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The chapter introduces Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) as a pioneer of the academic field of Buddhist philosophy in Japan. In his key work on this topic, Living Discourse on Buddhism, Enryō attempted to give Buddhism a philosophical foundation suited to the modern world. The chapter outlines this groundwork project and interprets its marginal reception as being due to Enryō’s ignorance of Sanskrit studies and his support of Japanese imperialism. The first generation of enlightenment thinkers of the Meiji period were convinced that the East Asian history of thought was backwards and stagnant because it lacked a culture of discussion and dissent. By revealing dialectical patterns in its genealogy, Enryō meant to prove Buddhism’s progressive philosophical character. The Buddhist doctrine of the Middle Path as it became influential in East Asia was not constructed as the avoidance of extremes but as the sublation (G. Aufhebung) of opposites. The dualisms of being and non-being, affirmation and negation were to be transcended to a higher synthesis, which is ultimately equivalent to the non-discriminative state of enlightenment. Enryō believed that the historical development of Buddhism could be reconstructed as the progressive spelling out of all possible metaphysical positions following dialectical patterns. Through this, Buddhist philosophical truth would become more and more abstract and Buddhism itself more and more encompassing. The apex of such a complete system was to be reached in the unbiased notion of the middle subsuming all possible viewpoints. Enryō mostly referred to this highest notion of Buddhism, which he believed to coincide with Hegel’s Absolute or Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable,” as “Suchness” (J. shinyo 真如).

This article is to provide a concise, yet comprehensible, explanation for the concept of obstructions of knowledge (jneyāvaraṇa) of East Asian Sākāra-vijnānavāda, mainly according to Xuanzang’s Cheung Weishi Lun, the encyclopedic commentary on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikā. The Cheung Weishi Lun is the major text for Sākāra-vijnānavāda tradition. Among the existing materials in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, very likely East Asian Sākāra-vijnānavāda is the major tradition able to provide a clear, detailed and comprehensible interpretation on jneyāvaraṇa. In this article, jneyāvaraṇa is explained in terms of three perspectives: first, the argumentation that counters epistemological realism, from an idealistic standpoint; second, the theoretical description about the relationship between the Vijnānavāda doctrine of eight consciousnesses (vijnāna) and jneyāvaraṇa; third, various levels of jneyāvaraṇa on the path (mārga) and stage (bhūmi) that are explained within the framework of ten obstructions (āvaraṇa). The concepts of five sciences (panca vidyā) and omniscience (sarvajnā), along with jneyāvaraṇa, are used to approach the Universal (Mahayana) horizon.

The evolving field of neuroscience provides a fresh perspective for understanding and clarifying the nondualistic epistemology of Buddhist philosophy. Its egalitarian adherence to “wisdom embracing all species” required an epistemological shift beyond both egocentric and anthropocentric assumptions, outlined in such texts as the Lotus Sūtra and the Diamond Sūtra. Parallels can be drawn to the Triple Loop learning process, “an ‘epistemo-existential strategy’ for profound change on various levels.” Inherently hierarchical tendencies in Daoist and Confucian philosophies posed a challenge to the egalitarian stance of Buddhist nondualism. Passages from Daoist (Laozi, Zhuangzi), Confucian (Confucius, Mengzi, Xunzi), and Neo-Confucian (Zhu Xi, Wang Yang-ming) texts demonstrate the limits of Chinese nondualism. The hybrid brain cultivated through Buddhist practice was able to maintain the benefits of the task-driven dorsal attentional network (promoting Wisdom), while being grounded in the stimulus-driven ventral attentional network (opening Compassion). The Five Ranks (wu-wei五位) of Chan meticulously trace the process of recognizing the nondualism of deluded mind (the bent) and awakened mind (the straight). The final rank, “Unity Attained,” restores the role of allocentric attention, which has been described as “the basic simplicity of the undyed fabric,” as the default. Thus, inspired by the pedagogy of cognitive dissonance woven into Sanskrit texts, Chinese practitioners deployed their own “circuit-breakers” of ventral attention to disrupt the dogmatic “perseveration” of dorsal attention. The resulting epistemological reorientation reveals the nondualism of reality.

