The self as agent: a review article

Asian Philosophy, 2018

We argue that the pratyabhijñā (recognition) system of Kaśmir Śaivism holds an inconsistent position. On the one hand, the Pratyabhijñā regards Śiva as an impersonal mechanism and the universe, including persons, as not having agency; call this the Impersonal Component. On the other hand, it considers Śiva himself as a person, and individual persons as having agency sufficient to respond to Śiva; call this the Personal Component. We maintain that the Personal Component should be affirmed and the Impersonal Component rejected. The Impersonal Component's claim that Śiva is unaware of and unaffected by his manifestation should be rejected, and the doctrine of satkāryavāda should be modified. The universe is Śiva's manifestation, in the first instance, but it also has a relative autonomy from him. Moreover, humans have agency and freedom. Their actions effect Śiva. He grows and develops in response to his manifestation.

Verità e bellezza. Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella, 2022

We argue that the pratyabhijñā (recognition) system of Kaśmir Śaivism holds an inconsistent position. On the one hand, the Pratyabhijñā regards Śiva as an impersonal mechanism and the universe, including persons, as not having agency; call this the Impersonal Component. On the other hand, it considers Śiva himself as a person, and individual persons as having agency sufficient to respond to Śiva; call this the Personal Component. We maintain that the Personal Component should be affirmed and the Impersonal Component rejected. The Impersonal Component’s claim that Śiva is unaware of and unaffected by his manifestation should be rejected, and the doctrine of satkāryavāda should be modified. The universe is Śiva’s manifestation, in the first instance, but it also has a relative autonomy from him. Moreover, humans have agency and freedom. Their actions effect Śiva. He grows and develops in response to his manifestation.

This note is my humble homage to Hemen Da who always inspired me with his childlike innocent smile and deep penetrative insight. I am grateful to the editors for giving me this opportunity to pay my respects to his sacred memory. Before I begin, a note of caution seems called for. This being a "brief hermeneutical note," the reader might feel disappointed if he or she finds the desired coherence and details missing or some doubts under-addressed. Nor is there any claim to present all aspects of the comprehensive speculation on consciousness in this system. This note is an improved and modified version of my paper written for the National Seminar on Consciousness organized by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sanskrit, University of Pune, in September 2012. Kashmir Śaivism, traditionally the Trika or Pratyabhijñā school, is all about consciousness. Way back in 1905, Prof. K.C. Bhattacharya, in the course of propounding his conception of philosophy, subjectivity and the absolute, formulated consciousness in three alternative modes-knowing, feeling and willing-and conceived of an alternation of truth, value and reality as constitutive of the absolute. He himself termed his thesis as the "doctrine of trinal absolute." 1 In 1934, Prof. T.R.V. Murti, in his article "Knowing, Feeling and Willing as Functions of Consciousness," brought out the implications of Prof. K.C. Bhattacharya's doctrine, arguing that the alternative forms of the absolute

Journal of Hindu Studies 6 (3) pp. 391-393., 2013

"Some hitherto unknown fragments of Utpaladeva’s Vivṛti (I): on the Buddhist controversy over the existence of other conscious streams", pp. 224-256 in R. TORELLA & B. BÄUMER (eds.), Utpaladeva, Philosopher of Recognition, Delhi: DK Printworld. The fields of indology and Indian philosophy owe to Raffaele Torella one of the most exciting manuscript discoveries made in the last decades, namely, that of the only extensive fragment thus far known of Utpaladeva’s own Vivṛti on his Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā. Thanks to the edition of this very incomplete codex unicus (it only covers 13 verses out of 190), we are now able to compare this known part of Utpaladeva’s lost text with the numerous annotations written in the margins of the manuscripts of Abhinavagupta’s commentaries on the Pratyabhijñā treatise. This comparison shows that some of these marginalia are quotations – and in a number of cases, rather lengthy ones – of Utpaladeva’s Vivṛti. The article, which presents the first results of an ongoing study of the marginal annotations found in manuscripts of Abhinavagupta’s Pratyabhijñā commentaries, offers an edition and annotated translation of a hitherto unknown passage of the Vivṛti on kārikās 1.5.4 and 1.5.5. The fragment bears on the Buddhist controversy between Vijñānavādins and Sautrāntikas over the existence of other conscious streams (santānāntara) and on the possibility of intersubjectivity if, as the Vijñānavādins claim, nothing exists outside consciousness. http://www.dkprintworld.com/product-detail.php?pid=1280858056

The Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’) sūtras are a large corpus of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts composed and redacted within the Indian subcontinent for over a thousand year period. The late Edward Conze, the leading modern authority on the Prajñāpāramitā texts, divides the development of this literature into four phases: 1. the elaboration of a basic text (ca. 100 B.C. to 100 A.D.), which constitutes the original impulse; 2. the expansion of that text (ca. 100 A.D. to 300); 3. the restatement of the doctrine in short texts and versified summaries (ca. 300 A.D. to 500); 4. the period of Tantric influence and the absorption into magic (600 A.D. to 1200). Conze identifies the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines (Aṣṭasahaśrikā-prajñāpāramitā) and its verse summary (the Ratnaguṇa-saṃcaya-gāthā) as representing the earliest strata. While Conze’s assertion of the Aṣṭa’s antiquity has had lasting impact on studies into the origins of the Mahāyāna, modern scholarship’s obsession with origins has caused most contemporary theorists to overlook or ignore the later phases of the Prajñāpāramitā literature’s development in India. By approaching these texts in a more synoptic fashion, I hope to demonstrate in the following pages important thematic continuities within the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras. In order to do this, I treat these texts as literature, which existed within a larger textual and social system (Indian Buddhism). Specifically, I investigate how dialogue is used in the sūtras to establish a particular type of textual authority and how certain commonly occurring characters in the dialogues, such as Śāriputra, Subhuti, and Ānanda, are employed to align the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras more closely to mainstream Buddhist literature. A primary conclusion of this investigation is that the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras to a large extent demonstrate a particular brand of Indian Mahāyāna religious conservatism. Moreover, because this conservatism spans numerous texts within the corpus throughout several centuries, its appearance can not be analyzed solely in terms of a relative chronology vis-à-vis other Mahāyāna sūtras, but must be considered as one particular ideological posture in relation to a spectrum of religious orientations existing (both synchronically and diachronically) within Indian Buddhism.