulabhaṭṭa defines in his Abhidhāvṛttimātṛkā. One reason Mukulabhaṭṭa was so expansive was because he entirely denied the existence of a separate linguistic operation called vyañjanā, trying instead to bring it entirely under the domain of lakṣaṇā. I wonder what this says about Appayya’s intentions?) He offers examples for each of them, and some day I will try to list them all out systematically. For now, though, I restrict myself to his last two subtypes of lakṣaṇā, both of which he exemplifies using the single verse offered below.

ā pādam ā cikura-bhāram aśeṣam aṅgam 
ānanda-bṛnda-lasitaṃ sudṛśām asīmam |
antar mama sphuratu santatam antarātmann
ambhoja-locana tava śrita-hasti-śailam ||

śuddha-sâropa-lakṣaṇā yathā ‘ā pādam’ iti | atra bhagavad-aṅgeṣv ānanda-kāritvena ānanda-padasya sāropa-lakṣaṇā | ānanda-karaṇe itara-vailakṣaṇya-dyotanaṃ phalam |  ānanda-kāriṇi viṣaya-nigaraṇena “ānando ’yam” iti prayoge sâdhyavasāya-lakṣaṇā | ānandâvyabhicāra-dyotanaṃ phalam  ||

From feet up to thick, curly locks,
May Your entire body
        shimmering endlessly with clusters of pure bliss
        for those with blessed sight,
shine resplendent eternally within me,

O Indweller of my soul,
Lotus-eyed Lord 
         who lives atop Elephant Hill!

Śuddhā sâropā lakṣaṇā is exemplified in the verse that begins with the words ā pādam. Here, the word ānanda (“bliss”) refers to the Lord’s limbs through sâropā lakṣaṇā, because of their being causers of bliss. The result is the illumination of the impossibility of any other thing being an instrument of bliss.

The word ānanda refers to a causer of bliss through sâdhyavasāya-lakṣaṇā via the usage “it is bliss”, because in that case the topic at hand (i.e., the causer of bliss) gets wholly subsumed by the description (i.e., bliss). The result of this is the illumination of the total non-deviation of bliss from the causer of bliss.


What Appayya Dīkṣita does not mention is the source of his example verse. It turns out to be the 105th, and last, verse of the Śrī Varadarāja Stava, his long, highly poetically ornate praise-poem dedicated to Lord Varadarāja, the form of Viṣṇu manifested in the temple icon at Elephant Hill in the city of Kanchipuram, Appayya Dīkṣita’s hometown.

Lightness and heaviness

Re(re)ading Gwendolyn Lane’s translation of Bāṇabhaṭṭa’s masterpiece Kādambarī, I suddenly recalled a fascinating anecdote about how Bāṇa decided to permit his son Bhūṣaṇa to complete the work. I fear I cannot remember the source of the tale.

The story goes that Bāṇa was on his deathbed without having completed the Kādambarī, and wished to entrust one of his sons with the job of finishing it. But how to decide which one would be worthy of the challenge? He called them both to his bed, and, pointing to a small stack of firewood nearby, asked them to describe it.

The elder son (whose name escapes me, and perhaps history too) said: 

śuṣkaṃ kāṣṭhaṃ tiṣṭhaty agre

“A dry piece of wood stands in front.” 

The younger, by name Bhūṣaṇa, came up with this: 

nīrasa-tarur iha vilasati purataḥ

“A sapless tree manifests itself before me.”

Both statements are factually correct, but only Bhūṣaṇa’s possesses the lightness (lāghava) and multiplicity of meaning that Bāṇa so prized in his work. Specifically:

• The two statements are both 16 morae long, but Bhuṣaṇa’s version crams 14 syllables in by using light syllables throughout (except at the beginning and the end). His brother’s, on the other hand, uses 8 syllables, each one heavy.
• The elder brother’s statement attempts to repeat ṣ in three consonant clusters, but two of these are the same, being the heavy and somewhat unattractive ṣṭh cluster. Bhūṣaṇa does not have any clusters at all, but lightly dances amidst repetitions of s, t, l, and r.
• Bhūṣaṇa’s first word, nīrasa, evokes the literary concept of rasa (about which Amazons’ worth of paper and Superiors’ worth of ink have been spilled).
• Bhūṣaṇa’s statement can be understood as referring not just to the firewood that his father has asked about, but also to his elder brother who lacked literary judgement but who stood before him in time and in the hierarchy of the Indian family.

