Malkovsky on the Personhood of Sankara's para brahman

Sankara's possibile antecedents: Patanjala yoga (Hacker); bhedabheda(Hajime Nakamura), perhaps under the influence of the Gaudapadiya-karika (Ingalls). Vaisnavism (Hacker; Nakamura; W.G. Neevel; Jacqueline Hirst; Malkovsky; Sengaku Mayeda). (542-544)

The distinction between a higher and lower brahman is central of Sankara. (545)

The majority of scholars - both nondualists and theists - believe that his para brahman is impersonal. The implication is that the God of the theists - whether Hindu or not - is an inferior deity. The bhaktas could never accept this. Georges Thibaut much preferred Ramanuja's conception. (546)

A small group regards the para brahman as personal - concluding either from philosophical considerations of 'person' (chiefly De Smet) or from exegesis (chiefly Hacker). (547)

Of course, Sankara does not - could not - take up the question of brahman's personhood. (547)

Hacker holds that Sankara is an illusionist, but also shows that most often S identifies isvara with para brahman. (553-555) A proper understanding of the Absolute need not exclude its being personal. (555)

D.M. Datta: one of the strongest affirmations of realism in Sankara. (555) See also Saccidanandendra Sarasvati as cited by Karl Potter. (556n51)

Julius Lipner: The Advaitic absolute is trans-personal rather than impersonal. (561)

De Smet on the Trinity: see "Light from the Christian Jnana-Karma-Bhakti-Samuccaya" in Religious Consciousness and Life-Worlds, ed. T.S. Rukmani (New Delhi: Indus Publ. Co., 1988) 81. (561n75)

Mahadevan. (562)

Gispert-Sauch and Dupuis on Abhishiktananda

Just dipped randomly into an article by Gispert-Sauch about Abhishiktananda, and found some precious insights, which G-S takes, I think, from Dupuis: three questions, actually, for the Swamiji, and an appreciation:

1. Are not experience and expression related? Is not all experience related to nama-rupa, name and form? Is it true that names and forms are totally unable to disclose the Absolute? G-S answers: Sankara at any rate believed that they are able to do so, and notes that Sankara developed a philosophy of laksanartha. (This is nice! G-S is probably echoing / drawing upon De Smet here.) The Upanisads themselves offer a more positive relationship between experience and expression. (123-24)

2. Can the experience of Jesus be reduced to the Upanisadic Aham Brahma asmi? Is not the filial relationship inserted into Jesus' very experience of 'I am'? (124-25)

3. Has not the dialectical opposition between vyavaharika and paramarthika been overcome by the Easter experience of Jesus and the apostles? G-S calls this "an astonishing and metaphysically subversive" news. (125-26)

He ends with an appreciation of Dupuis that I find wonderful, because of the way it appreciates the Swamiji's 'living with tensions' or 'holding tensions together', something that Stephanie Saldana hinted at in her sharing at the recently concluded ILW4 at Jerusalem:

Abhishiktananda was unable to transcend these antinomies (between advaita and Christianity) theologically. It was not his calling to construct their synthesis, and he left this responsibility to other. His greatness is elsewhere: It consists in having lived within himself the symbiosis of two traditions, Hindu and Christian, in so real a way that both became part of himself, without his ever being able to reject or disown either. His stubborn fidelity to his two faiths - or better, as he wrote one day, to the 'two forms of a single "faith"' - make of him a prophetic figure in a time when the 'marriage of East and West', especially the encounter between the Christian mystery and Hindu mysticism - in full respect for their differences and without lurking ambiguity - is felt as an urgent need. His experience opens an important avenue towards a Christian theology of religious traditions that would be based on an existential encounter with these traditions in inter-religious dialogue. (J. Dupuis, Jesus Christ and the Encounter of World Religions [Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991] 90) [See G-S 126-27.]

G. Gispert-Sauch, "Christ and the Indian Mystical Tradition - Swami Abhishiktananda," Blossoms from the East: Contribution of the Indian Church to World Mission, ed. Joseph Mattam and Krickwin C. Marak, Fellowship of Indian Missiologists (FOIM) n. 6 (Mumbai: St Pauls, 1999) 123-127.

I am excited because Dupuis and G-S put very charitably something that I have heard and read De Smet saying about the Swamiji. 