Angkor was the capital city of the Khmer kingdom from the latter half of the first millenniumAD. At its peak in the eleventh to twelfth century AD, the Khmer kingdom incorporated Cambodia, southern Vietnam, southern Laos, and parts of Thailand. Angkor was the primate city of this vast kingdom and was connected to a network of smaller, satellite cities by an extensive road system (Hendrickson, 2010). King Jayavarman II founded Angkor, it is commonly said, in 802 AD, proclaiming himself the universal king and unifying a constellation of smaller chiefdoms that were grouped by Chinese visitors under the generic names “Funan” and “Chenla.” However, this date comes from a stone inscription (K235; Coedes & Dupont, 1943–1946) written hundreds of years after the events it depicts, and its veracity is widely questioned (Vickery, 1998). Indeed, many of the early state temples that characterized Angkor’s urban form may be much older than the epigraphic evidence suggests (Penny et al., 2006; Pottier, 1996). Whatever the date of Angkor’s establishment as a city, it likely emerged from a long period of occupation in the area that dates back to the second millennium BC. No primary historical documents (stone inscriptions in Khmer and Sanskrit) from Angkor are known after the end of the thirteenth century AD. Monumental construction in the capital also ceased at this time. It is not until the late sixteenth century that European visitors – initially Portuguese missionaries and merchants – began to describe Angkor (Groslier, 1958). At that time, the city was in ruin, almost completely abandoned and overgrown with forest. More detailed accounts emerged in the nineteenth century from explorers such as Henri Mouhot – often incorrectly credited with the “discovery” of Angkor in 1860 – and in the subsequent and ultimately ill-fated “Mekong Expedition” of 1866, led by Doudart de Lagree (Osborne, 1996). The romantic notion of the ruined city conjured in nineteenth-century Europe by these reports from the Far East was, in part, fanciful. Angkor was never completely abandoned by the Khmer, and in fact the city was re-occupied – if only briefly – by a Khmer king in the 1550s. AngkorWat was probably continuously occupied by Theravāda Buddhist monks, and significant construction occurred in the sixteenth century at Angkor Wat and extensively within the enclosure of Angkor Thom (Jacques, 2007).

This chapter describes Patani’s Indic, Islamic and Thai pasts. The argument is that the Malay kerajaan of Patani was similar to—rather than distinct from—other port city-states on the peninsula and islands of Southeast Asia where a Sanskrit cosmopolis existed for a millennium before the earliest chapters of Islam’s Southeast Asian expansion. Islam also circulated east and west of Patani through trade between the Middle East and China via the Indian Ocean. This created a range of Indian/Arab/Malay creole communities whose members played key roles in the adoption of, or adhesion to, Islam in Southeast Asian port city-states like Patani. India’s importance to the arrival of Islam to the Thai/Malay peninsula relates to what Islam came to, where Islam initially came from, and who Islam came through. Rather than refer to conversion, I refer to an adhesion to, or adoption of, Islam. The impact of Thai and Islamic influences in Patani/Pattani following its defeat in 1785 is described. The details of the process through which the Malay Kingdom (SM. kerajaan) of Patani became the Thai Province of Pattani, including Bangkok’s legislative and administrative initiatives are also provided. A central concern of this chapter is to highlight the fact that these developments coincided with a period of revolution and reform in the Hijaz. I describe how these developments impacted local religious life and thought through local luminaries such as Shaykh Daud Al-Fatani, Shaykh Ahmad Al-Fatani and Haji Sulong. The methodologies and contributions of present-day reformist revivalist movements are also described.

A renewed interest for contextualization in indological studies,1 is but slowly affecting publications on Indian mathematics. The isolation of history of mathematics within the general field of indology derives partly from a lively historiographical trend of technical and patriotic history of mathematics which remains oblivious to social science. Preservation plays a role as well: precious little information exists on the context in which mathematics and astronomy were practiced in India in the past.2 To overcome this problem some historians of science have turned to periods (XVIth–XIXth century) and places where institutions, libraries and many texts help us contextualize their mathematical and astronomical ideas.3

Sanskrit philologists are not usually thought of these days as intrepid, but in their search for manuscript collections more than a century ago they were required to brave arsenic, plague, and worst of all, corrosive, insuperable suspicion. The essay that follows is about how that came to be so; it is also about science, broadly defined; about texts and their study as an inalienable part of science and its history; and about gaining access to collections as a strenuous sport.

Indians look upon their rivers with reverence and consider them sacred. From time immemorial, their mythologies have been harping on the sacredness of rivers but there is none more sacred and popular than the Ganga, the holiest among them. In the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, written in Sanskrit by sage Valmiki between 1400 and 1000 BC, which remains the bedrock of the Hindu culture, she is personified as a goddess. In Hindu mythology, she is the eldest daughter of Himavat and Menoka; her sister being Uma, or goddess Durga who is worshipped in autumn and spring by Bengalis, particularly. She became the wife of King Santanu and bore a son, Bhisma, who is known as Gangeya. She is also the mother of Kartikeya whom she bore, being in love with Agni. She has many other names too – Bhadra-soma, Gandini, Kirati, Devabhuti, Hara-Sekhara, Khapaga, Mandakini, Tripathaga or Trisrota i.e., three streams, flowing in heaven, earth and hell (in the last, she is called Patal-Ganga)

