Deepak Sarma Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Inquiry: Doctrine in Madhva Vedanta

International Journal of Social Science And Human Research, 2022

In India the philosophers, except the Madhyamika Buddhists and Jayarasi Bhatta, maintain that determination of an object depends on a pramana, a source of cognition. Similarly, pramana depends on prameya padhartha. In the present paper I will deal with the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics from the Advaita point of view. According to Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is the only highest reality. It does never get contradicted. Brahman is sat-cit-ananda i.e. Eternal Existence, Eternal Consciousness and Eternal Bliss. The three aspects -sot, cit and ananda- constitute the essence of Brahman. Brahman is unknown and unknowable. All sources of cognitions [pramana-s) fail to cognize Brahman. It is avanmanasagacara. The nature of Brahman can be explained through the methods of adhyaropa and apavoda. Advaita Vedanta does not admit any relationship between pramiti and Brahman from the higher standpoint. The teachers of Advaita Vedanta hold that the relationship between a pramana and a...

Re-thinking Religious Pluralism, 2020

In a pluralistic society, there are assumptions about the ways that religious communities ought, and ought not, to react to one another. Such modes of civility seem required in a secular democracy. The Mādhva school of Vedānta, whose origins are found in thirteenth-century India, anticipated a multicultural religious and philosophical landscape and prescribed strategies that fostered a robust sam. vāda (discussion and debate) that helped to sustain the tradition and may even be applied to contemporary and secular worlds.

This thesis is a reconstruction of a crucial episode in the history of systematic Indian realism. After the disappearance of Buddhism in India, the major threat to realist schools came from the Śāṃkara Advaita school of Vedānta. Śaṃkara and his followers were ultimately Mīmāṃsakas, concerned with the correct interpretation of the Upaniṣads. According to the Advaitins, the Upaniṣads' purpose is primarily to reveal the existence and nature of the absolute (brahman) which, according to them, is pure, immaculate consciousness, in some sense identical with the innermost essence of human beings. According to the Advaitins, the world of everyday appearance is ultimately reducible in some sense to brahman. While the world is ultimately unreal, however, it enjoys provisional, transactional reality. The Advaitins captured this tension in their argument that the world is “indeterminable” (anirvacanīya) from the point of view of its ontological status. From the 12th century onwards, the Advaita school and its philosophy were critiqued by theistic traditions of Vedānta, which focused on devotion to the god Viṣṇu. This thesis concentrates on the philosophy of one of these traditions, which was founded in Tuḷu-Nāḍu by Madhvācārya in the 13th century. While some Advaitins such as Śrīharṣa (c. 1140) favoured a negative dialectical approach to deconstruct pivotal realist categories, many Advaitins chose to work within the Nyāya framework to show that their doctrines could be established positively using the accredited means of knowledge. From Ānandabodhabhaṭṭāraka (c. 1150) onwards, Advaitins elaborated and defended a series of inferences which putatively show that the world is indeterminable. Successive Mādhva thinkers provided ever more elaborate refutations of these inferences. In turn, their debate led the Mādhvas and Advaitins into philosophically interesting discussions about the law of non-contradiction, perceptual illusion, and the nature of the inferential process. These arguments culminated in Vyāsatīrtha's “Distillation of Reasoning” (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha's magnum opus was quickly met with the “Establishment of Non-Duality” (Advaitasiddhi) of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. This in turn precipitated an ongoing philosophical conversation which continues to the present day. My thesis is a reconstruction of the Mādhva case against the Advaitin doctrine of indeterminability. It is based primarily around my own translation of, and commentary on, a part of Vyāsatīrtha's Nyāyāmṛta, along with the commentaries that were written on it. With the exception of the Advaitasiddhi, none of these texts has been translated into a modern European language. My thesis also draws on original translations of the texts that formed the backdrop to Vyāsatīrtha's arguments. Through a careful analysis of the Mādhva case, I attempt to show that the Mādhvas provided a strong voice for systematic realism, and that they had both incisive arguments against the Advaitin position, and strong alternative theories to those the Advaitins defended.

Centre for Historical and Cultural Studies & Research Varanasi (U.P.) India, 2021

: Reading can be an innocent, joyous aclivity or it can even be an intellectually oriented activity. It can be all of this and much more. However, the recent contentions on Hindu texts, rituals and practices, which has taken a central debate to nationalism in India requires us as citizens and humans to re look these texts. The naive practices of reading /hem in religious galherings, performing lhe text through classical dance or music and reading it for academic involve divergenl meaning making exercises of the same text. Most of the lexts, and even /hose which have been selected for this paper, believed to have various origins which makes inception, origin and usage of the text susceptible for any single way of meaning making and definitely not for a totalitarian state. Reading the texts for this paper highlight conceptual gaps which gives rise to freedom these texts enjoyed while writing at inception or while it is performed. Rigidity might appear more to scholars from outsider or to the scholars who wish to read it supe,jicially, as the thought has developed over the time during its practice. Relooking texts untie these knots and indicate at relevant meaning making. Epistemic beliefs address underlying themes of the chosen texts: Valmiki Ramayana, Bhagavat Purana, Satya Narayan Katha, and Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Reading with and for epistemic beliefs offer a window to rich variations these Hindu Texts offers that educational discourse can explore from different vantage points.

Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2016

In this paper I explore the extent to which the dialectical approach of Śrīharṡa can be identified as skeptical, and whether or how his approach resembles that of the first century Mādhyamika philosopher Nāgārjuna. In so doing, I will be primarily reading the first argument found in Śrīharṡa's masterpiece, the Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍa-khādya (KhKh). This argument grounds the position that the system of justification (pramāṇa) that validates our cognition to be true is not outside of inquiry. Closely adopting Śrīharṡa's polemical style, I am neither proposing a thesis in this paper that Śrīharṡa is a skeptic, nor am I denying such a possibility. I believe we can pursue our arguments on a neutral ground and let the facts speak for themselves. I will outline salient features that define skepticism in the mainstream philosophical discourse so that analyzing Śrīharṡa's first argument becomes easier. In so doing, I will introduce some of the arguments of Nāgārjuna in light of Śrīharṡa's position. This comparison, however, is restricted only to the salient features relevant to further the central argument of this paper and is therefore not aimed to encompass the overall positions of these two giants. Keywords Ś rīharṡa • Nāgārjuna • Skepticism • Indian philosophy • Advaita • Judgment • Justification Preliminary Remarks Ś rīharṡa is one of the most prominent Advaita philosophers of classical India. He is known at home and in the West in two different ways: traditionally, he follows the Advaita system and his arguments are read to buttress the non-dualism of Brahman,

Signs and Society (The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Semiosis Research Center, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and Brandeis University), 2015

This article focuses on strategies of discourse processing for the relay of Vedic truth-statements (mahāvākyas) in the context of globalization and secular modernity. Of primary interest is situational representation of communicative events and educational reforms surrounding the transmission of brahmajñāna, that is, knowledge (jñāna) of nondual reality (brahman). Culminating at the end of the Vedas, Upaniṣads codify contextual properties of teacher-student successions (guru-śiṣya-paramparās) structuring the transmission of brahmajñāna. Despite ongoing interest in Advaita Vedānta, there is still a need to conceptualize the teaching tradition (sampradāya) as a matter for empirical observation and thereby to propose a set of cognitive hypotheses that make it possible to account for the referential basis of discourse production and situation models representing Upaniṣads as a verbal means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa). Consequently, genre expectations in the Advaita sampradāya provide the starting point for further inquiry into variant discourses of Vedānta.

This philosophy entails the concept of God, World and soul in a modified non-dualistic and other dualistic term.