"Despoiling the Egyptians"

The first great inculturation of Christianity was into the Graeco-Roman world.
The basic transculturality of Christianity. A translation of the Koran, for example, is not the Koran. The Koran is the Koran only in the original language.
The call to a second great inculturation (by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio) - which is not to say that this begins with this call!
The caveats: the second inculturation will not and should not take place by abandoning the first great inculturation. The permanently valid achievements of the latter should be transposed into the new inculturation.
The great question is, how?
We find a model in Aquinas: wisdom and discernment, not without controversy (the Franciscan bishop wanted to condemn him posthumously).
Lonergan: objectivity as fruit of authentic subjectivity, where authentic subjectivity involves intellectual, moral and religious conversion.
The core problem here: judgment and truth. Is everything fine? will all things be okay? Can just any interpretation do? Or is there a limit, a boundary?
Gadamer has a spontaneous criterion of truth.
Perhaps also others like Ricoeur.
Lonergan offers an explicit, methodical criterion of truth, which, in Method in Theology, is found in the functional specialty dialectic.
In our Indian context: we cannot reject in principle the Brahminic contribution. See Newman's advice to Despoil the Egyptians. It is time to retrieve the great contributions of the past. (De Smet says somewhere that it is time. Search for the bibliography of Indian Christian Theology in an early issue of Indian Theological Studies, I think.)
Study the Calcutta School of Indology. It is the before of De Smet. Study also the after of De Smet.
See also my blog ICW.

Antecedents

Talking with Gianni Caputa yesterday, on the way back from Nazareth, I learnt that von Balthasar was a disciple of Henri de Lubac. I know that de Lubac was himself influenced very deeply by Pierre Rousselot, whose unpublished work he edited for publication. See my paper, Tradition and Innovation in Christianity. 

I was wondering about the connection between de Lubac and Blondel. A cursory search of the net throws up a book that i actually have, though in Nashik: Antonio Russo, Henri de Lubac: teologia e dogma nella storia. L'influsso di Blondel.

On the other hand, it might be interesting to explore De Smet's roots in Pierre Scheuer and Joseph Marechal. 

Myron Pereira on De Smet

Email to me from Myron Pereira, SJ, 9 Oct 2012

Dear Ivo,
                  You may remember me from a brief visit to Divyadaan several years ago to address your students of philosophy. We met briefly then; you went on later to become provincial; and I see that now you’ve returned to your first love, philosophy.

I’m writing to compliment you for your biographical note on Father Richard de Smet SJ (Divyadaan, vol. 23/ 1). I came upon your article by sheerest chance, browsing in the reading room of a local seminary, and moved by curiosity I went it through it at one sitting. You have been very thorough, not just in noting his academic accomplishments and his intellectual contributions, but also in recording the details of his personal life much of which I was unaware of, even though I always had a great affection for him. For he was a significant influence on me as a young Jesuit several decades ago.

I was Fr De Smet’s student during my years at JDV (then the Athenaeum), 1964 to 1967, as an uncomfortable student of philosophy. But somehow we struck up a relationship right from my first year, and I would love to listen to him talk and ask his opinion on various issues. In this, as I realize now, he was filling in the role of mentor, of the Jesuit teacher, something which has always been a glorious part of our tradition. Fr De Smet too acknowledged this himself, speaking of his early years as a schoolboy under Father Rene Debauche,  “the most gifted Jesuit teacher I have ever met”.

Incidentally, the excerpt about his teacher quoted by you from Jivan, was sent by him to me, sometime in 1991, when as editor of  that magazine, I had requested an article from him on ‘Excellence’  Simultaneously I had also asked for a contribution from Father Josef Neuner, and both Neuner’s and De Smet’s autobiographical details are memorable: De Smet spoke of Debauche (“Subjugated by his excellence, I became a Jesuit.”), and Neuner spoke of the young Karl Rahner who taught him for one memorable year in the juniorate  (“he encouraged us to ask him many questions…”).

Not for the first time, the influence of the Jesuit teacher on a young mind and heart made all the difference. It was like that with me and De Smet, and though our paths diverged completely after I left Poona, the memory of those times has never faded.