Hermes, [Gr.] Myth. A deity, the son of Zeus and Maia, the messenger of the Greek gods, the good of science, commerce, eloquence, and many of the arts of life; commonly figured as a youth, with the conduceus, or rod, petasus or brimmed hat, and talaria or winged shoes. From which comes hermeneuein [Latin, hermeneuticus; German, Hermeneutik] “to make something clear, to announce or to unveil a message”1 – in short, to interpret. Hermeneutics, then, first and foremost is about Meaning; and its presupposition is language or Speech. (What would the Sanskrit equivalent of the toppied-Kumārasvāmin of Indra, Vāc, and Māyā, with dan. d. a and uddatichappel, imaginary look like?)

This chapter has two parts, first a pedagogical complaint that will serve to introduce part two which concerns indological and philosophical hermeneutics. The first part is focused on a particular problem with English translations that do not acknowledge how the Sanskrit texts have been understood by Sanskrit commentators and others in the classical culture. The second part presents a general characterization of the methods of indology and of philosophy, and shows how in one sense, not appreciated by some within indology, philosophic engagement trumps context and placement of a work within a stream of intellectual history.

Rasa (sanskrit, lit. ‘taste’), a concept first introduced in the Natyasastra, the oldest existing Indian treatise on dramaturgy (200 BC–AD 200) can be translated as aesthetic appreciation, but this is a superficial definition that does not do justice to the spiritual and philosophical implications of this term. It is perceived as an experience ranging from simple enjoyment to complete absorption, to trance, to so-called out-of-body experiences. While these terms might alarm people, it is essential to understand that rasa refers to a complete state of empathy of a person with himself or herself, with another, or with a state of being or situation. Almost every classical dance form in South and South East Asia, (not to mention music, sculpture, poetry and literature) claims some form of rasa as its goal. In this endeavour, dance in these parts of the world becomes pure communication using the body, facial expressions, music, rhythm, dialogue, storytelling and whatever else works. There is no concept of dance as just body movement. It is complete theatre that endeavours to transport the artist and the spectator into a realm where nothing exists but art. However rasa need not lie solely in the realm of classical art forms. This article endeavours to build a different approach to a pedagogy more suitable to the Asian framework, using the concept of rasa as perceived in various performing art traditions in South and South East Asia and from the perspective of the philosophy propounded in the Natyasastra. Since I work with dance and the educational system in Asia, I choose not to use just the physical form of the art but the underlying philosophy as well. My goal is to use rasa in novel, effective and exciting ways to aid holistic education. I first explain the concept of rasa as detailed in the Natyasastra and give examples of how it is used in performing art forms. After this, the potential integration of this concept in the education system, to aid both students and teachers is illustrated. Several case studies are then described using different techniques for invoking rasa. This is followed by an observation of the benefits, problems and questions that could arise from invoking rasa.

The Tibetan, one of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, has a population of over 4,000,000 (China, 1994, pp. 2–3), which is distributed in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and four neighboring provinces, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. Within Tibet, the Tibetans are the dominant majority (above 95% of the population). Outside Tibet in those four provinces, the Tibetans either concentrate in smaller communities or are scattered in larger communities with other ethnic groups. This distribution of the Tibetan people has a consequence for the linguistic ecology of their language. Tibetan, a Tibetan-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family, has three main vernaculars: Wei Tibetan, Kang Tibetan, and Ando Tibetan. It is traditionally believed that the Tibetan script was created from Sanskrit by Tumi Sanpuzha in the 7th century (see China, 1992, pp. 17–18). Tibetan was used to different extents in different regions before the founding of the PRC in 1949. Since 1949, the PRC government has shown a great concern for the Tibetan language, and has made a series of policies to ensure its use and development. In this chapter, I introduce China’s language policy for Tibetan, discuss the linguistic ecology for Tibetan, and examine the use of Tibetan in education, cultural activities, media, and government. I conclude this chapter with some thoughts on both positive and negative experiences from the use and development of Tibetan in China.

The originality of India’s mathematical texts is a consequence of the refined culture of the scholars who produced them. A few examples display clearly some salient features of the habits of exposition and the methods of thought of ancient and medieval Indian mathematicians. The attitude of the traditional learned man, called “pandit”, is the same, whether he works on literary or technical matter. Propensity to orality, use of memory, brain work are his specific qualities. Composition in verse form, use of synonymous words, metaphorical expression, which are unexpected processes for the exposition of technical matter, have been the rule in all the vast Sanskrit mathematical literature. The present article analyses a technique of memorization of the text of the Vedas, the earliest exposition of geometry rules in the context of Vedic rites of building brick altars, the numeration system, the arithmetical and geometrical concept of square.

