Time and Some Temporal Notions: A Vaiśeşika Analysis

MUSE India, 2018

Indian Scholars had indeed talked a lot on various aspects of life in terms of theology and philosophy. Indian thought system has also a lot of contributions and contains several qualities; for instance, it always seeks to accommodate Lōka with śāstra. Loka (society) gives guidance to sāśtra and sāśtra would never be opposite to Lōka. The second quality of this tradition is to think about the society, not to a particular person. In this thought system, darśana is a guideline to get the supreme goal of human life. Till the time of Mādhavāchārya, there had been sixteen paths in the Indian philosophical system-- Pratyabhigyā Darśana was also an important path amongst them . But later on this darśana passed into oblivion, but this path always grew upward. Still we can consider this one of the worthy paths among the Indian philosophical schools. In this system kāla is an important entity. Here in this research paper, endeavours have been made to focus on the concept of ‘Time (kāla)’ with respect to eastern and western philosophical systems as well as modern science. Stress has been laid mainly on the perspective, trying to understand whether Time (kāla) is an absolute or a relative entity

Analele Universitatii Bucuresti. Limbi si Literaturi Straine, 2021

Even if absolutist approaches of time and space, which see these as selfexisting substances, are more agreed by the archaic cosmologies, at times, we can encounter the more philosophical alternative, of considering them in a relativist way. The article deals with two such approaches. At first, it analyzes the relational time of Buddhism, considered not as a substance but as the serial order of the so-called "moments" (ksana). It also deals with the more complex approach of a realistic school of Brahmanism, Vaiśesika, which includes, among the "substances" (dravya), a relational time (kāla) and a relational space (diś), apart from an absolute space, labelled as "ether" (ākāśa). The ether would be the receptacle where things are located, altogether, while the "space" (diś) or, better said, the directions, account for the spatial order of the objects. Moreover, the school approaches dimension or corporeality in a relativist way, considering them as a numerical issue, as the result of gathering together of the so-called "atoms" (paramānu).

智山学報（Journal of Chisan Studies）, 2002

Vṛṣabhadeva’s Sphuṭākṣarā, a commentary on the first chapter of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya and its Vṛtti, offers a peculiar interpretation of the monistic ideas exposed at the beginning of the mūla text. The reflection on the status of ordinary reality and its relation with the unitary metaphysical principle is particularly interesting. Although according to Bhartṛhari’s perspective the entities of the world are real, the Sphuṭākṣarā offers a more intricate picture in which different degrees of reality seem involved. Furthermore, the author adopts hermeneutical tools that are unusual in Bhartṛhari’s texts, and comparable to those of Advaita Vedānta. In particular, the article will deal with Vṛṣabhadeva’s use of the notion of ‘inexpressibility’ (anirvacanīyatva), as well as with other concepts which are typical of the scholastic phase of Advaita. In discussing these affinities the paper will also touch upon the problem of Vṛṣabhadeva’s historical collocation.

Journal of Hindu Studies, 2016

1992

TOC & Introduction It is second in the series of the IGNCA programme of a multi-disciplinary lexicon of fundamental concepts of the Indian tradition. In this volume seminal terms of space and time have been included. The terms have been scanned through a wide spectrum of texts drawn from the fields of metaphysics to science and the arts. It enables the reader to comprehend the multi-layered meanings of the concepts in different contexts.

Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2016

Eli Franco has recently suggested to distinguish the two main periods in the history of Indian philosophy, i.e. the older ontological and the new epistemological. In the Vākyapadīya, however, ontology and epistemology are evidently intertwined and interrelated. In this paper ontological and epistemological features of the concepts of paśyantī, pratibhā, sphoţa and jāti are analyzed in order to demonstrate that all these concepts, while being ontologically different, are engaged in similar epistemological processes, i.e. the cognition of a verbal utterance. Thus the identification of sphoţa and jāti as well as of paśyantī and pratibhā met with in some passages of VP and the commentaries implies not the absolute identity of these concepts, but only their overlapping in the sphere of epistemology. Considering concepts of different origin in one epistemological perspective enables to escape controversies in interpretation and provides a kind of consistency in a bit but amorphous work of Bhartŗhari. Keywords Bhartŗhari • Indian language philosophy • Paśyantī • Sphoţa • Pratibhā • Jāti Eli Franco in the introduction to the recent volume 'Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy' proposed to divide the history of Indian philosophy into three large periods, i.e. (1) the ontological period, (2) the epistemological period and (3) the Navya Nyāya period. The transfer from the first to the second period is dated to approximately the fourth century, which is associated with the rapid development E. Desnitskaya (&)

SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Indian Philosophy Beyond India: A Reconsideration of Vaiśeṣika 勝論 and Its Sources in East Asia, 2021

This paper deals with non-Buddhist Indian philosophy in East Asia, a subject that has received comparatively little attention from scholars, though there is a vast amount of East Asian material that contains information on Indian thought. The discussion focuses on the interpretations and sources pertinent to one particular school, Vaiśeṣika. Vaiśeṣika, in Indian philosophy, is famous for its theory of primordial principles (padārthas), aiming to explain the universe on a naturalistic basis. The primary source associated with this school in East Asia is Daśapadārthī 勝宗十句義論, a Vaiśeṣika text translated from Sanskrit by Xuánzàng 玄奘 in 648. However, there are numerous other relevant passages and references to Vaiśeṣika scattered over hundreds of East Asian Buddhist texts. On top of that, during the Japanese Edo period (eighteenth–nineteenth centuries), dozens of direct commentaries were written on Daśapadārthī. Thus, concerning the plurality of sources on Vaiśeṣika in East Asia, this paper puts forward two arguments. First, although there are other unique East Asian sources on Vaiśeṣika, scholars have overwhelmingly based their analysis on Daśapadārthī treated solely as an Indian text, to the neglect of the intellectual framework of East Asia. This argument is put forward via a bibliographical analysis of previous scholarship on the topic. Second, Daśapadārthī, together with other East Asian textual materials discussing or referring to Vaiśeṣika, constitute a unique East Asian interpretative tradition for Vaiśeṣika. In making this argument, I distinguish three consecutive stages for the reception of Vaiśeṣika in East Asia and describe peculiar features of Vaiśeṣika within each.