You rightly locate De Smet within the grand tradition of  Christian  approaches to  Hindu philosophy and theology, a tradition which began with De Nobili, Beschi, Coeurdoux and others, and whose more recent mainstay was the ‘Calcutta School’, Belgians all of them -- Johanns and Dandoy, Antoine and Fallon, and  others. In this Richard De Smet, erudite, polymath, but always accessible, was the true jnana-yogi. Today as you pointed out, with the rise of ‘subaltern studies’, such classicist approaches interest us less and less.

This is why I’m grateful that you chose to remember De Smet and record his accomplishments, when so many of his own Jesuit brethren have failed to do either.

Sincerely,

Myron J. Pereira SJ

Malkovsky on De Smet

"The subtleties of De Smet's interpretation of Samkara are at times nearly as challenging as those of the great acarya himself." B.J. Malkovsky, "Introduction," The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Samkaracarya (Leiden, etc.: Brill, 2001) xvi.

"It is a tribute to the high regard that De Smet enjoyed in India that in the planning stage of the volume [New Perspectives in Advaita Vedanta] on well-known Hindu philosopher suggested to me that all the essays ought perhaps to deal with the contribution of De Smet himself to Advaita studies." Malkovsky xvi n 5.

Som Raj Gupta's bhasya on the Sankara-bhasyas

The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man - a series of volumes 'by' Som Raj Gupta, published by Motilal Banarsidass. Going by the title, no one would imagine that this is a major contemporary translation of most of Sankara's works. In fact, a bhasya on the bhasyas: Gupta provides the original texts (Upanisads, Gita or Brahma-sutras as the case may be), Sankara's commentaries, and then his own commentary. I came to know about this work only because of a brief notice by De Smet of vol. 1. Reading closely, I realized that there were several volumes to follow. Luckily MLBD had copies, so now Divyadaan library has vols. 1-5, with vol. 5 in two parts. Unfortunately one has to dig beyond the title page to find out just what the particular volume is dealing with. So this might be helpful:

1: Isa, Kena, Katha and Prasna Upanisads.
2: Mundaka and Mandukya Upanisads.
3: Taittiriya and Aitereya Upanisads.
4: Chandogya Upanisad
5-1: Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, chs. 1 and 2.
5-2: Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, chs. 3-6

Projected:
6: Bhagavadgita
7 (parts 1, 2, 3): Brahmasutras.

Of the above, De Smet would reject the authenticity only of the Mandukya Up. Bh. But it is certainly useful to have the text so readily available.

Is Gupta going to do also the Upadesasahasri? 

Anvaya-vyatireka in Sankara

• Halbfass, Wilhelm. "Human Reason and Vedic Revelation in Advaita Vedanta." Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought. [Albany: SUNY, 1991.] Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992 162-182. In the Preface the author notes that this article, which is ch. 5 in the book, is an enlarged and thoroughly revised version of the third of the four Studies in Kumarila and Sankara. [vii-viii.]
• Mayeda, Sengaku. “An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Śaṅkara.” Śaṅkara’s Upadeśasāhasrī. Vol. 2: Introduction and English Translation. Tr. and ed. Sengaku Mayeda. Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1973. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006. 1-97, at 46-68. Cites De Smet 66n14, 66n17, 67n28, 

De Smet on person

Michael Comans criticizes De Smet's suggestion that the para Brahman is equivalent to the personal God of Christianity. See The Early Method of Advaita Vedanta (Delhi: MLBD 2000) 225-231. Note that his maximum court of appeal w.r.t. an interpretation of Aquinas seems to be Copleston. Should be interesting to study this better. De Smet comes to Sankara trained by people like Scheuer (who De Smet himself calls "a prince among metaphysicians and a mystic", see "Surrounded by Excellence"), Marechal (in his mind the greatest of contemporary Thomists, again De Smet, see Understanding Sankara 132 tentative), and having taught a course in Metaphysics as well as Natural Theology for many years.
The bibliography lists: the dissertation, the article on Suresvara (1961), the Religious Hinduism article (1968, 1997), "Sankara and Aquinas on Creation" (1970), and the 1974 article "Towards an Indian View of the Person."

In general, see also:

• Paul Hacker, [Essay on the Person in Indian Thought] Kleine Schriften, herausgegeben von Lambert Schmithausen. Glasenapp-Stiftung: Band 15 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978) 270-292. [De Smet is aware of this: see his review of Hacker.]
• Paul Hacker, "The Idea of the Person in the Thinking of the Vedanta Philosophers." Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta. Ed. Wilhelm Halbfass. Albany: SUNY, 1995. 153-176. [Very likely a translation of the previous item.]