Naturalism, like spiritualism, is an ambiguous term. In some cases, in India and elsewhere, naturalism has been contrasted with spiritualism or idealism, and naturalism at times has been used as a synonym for materialism. Equally widespread is the use of the word shamanism, derived either from Sanskrit śraman (priest) or Tunguso-Manchurian saman (knowledgeable person) or both. Shamanism is a concept in which the elements of both naturalism and spiritualism are present. Interestingly enough, both in their European and Indian contexts, one finds some thinkers who do not recognize any dualism between naturalism and spiritualism. Nature is spiritually informed or permeated, and spirit has its influential presence in nature. Spirit and nature are also said to be two different hemispheres or aspects of one and the same reality, God or Brahman. Naturalism and spiritualism developed in India at times side by side and often in and through mutual interaction. In India the Sāmkhya system, (number-or sāmkhya-based system), is recognized as paradigmatically naturalist. In fact one of its first principles, prakrti, literally means nature. Those who are pro-materialist are inclined also to designate lokāyata/cārvāka as a naturalist system. Literally lokāyata means that which is pervasive among the people (loka), and the expression cārvāka is a combination of caāru (sweet) and vāk (words).

The history of any remote ancient civilization is often surrounded by mystery and controversy. Even now, Western scholars have not given enough credit to the work of some of the ancient Indian mathematicians, particularly Brahmagupta and Bhāskara II, despite the fact that their entire works were translated into English by the British Sanskrit scholar Henry Thomas Colebrooke in the early part of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this article is to set forth the facts and leave the reader to interpret and assess them according to his own understanding of the subject. A sincere attempt has been made to do so. Due to limitations of space, this article discusses only some of the mathematical accomplishments of only a few outstanding mathematicians of ancient India.

In November of 1730 the Portuguese astronomer Pedro da Silva arrived in Jayasimha’s court bearing, among other books, a copy of the second edition of Philippe de La Hire’s Tabulae Astro-nomicae, published in Paris in 1727. The choice of this text as the representative of contemporary European astronomy being sent to the Mahārāja was apparently due to the fact that de La Hire, finding fault with the Rudolphine Tables, whose alleged errors he attributes to Kepler’s hypotheses, claims: Quamobrem id statui Tabulas meas nulli hypothesi, sed observationibus tantummodo superstruere, nullâ cuius vis Systematis habitâ ratione. This abjuring of adhesion to an “heretical” astronomy must have pleased the Jesuits who chose the book. This aspect of the Tabulae Astronomicae (though in fact de La Hire does adhere to an astronomical hypothesis, the heliocentric) appealed also to Jospeh Dubois, who wrote at the beginning of the Jayapura copy on September 1732: Tabulae Astronomicae in quibus Solis, Lunae, reliquorum planetarum motus ex ipsis observationibus nulla adhibita hypotesi traduntur. This same propaganda explains the title, Drkpaksasāranī, given to the adaption of the Tabulae Astronomicae written in Sanskrit verse by Kevalarama, Jayasimha’s jyotisarāja, in or after 1733 when the new city of Jayapura, to which he refers, began to be occupied, and the astonishing fact that Kevalrarāma nowhere in this work mentions the heliocentric theory though the computations that he prescribes are based upon it.

Although the methods of plane trigonometry became the cornerstone of classical Indian mathematical astronomy, the corresponding techniques for exact solution of triangles on the sphere’s surface seem never to have been independently developed within this tradition. Numerous rules nevertheless appear in Sanskrit texts for finding the great-circle arcs representing various astronomical quantities; these were presumably derived not by spherics per se but from plane triangles inside the sphere or from analemmatic projections, and were supplemented by approximate formulas assuming small spherical triangles to be plane.

Singapore, Southeast Asia’s most prosperous country, has attained a level of development unmatched by any other equatorial country in the world. Singapore’s progress negates the outdated theories of environmental determinism, such as that of Huntington, which states that the hot, tropical, and equatorial regions of the world are not suited for modern development.1 The name Singapore originated from the Sanskrit word Singapura (singa means lion and pura means city). The lion city has held its name since the end of the 14th century.

[The present essay is a translation of a Sanskrit paper written by one of the greatest exponents of the Nyāya tradition (both old and New Nyāya) of our times who died in 1987. He tries to 101summarize some of the controversies and comparisons discussed during a conference in July 1983, at Pune (India) where Russell’s and Moore’s views about ‘propositions’ were explained in Sanskrit to traditional Sanskrit-speaking philosophers who are otherwise unexposed to Western philosophy].

