Indian Perspectives on Consciousness, Language and Self

The School of Recognition on Linguistics and Philosophy of Mind

Marco Ferrante

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book examines the theory of consciousness developed by the school of Recognition, an Indian philosophical tradition that thrived around the tenth c. CE in Kashmir, and argues that consciousness has a linguistic nature. It situates the doctrines of the tradition within the broader Indian philosophical context and establishes connections with the contemporary analytic debate.

The book focuses on Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta (tenth c. CE), two Hindu intellectuals belonging to the school of Recognition, Pratyabhijñ? in Sanskrit. It argues that these authors promoted ideas that bear a strong resemblance with contemporary 'higher–order theories' of consciousness. In addition, the book explores the relationship between the thinkers of the school of Recognition and the thought of the grammarian/philosopher Bhart?hari (fifth c. CE). The book bridges a gap that still exists between scholars engaged with Western traditions and Sanskrit specialists focused on textual materials. In doing so, the author uses concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind to illustrate the Indian arguments and an interdisciplinary approach with abundant reference to the original sources.

Offering fresh information to historians of Indian thought, the book will also be of interest to academics working on Non-Western Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Religion, Hinduism, Tantric Studies and South Asian Studies.

1 Historical and philosophical contexts

The school of Recognition

The expressions pratyabhijñā, pratyabhijñādarśana, pratyabhijñā system, ‘school of Recognition’, etc., all indicate the philosophical, theological, and ritual theories of a group of authors and spiritual teachers who lived and taught in Kashmir between the tenth and the eleventh centuries CE. These authors belonged to the same intellectual lineage—often in a relationship of master and disciple—and were probably initiated to the same ritualistic tradition, a variety of Śaiva Tantrism. The Pratyabhijñā works are part of that prolific and diverse religious and intellectual movement—sometimes labelled post-scriptural exegesis¹—which followed the emergence and the propagation throughout the Indian subcontinent of a specific type of texts known as Tantras. These texts, which presumably did not appear before 400 CE, presented themselves as depository of a peculiar soteriological wisdom that differed both in character and aims from the one revealed in the two classes into which the authoritative texts of the Vedic tradition are usually divided, the so-called śruti and smṛti (Sanderson, 1988, pp. 660–661). By applying a form of hyper-ritualism, the tantric adept, or tāntrika, aspires to achieve various spiritual goals, spanning from the release (mokṣa) from the cycle of births to the acquisition of supernatural powers (siddhis). Furthermore, by complying to the precepts of a spiritual tradition that entails various degrees of esotericism, transgressive behaviours, and a strict liaison with a guru, the tāntrika is able to achieve her religious purposes more quickly than her Vedic counterpart.² However, the Tantras rarely go as far as to negate the validity of the Vedic orthodox systems; much more often, they simply regard them as provisional, imperfect, and hierarchically inferior ways to cope with the knowledge of ultimate things.³ In early medieval South Asia, tantric literature was widespread and covered the whole spectrum of Indian religions, so that a vast body of Śaiva, Śākta, Vaiśṇava, Buddhist, and to a lesser extent, Jaina Tantras has been preserved.

Following a classification introduced by Alexis Sanderson (Sanderson, 1988, pp. 667–679), Śaiva Tantras can be divided into two main groups. The first one includes the 28 tantras that form the scriptural basis of a tradition known as Śaiva-Siddhānta. Its adherents—who were openly concerned with the civic domain of religion—embraced a dualistic ontology and adopted rituals and social behaviours which were largely acceptable to the standard Vedic practitioners (Sanderson, 2009a, p. 118). The second group comprises a much more diverse collection of texts characterized by the veneration of terrific forms of Śiva (particularly Bhairava) and/or of his female counterpart.⁴ These texts generally backed a non-dualistic ontology and constituted the scriptural authority of a number of traditions which were far less involved in the public sphere of religion, and whose rituals often displayed transgressive and antinomic behaviours. However, following again a recurrent hermeneutical scheme, the non-Saiddhāntika traditions did not reject the teachings of the Siddhānta but regarded them as preliminary to their own.