Important observations by De Smet in his review of Doctrine de la non-dualite,  see Understanding Sankara 443 (tentative). The author has not assimilated Krempel's masterly study of relation especially in Aquinas. Like many contemporary Christian writers, he includes 'relation' within the very definition of person without wondering why Aquinas did not do that. He explains: specific definitions of the term, when applied e.g. to the Trinity, have to include it for special reasons. but relation is not a definiens of person in general, which only connotes 'capacity for interpersonal relationships.' (ibid.)   

Halbfass and Hacker

• Halbfass, Wilhelm. Studies in Kumarila and Sankara. Reinbeck: Verlag fur Orientalistische Fachpublikationen, 1983.
• Halbfass, Wilhelm. Tradition and Reflection; Explorations in Indian Thought. New York: SUNY, 1991. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992. [DD: 170 HAL.W 36126]
• Halbfass, Wilhelm. "Introduction: An Uncommon Orientalist: Paul Hacker's Passage to India." Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta. Ed. Paul Halbfass. Albany: SUNY, 1995. See http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/53259.pdf as of 1 April 2011.
• Franco, Eli and Karen Preizendanz, ed. Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and Its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies. Amsterdam / Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. 
• Halbfass, Wilhelm, ed. Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta. Albany: SUNY, 1995. 

Sankara as srutivadin

• Rambachan, Anantanand. "Sankara's rationale for sruti as the definite source of brahma-jnana:  refutation of some contemporary views." Philosophy East and West 36 (1986) 25-40. [See Clooney, Theology After Vedanta (1993) 254.]
• Halbfass, Wilhelm. Studies in Kumarila and Sankara. In his review, De Smet is happy to note that the second study here confirms his own thesis about Sankara as srutivadin. [Understanding Sankara 434 tentative.]
• Halbfass, Wilhelm. "Human Reason and Vedic Revelation in Advaita Vedanta." Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought. [Albany: SUNY, 1991.] Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992 162-182. In the Preface the author notes that this article, which is ch. 5 in the book, is an enlarged and thoroughly revised version of the third of the four Studies in Kumarila and Sankara. [vii-viii.] There is no mention of De Smet in the notes or Index. In 204n208 Halbfass gives a list of studies that he found after completing the original version of this chapter (1982) dealing with reason and revelation in Sankara, but says they do not modify his thesis. 

Sean Doyle's Synthesizing the Vedanta: The Theology of Pierre Johanns, S.J.

Yesterday I received for review from Peter Lang, Sean Doyle's Synthesizing the Vedanta: The Theology of Pierre Johanns, S.J. (2006).

This is a truly welcome book, because up to now Johanns has not received the attention he deserves - even though there have been a few small attempts here and there, as for example the two articles and one book by Mattam.

Johanns was one of the leading lights of the so-called 'Calcutta School' of Catholic, mostly Jesuit, Indologists. The School took its inspiration from Brahmabandhab Upadhyay. William Wallace, SJ, convert from Anglicanism, was impressed by Upadhyay's attempt to Indianize Christianity, and urged his Belgian Jesuit province to set aside gifted men for the study of the Hindu texts. Among the results of this vision were stalwarts like Johanns and Georges Dandoy, co-founders of the innovative monthly The Light of the East.

Johanns' articles on the Vedanta, originally published in The Light of the East, were published in book form by UTC, Bangalore, edited by Theo de Greef, under the inspiration and advice of the later Richard De Smet.

Doyle, who is himself a Protestant and has lived in the US and the UK, helpfully fills in Johanns' background, enabling the contemporary reader to understand just why Johanns was such a great pioneer in the field of the dialogue between Hinduism and Christianity. The one false note is when Doyle keeps calling Johanns a neo-Thomist - unaware that this term is reserved for the likes of Maritain and Gilson. Johanns is better classed as a Transcendental Thomist, or perhaps a Marechalian Thomist. He was certainly influenced by Pierre Scheuer, who De Smet has called a prince among metaphysicians.

In his opinion, Johanns' work has still to be surpassed, in the sense that no Christian has yet given as much attention to the three major strands of Vedanta - Sankara's advaita, Ramanuja's visistadvaita, and Vallabha's suddhadvaita - as Johanns has done. (Strangely, Johanns does not seem to have given as much attention to Madhva's dvaita, which people often assume to be the closest to Christianity.) In fact, according to J. Patmury whom Doyle quotes, Johanns work on Vallabha has still to be surpassed among Christian scholars.

