This paper is devoted to theoretical and methodical considerations on our study and understanding of macroscopic transitions in the world of Sanskrit intellectuals from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (cf. Pollock, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38(1):3–31, 2001). It is argued that compared to his immediate predecessors Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contribution to Prakriyā grammars was modest. It was to a large extent on account of changed circumstances—over the centuries mainly a slow but steady decline—in the position of Sanskrit and (...) the general public’s need for a simple definition of authoritatively correct Sanskrit that Bhaṭṭoji’s grammar met with success so quickly, so widely, and so solidly. I once knew a little boy in England who asked his father, “Do fathers always know more than sons?” and the father said “Yes.” The next question was, “Daddy, who invented the steam engine?” and the father said “James Watt.” And then the son came back with “But why didn’t James Watt’s father invent it?” Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 21). (shrink)

In the last few years, several scholars have attempted to analyze the historical circumstances of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita and the development of his specific stances in the area of Pāṇinian grammar. This paper seeks to broaden that investigation by exploring Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s relationship to Appayya Dīkṣita. Appayya Dīkṣita’s works, such as the Madhvatantramukhamardana, were the direct source of inspiration not only for the critique of the Mādhva Vedānta that appears in Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Tantrādhikārinirṇaya and Tattvakaustubha. They may also be seen as (...) the ideological source for Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s grammatical fundamentalism, in rejecting any views that are not strictly in agreement with the views of the three founding sages of Sanskrit grammar, namely Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali. (shrink)

This essay is a first attempt to trace the evolution of biographical accounts of Appayya Dīkṣita from the sixteenth century onward, with special attention to their continuities and changes. It explores what these rich materials teach us about Appayya Dīkṣita and his times, and what lessons they offer about the changing historical sensibilities in South India during the transition to the colonial and postcolonial eras. I tentatively identify two important junctures in the development of these materials: one that took place (...) in the first generation to be born after his death, when the idea of him as an avatar of Śiva was introduced, and another at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when many new stories about his encounters with his colleagues and students surfaced. The essay follows a set of themes and tensions that pertain to Appayya Dīkṣita’s social and political affiliations, his sectarian agendas, and the geographic sphere of his activities. These themes and tensions are closely related and prove to be surprisingly resilient, despite the many changes that occurred during the five centuries of recollection that this essay sketches. This overall coherence, I argue, is integral to Appayya Dīkṣita’s sociopolitical context and self-chosen identity. (shrink)

The scope and audacity of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contributions to Sanskrit grammar has made him one of early-modern India’s most influential, if not controversial, intellectuals. Yet for as consequential as Bhaṭṭoji’s has been for histories of early-modern scholasticism, his extensive corpus of non-grammatical writings has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This paper examines Bhaṭṭoji’s work on Vedānta, the Tattvakaustubha, in order to gage how issues of language became an increasingly important site of inter-religious critique among early-modern Vedāntins. In the Tattvakaustubha, Bhaṭṭoji (...) reproaches Madhvācārya, the founder of the eponymous Mādhva or Dvaita Vedānta system, for his use of ungrammatical words. In extending his accusations of grammatical negligence to include Madhva’s early commentator Jayatīrtha, Bhaṭṭoji sought to undermine Mādhva claims to authoritative scriptural exegesis. Bhaṭṭoji’s provocation impelled later Mādhva scholars like Rāghavendratīrtha to bring a sharper set of grammatical tools to core commentarial works. Where others have pointed to Vyāsatīrtha as a turning point for Mādhva scholastic discourse in the areas of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Navya Nyāya, this paper suggests that it was the post-Bhaṭṭoji scholar Rāghavendratīrtha who brought a hitherto unrivaled grammatical expertise to Mādhva writings. That both Mādhva and Advaita Vedāntins wielded grammatical legitimacy as a cudgel against the other raises important socio-historical questions about the relationship between text-criticism, conceptions of scholastic legitimacy, and inter-religious contestation in early-modern South Asia. (shrink)

In his celebrated treatise of Navya-nyāya, the Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa offers a detailed formulation of the inference of God’s existence. Gaṅgeśa’s inference generated significant commentarial literature among Naiyāyikas in Mithilā, Navadvīpa and Vārāṇasī, but also attracted the attention of South Indian scholars, notably Vyāsatīrtha, who comments on it extensively in the Tarkatāṇḍava. In the wake of Vyāsatīrtha’s pioneering critique, the 16th-century Sanskrit polymath Appaya Dīkṣita developed a revised version of Gaṅgeśa’s inference in his magnum opus of Śivādvaita Vedānta, the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā. This (...) article highlights that Appaya was thoroughly acquainted with the technical idiom of Navya-nyāya and sufficiently conversant with its literature to address authoritatively one of its key problems. Appaya’s contribution sheds new light on how the Navya-nyāya tradition continued to flourish in South India during the late medieval period. (shrink)

