Monday, October 22, 2012

Sequence in the study of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta in Vedāntadeśika's Seśvaramīmāṃsā

UPDATED!!!
At the beginning of his Seśvaramīmāṃsā, Vedānta Deśika discusses the unity of Pūrva- and Uttara-Mīmāṃsā (also known as Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta). Having established it, he needs to explain why one necessarily comes before the other. It seems that one must start with the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā because one needs to start with what is principal, given that the Vedas themselves start with ritual actions (for the Upaniṣads come at the end of the Vedas). Vedānta Deśika adds an example: "according to the rule of the Sārasvata auxiliary sacrifices".

The passage I am referring to in the Seśvaramīmāṃsā runs as follows:
 
atha ca karmopakramatayā prāyo vedānāṃ taditikartavyatābhāgayor api sārasvatāṅganyāyena mukhyakramānusārāt […] karmavicāraḥ pūrvabhāvī.

Then, the investigation on the ritual action comes first because one follows (anusāra) the sequence of what is principal (mukhya), according to the rule (nyāya) of the auxiliary [sacrifices] (aṅga) to Sarasvatī  and Sarasvat, among the two parts constituting their procedure (i.e., the PM and the UM?) on the basis of the fact that in general the Vedas start (upakrama) with the ritual action. 

The Śatadūṣaṇī is almost identical:

 kramam apekṣamāṇaṃ svādhyāyānāṃ sarveṣāṃ prāyaśaṃ karmopakramatvāt sārasvatāṅgavat  mukhyakramānurodhena.
What are these sacrifices to Sarasvatī and Sarasvat? Andrew (see comments) and Kei Kataoka (via personal email) made me aware of a debate in the ŚBh (ad 5.1.14) and in further Mīmāṃsā authors. Śabara starts by  discussing the case of a prescription in the Taittirīya Saṃhitā concerning two sacrifices, one to Sarasvatī and one to Sarasvat. The upholder of the prima facie view (aka pūrvapakṣin) states that there is no restriction concerning their order and that one can, hence, perform first either the one or the other, as one wishes. The concluding opinion, however, established that the order of this auxiliary sacrifices should be the same as the order of the primary sacrifices, which is prescribed in an earlier passage of the Taittirīya Saṃhitā. Similarly, although Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta have both to be studied, nonetheless one cannot start with whimsically with either the one or the either.

 Reading Vedānta Deśika makes me feel (again) like a neophite, who knows little of the background that the author thinks to be obvious and shared by all his readers. This is even more embarassing when I have to find out that he was referring to a Mīmāṃsā rule…

On Vedānta Deśika on the unity of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, see this post. On another instance of my lack of comprehension of Vedānta Deśika's background (and on Vidya's help on it), see this post.

49 comments:

andrew said...

see śābarabhāṣya on 5.1.14.

elisa freschi said...

thanks a lot! then, it's just my fault!

windwheel said...

'Reading Vedānta Deśika makes me feel (again) like a neophyte, who knows little of the background that the author thinks to be obvious and shared by all his readers'
Actually, he is making an innovation and that innovation is justified according to the notion of apoorvata as is shown by the relevant hagiography.
For the pious purpose of sradda, a convert to the Iyengar sect may write like you have done, but unless you have actually had a 'Road to Damascus' conversion, then this is 'preference falsification' merely and that too to but advance a foolish availability cascade.
Okay, if you are translating Hamsa sandesa, then this is allowable.

To know a language is to know enough only to be misled. An Italian hearing the English sentence 'let us dine al fresco' thought it meant 'let us dine in jail' rather than 'let us have a picnic'.
Let us take another example. A Buddhist scholar interpret's Basho's famous 'Old pond, frog' haiku as just a restatement of Shatideva. But, in fact it is an innovation, it has apoorvata.
This is the only 'epistemic' value of Mimamsa.
Of course, I understand this is just an engaging way of speaking but it can carry over to published books. Sooner or later, Indologists become senile and/or exhibit 'frontal lobe' behavour- i.e. they are disinhibited and write nonsense which then founds or contributes to an availability cascade- Seminars and so on- so this isn't a good way to go if you don't want your old age to be sheer stupidity and prejudice.

elisa freschi said...

1. I was referring to my misunderstandings of Rahu-Kabandha and Sārasvatāṅga and of similar cases where Vedānta Deśika mentions something in passing and expects his readers to understand it in full (and I miss it).
2. You are right, I tend to give credit to the text. This is one of my methodological principles and one I already received negative feedback about (even during my defensio). But it still seems to me the only viable way to learn from the text. Criticisms will come later.

3. Thanks (sincerely) for taking care of my intelligence and how it will look like in some years. But do you mean to say that Indologists tend to fail to recognise novelties? I usually detect the opposite mistake, with people claiming that, e.g., Jayanta has been the first to stress X over Y (although the same claim was quite explicit in Uddyotakara).

windwheel said...

