The Culmination of Sanskrit Asthetics in Kashmir (2016) In: "Around Abhinavagupta Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century", edited by Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié (original) (raw)
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Cuneo 2024, Back on the Map. Sahadeva's Place in the Intellectual History of Kashmiri Poetics
Comme une qui entra dans la forêt bruissante / Like One Who Entered the Rustling Forest. Hommage à Marie-Claude Porcher. Sous la direction de Lyne Bansat-Boudon et de Sylvain Brocquet. Bulletin d’études indiennes no 36 (2023-2024). Paris : Association française pour les études indiennes, 2024
This article examines an unpublished commentary on Vāmana’s Kāvyālaṅkārasūtra (early 9th century), known as ṭippaṇa or simply vivṛti, composed by a certain Sahadeva and preserved in a single paper transcript from Trivandrum, currently being edited by the present author. After an introductory section investigating Vāmana’s significance and his pioneering innovations, the second section discusses the introductory and concluding verses of Sahadeva’s work in order to assess all the available evidence on his scholarly activity’s time and place. The main part of the article explores various sections of the Ṭippana, offering an initial assessment of both Sahadeva’s exegetical style and theoretical insights. Besides his importance as the first commentator on one of the foundational figures of the discipline of alaṅkāraśāstra, his direct contributions lie in the very updating and defense of Vāmana’s system, particularly his theory-driven identification of simile (upamā) as the underlying master-ornament of all poetic ornaments of sense (arthālaṅkāra). For instance, Sahadeva enhances Vāmana’s theory by incorporating new conceptual tools from different disciplines and recent thinkers, such as the theory of lakṣaṇā by Bhaṭṭa Mukula (probably his direct teacher) and Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s theory of tātparyaśākti. This preliminary analysis of Sahadeva’s work aims to reintroduce this neglected figure into the history of alaṅkāraśāstra and to reassess and reorient the debates raging in the field of Kashmiri Poetics in the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium.
Highland Philology. Results of a Text-Related Kashmir Panel at the 31st DOT, Marburg 2010 (2012)
Highland Philology. Results of a Text-Related Kashmir Panel at the 31st DOT, Marburg 2010, 2012
The present volume is a collection of textual studies on various features of the history and culture of Kashmir. It is mainly based on revised versions of lectures delivered at a “Kashmir panel” held on the 22nd of September 2010 at the 31st German Oriental Conference (Deutscher Orientalistentag = DOT) in Marburg. It deals with the transfer of India’s sacred geography to the highlands of Kashmir in a miniaturized form (Walter Slaje), a previously unnoticed recording of an appearance of Halley’s Comet in Kashmir by the poet-historian Śrīvara (Walter Slaje), the historical traces of vocal and instrumental music (saṅgīta) in Kashmir (Advaitavadini Kaul), as well as with the poetical figure bhāṣāśleṣa (simultaneous expression of different meanings in two or more languages) as a peculiarity of Kashmiri writers and critics (Michael Hahn). Further subjects are the formation of a specifically Kashmiri literary genre—the Kashmiri kathā—and the development of a special style connected to it (Luther Obrock), and the question, when, where and why did Bhaṭṭa Jayanta write his Nyāyamañjarī (Walter Slaje). The last four contributions are about different aspects of the Mokṣopāya/Yogavāsiṣṭha literature: John Shore’s lost translation of a Persian version of the so-called Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha which he already wrote in 1784 (Jürgen Hanneder), the special character of the fourth book (Sthitiprakaraṇa) of the Mokṣopāya (Roland Steiner), and the meaning of single words (araghaṭṭa, saṃsāracakra, kośakāra) used in the Mokṣopāya (Martin Straube). A reply to a review of a partial edition of Bhāskarakaṇṭha’s Mokṣopāyaṭīkā along with general remarks on the “indological culture of debate” (Jürgen Hanneder and Walter Slaje) completes the volume.
Abhinavagupta is undoubtedly the most famous Kashmirian medieval intellectual: his decisive contributions to Indian aesthetics, Śaiva theo-logy and metaphysics, and to the philosophy of the subtle and original Pratyabhijñā system are well known. Yet so far his works have often been studied without fully taking into account the specific context in which they are embedded – an intellectual background that is not less exceptional than Abhinavagupta himself. While providing fresh inter-pretations of some of the great Śaiva polymath’s works, the nineteen essays gathered here attempt to map out for the first time the extra-ordinary cultural effervescence that took place in the little kingdom of Kashmir around Abhinavagupta‘s time.
Anantaprapañcā: Thinking through samāsokti with Ruyyaka
Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 2017
The details and periodization of what is by now commonly recognised as the Kashmirian transformation of the discipline of alaṃkāraśāstra can be further refined through attention to the ways in which Kashmirian theorists understood and explained the figure of samāsokti. The central concern of this essay will be to understand the account of this figure in Ruyyaka’s early twelfth century text, the Alaṃkārasarvasva. It is characteristic of Ruyyaka’s work as a whole that his theory of samāsokti is synthetic of the earlier intellectual history of poetics in Kashmir, and so I begin with a review of this history. Ruyyaka’s account of samāsokti is the most detailed we possess from any premodern writer; nevertheless, it is a difficult account, and frequently obscure in its organising logic. I would suggest Ruyyaka’s treatment of samāsokti to be symptomatic of his presuppositions about alaṃkāraśāstra, and that through understanding this, we stand to gain not only a better grasp upon his own formulations, but upon the longer trajectory of thinking about literary language in which he locates himself.
Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substantial section of Helārāja's Prakīrṇaprakāśa on Bhartṙhari's third book of the Vākyapadīya, the article argues that the likely ideological motive of this commentary was to establish its mūla work firmly within the Brahmanical canon and should therefore be seen in the context of the appropriation of Bhartṙhari's ideas on the part of the roughly contemporary Pratyabhijñā philosophers of Kashmir. Incidentally, it also touches upon the making of the Pāṅinian tradition and the relation between Helārāja and Kaiyat˙a, the Kashmiri commentator of Mahābhāṣya.
Vastutas tu: Methodology and the New School of Sanskrit Poetics
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, Jagannā tha Pan : d : itarā ja, the most famous and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīks : ita. We discuss Jagannā tha'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.