In this paper, the problem of illusory perception, as approached by the Nyāya and Advaita Vedānta schools of philosophy, is discussed from the standpoint of the Parimala. This seminal work belonging to the Bhāmatī tradition of Advaita Vedānta was composed in the sixteenth century by the polymath Appaya Dīkṣita. In the context of discussing various theories of illusion, Dīkṣita dwells upon the Nyāya theory of anyathākhyāti, and its connection with jñānalakṣaṇapratyāsatti as a causal factor for perception, and closely examines if (...) such an extraordinary (alaukika) perception is tenable to explain illusory perception. He then proceeds to point out the deficiencies of this model and thereby brings to the fore the anirvacanīyakhyāti of Advaitins as the only theory which stands scrutiny. (shrink)

Although today Appayya Dīkṣīta enjoys a reputation as the preeminent Śaiva polemicist of the sixteenth century, it must be remembered that he also wrote works from a distinctively Vaiṣṇava perspective, in which Viṣṇu is extolled as the paramount god rather than Śiva. This paper examines one of those works, the Varadarājastava and its autocommentary. It places special emphasis on how the poem is patterned on the Varadarājapañcāśat of the fourteenth-century Śrīvaiṣṇava poet and philosopher, Vedānta Deśika, with close attention to the (...) Varadarājastava’s use of the Vaiṣṇava imagery of the dahara-vidyā or meditation on brahman as the small space within the lotus-shaped heart. While this meditation was the central devotional practice for Appayya Dīkṣita and for his Śaiva predecessor Śrīkaṇṭha, in the Varadarājastava, Appayya is able to develop a more overtly Advaita dahara-vidyā, unfettered by hermeneutic fidelity to Śrīkaṇṭha’s Śaiva approach. The paper also considers the anomaly of Appayya writing as a Vaiṣṇava in the context of the institutional conflicts that took place between Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas at sites close to where Appayya received patronage. (shrink)

The seventeenth century author Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara wrote several works criticising the Vedāntic theology of the sixteenth century author, Appayya Dīkṣita. In one of these works, the Vedāntakataka, Nīlakaṇṭha picks out two doctrines for criticism: that the liberated soul becomes the Lord, and that souls thus liberated remain the Lord until all other souls are liberated. These doctrines appear both in Appayya’s Advaitin and in his Śivādvaitin writings. They appear to be ones to which Appayya was committed. They raise theological and (...) conceptual problems, however, both in themselves as doctrines, and as part of nondual Vedāntic teaching. A study of the Vedāntakataka reveals those features of Appayya’s Vedānta that Advaitins in Banaras in the century after his life considered to be anomalous, and illuminates aspects of the context in which his ideas developed and circulated. (shrink)

This article examines Appaya Dīkṣita’s intellectual affiliation to Śivādvaita Vedānta in light of his well-known commitment to Advaita Vedānta. Attention will be given to his Śivādvaitanirṇaya, a short work expounding the nature of the Śivādvaita doctrine taught by Śrīkaṇṭha in his Śaiva-leaning commentary on the Brahmasūtra. It will be shown how Appaya strategically interprets Śrīkaṇṭha’s views on the relationship between Śiva, its power of consciousness and the individual self, along the lines of pure non-dualism. In this context, the hermeneutical role (...) of the daharavidyā doctrine will be considered with reference to Appaya’s Śivādvaita magnum opus, the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā. (shrink)

Recognizing newness is a difficult task in any intellectual history, and different cultures have gauged and evaluated novelty in different ways. In this paper we ponder the status of innovation in the context of the somewhat unusual history of one Sanskrit knowledge system, that of poetics, and try to define what in the methodology, views, style, and self-awareness of Sanskrit literary theorists in the early modern period was new. The paper focuses primarily on one thinker, Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, the most famous (...) and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīkṣita. We discuss Jagannātha’s complex system of labeling of ideas as “new” and “old,” the new essay style that he used to chart the evolution of ideas in his tradition, his notion of himself as an independent thinker capable of improving the system created by his predecessors in order to protect its essential assets, and the reasons his critique of Appayya was so harsh. For both scholars what emerges as new is not so much their opinions on particular topics as the new ways in which they position themselves in relation to their system. (shrink)

This paper argues that the grammarians Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita and Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa did innovate in the realm of grammatical philosophy, without however admitting or perhaps even knowing it. Their most important innovation is the reinterpretation of the sphoṭa. For reasons linked to new developments in sentence interpretation (śābdabodha), in their hands the sphoṭa became a semantic rather that an ontological entity.