1) You are referring to lack of local knowledge- i.e. an extensional rather than intensional deficit. The correct word is not neophyte but 'foreigner'. I am a neophyte of Organic Chemistry I am a foreigner to Calabria. I understand both Chomskian i-languages which Scholars might hypothesize as 'covering' both domains but I am still a neophyte not a foreigner precisely because I believe such an i-language to exist.
In the case of Chemistry, I might progress to being an 'expert practioner'. In the case of Calabria- no. I can't become Calabrese except by getting married and living there and raising bambinos and getting hit on the head by Neo-Facists and..so on.
Vedantadesika is an important poet for Tam Brams. We all, if we 'do' poetry, do our version of Hamsasadesa just like all Tamils do a sillapaidkaram.
What I'm saying is Indology in this respect can only legitimately cash out as some sort of hermeneutic-as-autopoiesis such that Italians turn into Iyengars or Iyers turn Calabrese.
2)You don't give credit to the text. To give credit to something is to believe in it. You don't really believe in what the text says. If you did- sure, a doxographical method would indeed render you an Iyengar- one to whom I'd come for instruction about my own tradition. What you are really saying is 'I've got a job. It's like the job a lawyer has. He goes by what precedents have been recognized and tried to get 'apoorvata' on that basis so that he wins his case of by a 'harmonious construction' doctrine enables a change in what the Law says is okay.
Notice, the important Mimasa principle here is 'apoorvata' as gunapradhan. But, if so, how is being a 'neophyte' a disadvantage? Surely the reverse is the case? Consider what is being said in the text. Is not the implication that those Iyengars born of Iyer wombs are 'neophyte'- new souls not bound by birth determining karma but purely gratuitous and supererogatory to the previous conception of the Lord?
Don't get me wrong. I love your blog. It is so fresh. It revives my jaded shradda.
Your book may be liberative for me (I smoke, drink and eat meat)- I don't know. BTW this is my edited (and naive) version of something I sent you earlier-
sound a bit like Ibn Arabi's barzakh, if not the Tibetan bardo? But, before we develop that idea, let us define a notion of 'Zero derivation' as what happens, from the morphological p.o.v, when a word shifts from one category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective etc) to another without any apparent change in form. The null morpheme is invoked here, by formalists, as a sort of invisible affix permitting a word's conversion from one category to another. This poses the problem of polysemy for word-formation theory- which emphasizes connection between form and meaning- because visible affixes have a limited set of meanings whereas zero-morphemes are not limited in this way. For this reason, generative linguistics of the Panini/Chomsky type might appear to be of limited use. Perhaps language is just an extension of general cognition rather than syntax being an independent cognitive system autonomous from general cognition. Under this view, semantics takes center stage whereas for generative linguistics it is syntax which is the star of the show. However, the more inflectional endings a language retains, the bigger the constraint on run-away Congitivist metonymy and the greater the canalisation towards Generative null-morpheme polysemy. However what can be said about words- viz zero-derivation based on null morphemes- can be said of larger collocational units. In other words, we have a route from null morphemes, to metonymy via zero derivation, to meta-metaphoricity all of which occurs 'at the border between existence and non-existence'- i.e. in barzakh.

windwheel said...

This may be an interesting question. Iyers had been excluded from Nambudri ritual already at this early date, so very interesting point. I will definitely look into this.

windwheel said...

Sorry, I think I should be clear because I have used some 'lakshana' type figurative or allusive language in my comments.
Let me be clear.
1) Mimamsa is 'bounded' not substantive rationality- and always thus conceived itself
2) The novel aspect of Mimamsa is its fastening on novelty as the condition for meaning. What is interesting, and fruitful for investigation,is the apoorva/apurvata syzygy especially w.r.t. to the Gita as the epoche defining and transmuting the notion of CANONICAL yajnya.
3)Just as elucidation of the magical beliefs of ancient Indian nonsense is JUST as Philosophical as the information processing claims of current Western nonsense,
so too is every aporia you unknot- if you but think about it- something definitely European and thus of interest.
This because no Tam Bram woman wants to marry me. I'm good looking. Not rich. But Tam Bram women marry even poorer Italians, Americans, Nigerians, whatever. What's wrong with that?
Ever heard of an 'honor killing' among Tam Brams?
What I have heard off is 'Smarta Vicharams'- but women weren't killed.
My father told me a story about a girl of our family who got too familiar with some village louts at
the well. She was ostracized- i.e. for a couple of years she stayed with the family servants and then got married to an old man. The old man was 30. Her descendants are all Doctors in the States.
So much for 'Caste' amongst Tam Brams. But, something different happens in Haryana where I go on teerth to Kurukshetra. Second time I went, a Brahmin family asked me to take their raped daughter back with me. That was a terrible silence in the car! These people were very high caste Brahmins- in fact our own Purohits- but the daughter was raped so they sent her to the Modern World.
She adapted fine. Rape, for her, was no cause for shame- anymore than my getting mugged was a cause for shame for me though I am well built and tall- that true Brahmin lady did well in life, though a bit dark, she is married to an Arya Samaji Punjabi boy, Brahmin caste (i.e. a bit poor) here in the U.K.
How can Rape disfigure a Bhramin woman? Yet the British, back in the early 1980's introduced a virginity test to keep out non virgin wives or fiancees of Asian people! Indology gave a helping hand to this Nazi procedure. In Germany there is a notion that women should be beaten and raped because that is their culture.
Do you want to contribute to that? If so you are under paid. They should give you millions.