The religious setting of medieval Kashmir was extremely diversified, and its culture was the result of the interaction of different traditions. The first major religion to set foot in the valley was probably Buddhism, but Brahmanism with all its tantric varieties followed rather soon.⁵ There are reasons to believe that by the end of the ninth century the Śaiva-Siddhānta and most of the non-Saiddhāntika schools were active. By this period, they started to interact with one another, thus paving the way for that post-scriptural phase that is the main concern of this book. A first watershed moment occurred in the second half of the ninth c. when two crucial works were composed, the Śivasūtras of Vasugupta and the Spandakārikās of Bhaṭṭa Kallaṭa, a disciple of the former (hereafter ŚSū and SpKā); as Sanderson puts it, they were “the first attempt from the Śākta—Śaiva domain to present a non-dualistic metaphysics and a gnostic soteriology in opposition to the dualistic and ritualistic exegesis of the Saiddhāntika Śaiva scriptures” (Sanderson, 2007, p. 426). Even if these two works were far from being a full-fledged exposition of Śaiva non-dualistic philosophy—they had rather different purposes and were composed in a style that did not allow too much elaboration—they nevertheless quickly gained an aura of authoritativeness and became an object of quasi-sacred veneration for later authors.

The tendency towards non-sectarian debate became finally explicit with the establishment of the school we are directly concerned with. The Pratyabhijñā took shape thanks to the teaching of a series of gurus whose lives covered a little more than a century, roughly from the beginning of the tenth c. to well into the eleventh c. The first exponent of this lineage is Somānanda, a scholar and spiritual teacher whose date has been assigned to 900–950 CE (Sanderson, 2007, p. 411). Somānanda was the first to attempt to organize and philosophically explicate the teachings of Śaiva non-dualism, a task he carried out in the Śivadṛṣṭi (ŚD), in all likehood his only work.⁶ He was a brahmin and was probably involved in the court of the kings of Kashmir (Nemec, 2011, p. 20). The ŚD’s most striking peculiarity is the use of a mixed register, which blends mystical intuitions on the nature of the ultimate reality with philosophical analysis and criticism of opposite views. This has prompted John Nemec to argue that the work “was probably intended for a philosophically oriented audience, but one that was primarily made up of tantric initiates, or for potential initiates who would be predisposed to the scriptural tone and high, if mixed, register of the work” (Nemec, 2011, p. 20).

A radical shift in the purposes and the positioning of the Pratyabhijñā came with Somānanda’s disciple, Utpaladeva (925–975), who was undoubtedly the great innovator of the school and its central figure; to his writings we owe the name of the tradition itself and an in-depth exposition of its basic tenets. Most important was Utpaladeva, who put the Pratyabhijñā into the wider inter-religious debate that was at the heart of the classical phase of Indian philosophy. Apart from subtler theoretical differences, the main rift between Somānanda’s ŚD and his pupil’s works was the latter’s being open to the influence of a number of traditions, including Buddhist Pramāṇavāda, Bhartṛhari, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, Sāṃkhya, etc. Scholars have proposed different reasons for this shift, indeed all plausible. Raffaele Torella has hypothesized that the purpose of the school was “to offer itself implicitly as an alternative to the dominant Śaiva Siddhānta, or at least to establish itself as a non-extraneous element” (Torella, 2002, p. xiii). Sanderson, on the other hand, has stressed that the decision derived “from the nature of the commentators’ social milieu, which is one of Śaiva Brahmins eager to consolidate their religion on the level of high culture”.⁷ The result is the development of what David Gordon White has defined High Hindu Tantra, an intellectual construction stemming from the necessity of an “internalization, an aestheticization, and a semanticization of Kaula [i.e. antinomic and extreme] practice”. That is to say, “the transformation ‘from a kind of doing to a kind of knowing,’ a system of ‘overcoding’ that has permitted householder practitioners to have it both ways and lead conventional lives while experimenting in secret with Tantric identities” (White, 2003, pp. 219–220). Whatever the reason, Johannes Bronkhorst is certainly right in pointing out that this opening to others implied a radical influence of the adversary tenets on the Pratyabhijñā’s ones. And, implicitly, this also proves how remarkable was the capacity of attraction of the Indian rationalist tradition: in the end, even Tantric intellectuals were eventually forced to prove the validity of their theses by recurring to rational scrutiny (Bronkhorst, 1996a).