Indian Logic is vast. Its problems are many. The Pandit World is also quite big. The erudition of pandits is well known and their mastery of many difficult original texts of the śāstra is amazing. Many pandits have suggested many solutions in their speeches and in their writings. Their speeches have not been recorded. Many of their writings are also not available; yet a great number of them are available in Sanskrit. The available material itself looks like an ocean indeed! But how much of it have I drunk and digested? Hence to write under the above heading is a precarious job. Only a fool could venture to contain this ocean-like subject within a peppercorn-like paper of some fifteen pages. Inescapably, therefore, one has to choose one or two convenient problems only for the paper. Let me proceed. I am also a pandit, in a way.

Indian philosophy by and large has been treated up to now in an antiquarian spirit, something belonging to past history which has no relevance to current concerns of philosophical thought in the world. Further, it has readily been assumed that the past traditions of philosophical thought had already reached a dead end and that there were no living representatives of that thought in modern times or that those who existed were concerned primarily with the preservation and safe-guarding of past knowledge in these domains. The intellectual and cultural domination of the west as well as the establishment of educational institutions on western models, along with the training of students in western universities, ensured that the paradigmatic model about philosophy and what was to count as “philosophical” was determined by the west. Also, as English was the language of both national and international intellectual life, it automatically ensured that those who did not know the language or could not write or converse in it would become intellectually nonexistent even in their own country. This resulted in a situation where only those persons were paid attention to even in the field of Indian philosophy who wrote in English or in other major European languages. If one only knew Sanskrit and wrote in it, one had very little chance of being treated as a serious scholar or thinker even in those areas of philosophy which specifically pertained to that which was exclusively contained in the Sanskrit texts themselves. The scholar who could not read, write or speak in English thus gradually became invisible in the philosophical scene during the course of this century in India.

In his PMLA “Presidential Address 1987: Woven Close,” Winfred P. Lehmann writes that Benjamin Whorf, in the posthumous essay “Language, Mind, and Reality,” “presents a conception of language that contrasts sharply with the views of the dominant school of criticism today. That conception he [Whorf] bases on ‘an idea, entirely unfamiliar to the modern world, that nature and language are inwardly akin’, pointing out that this ‘idea ... was for ages well known to various high cultures whose cultural continuity on the earth has been enormously longer than that of Western European culture.’ ”1 The Vedic civilization of ancient India is perhaps the oldest culture of this kind and the one whose knowledge of higher consciousness has much to offer modern culture and literary criticism. Vedic literature,2 reputed to be the oldest record of human knowledge, has given rise to a language theory that underlies the entire tradition of Sanskrit poetics. This tradition has its roots in “unknown beginnings”3 and extends from A.D. 800 to 1800.

The full treatise of the Introduction to the Middle Way (Madhyamakavatara) consists of a set of verses, known as the Madhyamakavatara or Madhyamakavatara-karika, and Chandrakirti’s own commentary on these known as the Madhyamakavatara-svavrtti or Madhyamakavatara-bhasya. It does not survive in its original Sanskrit, having been lost, as were so many Buddhist scriptures in the Muslim persecution of Indian Buddhism. It exists now in its Tibetan translation which was made in the first case by the Indian Tilaka-kalasha with the Tibetan Nyi ma grags, and revised and improved some time after by the Indian Kanakavarma working with the same Tibetan translator.

The Sanskrit words ācārya and guru both have the meaning of ‘teacher’. The etymology of ācārya is not certain. It is generally supposed to derive from ācāra, right conduct, or fromācarati, to approach, to go to as for instruction, or from ācinoti, to accumulate knowledge, wealth or merit.2 Guru derives from an Indo-european word for ‘heavy’, its semantic development being from heavy to important, awesome, thus, an elder, a teacher.3 However, it is not with etymologies that we are here concerned, but with the finished product. In Sanskrit commentaries and versified texts the two words are freely interchanged, as though they were exact synonyms.4 However, the two words had separate origins, and to attribute equal semantic value to these apparently synonymous words may efface the subtle nuance attached to each.5 In the pages which follow, we shall examine briefly the passages where these words occur, bring to the light the aspects in which the two words distinguish themselves from each other, and ascertain several distinctive connotations of both words. It is with gratitude and respect toward my guru, who is at the same time a great ācārya in Indological Studies, that I here take up the Hindu concepts of teacher, and dedicate this small contribution to the guru-pūjā-kaumudī of Professor Daniel H.H. Ingalls.