You don't understand metaphors or other figurative types of speech.
This is not a good thing.
I too could, and did, immerse myself in an autistic 'Wissenschaft'- but the results were not good for Man or God except in so far as it was purely 'Operations Research' .
I want you to succeed. You probably already have struck a balance between 'hypermentalism'- i.e. an autistic approach- and 'hypomentalism'- i.e. schizophrenia.
Such things describe a trajectory in the sort of thought which is paid for.
But is that what you want for the mother of your children?

windwheel said...

OMG, not just metaphor but 'mixed inference' is outside your ken.Dunno how you manage to be anything but what you are.
In plain speech- I am making an argument from incentive compatability and resource access. Even if you say 'well, we will only look at these texts because we know they are in such and such chronological order'- still you can't derive anything thereby unless you make arbitrary assumptions.
How is this Philosophy? It certainly isn't Philology which would force you to learn Tamil.
I suggest to you that Hindus, like me- who are not part of your Credentialist Ponzi Scheme- have a perfectly good notion of Mimamsa.You don't. You write nonsense. We, I mean me, don't write nonsense. We say things like 'NO- bhratrhari's Vakapadiya is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE Wittgentstein, later or early or after he'd just dropped off his suits at the dry cleaners.'
You guys can't.
I know young Albanian gangsters who know more about how to get an American Green Card than I do. If I only helped 'Educated' people- then the Albanians could soon crowd me out of the market which my sponsors in the States consider 'worthwhile' immigrants.
Elisa, do you really want to end up in this cul de sac? Pollock will die, Witzel will end up trying to eat his own shirt, U.S led Indology was a flash in the pan, anyway.
True, you can keep your blog and this Hare Krishna guy or that Iyengar matron may occassionaly post comments- but basically you'd have to shift to Germany and be part of Germanic boring stupid shit.
Believe me, I was born in Bonn, in 1963. I know their Indology from the INSIDE.
I also know Russian Indology- not so bad as far as Sanskrit is concerned- but totally evil w.r.t Tamil (actually very good technically- but still totally bloody Evil).
I am making this comment, or meta comment, on your ingenuous and disarming confession of not understanding 'Rahu Karbandha'. Yet, just by Googling it you'd have got all the relevant information.
One of my 22 year old students, supposedly 'from village'- cloud sourced an answer to my question on his mobile (I am the token 'Hindu' on the Scholarship Committee of this supposedly Hindu Educational Trust)- I was proud of her. She is Afghan.Hopefully, by learning about Ahimsa, she will kill my enemies. I mean myself, of course.
This is what is missing in your writing. You want to create a Philosophically level playing field between Germany and everywhere else.
But nobody in their right mind plays with Germans. They are provincial and stupid. They were always provincial and stupid. They don't know how to behave outside their tiny little Welt Bild.

I am so sorry for you. For an Italian to learn German is just tragic.
Talk to Indians. Come and become our Prime Minister. Learn from Roberto di Nobili, Joseph Beschi- you are TAMIL already. Forget German nonsense. Embrace India.
We have more money than the Germans. We just don't know how to spend it yet. Russian Indology had an open quality. Yours can too.
Jai Berlusconi! Jai Hind!

elisa freschi said...

Dear Windwheel,
as you already said, I do not understand anything but plain language in its abhidhā function. It is a pity, you are right to point it out, and I hope to improve. But it does not make sense to fight against oneself and I will at the same time keep on encouraging people talking with me to speak in a plain, rasa-less way (if they can and if they want to communicate with me).

As regards what I could understand of your thought-provoking comments:

1. one cannot avoid making assumptions whenever one looks at texts. If one is bound by them, while claiming to be free, one is prey of one's own prejedices. Philosophy starts when one starts being aware of them.

2. I enjoyed learning German and I loved German literature and philosophy. If it is tragic, I am ready to accept tragedy as part of my life.

3. Though implicitly, you make interesting points about the direction of Indology (and of my work in particular). I cannot speak for the discipline, but as far as I am concerned, I try to understand philosophical texts in a philosophical way, i.e., by taking them seriously as ideas of intelligent thinkers (hence my point of reading texts giving them the benefit of doubt whenever they sound non-sensical). By doing that, I hope to be part of the enterprise of making philosophy a general attempt, not a Western specialisation, with South Indian (or Chinese) ghettos. Since I will never be as good as a Sanskrit "native thinker", I try to contribute to such an enterprise with my specific competences (which include, alas, Giovanbattista Vico but also German philosophy).

Phillip said...

विन्द् वील् इत्येव प्रवातचक्रः। किमधुनाऽवगतम्। कुकुकुकु इत्यद्याऽपि प्रलपति।

Phillip said...

वंशवाद्यप्ययम्।

nOe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
elisa freschi said...

