Commentary on Tantravārttika of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, work on Mimamsa philosophy.

Portion of Sanskrit treatise on Hindu logic and epistemology of the Navya-Nyāya school in Hindu philosophy.

Classical Sanskrit text on Lokāyata, with English English translation.

Commentary, with supercommentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, presenting the viewpoint of Śuddhādvaita school in Hindu philosophy.

Ancient India recognized the supreme value of education in human life. The ancient thinkers felt that a healthy society was not possible without educated individuals. They framed an educational scheme carefully and wisely aiming at the harmonious development of the mind and body of students. What they framed was a very liberal, all-round education of a very high standard, calculated to prepare the students for a useful life in enjoying all aspects of life. This is essentially a universally applicable educational (...) framework highlighting the purpose of human life and interconnectedness at all levels of existence as a basis of human values. Insights from ancient Indian educational system are of great help in facilitating the production of a creative, ethical and a learning mind, which will concern itself not only with greater ‘progress’, but primarily or more importantly with the inner transformation of the human consciousness. (shrink)

An attempt has been made in this article to re-examine the inscriptions of Ashoka, an ancient Indian king, who was a great leader, well known in history, who had the courage, confidence, vision and will to provide an administration based purely on genuine human values. As evidenced in his inscriptions, 'effective leadership' depends not on preaching moral values but on practising them, and modifying life and leadership styles accordingly. Ashoka believed that the success of a true leader is directly related (...) to the maintenance of purity in public life and harmony in domestic affairs. (shrink)

A prominent way through which wave-particle duality has been ascribed to photons is by illustrating their “wave-like” behaviour in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer and “particle-like” behaviour in the anti-correlation experiment. This duality has been formulated in two ways. Some have based the claim on the complementarity principle. This formulation, however, has already been shown to be problematic. Others have made a much simpler duality claim by considering that single-photons are analogous to waves and particles in the above experiments. I criticise this (...) formulation by arguing that the analogies cannot be distinctly established. Thus, this duality claim is found to be unsubstantiated. (shrink)

Indian theories of sentence and its meaning with special reference to grammar (Vyākaraṇa), logic (Nyāya), and ritualism (Mīmāṃsā).

Study of Bhāvanaviveka of Maṇḍanamiśra, work on the Purva-mīmāṃsā doctrine of causation.

Contributed seminar papers presented at Vidvatgoṣṭhī at Melkote.

Philosophical aspects of Rāmāyaṇa, classical Hindu epic by Valmiki; a study.

The paper examines the Tattvôpaplava-siṁha of Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa, and presents an analysis of his positive arguments that can be traced in the work. Despite the widely held opinion that Jayarāśi was a sceptic or held no positive opinions, the author concludes that, first, Jayarāśi does not fit a standard description of a sceptic. What may appear as an approach to philosophical problems, typical of a sceptic, turns out to be Jayarāśi’s particular method of critical examination on the part of a (...) rationalist. Second, a number of positive views Jayarāśi entertains can be identified in his work, and most of them overlap with much of the doctrine of the Cārvākas and Lokāyatas and materialist tradition recorded as early as the Sāmañña-phala-sutta. Therefore, Jayarāśi should be classified as a representative of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition. (shrink)

This essay seeks to characterize one of the leading ideas in Bhaṭṭa Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī, the fundamental role that the idea of complexity plays in its theory of knowledge. The appeal to the causally complex nature of any event of valid awareness is framed as a repudiation of the lean ontology and epistemology of the Buddhist theorists working in the tradition of Dharmakīrti; for Jayanta, this theoretical minimalism led inevitably to the inadmissible claim of the irreality of the world outside of (...) consciousness. In countering this Buddhist position, Jayanta adopts some of his opponents’ characteristic terminology, most notably in his use of sāmagrī, “causal complex” itself. He resituates this borrowed vocabulary within a strong appeal to the theory of the kārakas or the semantic roles detailed by grammarians since the time of Pāṇini. Possibly borrowing this sāmagrī-kāraka amalgam from the Buddhist grammarian-epistemologist Jinendrabuddhi, Jayanta uses it as a point of departure for a sustained attack on the views of Dharmottara, who Jayanta understood as offering the most advanced and most problematic Buddhist philosophical position available in his time and place. (shrink)