Traditional studies of mysticism1 have generally been written by men who were themselves aspiring toward the mystic experience. Two modern exceptions are the books by Danto (1972), a Western philosopher known for his earlier work in the philosophy of knowledge, and Staal (1975), a scholar who knows at first hand many of the texts about which he writes. However, it is not true that a close acquaintance with the original texts of mysticism inclines a scholar towards belief in them, in spite of the well-publicized views of R. C. Zaehner, who for many years occupied the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford. Zaehner believed that no scholar who was acquainted in any depth with the original texts of mysticism could fail to be moved by the desire to experience the ecstatic states which these texts describe. However, we begin to understand his stance when we realize that he withdrew his sympathy in face of Sanskrit texts which were infused with monistic ideals (best summarized in the famous line ascribed to Śaṅkara: brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ, “Brahma is real, the world is unreal, the self is none other than Brahman”2) and attempted to persuade his readers of the superiority of the Indian dualist tradition, which was much closer to Zaehner’s fervent Catholicism. To Zaehner, psychoanalysis meant Jung, for whom, of course, he had great sympathy. But such an attitude is not necessarily the result of scholarship.

Almost fifty years have passed since the first milestone was laid down for a critical study of the Buddhist pramāṇa system by Theodor Stcherbatsky with his publication of Buddhist Logic (2 vols., Bibliotheca Buddhica, XXVI, Leningrad, 1930–32). The intervening years have witnessed many significant publications providing fresh information on the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the founding fathers of the Buddhist pramāna system. These publications place us on much sounder ground than ever before for making an intellectual excursion into the inner sanctum of the system. It is also true, however, that new findings in scholarship sometimes lead to hitherto unnoticed problems and occasionally revive some of the old ones, with their complexities now articulated in a new fashion. One such case in the Buddhist pramāna system is mānasa-pratyaksa (mental perception) as a variety of pratyaksa (perception). The question of why Dignāga deemed it necessary to postulate mānasa-pratyaksa and just what he meant by it still remains as much a conundrum to us as it was to post-Dharmakīrti philosophers in classical India and to Buddhist academics in Tibet. The aim of this article is merely to attempt to locate the proper place for a tiny missing piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle — a piece that has been shuffled and reshuffled over the centuries. It is written in a spirit of gratitude to Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, who has patiently guided me on my venture into the maze of the Buddhist pramāna system.

The collection of rules of conduct applicable to natives and foreign orientals — which are ‘adat’ on account of their uncodified state, and ‘law’ because they carry sanctions — has not been derived from a single source. As with the languages and ethnic groupings, the influence of history is noticeable. Against the Malayo-Polynesian background of the indigenous languages, Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch words and usages appeared as the result of the arrival of Indian, then Moslem, and finally European, foreigners. Against the Malayo-Polynesian background of indigenous beliefs and customs the imprint of Hindu, Moslem and Christian shapes and shades became visible. Likewise, the languages and customs of the Chinese and Arabs in the Indies were subject to non-Chinese and non-Arabic influences. It was no different with the adat law of these peoples. Here, too, the indigenous Malayo-Polynesian law is still the background of the adat law of the Indonesians, whether autochthones like the Batak, Dayak, and Toraja, or immigrants like the members of the Malayan race. But among the 34 million-odd Indonesians of to-day (—) only a minority estimated at less than 3 million has remained pagan, adhering to an animistic-fetishistic religion (Badui, Tenggerese, many Batak, the inhabitants of the interior of Borneo and Celebes, the people of New Guinea, the Baliaga in Bali, etc.).

Any discussion of the procedures to which Sanskrit medical texts are being submitted by their editors, commentators and translators, before the texts become readable and reliable, is likely to extend beyond the field of pure philology. A number of terminological problems encountered in the philological study of Ayurvedic texts are related to the logical frame of mind of the Asian doctor, or to the logical structure of the Asian medical discourse. Philologists cannot avoid encroaching on the domain of anthropologists and broaching the vast question of the relation between text and practice in Hindu society, in order to address important issues like, for example, that of polysemy in the names of diseases or drugs. The collation of manuscripts, the edition, annotation, and translation of the classic texts cannot be dissociated from other, complementary approaches and techniques used by ethnobotanists, sociolinguists, and others.

In a paper on narcissism (Masson and Hanly, 1976), we indicated that the term ‘oceanic feeling’ or ‘oceanic experience’ (ozeanisches Gefuhl or Ewigkeitsgefuhl) used in Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1930) was taken from Romain Rolland and that it derived, ultimately, from Sanskrit sources. Further and more careful research has allowed me to be more precise in tracking this term back to its origins. An investigation of the surrounding imagery and related ideas suggested certain key features in such experiences (feelings of sadness, of the awareness of transience, feelings of world-weariness and of the dream-like nature of existence), and this in turn provided certain clues as to Freud’s interest in these experiences. Following a hint of Kanzer (1969), I was able to link more closely than has hitherto been attempted the Acropolis experience and oceanic feelings. Finally, I was led to take a closer look both at the image of the sea and the experience to which it points in an effort to provide a psychoanalytic explanation for both the form and the content of the oceanic feeling.