हा हा हा ! इदानिमेवावगच्छामि | एतस्मादेव कालात्पूर्वं मया पुनः पुनः "प्रवातचक्र" इत्युक्ते किमिति चिन्तितम् |

elisa freschi said...

वंशवादीत्युक्ते किम् "यः दीर्घकालेन वदति सः" इत्यर्थः ?

windwheel said...

'it does not make sense to fight against oneself and I will at the same time keep on encouraging people talking with me to speak in a plain, rasa-less way (if they can and if they want to communicate with me).'

This statement clarifies matters. Let me posit two opposite poles of abhidaa reception- Odysseus and Ajax/
Ajax is producing meanings when he slaughters sheep thinking them his enemies and, ultimately kills himself. This is the bad agon of abhidaa, for you. The good abhidaa agon is Ulysses, chafing at being yoked, galley slave fashion, to an 'aged mate'- setting sail in Tennyson's poem- to find vyanjana's true Penelope in Flaubert.

Plainly put, by operating at language's lowest common denominator level, you make yourself a Viconian argonaut- i.e. you deliberately put yourself in danger in a purely notional Jurassic Park.

Basically you are saying 'I don't do metaphors.' Cool. Metaphors are about creating the illusion you understand something or that is actually meaningful. Eschatology tells us that statements about the 'Unseen' are never metaphorical because there is no basis in human understanding for them to hook on to. Thus you have committed yourself in advance to Eschatology and a doctrine of the effable Unseen as opposed to less facilely effable Immanence.

What I think will be good for your old age (I'm there already coz I'm just precocious is all) is skipping laksana and going straight to meta-metaphoricity- i.e. the notion that we use figurative language so as to keep our options open as to what we mean.
You haven't engaged with my central point- viz. this artificial fake antique Uttara Mimamsa aint interestingly primarily because it posits a very Jurrassic Park type assumption to the dinosaur of epistemology- viz. it can't see you if you don't move, in fact it can only see you if you do something gratuitous and unpredictable.
Seriously, I do really care about how you end up in old age. You've got people who love you. They'll love you more and more as they develop so just make sure you are that terminus of Love's auto-poiesis which is also bardo, barzakh and what Sankara (a good boy who loved his Mummy) called Satcitananda Bliss.
God bless you. Your blog provides evidence that Savage beasts and Rakshasas also seek divyadhvani- and even the Indologist's Rama leaves them alone.
Ram tera gorakh dhanda..
This is

elisa freschi said...

Thanks for your concern. I am constantly trying to jump one intermediate step (that of poetry) and land on spirituality directly from intellectual rationality.
Thanks for your depiction of Mīmāṃsā's apūrva epistemology. In its favour, one could say that assuming the existence of unmovable/undetectable things could end up to the postulation of far too many entities, of purely speculative nature.

windwheel said...

'Thanks for your concern'- really? That's what you are going to say to me? What are you- elderly, stupid and male Tam Bram?
How dare you! Are you not aware that anybody who has genuinely disintermediated Viconian poetry to 'land on spirituality' has also made their every utterance to me univocal with the provision of idli sambar and a little coconut chutney and some lime pickle and maybe one two pappadoms and also dunno but maybe u should send a full vegetarian thali due to otherwise I'll turn Muslim or Mormon or something- just see if I don't.

The problem with you Italian Indologists is that you don't understand that Pyrrho was one of your own- he was from Puglia- and he was the first Italian Indologist what with his meeting Gymnosophists and so on.
After Pyrrho came Pareto, whose notion of 'derivatives and residues' operationalizes a Samkhya Arthashastra of 'cittavrittis and vasanas'
But I fail to mention the greatest Italian 'Orientalist' of them all- Pontius Pilate- 'what is Truth?'- but don't go there Freschi Mem Sahib. Actually, you never will. An English Mystic, Julia of Norwich said that 'Christ on the Cross, gave birth to the World'. (the metaphoricty here is that Christ had his arms spread whereas his legs were pinned close together. During birth, however, mother's legs are parted.) You already have two bambinos- well one bambino and one raggazzo (can't spell & don't actually know Italian)- so, I am sorry to say, you have already stepped from svara 'fact' to vyanjana 'Paradise' because you are indeed the Goddess of two beings vastly more intelligent than myself.
May God bless you- for you are all the God they can know till they understand you are something more.

windwheel said...

(Completing my remarks)
Pirandello spoke off a reverse Freudianism where the opera glass replaced the analytic onieroscope (I know that aint a word) and though Italy may be in hock to Germany at the moment, Elisa Luv, don't give in to Germanist Indology.
Okay, Pyrrho may not have been Puglinese, and I think Pontius Pilate was Spanish or Illyrian or summat, still Pareto, Pirandello and Pietas are varieties of Pizza or Pasta or summat- anyroad, that's what I read somewhere.
In case you don't get what I'm trying to say, you likely error margin in reception invalidates any positivist leap frogging over metaphoricity, let alone meta-metaphoricity.