According to the seventh-century C.E. philosopher Kumārila Bhat.t.a, epistemic agents are warranted in taking their world-presenting experiences as veridical, if they lack defeaters. For him, these experiences are defeasibly sources of knowledge without the agent reflecting on their content or investigating their causal origins. This position is known as svatah prāmāṇya in Sanskrit (henceforth the SP principle). -/- As explicated by the eleventh-century commentator, Pārthasārathi Misŕa, this position entails that epistemic agents know things without simultaneously knowing that they know them, (...) or being in a position to know that they know. In contrast, some contemporary Anglo-analytic philosophers argue for the “knows-knows principle” (KK principle), in which if someone knows that p, then that person also knows that they know that p, or that person is in a position to know that they know p. Despite some apparent similarities, the SP principle is not a version of the KK principle, nor would Pārthasārathi’s Kumārila have held the KK principle. -/- Recently, Daniel Immerman (2018) has argued that the SP principle is a position-to-know version of the “knows-knows principle” (KK-pos principle). By examining Kumārila’s response to his Buddhist opponent, who challenges the veracity of Vedic testimony, we will see that Kumārila understands higher-order knowing as involving an independent check on one’s epistemic processes, through an epistemic instrument known as postulation (arthāpatti). This precludes him from holding the KK-pos principle. (shrink)

The article considers what happened to the Buddhist concept of self-awareness ( svasaṃvedana ) when it was appropriated by Śaiva Siddhānta. The first section observes how it was turned against Buddhism by being used to attack the momentariness of consciousenss and to establish its permanence. The second section examines how self-awareness differs from I-cognition ( ahampratyaya ). The third section examines the difference between the kind of self-awareness elaborated by Rāmakaṇṭha (‘reflexive awareness’) and a kind elaborated by Dharmakīrti (‘intentional self-awareness’). (...) It is then pointed out that Dharmakīrti avails himself not only of intentional self-awareness but also of reflexive awareness. Some remarks on the relationship between these two strands of Dharmakīrtian Buddhism are offered. The conclusion points out that although self-awareness occurs in Buddhism as inextricably linked with anātmavāda , the doctrine of no-self, and sākāravāda , the view that the forms we perceive belong not to external objects but to consciousness, it is used by Rāmakaṇṭha to refute both of these views. An appendix addresses the problem of how precisely to interpret Dharmakīrti’s contention that conceptual cognition is non-conceptual in its reflexive awareness of itself. (shrink)

Classical commentary, with a supercommentary, on Jaimini's Mīmāṃsāsūtra, presenting the tradition of Bhāṭṭa school; includes Mīmāṃsāśāstrasāraḥ, by N.S. Anantakrishna Sastri.

Two eight-century Jaina contemporaries, a Śvetāmbara philosopher Siddhasena Mahāmati and a Digambara Akalaṅka Bhaṭṭa revolutionised Jaina epistemology, by radically transforming basic epistemological concepts, which had been based on canonical tradition. The paper presents a brief historical outline of the developments of basic epistemological concepts in Jaina philolosophy such as the cognitive criterion and logical faculties as well as their fourteen typological models which serve as the backdrop of important innovations in epistemology introduced by Siddhasena, Pātrasvāmin and Akalaṅka. An important contribution (...) of these Jaina thinkers was to economize Indian logic and the rules of inference, first, by devising only one kind of logical reason called ‘inexplicability otherwise’, based on the single inseparable connection of the proving property with the inferable property, and, second, by limiting the necessary number of the members of the proof formula merely to two. These two innovations were related to the thinkers’ intention to devise a logic which would not primarily be based on empirical verification but its structural patterns would be valid irrespective of external observation. Further, the paper focuses on the nature of the epistemological shifts which Siddhasena and Akalaṅka introduced independently of each other and on the question how Siddhasena’s and Akalaṅka’s ideas were partly anchored in Buddhist concepts of the pramāṇa school of Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti. With the Buddhist background, Siddhasena sought to define the criteria essential to distinguish true from false cognitions and to provide a novel classification of the pramāṇas. He can further be accredited with formulating the first Jaina descriptive definition of the cognitive criterion. The final section of the paper explains how Akalaṅka applies novel epistemological ideas, first, to construct realistic ontology and objectivity of both the external world and the cognising subject, and, secondly, to combat fundamental Buddhist concepts such as idealism and momentariness. (shrink)

Critical study of the commentary on Gautama's Nyāyasūtra, aphoristic work of the Nyaya school in Hindu philosophy.