Bhūṣaṇa was given the privilege of completing Bāṇa’s work. Scholars hold, however, that his effort lacks the mastery of his father’s. History is the harshest critic of all.

Annambhaṭṭa on svârtha- and parârthânumāna

The Naiyāyikas, like every other philosophical “school” in India with the notable exception of the Cārvākas, accept that anumāna, the method of inference, is capable of giving rise to jñāna, an episode of knowledge—specifically, anumiti-jñāna, an inferential knowledge-episode. (Loosely translating jñāna as “knowledge” misrepresents the Naiyāyika position.) Interestingly, the Naiyāyikas hold that there are two kinds of anumāna: svârthânumāna (inferring for oneself) and parârthânumāna (literally, “inferring for another”). The latter makes no sense in English—how can one infer something for somebody else? It may make more sense to think of parârthânumāna as “proof” or “demonstration”.

Here is what Annambhaṭṭa has to say on the matter.

anumānaṃ dvividham — (1) svârthaṃ (2) parârthaṃ ca ||


(1) svârthaṃ svânumiti-hetuḥ, tathā hi svayam eva bhūyo darśanena “yatra yatra dhūmas tatra tatrâgnir” iti mahānasâdau vyāptiṃ gṛhītvā parvata-samīpaṃ tad-gate câgnau sandihānaḥ parvate dhūmaṃ paśyan vyāptiṃ smarati — “yatra yatra dhūmas tatra tatra vahnir” iti  | tad-anantaraṃ “vahni-vyāpya-dhūmavān ayaṃ parvataḥ” iti jñānam utpadyate | ayam eva liṅga-parāmarśa ity ucyate | tasmāt “parvato vahnimān” iti jñānânumitir utpadyate, tad etat svârthânumānam ||

(2) yat tu svayaṃ dhūmād agnim anumāya paraṃ prati bodhayituṃ pañcâvayava-vākyaṃ prayujyate tat parârthânumānam | yathā — 
(a) parvato vahnimān [pratijñā]
(b) dhūmavattvād [hetu]
(c) yo yo dhūmavān sa vahnimān yathā mahānasam [udāharaṇa]
(d) tathā câyaṃ [upanaya]
(e) tasmāt tathêti [nigamana] | 
anena pratipāditāl liṅgāt paro ’py agniṃ pratipadyate || 

Annambhaṭṭa on the types of perception

nidhāya hṛdi viśvêśaṃ vidhāya guru-vandanam |

bālānāṃ sukha-bodhāya kriyate tarka-saṅgrahaḥ ||

How do we perceive the world around us? What sort of semantic structure does the content of these perceptions possess? The Tarkasaṅgraha or Bālagādādharī of Annambhaṭṭa, a 17th century introduction to the school of logic known as Navya Nyāya, attempts to answer these questions, among many others, at a level suitable to “children”. (Looks like they used to have smart kids back in those days.) Annambhaṭṭa presents six kinds of relations between the senses of perception and objects of perception to account for the various features of our perceptual experiences. This sextet is a tradition that extends over a millennium before him to Udayana. (For what it’s worth, this sextet was criticized by some very prominent Naiyāyikas like Gaṅgeśa and Raghunātha Śiromaṇi.)

If that makes no sense, fear not. Navya Nyāya is regarded as impenetrably technical hair-splitting by most Sanskrit paṇḍits, who are themselves usually regarded by others as engaging in impenetrably technical hair-splitting. As a result, English translations of Navya Nyāya texts flourish in a special circle of Indological hell where even furiously sleeping colorless green ideas fear to tread.

Nevertheless, I shall try to translate this short excerpt from the Tarkasaṅgraha into English, fully aware that I resemble the man who wishes to speak in an assembly without knowledge of grammar, who in turn resembles the man who wishes to restrain a rutting elephant with a rope made from a lotus-stalk (śabda-śāstram anadhītya yaḥ pumān vaktum icchati vacaḥ sabhântare / bandhum icchati vane madôtkaṭaṃ kuñjaraṃ kamala-nāla-tantunā). If nothing else, my translation will show how wordy an English translation of Navya Nyāya will be if it wants to resemble idiomatic English. I make no claims of correctness or accuracy of translation. This is what I understand of Navya Nyāya for now.