What you say here is nonsensical- 'thanks for your depiction of Mīmāṃsā's apūrva epistemology. In its favour, one could say that assuming the existence of unmovable/undetectable things could end up to the postulation of far too many entities, of purely speculative nature.'
No doubt you meant to write something different. I know Mimamsa- you don't- it is ontolgically inflationist, methodologically 'pawky' or Pyrrhonist.
Still, my own truly Brahmanic project of 'Veda without Vyakarana' permits me some lenience towards your puppyish Protestantism.

My suggestion is you look at my reduction of everything in the Mahabharata to 'balanced game' rational choice hermeneutics to understand how there can be a genuinely liberal, Paretian, Italian Indology, which shows Mimamsa rules to be useful in dealing with Paretian 'derivatives and residues' or Samkhya-Yoga 'cittavrittis and vasanas'.
Like all my other suggestions, you will ignore this too. You will interpret it as an expression of care towards your and your country's career, or destiny, to being Angela Merkel's bitch.
Worse things can happen.
I love your country. My next door neighbor who died worth over a million pounds (that's a lot of money in London) came here as an illiterate 'contadino' girl from the highlands above Naples. She worked hard all her life. She had an arranged marriage to a hard working, handsome, idiot. He'd gone back to Italy to buy some more land and some Scarlet Woman got her hooks into him.
It was a devastating blow to an 'honest' woman. She had already lost her one son at birth. Still she rose above it.
This lady was my neighbor but she was also everybody's neighbor. She would go and invite anyone to her flat for spagghetti. Muslim people loved her. The English were charmed. Even I ultimately succumbed because she let me buy her cigarettes and wine (good South Italian women can't buy these two items!) and take her to Church. Still, it was only when I fought with her in the street with a lot of very loud shouting and arm waving that she came to love me without reservation. This is because, Italians- totally unlike Tamil Brahmins who are very peaceful and not at all combative or pugnacious coz we just like apologizing so much- are very bad and evil and how come my late neighbor Signora Martha Mone always caught me and fed me nice pasta whereas you make snarky comments like 'thank you for your concern' which is like totally what Heidegger might have said to Hannah Arendt if Husserl had manned up and beaten that silly Holwege Troll into the ground.
True, jumping over 'metaphoricity' to vjanjana means your words become univocal with food.
Kindly read Chandogya- Food alone is Ka, Kha and some nice Kulfi ice cream to round off the meal.
Mind it kindly.

windwheel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
windwheel said...

Some errors of punctuation in the above- but bin Vyakarana Veda is the actual adi Mimamsa Brahmanic Research Project- so just get with the program already.
God bless.

windwheel said...

Some errors of punctuation in the above- but bin Vyakarana Veda is the actual adi Mimamsa Brahmanic Research Project- so just get with the program already.
God bless.

Anonymous said...

वंशवादीत्युक्ते किम्

Razzista.

"यः दीर्घकालेन वदति सः" इत्यर्थः ?

Sembra che voglia dire "colui che per lungo tempo dice o parla", ma fuori contesto non ha molto senso. L'ho scritto io?

elisa freschi said...

किमर्थं वंशवादी स्यात् ?
यो दीर्घकालेनेत्यादि मया एवोक्तम् । वंशः इतिशब्दस्य "परंपरा" इत्यर्थः स्यादिति मया मतम् । मम एव दोषः ।

Anonymous said...

मराठीभाषायामेव वंशवादी इत्ययं शब्दोऽस्मिन्नर्थे युज्यते। आधुनिकस्त्वेवाऽयमर्थः। प्रवातचक्रं तु वंशवादिनं न मन्यसे किम्। इतालियादेशी मानवः सदाऽवश्यमीदृशो भवति जर्मनस्तु मानवः सदाऽवश्यमेवं चरतीत्यादि स सततं वदति। अहमेव तादृशं वंशवादिनं वदामि।

elisa freschi said...

@अश्वमित्रमहोदय | समीचिनमस्ति | प्रवातचक्रः पुनः पुनः "सः _देशीयः, अत एवमेव स्यात्" इत्यादि वदति |

Phillip said...

प्रवातचक्र एव तु स्वां मतिमसत्यां दर्शयति। अहमेव मीमांसां जानामि यतोऽहं भारतीयजातिकोऽस्मि त्वं तु मीमांसां ज्ञातुं न शक्नोषि यत इतालियादेशजाताऽसीति पुनः पुनः वदति। अतिव्यक्तं तु यत्स सर्वतो यूरोपजातस्वभाविकः पुरुषोऽस्ति । यदयं महामीमांसाशास्त्री संस्कृतमेव न जानातीदं हाहाकारमस्ति। सत्यनामैव त्वयं यतः प्रवातमेव वदति।

Phillip said...

चक्रवच्च परिवर्तते वदन्। अहो विदूषकः।

windwheel said...