Apart from his voluminous, immensely learned, and spectacularly successful contributions to the fields of Hermeneutics, non-dualist Metaphysics, and poetics, the sixteenth century South Indian polymath Appayyadīkṣita is famed for reviving from obscurity the moribund Śaivite Vedānta tradition represented by the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya of Śrīkaṇṭha. Appayya’s voluminous commentary on this work, his Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, not only reconstitutes Śrīkaṇṭha’s system, but radically transforms it, making it into a springboard for Appayya’s own highly original critiques of standard views of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta. Appayya addresses long (...) sections of his commentary to matters dealt with glancingly or not at all in the root text, drawing conclusions which Śrīkaṇṭha nowhere endorses. Furthermore, the distinctive positions Appayya develops in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā feed into Appayya’s other works in ways that have so far been largely ignored by modern scholars. For example, most or all the discussions Appayya’s Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā, twenty-seven essays on scattered topics in Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, build on arguments first advanced in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā—most notably Appayya’s totally original theory of the signification of adjectives, first developed in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, the full elaboration and defense of which takes up fully sixteen of the twenty-seven essays that make up the Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā. (shrink)

Classical and modern figures in numerous religious traditions—including Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the Baha’i faith—have championed the doctrine of universal salvation, the view that everyone without exception will be saved.1 However, recent scholarly work on the topic has made clear that universal salvation is not a monolithic concept. Rather, the doctrine of universal salvation takes a wide variety of forms, depending on the broader theological or metaphysical framework within which it is embedded.Within Hinduism, for instance, figures as (...) diverse as Appayya Dīkṣita, Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan have all advocated the general doctrine of... (shrink)

This article tells an intellectual history of Mammaṭa Bhaṭṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa in the Benares-Centered Network of Sanskrit Learning from c. 1600–1750 CE. The core narrative proposed herein is that the discourse on Sanskrit Poetics reaches a bifurcated state by the 1400s and 1500s: the Kāvyaprakāśa commentarial tradition constitutes a distinct domain, wherein commentators debate exclusively among themselves on lower-order issues. This period of normalcy is ruptured by Appayya Dīkṣita, who effectively destabilizes the discourse, overhauling the conventional wisdom via his empiricist polemics (...) and via the importation of a new doxographical methodology from Vedānta in his magnum opus on Sanskrit Poetics, the Citramīmāṃsā. Shortly thereafter, Jayarāma Nyāyapañcānana, the Benares-based Naiyāyika from the East, substantially defends Mammaṭa’s system of poetic ornaments against Appayya’s polemics within his Kāvyaprakāśa commentary, marking the beginning of the bifurcation’s erosion. The tension of how to resolve Appayya’s system with Mammaṭa’s dominates the literature for the ensuing century, and commentators such as Kamalākara Bhaṭṭa, Bhīmasena Dīkṣita, and Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa all champion defenses of the Kāvyaprakāśa’s authoritative and conservative system against Appayya. This tension culminates in the discourse’s last major treatise, the Alaṅkārakaustubha of Viśveśvara Paṇḍita, wherein Viśveśvara situates himself on a continuum with Jayarāma and defends the core contours of Mammaṭa’s system against Appayya and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja. Viśveśvara systematically utilizes the most up-to-date frameworks and positions of Nyāya, entailing radical transformations for the core terminology, standards of debate, and philosophical underpinnings in Sanskrit Poetics. The article concludes by way of contextualizing Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja within this new narrative. (shrink)

In sixteenth-century South India, the notion of the imagination was strongly thematized as perhaps the defining aspect of the human mind. We examine one striking example, an allegorical play called the Bhāvanā-puruṣottama by Ratnakheta Srinivasa Dīkṣita. Here we see a king searching frantically for his own imagination, the young woman Bhāvanā with whom he is in love, while she, for her part, is absorbed in the uneven and rather frustrating processes of imagining him. The two lovers could be said mutually (...) to determine one another’s existence. On the other hand, imagination, for this poet, is not a matter of discovering something new but of perceiving something that is already there and, by perceiving it, enhancing or intensifying its presence and its activity. At the same time, the imagination focuses on singularities, however elusive: in this period, the general faculty of imagination has become a highly personal matter. (shrink)