[For those who actually want to know what objects of perception are in Navya Nyāya, I recommend Daniel H. H. Ingalls’ classic Materials for the Study of Navya Nyāya Logic, as well as Sibajiban Bhattacharya’s critical review of this book. I should add that I haven’t really read Ingalls as closely as I ought to, but am relying on āpta-vacana in recommending this book.]

pratyakṣa-jñāna-hetur indriyârtha-sannikarṣaḥ ṣaḍ-vidhaḥ (1a) saṃyogaḥ (1b) saṃyukta-samavāyaḥ (1c) saṃyukta-samaveta-samavāyaḥ (2a) samavāyaḥ (2b) samaveta-samavāyaḥ (3) viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣya-bhāvaś cêti ||

1. 
   
1. cakṣuṣā ghaṭa-pratyakṣa-janane, saṃyogaḥ sannikarṣaḥ ||
2. ghaṭa-rūpa-pratyakṣa-janane, saṃyukta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: cakṣuḥ-saṃyukte ghaṭe rūpasya samavāyāt ||
3. rūpatva-sāmānya-pratyakṣe, saṃyukta-samaveta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: cakṣuḥ-saṃyukte ghaṭe rūpaṃ samavetaṃ, tatra rūpatvasya samavāyāt ||
2. 
   
1. śrotreṇa śabda-sākṣāt-kāre, samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: karṇa-vivara-varty-ākāśasya śrotratvāc, chabdasyâ ’’kāśa-guṇatvād, guṇa-guṇinoś ca samavāyāt ||
2. śabdatva-sākṣāt-kāre, samaveta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: śrotra-samavete śabde śabdatvasya samavāyāt ||
3. abhāva-pratyakṣe, viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣya-bhāvaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: “ghaṭâbhāvavad bhū-talam” ity atra cakṣuḥ-samyukte bhū-tale ghaṭâbhāvasya viśeṣaṇatvāt ||

evaṃ sannikarṣa-ṣaṭka-janyaṃ jñānaṃ tat-karaṇam indriyaṃ tasmād indriyaṃ pratyakṣa-pramāṇam iti siddham ||

“The Splendor of the Great Hero”: Śrī Raghuvīra Gadyam aka Śrī Mahāvīra Vaibhavam

Among the most remarkable compositions of Swami Śrīman Nigamānta Mahādeśikar is the Śrī Mahāvīra Vaibhavam, also known as the Raghuvīra Gadyam. In about 90 lines, it summarizes the entire story of the Rāmāyaṇa, paying special attention to the glory and heroism of Rāma. I have attempted to translate the work here while paying close attention to the poetic effects of the original.

|| Śrīḥ  ||

śrīmān veṅkaṭanāthâryaḥ kavi-tārkika-kesarī |
vedāntâcārya-varyo me sannidhattāṃ sadā hṛdi ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,
endowed with śrī,
saffron-maned Lion among poets and philosophers,
supreme teacher of the Vedānta
—may he be established forever in my heart!

jayaty āśrita-saṃtrāsa-dhvānta-vidhvaṃsanôdayaḥ |
prabhāvān sītayā devyā parama-vyoma-bhāskaraḥ ||

He conquers all,
His dawn dispelling the darkness of His devotees’ dread;
Luminous,
Inseparable from the Goddess Sītā, 
The Sun of the Supreme Heaven!

jaya jaya mahāvīra! 
mahādhīra dhaureya! 

Victory, victory to the great hero! 
to the steadfast, resolute, bearer of all burdens!

Verbal knowledge (śābda-bodha) in early modern India

(This is unlikely to be of interest to anybody but me, but then again most things on this blog fall into that category!)

In all things associated with language—grammar, semantics, exegesis, hermeneutics, literary theory, you name it—the Sanskritic intellectual tradition developed perhaps the most sophisticated toolkit available to pre-modern humans. One of the most substantial advances on this front was made by the Navya Naiyāyikas (the “New Logicians”), who came up with a formal terminology designed to make communication unambiguous (or at least as unambiguous as can be possible in a natural language). Their terminology was adopted by intellectuals with wide-ranging commitments and projects, such as Mīmāṃsā (hermeneutics), Vyākaraṇa (grammar), and Vedānta (philosophical theology, for lack of a better description).