What is a Vidushaka and how is he different from the Rg Vedic Vidusha or contemporary Vidushi?
The answer of course is that the Vidushaka is hunch backed, wears spectacles, is fat and ugly, of Brahmin caste, and dark-skinned in the manner of 'Kala', not Krishna, and that he is also the sort of spoilt or soured cream of that milk of human kindness which pumps most in an idealistic uxorious sap who really wants to get married but all women find him repulsive.
Philologically, the Vidushak is interesting because he gives rise to Manipravalay.
I have written an entire novel- Samlee's daughter- in hasya/bibhatsa rasa explicating vatsalya-as-theodicy 'pillai bhakti' tradition to which I belong by ancestry- which you Indologists might find it interesting to read, if you genuinely wanted to leap-frog lakshana rather than clutch to the coat-tails of respectability of the Credentialist Ponzi Scheme of the Academy against which they young anonymous students of Paris rose up in vain.
Elisa, luv, (luv is Cockney, working class, London, English like wot William Blake spoke)of course you can ' jump one intermediate step (that of poetry) and land on spirituality directly from intellectual rationality'
That's what great poets do- at least in India.
But, it's like saying 'I want to go from being a maiden to being married without any supervenience of courtship'
Actually a lot of good marriages happen that way. Bus so do bad marriages. Courtship, on the other hand, is something good in itself.
The unexpected aspect of Petrarch's (the 'first modern') interaction with Barlaam is that haecceity gets a hypokeimenon in every boy & girl romance and the babies (or their piquant ontological lack which binds them together that much more firmly) which result.
Anyway, the good news for you & me is that I don't really piss you off- everybody just hates me.

windwheel said...

Could I request a favour? I'd like permission to quote, in full, some of the Sanskrit comments here in a forthcoming book of mine about Western Indology. I want to show how Sanskrit is either bin Vyakaran Vyanjana or else a memetic canalisation of stupidity, deliberate & deliberative ignorance, and pure (that is entirely foolish) colour based prejudice.
Don't worry, nobody reads my books and since I was born in Germany to Iyer that is Aryan parents, I have a totally sterile and un-infectious sense of humour. Also I don't do esprit unless some bullying Berlusconi type of Italian female like yourself shouts at me and then kicks me down stairs. In that case, I can rise to the sort of l'esprit de l'escalier expressible in my earlier and lapidary suggestion that your Careerist ladder climbing made you Merkel's prison bitch.
Meditation on this image, too, is fractally productive of Moksha.
Mind it kindly.

windwheel said...

I know you will ignore this request of mine- just as you have done every other- because of a perception of self-alterity which those productive in this autonomous, if still heteronomous, field nevertheless shoulder as part of their 'White Man's burden' of being now despised by wealthier, more academically successful, people from that 'Area of Darkness' which was your Caliban mirror, still, you are Paretian, Pirandellian, you work hard, you are a good person, you don't tell lies, so- I request you- answer the questions I raise. From being a German type philologist, you could at least become a Russian type.
The Russians want you to stay Italian- you are more all-round productive that way, the Germans don't.
Indians don't care. Americans are stupid. China, which produced Moh Tzu- only good guy in the history of Pol Phil ever- China is the place to start to understand Kurmarila and other such cunts.
What you call Mimamsa isn't Mimamsa at all. I'm a Hindu. I do Mimamsa same way my ancestors did. I'm also a (bad) poet. Rg Veda came alive to me- I know I have the right hermeneutic for it- no fucking Marcel or Mickey Mouse shite about 'Sacrifice as potlatch or some other idiocy some real stupid 'anthropologist' (i.e. stupid, sexually degenerate liar) said; everything is already known, the Bhagvad Gita was given away for free to 'women, slaves, and people like me'
so I do know this stuff.
Why don't you?
I'm amazed you never asked me to source a Pandit for you to run your stuff by. You remember I asked if you could volunteer as an editor? You asked- why would you want to do that?
Was it not obvious?
Sanskrit is a 'Holy Language' for me because of the sect I belong to.
It would be easier for me to write poetry in Sanskrit because of it's obvious advantages. I struggle to achieve the same thing in English and Urdu.
People like you, who have no interest in India, are like those prostitutes and street peddlers and casual labourers and lovers who are that scum- fex urbis- whose need for love creates the condition for their becoming lex orbis.
In some respects, I won't disguise my disappointment with you- your closed mind and lack of any discernible azure horizon- but I feel there is a parrhesiac quality to you- be it howsoever misguided- which either the futility of your pursuit or the fatuousness of your profession might, at any moment, yield something as worthy as your womb.

windwheel said...

My God is called God without Shame- Nirlajjaishvara. Shame, as I am sure you know, is the other side of the coin of thymos.
Indology was and is and a practice of low thymos, ashamed of itself. Roberto Callasso, in praising Talleyrand, wasn't doing a better job than his then best-in-class translator; nor was he really adding to our appreciation of the guy as Kipling does (Kipling did not go to Uni. That's how come he knows worthwhile stuff about French and 'Hindu palaver' and 'Muslim mouthing off'- i.e. if you just tell stories to your kids- or listen to the boy tell stories to his little sis- you've got the ability to end the vicious circle of crap books breeding more crap books.
Do it for your kids.
They're worth it.

elisa freschi said...