In commenting on the lack of individual personality in Sanskrit poetry, Daniel H.H. Ingalls has written that impersonality appears in its extreme form in India only in Sanskrit…As to how poetry could exist in the absence of individualism the answer is easier. It existed, just as Indian religion existed under the same circumstances, by making a virtue of its lack. To the Vedantin the advantage of stripping off the personality was that only thus could he arrive at what he considered to be real, at something permanent, unchangeable, and unitary. To the Sanskrit poet the advantage of abandoning personal idiosyncrasy and adventure was that the resultant character by being typical came closer to being universal.

We began our discussion of the emergence of linguistics with the question of how to account for the fact that during most of the nineteenth century, linguistics was a German discipline. The argument that Romantic concepts and ideas were profoundly embedded in the idea system of the early comparative grammarians might explain why German scholars took particular interest in the links between Sanskrit and the European languages, but it hardly explains why comparative studies of language became a subject of lasting interest in the German universities. After all, long after Romanticism had ceased to exercise any direct influence on intellectual life in Germany, comparative and historical linguistics was still a growing field of research.

What I shall try to show in the present chapter and in the following chapter is that there are two currents present in Buddhist canonical literature from the very beginning and that these two currents are also predominant in the philosophical writings of early Mahāyāna systematizers such as Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu. The first of these currents is a kind of skeptical rationalism according to which there is no knowledge aside from that which meets the test of logical consistency, and moreover very few of our beliefs meet this test. And the second is a form of nominalism, according to which universals are not features of the external world that exist independently of our awareness of the world but rather are born of the attempts of awareness itself to organize the data of sense experience. In later chapters I shall be trying to show that these two currents are the principal currents in Diṅnāgan’s system of thought as well. My motive in showing this is not to support the conclusion that Diṅnāgan had nothing new to say on the these issues or that he was doing nothing more than drawing out in full detail the implications of earlier Buddhist dogmatics. Nor is my motive to deny that Diṅnāgan was heavily influenced by non-Buddhist sources, for I am convinced by the evidence adduced by Frauwallner and by R. Herzberger that Diṅnāgan did indeed owe a great debt to Bhartrhari and to the whole tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians.

In the preceding chapter, I traced the origin of the term ‘oceanic feeling’ through Freud to Romain Rolland, to Ramakrishna and finally to a medieval Sanskrit text, the Aṣṭdvāakrasaṃhitā. The verses from this last text display an abstract quality and a degree of removal from the concerns of everyday life that are striking. I am reminded of a patient who reports that she has never known an affect: she is rarely aware of having dreamt, displays no symptoms, says she has no childhood memories and has never, so she insists, had a fantasy. Her entire emotional life lies submerged beneath an exterior of extreme calm and placidity, and it is only very occasionally that some subtle sign will signal the existence of a remote realm of feeling. In a similar fashion, the descriptions of oceanic-feeling states from the Aṣṭdvāakrasaṃhitā take on a stark quality that nonetheless betray, by subtle signs, a different world lurking within the person who wrote them. Within these verses, and basic to all such Indian mystical texts, one can discern certain invariable themes occurring over and over again: feelings of sadness and of an awareness of transience; feelings of disgust with the world, or of world-weariness; the pull of the long sleep, of death; world- destruction fantasies; nostalgia. These are, I believe, some of the dominant themes of Indian philosophical writings. Furthermore, these themes seem to be related not only to one another, but also to the oceanic feeling.

In the early history of its commercial and administrative presence on the Indian subcontinent British servants of the East India Company treated native healers of south Asia with as much respect as they treated English physicians. In part, this respect was provoked by the European belief that certain illnesses were caused by the airs and water of a country (Jones 1967); hence treatment of such illnesses required the diagnostic skill as well as pharmacological knowledge of the physicians of that country, in this case the hakims and vaidyas. To this personal view must be added the Company’s considerable interest in the discovery of useful native plants, such as medicines and dyes, the knowledge of which was published in the early issues of Asiaticke Researches, later the Journal of the Asiatic Society. The journal, and indeed the Society, was founded by a group of Englishmen, trained in the classics, who developed an interest in the ancient languages and civilizations of the Indian subcontinent. Even though in some cases these Englishmen, dubbed Orientalists, might have thought the Brahmans of Bengal to be poorly qualified, indeed degenerate, inheritors of a glorious civilization, this did not diminish their respect for the civilization itself. ‘Native doctors’ were attached to regiments and civil stations; and ayurvedic medicine was taught in conjunction with English medicine at the Calcutta Sanskrit College, founded with Company support in 1824 (Gupta 1976: 369).