Jan Houben’s article “‘Semantics’ in the Sanskrit tradition ‘on the eve of colonialism’” shows how Vaiyākaraṇas (grammarians), Naiyāyikas (logicians), and Mīmāṃsakas (exegetes) all used terminology borrowed from the Navya Naiyāyikas to precisely and unambiguously describe the kind of “verbal knowledge” (śābda-bodha) produced in a speaker of Sanskrit upon hearing the sentence:

rāmo ’nnaṃ pacati 

“Rāma cooks rice”

The question for all three groups of intellectuals is the same: what is the main meaning-bearing element of a sentence, and how does it relate to all the other elements? All three agree on what the sentence conveys to a speaker of Sanskrit; where they differ is on the “keystone” of the sentence.

The birth of poetry in Sanskrit

While translating the first verse of the Rāghavayādavīyam of Veṅkaṭādhvarin, I came across a word that I simply could not decipher on my own: mārāmorāḥ (मारामोराः in Devanāgarī). I had to look up the English commentary of Dr. Saroja Ramanujam to figure it out. She resegmented it as mā-ārāma-urāḥ, and glossed it as a bahuvrīhi (an “exocentric” compound functioning as an adjective) that means “one whose chest is a pleasure garden for Mā”. (There is no way I would have figured that out on my own!) 

But what, or who, is Mā? Dr. Ramanujam simply noted that it was a name for Lakṣmī, but I wanted to find out more and dug deeper. Now, digging too deep is fraught with difficulties. (Just ask the dear departed dwarves of Dwarrowdelf, who delved too deep, disturbing a denizen of the dark depths that then dealt the deathblow to their delightful dominion.) But in this case, what I found was pure mithril.

Prof. Ajay Rao has written a fascinating paper called “Theologising the Inaugural Verse: Śleṣa Reading in Rāmāyaṇa Commentary” for the Journal of Hindu Studies. The underlying argument of the paper (which Prof. Rao elaborates in his dissertation) is that the Rāmāyaṇa was not always perceived as a fully religious text, and that at least early in its history it was seen as a work of literature (kāvya) and not a received tradition (smṛti). Indeed, the Rāmāyaṇa is seen not just as any literary work, but as the first literary work (ādi-kāvya), and its composer, the poet-sage Vālmīki, is regarded as the First Poet (ādi-kavi). Prof. Rao further argues that the “theologization” of the Rāmāyaṇa was accomplished by a series of Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators who interpreted key episodes in the narrative as illustrative of the theological ideas underpinning their philosophical theology. Foremost among these commentators was the sixteenth-century Govindarāja, upon whose Rāmāyaṇa-bhūṣaṇa commentary Prof. Rao relies.

Smell and memory

I've never read Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, but I've certainly heard about the famous madeleine episode in which the narrator's experience of seeing, smelling, and tasting a madeleine leads to a flood of past memories (and a voluminous novel!). This is perhaps the best-known contemporary account of the incredible power of the sense of smell, and its profound connection to our deepest emotions. The smell of a favorite dish, of a lover's cologne, of petrichor after summer rains, of a flower: all of these smells can immediately and instantaneously transport us to a different time and place and emotional state.

It is perhaps for this reason that smell plays an extremely important role in Indic culture. David Shulman has written a fascinating article called "The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India" (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 123–133) in which he explores some of the connections among smells, memories, emotions, and aesthetics. 

A Sanskrit benediction

The great sixteenth-century intellectual Appayya Dīkṣita opens his introductory treatise on Sanskrit poetics, the Kuvalayānanda or the "Joy of the Water-Lily", with three beautiful benedictions, or maṅgalācaraṇas, dedicated to the Devī, to Śiva and Pārvatī, and to Kṛṣṇa / Mukunda. I'm trying to read this work right now along with my friends BW and MS, and we worked out rough-ish translations for these verses. The opening verse, in particular, is beautifully structured both in terms of its aural effect and in terms of its coherence of meaning.

amarī-kabarī-bhāra-bhramarī-mukharī-kṛtam |

dūrīkarotu duritaṁ Gaurī-caraṇa-paṅkajam || 1 ||

|| 1 || 

May the lotuses that are the feet of Gaurī,

        resonant with the buzzing bees that are the dense, braided locks of goddesses,

dispel impurity!

As befits a work that attempts to (re)define the hugely complex world of Sanskrit formalist literary theory, this opening verse is worthy of deeper analysis, in order to figure out precisely how it depicst a fully coherent poetic image. In particular, Nirañjan Miśrā's twentieth-century Hindi commentary on the Kuvalayānanda sheds some useful light on the poetic images here. 