I am sorry if it seemed that I ignored your offer. In fact, I thought I had written to you that I would have been very pleased, but that I could not see why you would have wanted to do it. After your answer, I assumed I would have sent you a future article and asked for your advice.

As for the current request, you can quote me and my weak Sanskrit, of course. If I had wanted to keep my flaws private I had avoided blogging in Sanskrit. I do not know about Aśvamitra, but maybe you can drop him a line?

As for my being disappointing for you, in one sense it was foreseeable, since you are a poet and a free spirit and I work within the boundaries of Western disciplines, with all their flaws. In one sense, as my first answer to your offer shows, I am surprised that you could at all find what I write of any interest. But this spark of interests encourages me anyway.

Anonymous said...

[I do not know about Aśvamitra, but maybe you can drop him a line?]

Drop me a line, Windwheel. You should be able to get both my Gmail and Facebook addresses via my comments as अश्वमित्रः I am only anonimo between nine and six, when I have to comment via my office computer, which does not permit me to sign in to my Google account.

Anonymous said...

[People like you, who have no interest in India]

Are you somewhere in or near Pune or Bengaluru? Let's meet for thali. I'll bring my wife to protect me, and lighten the conversation a bit. I'm serious.

Anonymous said...

[Your worthless friends who think they are smart because they have learnt the easiest of artificial languages]

I guess this is why you're so angry. You think we're egomaniacs too, and that we do what we do because we want to make you feel bad about yourself. But this is paranoia. Speaking for myself, I know I'm an idiot, I know my Sanskrit is crap. I do Sanskrit because I love it, and Sanskrit will survive the vilolation of my unworthy love. We've got something in common: I'm a bad poet too, and it would be so much easier for me to write my bad poetry in English. You should be able to relate, a bit.

Phillip said...

[BTW everybody's Sanskrit is shit- except mine because I'm using it properly just as my ancestors did.]

LOL, Sudipta is here put on notice that he is violating Windwheel's sacred language by speaking and writing it. Anyway, Windwheel, you're fulla shit, though I say it without rancour and with recognition. Our Sanskrit may be bad, but you're not the one to tell us. There was an uncharacteristically long pause before your response, and that response betrays very little awareness of the actual content of our conversation. We're bad, but not that bad. Sudipta has no trouble with our mistakes, nor do the many genuinely Sanskrit-knowing Indians with whom I correspond. From my point of view, there's nothing wrong with the fact that you don't know Sanskrit well enough to get more than a superficial sense of even a simple text, sniping at others' mistakes without putting forward even a single syllable of your own like the crappy non-Indian academic sanskritists you despise. No, it doesn't bother me, but it clearly bothers you (though your rage is displaced onto those who threaten to bring the fact to your attention), and that's precisely because of the defining fault of yours that we were talking about: I wasn't wrong, you're a वंशवादी, living in a world of gross groupist stereotypes that you project in all directions, including back onto yourself: just as Elisa (despite the total lack of supporting evidence and every indication of exactly the opposite) simply must be all kinds of terrible and wicked and disgusting things just because she is Italian, an indologist, and working in a German university, so you simply must know Sanskrit and simply must have a deep and total understanding of Hindu philosophy by virtue of the fact that you are a Tambram, and the repressed fact that you actually don't is evidently an incomprehensible embarrassment to you.

Anyway, no hard feelings, really. I'm a fuckwit too (to use your frequent if probably disingenuous and manipulative self-appelation). Your rants are highly entertaining, you obviously know an enormous amount and you present it in a hilarious and lively way. So let's be friends, all of us. But let's cut the crap.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

वाचस्पतिं नमस्कृत्य वर्णयामि मरुद्भवम्।
चक्रायन्ते गिरो यस्य प्रवातेन तु मौढ्यस्य॥

windwheel said...

Okay- I really fucking like Ashwamitra! Does that make me gay? Well maybe, now I'm coming up to the big five Oh- yeah, sure, urm ... maybe.. fuck would it involve.. I go to the gym everyday but I'm 'a grower not a shower' - actually, Ashwamitra I'm sorry I don't do dunno whatever it is that has me so stirred up internally.
I mean my trying to kinda sexually harass Elisa Freschi ( a name Umberto Saba would have creamed over) was all just good fun- like she wouldn't get her bottom pinched if she mounted vyanjana's Clapham omnibus like she said she wanted to do.
I am no longer addressing, with a measure of embarrassment I confess, the noble chatelaine of this Parnassus of discourse, but, in tribute to her, her insistence on- an insistence I equate with that of Victoria Lady Welby- on the plain facts of the case obliges me to confess that I don't know Sansrit any more than I know English or my own family's Credo.
I wasn't taught these things. I grew into them. At various times in my life people have tried to teach me Sanskrit or English or Maths, but I was just too smart/lazy to do any such thing.
Purely because of my own idleness and lack of ambition, I went to the LSE in 1979 when I was 16. The greatest intellectual revolution- since the Rg Veda discovered God was a Mom and hence fucking hilarious- had happened there a few years previously.
I'm now 50. I'm not German- I'm Tam Bram. I don't want to be dealing with Sanskrit grammar especially because of my own bin Vyakaran Veda poem- because Pannini is a fucking innovator and a stupid one at that. The Rk is about collacations not fucking sandhi.
I was born in Germany- I love fucking German people, true my Nanny fed us only on pure Vege stuff which is why me and my sister are bigger and stronger than you guys, but for me- honestly- I could eat sausages- well, I like sauerkraut- and, yeah, German beer is okay- not as good as Czech beer, but there you go.
I will continue this drunken comment after the break

windwheel said...