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 164-166, May 2022. C. Panduranga Bhatta and Pragyan Rath, The Art of Leading in a Borderless World. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2020, 323 pp., ₹435. ISBN: 9389867193.

The paper presents an analysis of the anumāna chapter of Jayarāśi’s Tattvôpaplava-siṁha and the nature of his criticism levelled against the anumāna model. The results of the analysis force us to revise our understanding of Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa as a sceptic. Instead, he emerges as a highly critical philosopher. In addition, the nature of Jayarāśi’s criticism of the anumāna model allow us to conclude that anumāna should not be equated with inference, but rather is its limited subset, and may at best (...) be rendered as ‘disputational inference’, ‘debational inference’ or even ‘dialogical inference’. Jayarāśi applies a range of logical laws which clearly represent patterns of what can be classified as a priori reasoning and analytical justifications for knowledge, which were traditionally not reckoned sound. Against the backdrop of Jayarāśi’s criticism of anumāna, the paper also attempts to provide an explanation to why Indian philosophy and logic did not develop any concept of proper symbols and variables. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception of Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika, one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical Indian philosophy and other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The (...) book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. (shrink)

Das philosophische System der Mimamsa hat, was Theorien über Sprache und Tradition betrifft, die indische Geistesgeschichte nachhaltig geprägt. Diese Arbeit rekonstruiert Grundstrukturen des philosophischen Denkens eines seiner bedeutendsten Vertreter aus dem 7. Jahrhundert und stellt sie in den Kontext der Entwicklung sprachphilosophischer und hermeneutischer Auffassungen in Indien. Dabei wird untersucht, wieweit Kumarila der Tradition dieses Systems folgt und wieweit er eigene Konzepte entwickelt. Vergleiche mit Ideen aus der westlichen Philosophie erleichtern den Zugang zur Philosophie Kumarilas und zeigen, daß seine Auffassungen (...) auch für die moderne sprachphilosophische Diskussion von großem Interesse sind. (shrink)

In the Āgamadambara (“Much Ado about Religion”), Jayanta Bhatta appears to be making a case for religious toleration and pluralism. This paper considers whether Jayanta has a concept like toleration in mind at all, or at least something that we today might understand to be toleration. If he is doing neither, our understanding of the nature of tolerance and its conceptual limits may be furthered by determining exactly what he is talking about and why it looks so much like tolerance.

This paper examines three commentaries on the Śabdapariccheda in Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s Ślokavārttika, along with the the seventeenth century Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā work, the Mānameyodaya. The focus is the Mīmāṃsā principle that only sentences communicate qualified meanings and Kumārila’s discussion of a potential counter-example to this claim–single words which appear to communicate such content. I argue that there is some conflict among commentators over precisely what Kumārila describes with the phrase sāmarthyād anumeyetvād, although he is most likely describing ellipsis completion through arthāpatti. (...) The paper attempts both a cogent exegesis and philosophical evaluation of the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā view of ellipsis completion, arguing that there remain internal tensions in the account of ellipsis preferred by the Bhāṭṭa, tensions which are not entirely resolved even by the late date of the Mānameyodaya. (shrink)

In the Āgamaḍambara (‘Much Ado About Religion’), Bhaṭṭa Jayanta presents an argument for an inclusivist approach to the problem of religious diversity, building upon some of the arguments given in his Nyāyamañjarī. Although his arguments are restricted to consideration of a form of Hinduism particular in time and place, I argue that Jayanta’s solution to the problem of religious diversity has wide-ranging relevance and some applicability to contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion. I consider possible pluralist objections to inclusivism, (...) such as those given by John Hick in An Interpretation of Religion and elsewhere. In response to these objections, I argue that an inclusivism like Jayanta’s addresses all the reasons someone might have for adopting a pluralist position and in fact does so better than the pluralists by remaining within a live religious tradition. (shrink)