Utpaladeva’s main theoretical accomplishment are the Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, the ‘Stanzas of the Recognition of the Lord’ (ĪPK). At the same time,⁸ he also composed a first brief explanation of the stanzas, known as Vṛtti; later in life (Torella, 2014, p. 116) he analyzed the complex kārikā-vṛtti, in a further work, the Vivṛti or Ṭīkā, a more comprehensive and detailed commentary which is almost totally lost.⁹ This is certainly a severe blow for the study of the Pratyabhijñā. By judging on the basis of the few fragments preserved, there is little doubt that the Vivṛti must have constituted the very heart of the system and had a great impact on the achievements of Utpaladeva’s most brilliant and influential successor, Abhinavagupta. After these works, Utpaladeva composed three specific treatises, meant to analyze in greater detail themes he had already touched on in the ĪPK: the Īśvarasiddhi, devoted to the defend the notion of God, a task which he carried out by adopting a Naiyāyika point of view; the Ajaḍapramātṛsiddhi, which aims at proving the existence of a conscious knowing subject; and finally, the Saṃbandhasiddhi, concerned with the defence of the metaphysical notion of ‘relation’ from the Buddhist criticism. To these theoretical writings Utpaladeva added two other works: a commentary on the ŚD, which is only partially preserved, and a popular collection of mystical hymns, the Śivastotrāvalī, which the author composed throughout his life and which was collected by his pupils after his death.

Among Utpaladeva’s followers, the most significant is certainly Abhinavagupta (975–1025), who was made acquainted with the Pratyabhijñā tradition by a teacher known as Lakṣmaṇagupta (950–1000). Lakṣmaṇagupta did not leave any work behind, but he is traditionally regarded as a direct disciple of Utpaladeva. Abhinavagupta was truly one of the great intellectuals of India, a polymath who gave outstanding contributions to many fields, from metaphysics to aesthetics and theology. From a philosophical and religious standpoint, his crucial achievement was the systematization of the teachings of the Pratyabhijñā, which he employed as a theoretical device to harmonize the ideas and the practices of the many Tantric currents present in the Kashmir of his time. He also further expanded the boundaries of the tradition by making the interconnection with other schools much more explicit and edulcorated the power of antinomic rituals with the purpose to create a synthesis palatable to a wider audience. Whether Abhinavagupta succeeded in the process of harmonization of the various strands of the so-called Kashmir Śaivism, in terms of both ritual practices and theoretical background, is questionable,¹⁰ but it is out of question that after his intervention many typical themes of the Pratyabhijñā set foot in traditions that were far from the original one, sometimes even geographically. Later in life (Gnoli, 1999, p. lxxxi), Abhinavagupta devoted to the Pratyabhijñā his two main philosophical treatises, both of them in the shape of commentaries on Utpaladeva’s works. Probably also relying on an already developed oral analysis of the ĪPK (Torella, 2002, p. xlii), Abhinavagupta composed a first commentary on Utpaladeva’s kārikās named Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī (ĪPV), later followed by a longer work titled Īśvara-pratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī (ĪPVV), in which he commented the lost Vivṛti. As far the spreading of the Pratyabhijñā doctrines is concerned, there is no doubt that Abhinavagupta played a role that is difficult to overstate. The ĪPV in particular has long been regarded as the literary and philosophical masterpiece of the school,¹¹ the work in which the ideas advanced in the original stanzas are expanded and contextualized by abundant references to views of other schools, which is something that in Utpaladeva’s preserved works is often missing. Nevertheless, our appreciation of the originality of Abhinavagupta as a theoretical thinker—at least as a Pratyabhijñā thinker—is inevitably affected by the lack of Utpaladeva’s Vivṛti. According to a tradition he himself fostered,¹² Utpaladeva composed his three main works with different aims and readers in mind. The stanzas were addressed to those who have already reached the highest level in the philosophical and religious path. For these persons, even the relatively concise form of the kārikās is enough to fully realize the message of the school. But those who are, so to speak, in the middle of the path, they must read and meditate the stanzas with the aid of the short explanations provided by the Vṛtti, thus eliminating even the slightest influence of alien (and erroneous) doctrines. At the lowest level, those who are still at the mercy of false opinions should approach the Pratyabhijñā’s teaching through the Vivṛti, the work in which all details are carefully explained and fallacious notions refuted. If this scheme is true—and there is no reason to doubt it—it is obvious that Utpaladeva’s most interesting work, at least from the point of view of a historian of ideas, is the longest one, the Vivṛti, precisely the one that is missing. This inevitably casts a shadow on Abhinavagupta’s centrality as a theoretician of the Pratyabhijñā: as long as the Vivṛti remains mostly unknown, there is no way to determinate whether what is contained in Abhinavagupta’s commentaries is the result of original thinking or rath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Historical and philosophical contexts
• 2 The Buddhist doctrine of non-self
• 3 The true nature of self-awareness
• 4 Self-awareness: Pratyabhijñā’s forerunners
• 5 A linguistic consciousness
• 6 Subjectivity and first-person stance
• 7 Self
• Epilogue
• Appendix: translations
• Bibliography
• Index