Sorry- I just saw that Ashvamitra, whom I actually had been aware off previously, was inviting me to chat privately.

Anyway, Signiora Freschi, I must humbly apologize. Ah! if only you had a Mum dressed all in black with a rolling pin in her hand- believe me, when I first came to London at the age of 14, I made peace between 'the Capulets and Montagues' by going myself to see the old ladies.
Now, 8 percent of the Italian population is black- nobody will believe the black Indian boy was only being Christian.


Anyway, Elisa, my dear, your blog which is Ka, Kha and the honeycomb of the sky- deserves my imprecation.
You don't know it but having bambino in the house- Ah! What can one say? Just visiting my young colleague and his wife (where have they hidden baby?) I also get that feeling though at an advanced age.
Still, you must understand 'meta-metaphoricity'- it will help you and prevent you saying really stupid things in your old age.
BTW I've looked at Tantra and Jyotish- it's 'matching problem' your paradigm is already out of date and foolish.
Babe, in this context, everybody does poetry.

windwheel said...

OMG. I really don't make sense AT ALL- do I?
What I mean is this
1) yes than you Elisa, Mem Sahib, I will be friends with Ashvamitra, very sweet of you to insist on it
2) looking at your material, I think things like 'matching' which is as important as 'concurrency' and 'subsumption' (which you don't seem to be aware of though you must have come up under Structuralism) such that you don't have a picture of Yagnya and are simply talking nonsense.
I was struck by something you said on your blog- BUT YOU WERE WRONG. There is no Hindu warrant for it. This is simple U.F.O-ology which stupid Indians back home will repeat or bleat.
I said I would edit your book- it would have been a free Master Class in Philosophy and Indology.
Two weeks in, you would have understood why Classical Skt. is totally shit and everybody safe guarded their results in manipravalay prose.
Look, Skt is great because a Tamil like me finds EVERYTHING WONDERFUL about my own place- even in that bloody Punjabi dialect!
I have been thinking of publishing my Sansrit verse- I already published my Urdu verse- but have been held back by my own radical ideas and method of semantic compression.
But what does that matter? The language is not just now dead but stupidly dead.
I can still adapt it for Tamil or Hindi and thus for English- what you say is foolish simply.
I do write in Skt- but I don't publish. Let's see what you or Ashvamitra have!

elisa freschi said...

Could you point out what is plainly wrong in my posts? Please consider that I will need to read it stated in plain terms (otherwise I will not understand it). You might say that it is not your fault if I do not understand and that this lack of understanding is part of my faults. But please consider that, for the sake of other readers, it would be helpful if I could avoid some flaws.

Anonymous said...

[I do write in Skt- but I don't publish. Let's see what you or Ashvamitra have!]

This is where I publish my Sanskrit verse:

http://dainikahshlokah.blogspot.in/

That I do so, and that I publish this shameful secret here, should be counted unto me as boldness and humility both. I imagine that most of these "daily verses" are bizarre and even incomprehensible, but sometimes I hit the bullseye and produce one that deceives even the learned, so that they ask me which shastra it is from.

[I love fucking German people]

I'm trying to remember if I've ever done that.

[true my Nanny fed us only on pure Vege stuff which is why me and my sister are bigger and stronger than you guys]

I'm sure we're all vegetarians here.

[but for me- honestly- I could eat sausages]

I couldn't.

Phillip said...

अहं मूढोऽस्मि नेत्येवं मूढाः प्रायेण वै विदुः।
यावत्तु वेत्ति मौढ्यं स्वं तावदात्मविदेव सः॥

विश्वासः वासुकेयः said...

नितराम् लज्जावहः अयम् दुर्गन्धमारुतचक्रः। अश्वमित्रो तम् सम्यगवगतवान्।

विश्वासः वासुकेयः said...

* अश्वमित्रस्

Anonymous said...

अहो मम सुहृद्विश्वास आगतोऽस्ति। कदाचिदेलीसासुदीप्तयोः श्वैतद्वीप्यस्य भारतीयस्य च शास्त्रस्य विषये संवादस्तवाऽपि रोचिष्यते। अद्याऽप्यत्र वर्तते।

elisa freschi said...

श्वैतद्वीप्य इति पाश्चत्यलोकः किम् ?

Anonymous said...

हिहिहि। श्वेतद्वीपस्य विषये यत्तच्छ्वैतद्वीप्यं। यूरोपद्वीपमम्रीकद्वीपं च श्वेतद्वीपमेव तत्त्वज्ञा आहुः।

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