We have to be grateful to Doyle for his path-breaking work on Johanns, marked by competence, thoroughness, openness and fairness. I think we should look forward now to similar work on the other members of the Calcutta School - beginning with Dandoy and De Smet. De Smet has produced a significant body of work on Sankara. Last year, 2010, Motilal Banarsidass brought out a collection of his essays on the personhood of Brahman (Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet, ed. Ivo Coelho). Currently I am working on a similar collection of his essays on Sankara. Since 2009, Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education has been serializing De Smet's cyclostyled notes for students, Guidelines in Indian Philosophy; hopefully these too will be made available in book form. Negotiations are on with George McLean, who holds the rights, for the publication of De Smet's doctoral thesis, The Theological Method of Samkara.

De Smet, one of India's great advaitins

George McLean, in an email to me of 7 April 2010 (spellings corrected): 

“What excited me about Fr. De Smet's original work was that it enabled the richness of Shankara and the Hindu tradition of the interior path to the divine to be re-related to the material world from which it has been separated.

Father De Smet pioneered this re-relation by opening the connection which the advaitin scholarship had severed in the interpretation of Shankara.

I see this as the key to the present need not to abandon the sacred but to show it to be the real foundation of the sense of the material life, and hence for us of the scientific world in which we now live.

I saw with my own eyes the excitement this caused at a meeting at the University of Madras when two key people jumped up at the end of his talk, which summarized the first part of his dissertation, to say that this was the way Hindu philosophy needed to be done and that he was one of the greatest advaitins in India, indeed in the whole world.” 

De Smet on Sankara's acosmism

My impression is that, while De Smet in 1953 defended the thesis that Sankara was a srutivadin, and while he discovered in him a theory of analogy (laksana) that corresponded closely to the intrinsic analogy of Aquinas, he had not as yet come clearly to the affirmation that Sankara was not an acosmist. This needs to be confirmed by a reading of the text of his dissertation.

By 1964/68 (his article for Religious Hinduism) - and perhaps already in 1958 (the first edition of this article) - he is certainly maintaining that Sankara is not an acosmist. The notes (Guidelines in Indian Philosophy), which bear a 1968 date on the front page, also bear this out quite abundantly.

It might be another interesting study to find out the position of the Calcutta School of Catholic Indologists on the matter. What did Johanns and Dandoy think? Pessein? Etc.

Gispert-Sauch's Review of 'Brahman and Person'

Very generous review of Brahman and Person by George Gispert-Sauch in Vidyajyoti 74/6 (June 2010) 480, 474. Gispert calls it "one of the most important books, perhaps the most important, coming from India in the area of Indian and Western philosophy and theology in the last few decades."

Quiet gratitude...

I wrote this morning that I have been struggling with my paper for the forthcoming Workshop in Boston. I write now, in the late evening, with some measure of satisfaction and gratitude. Gratitude is the only proper word, for the insights that are not under the command of our will, for their arrival, their giftedness....

Not that there have been major insights. But it has been a day of quiet, mostly flowing, writing. I experienced the goodness of having small summaries of the main points hanging out in print. I suppose that was the point of the old schede system. And once again, the importance of not being kanjoos, of generously printing out (despite the damage to the trees!), because insight calls for the phantasm!

Also the importance of having more or less worked out what seems to be a workable scheme. Then, with the schede / printouts in front of you, you can read slowly, ruminate, pommel things into shape, insert.

So today I found myself wanting to modify the three part scheme I had worked out for De Smet on Sankara. The first part of quite okay, not really problematic, the part about Sankara's stage of meaning and mode of expression, though I found it clicking rather well with what I had written / suggested last year: Sankara is really in the 'mixed mode' that is neither purely symbolic nor yet fully systematic.

The second part really needed modification or expansion, and that because of the introductory part of my paper, or better the overall aim of my paper: Retrieving Good Work. Such retrieval involved attempting to read De Smet / Sankara from generalized method. How do I do that? I am just falling back, without too much fuss, on the little notes I had made already. So I incorporated, without being too ambitious, notes on Sankara on experience/ consciousness, understanding, judging; on being; on objectivity. Now that I write that, perhaps I must try to see whether I can do something similar also about meaning, given the importance that vakya / sentence / proposition plays in Sankara's exegesis. ...