An advice given to students in our country according to tradition is — I will give you the Sanskrit first: ‘matr devo bhava, pitr devo bhava, acarya devo bhava, atithi devo bhava, prajatantum mat vyavacchesih” — “do not cut off the thread of offspring”. Students, when they complete their careers are called upon to enter the state of the householder and there the advice given to them is “do not cut off the thread of offspring.” In other words, they are called upon to marry and produce offspring. We never regard sex as something impious or obscene. It is the duty, normally speaking — we are not making laws for exceptional cases — of young students when they leave the universities to enter into the state of marriage, and there the main purpose of marriage is inculcated as the production of offspring. Marriage is the union of man and woman, and family life is enlarged and completed by the arrival of children.

It was a happy coincidence that the appearance of the Gāndhāri (= G) Dharmapada (=Dh.) in 19621 was followed closely by that of the Udānavarga (= Uv.) in 1965.2 Although portions of both texts had long been known,3 their publication in toto gave renewed impetus to the comparative study of the Pāli (= P) Dh. in relation to its Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (= BHS) and Prakrit (= Pkt.) equivalents.

The Pradakṣiṇā-sūtra (Ch 0048, 13–71, first edited in my Khotanese Buddhist Texts (1951), 72–74) is so named in line 62. It is, however, concerned with the pradakṣiṇā of the caitya (baśa, loc. sing., older balśa, rendering Buddhist Sanskrit both caitya and stūpa). It is therefore parallel to the BS Caitya-pradakṣiṇā-gāthā (Tibetan, Peking edition No. 697). Though highly divergent this text has been valuable in confirmation. Susumu W. Nakamura published a study of pradakṣiṇā in the Semitic and Oriental Studies presented to W. Popper, 1951, pp. 345–354. The five advantages of satkārya-caryā‘reverential conduct’ are in the Ekottarāgama (Taishō, No. 125, 647a). In the Saka text there is reference to ten advantages.

Two distinct forms of the vocable appearing in Old Indo-Aryan as gotra- ‘family, clan, lineage’ are attested in the Middle Indo-Aryan of the Pāli literature. The form gotta-, with assimilation of the Old Indo-Aryan consonant cluster -tr- to -tt-, is the normal Pāli development of OI gotra-;1 and in the literature it is frequently met with in the well-known meanings of ‘family, lineage, ancestry’ (PTSD). It appears for example in collocation with, or in the proximity of, nāma ‘name’ (e.g. Vinaya I, pp. 93, 127; II, p. 239; IV, p. 12;Dighanikāya I, p. 92);jāti ‘birth, descent’ (e.g. Suttanipāta vv. 104,423, 1004), and kula ‘family’ (e.g. Suttanipāta v. 423;Jātaka II, p. 3). When the Buddha is represented in the Pabbajjāsutta of the Suttanipāta (v. 423) as saying: ādiccā nāma gottena sākiyā nāma jātiyā tamhā kulā pabbajito ’mhi, this means that he entered the religious life leaving a family that is solar by lineage (gotta) and Śākyan by descent. The Pāli texts also present such compounds as gottatthaddha ‘conceited as to lineage’ (Suttanipāta 104, together with jātitthaddha ‘conceited as to descent’), gottapanha ‘enquiry regarding lineage’ (Suttanipāta v. 456), gottapaṭisāri(n) ‘relying on lineage’ (Dighanikāya I, p. 99; Aṅguttaranikāya V, p. 327),gottarakkhita ‘protected by lineage’ (Suttanipāta v. 315), and nātigottabandhava ‘related through kinsmen and lineage’ (Cullaniddesa, p. 455, quoted in PTSD).

The primary purpose of the present research was to find an account of the Śivarātri story in India similar to that contained in the Old Javanese kakawin. Before the discussion can commence, however, two things must be pointed out. In the first place the present research can in no way be described as complete. What is found below is simply what has come to light as the result of brief and incomplete searching in both Sanskrit texts and in secondary works about India. In the second place, the nature of the material collected for comparison must be made clear. The Sanskrit texts are taken from the Purānas, works of diverse and sometimes vast content whose origins and distribution throughout India are still obscure. In the case of both the Sanskrit texts and the secondary sources the stories are presented sometimes in great detail, sometimes only the briefest summary is given, and in the case of the secondary sources there is perhaps the added hazard of wrong or partially understood information having been passed on, which only a detailed and thorough investigation could bring to light. In view of this, it was thought best to give a more or less detailed account of the material contained in the Sanskrit texts which have been read, mentioning the secondary material in footnotes only, and, keeping the purpose of the exercise in mind, to devote most attention to that Sanskrit account which was closest to the Old Javanese kakawin.