Bhavabhūti on language

The Sanskrit dramatist Bhavabhūti is reckoned second only to Kālidāsa in his command over the Sanskrit language, his exquisite depiction of the emotions, and his mastery over the art and the science of literary composition. His Uttararāmacarita is a fascinating and powerful retelling of the seventh chapter of the Rāmāyaṇa, the Uttara Kāṇḍa. This powerful, even tragic, chapter is in fact not included in many versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, in particular Kampan's Irāmāvatāram (also known as the Kamba-ramayanam).

One of the things that makes Bhavabhūti so fascinating is his self-conscious reflection on the power of language and art. While Sanskrit literature in general abounds in such reflection—indeed, there is a Ṛgvedic verse on speech uttered in the voice of Speech personified, which promises to bestow speech upon those Speech favors—Bhavabhūti seems to take it to a whole new level in his work. One verse in particular struck me, because of its self-contained meaning, its particular signification in the immediate context of the play, and its more general meaning in the context of literary works as a whole.

laukikānāṃ hi sādhūnām arthān vāg anuvartate |
ṛṣīṇāṃ punar ādyānāṃ vācam artho 'nuvartate ||

New Swadharma post

A new post, after I attended T.M. Krishna's wonderful lecture-demonstration on the "Evolution of Ragas" in Carnatic music. TMK's emphasis of the historicity of the structures we use to understand Carnatic music today is, I think, a wonderful remedy for the broader problems that are caused by South Asians' currently ahistorical approach towards our culture(s) and heritage(s).

I will write more about TMK's lecture later today or tomorrow.

(How) does history matter?

Much to think about.

Introductions and such things

śarad-indu-sundara-ruciś cetasi sā me girāṃ devī |

apahṛtya tamaḥ santatam arthān akhilān prakāśayatu ||

Well, I've done it after all. After initially dismissing blogging as an essentially narcissistic activity—what arrogance, the assumption that one's writing and one's thoughts are important enough to be read by the world at large!—I have succumbed to temptation and created my own blog.

I don't know precisely why I'm doing this. Part of it is simply the fact that my instinctive reaction to blogging has given away to increasing admiration for the stellar bloggers whose work I've been following since the last US Presidential election, in particular Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. (I need hardly say it's highly unlikely that my posts are going to be quite as interesting or as thought-provoking or (sadly) as audience-attracting as his!) Since I often email blog posts and articles accompanied by my comments to my unfortunate friends, I figured that starting my own blog would be a good way to consolidate such posts and my responses to them. This blog would then have the secondary function of allowing me to flesh out my own opinions by providing me with the space to articulate more clearly my responses to external stimuli, so to speak. The goal of such essays (in the original sense of the word) is not to attain some arbitrary level of clarity of opinion, but to continue to explore and to record, through debate with myself and with others who (I hope!) will choose to comment on my posts, the evolution of my own thinking. It is to be hoped that such debates will serve not just to refine my thoughts but also to sharpen the implements that shape good thoughts—close reading, logic, analysis, and rhetoric.

Since this blog is meant to be a collection of my thoughts, I don't promise that there will be any common thread binding the various posts, or that all the posts will be interesting to everyone; after all, these are my own reflections and there is no a priori reason why they should be of interest to anyone but me. However, should any of my ramblings interest you or upset you or infuriate you, Gentle Reader, feel free to hammer away at the comments; I do promise to respond to and sustain engaging conversations through these posts and comments. Be forewarned that I have never considered the lack of a partner to be an obstacle to good conversation, and hence there may be cases of my commenting on my own posts in the scholastic fashion.

(As an aside, I'm quite surprised that I unconsciously chose to begin in this fashion, by attempting to sketch out a telos of sorts for this blog. As they used to say in classical India, prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate ("even a fool doesn't proceed without pointing out the purpose [of a work]").)

Now that I've drawn classical India into this, I may as well proceed along the same lines. I've chosen to open my first blog post with a famous Sanskrit verse (in the upagīti meter, for those who care about things like chandaḥ) dedicated to Sarasvatī, the Goddess of Words. Seeing as this blog is supposed to be an intellectual endeavor, it's probably not a bad idea to get a few divinities on my side right from the start!

