Vaisesika

"Religion 43 (2013), no. 4, pp. 487-498 (+ addendum).

""This article supplements Jens Schlieter’s discussion of the cognitive metaphor of a karmic bank-account,

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0048721X.2013.765630#.Ugy7t5I3Bic

adding selected points on karma monetary/fiscal metaphors as preserved chiefly in Pāli and Sanskrit sources. It explores various strands of the history of South Asian religions where distinct economic metaphors for karma come closer to the late ‘bank-account of karma’: i.e., the Vedic ‘three debts’, a Hindu concept of God as accountant, the varieties of weighing the (mis)deeds, the Buddhist monastic status of debt and fiscal transactions, the equivalence of karma and debt as discussed by Madhyamaka thinkers, and others. While endorsing Schlieter’s point, it also takes into account such modern Western sources as early theosophical discourse and ‘Protestant Buddhism’."""

In this article an attempt is made to detect what could have been the dialectical reasons that impelled the Cārvāka thinker Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa to revise and reformulate the classical materialistic concept of cognition. If indeed according to ancient Cārvākas, cognition is an attribute, entirely dependent on the physical body, for Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa cognition is an independent principle that, of course, needs the presence of a human body for manifesting itself. He, thus, seems to describe cognition according to a double ontology: it is both a principle and a characteristic, both independent and dependent. Two philosophical contexts – Vaiśeṣika and Nyāya – are here taken into account as possible anti-Cārvāka fault-finding points of view that spured Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa to reconsider the Cārvāka perspective. Although we do not have so much textual material on this particular aspect of the ancient and medieval philosophical debate in India, it nonetheless can be supposed that Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa’s reformulation of the concept of cognition was a tentative response to the Vaiśeṣika idea that cognition is not an attribute of the body, rather of the mind (which is here supposed to be eternal), and to the Naiyāyika perspective according to which cognition would be an attribute of an ever-lasting self. In the case of the Nyāya school, we fortunately have at our disposal the criticism put forward by Vātsyāyana against the materialistic conception of cognition during this time. By examining some Vātsyāyana’s objections, we will see that Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa’s idea of cognition seems really to have the aspect of a consistent answer to them, from a renewed materialistic point of view.

It has been generally recognized that the extremely important philosophical sūtras, most of them the oldest surviving texts of Indian philosophical schools, contain some interpolated material. In this paper the suggestion is put forward that their compositeness is of a far more fundamental nature, i.e. during the period of their formation – that could be half a millennium – they were not texts proper but memory aids for students. They must have been something like our handouts (but purely oral at the beginning), with different additions, deletions and interpretations in different places and times, without any fixed order or set number of contributors. The edited form of these texts that has come down to us derives from a late collector-editor who most probably wrote some sort of commentary as well on the sūtras. This unusual textual history suggests that we cannot really speak about the authors, the time of their writing or even their relative priority. Moreover, often there is no point in speaking about the true meaning of a given sentence or paragraph, as it may have had several ones in different historical contexts, and there is no available standard to establish which interpretation is more fundamental or original.