The invoking of divinities before beginning any major endeavor is, of course, a very old practice, and I'm pretty certain that virtually every book ever written in classical India or the Middle East began with an invocation to the divinity of the author's choice. (The only two exceptions that come to mind are the openings of the Diwans of Hafez and of Mirza Ghalib, and due to my ignorance I will say nothing further on the matter!) The verse above dedicated to Sarasvatī is the opening benediction of the Sāhitya-darpaṇa, a major text on Sanskrit poetics written by Viśvanātha, and a translation of it is the epigraph to the enjoyable Dropping the Bow, a translation of Sanskrit and Prakrit love poetry by Andrew Schelling. Word for word, the verse goes:

autumn-moon-beautiful-radiance'd in-the-consciousness she of-me of-words goddess |

having-carried-away darkness eternal meanings entire may-[s]he-illuminate ||

(Gotta love Sanskrit verse!)

Don't be surprised by the awkwardness of the literal English translation; the original is easier to understand despite its free word order, thanks to Sanskrit's extensive case system. The entire verse is a single, heavily scrambled sentence, whose subject is the very last word of the first line (devī) and whose verb is the very last word of the second line (prakāśayatu). The poetic weight falls on the very first word, a compound rather unwieldy in English but quite magical in the original. Acting as an attribute of the goddess, this compound, like most poetic Sanskrit compounds, can be parsed in slightly different ways, each one casting a slightly different light (no pun intended) on the meaning of the verse: "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon", "she whose beautiful radiance is [like that of] the autumn moon", "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon's". Immediately, the choice of verb stands out more brightly. Pretty, isn't it?

The elaborate attribute's real punch comes in the second line, thanks to another of Sanskrit poetry's strengths—homonymy. The word tamaḥ literally means "darkness" and is almost certainly cognate with the Russian тьма, but it is frequently used figuratively to mean "ignorance". The word artha has a multitude of meanings, including such things as "meaning", "desire", "object", "motive", but in the context of the verse it makes most sense to consider just two: "meaning" and "object". One interpretation of the verse is straightforward and follows directly from the grammar of the verse: "may the Goddess illuminate entire meanings, having carried away eternal ignorance." But what of the autumn moon evoked at the beginning of the verse? Why compare, of all things, the radiance of Sarasvatī to, of all things, the autumn moon? Well, the autumn moon's bright rays do destroy the (literal) darkness of the night, and they do cast light upon the forms of objects (and by doing so, they destroy the ignorance and misperceptions that cloud our consciousness).

Hmm, it seems the simile is more elaborate and more meaningful than it initially seemed! It's no longer simply a comparison of the goddess's radiance to that of the autumn moon, but includes an indirect comparison of the effects of the two sources of illumination, and perhaps, if we use some poetic license here, even an implicit comparison of the manner in which the moon and the goddess go about their respective jobs of illumination. The moon destroys darkness and illuminates objects effortlessly, merely through its presence in the night sky (let's ignore what we know of modern physics and astronomy and eclipses for now!); further, it does so without being limited by the number of objects it illuminates or by the number of people who benefit from its light. Maybe, just maybe, the verse suggests that the act of illuminating meaning is just as effortless, just as natural for Sarasvatī, and maybe she is as gracious in sharing her blessings as the moon is. (I daresay the poet would disagree that Sarasvatī's blessings can be obtained effortlessly, even without prayer, just as the moon illuminates objects for everyone! If that were the case, then literature would be plagued by a major free-rider problem.)

What seemed to be a routine benedictive verse has turned out to be a more complex beast after all. It's sorely tempting to see the "entire meaning" referred to in the verse as being a comment on the verse itself inserted by a too-smart poet testing his audience! Anyway, enough theorizing, and here's a fairly free translation of the verse (I'm trying to find a good way to use lines and spaces to reflect the multiple allusions that Sanskrit pulls off using grammar alone, and any comments / advice / critique would be immensely appreciated):

May that Goddess of Words,

whose beautiful radiance, like that of the autumn moon,

destroys eternal darkness,

illuminate objects completely

in my consciousness.

<UPDATE>

Imagine my surprise upon finding a reference in John D. Dunne's Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy to the verse fragment

I cited above! The verse is apparently verse 55 in the sambandhākṣepaparihāra section of Kumārila's Śloka-vārttikā, and reads:

prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate |

evam eva pravṛttiś cec caitanyenāsya kiṃ bhavet ||

(footnote 72 on p. 48, Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy)

</UPDATE>