So that's where I am, and its a good feeling.

Boston 2010

Still struggling with the paper for Boston 2010. Backbreaking! You work through the year, and then through the summer, and then the year begins again... But then, what would I do if there were nothing to do?

At any rate: the first part of the paper, which is a Lonerganish background attempting to unfold what "Retrieving Good Work" might mean, seems to be relatively stable. I began, strangely, only now to understand the difference between the hermeneutical canon of relevance and the the canon of explanation. These two seem to parallel the later distinction between the functional specialities interpretation and history, except that 'determining the particular viewpoint' is shifted out to dialectic.

The second part is the tricky one: there are no paths here. As McShane wrote to me, you have to create the path here, and that is done by walking!

All these days I was working at a sort of 'raising of categories' in Sankara as seen by De Smet: judgment (pratyaksa, which is sense perception), understanding (clearly Sankara is intellectualist), experience (the Buddhists and the Purva Mimamsakas speak of bare sensation or the nirvikalpa phase of pratyaksa, but I have not found Sankara doing so; but Sankara does, of course, speak of consciousness, and he has a notion of consciousness as experience, I propose); intellectual dynamism, being (I found that very difficult, because Sankara has so many things to say on this point, and it is one of the controverted points!), objectivity (yathatmya; the self-validity of judgment or sva-prakasatva, which De Smet says is the only sensible approach to knowing). I was trying to work out also the 'metaphysical' categories (cause, relation, tadatmya, atman) but did not get far.

Yesterday another approach: De Smet himself provides three points: (1) establishing that Sankara is a srutivadin, a theologian, an exegete of scripture, rather than a systematic philosopher; (2) showing that Sankara's extra-textual understanding of understanding and of meaning (intellection and vakya, in his terms) determines his exegesis; (3) the interpretation itself: Sankara as non-dualist rather than acosmist or monist.

These points correspond neatly to (1) establishing the level of expression and stage of meaning; (2) showing how cognitional theory and its extensions - generalized method or the general and special categories - influence exegesis; (3) the exegesis itself.

Will it work? Let's hope so.

The metaphysical depth of things

I am, I think, finally beginning to understand what Joaquim might have meant when he used to speak of the 'metaphysical depth' of things. But - I am not really sure what Joaquim meant.

Reading De Smet on Sankara, it is becoming clear that, in Sankara's perspective, all ordinary knowledge is a-Vidya, precisely because it does not go to the true depth of reality - which is the Brahman-Atman. Here is one summary of what he says:

Knowledge results from the sources of valid knowledge whose objects are existent things as they are in reality. (B.S.Bh. 1, 1, 4) The objective identity, yathatmya, is not easy to attain. Things have a physical substantiality, which pratyakṣa and anumāna can ascertain, but also a metaphysical depth, namely, their total dependence on their Cause. So long as we ignore or deny this, our knowledge has not yet reached yathatmya. However correct it may be as far as it goes, it is avidya, for it lacks the complement and finality which śruti alone can give. The śruti will not cancel its content but only its pretention of having reached exhaustively the yathatmya of things. [“Śaṅkara’s Non-Dualism” Religious Hinduism 1997 86.]

My paper for Boston 2010

I have some 10 days to go (not counting the class days), and have not yet crystallized my paper for Boston 2010. But, as has been happening the last few years, I do not seem to be overly worried. Things are moving, will move, despite the not infrequent distractedness, boredom, and tiredness.

Yesterday, for example, was quite fruitful. The "Jaimini" paper gave me the stuff about Vakya and Intellection that I had been searching for. Then there was something from the "Governing Principles of Indian Philosophy" paper, perhaps something on Sankara on intellection. Just now I am reading "Indian Contribution to General Metaphysics." Very revealing. Much useful matter.

I have a substantial note in the making on Pratyaksa / Perception, which is the sense judgment, but it does not have much stuff from Sankara. I am finding some matter on Sankara on understanding. I have already, from last year, the matter on consciousness: Sankara subscribed to consciousness as experience, rather than consciousness as perception. I have plenty of matter on intellectual dynamism. I have some curious matter on the Saksin as agent intellect.

I have not yet begun concentrating on the metaphysical categories, especially on causation, operation, and relation.

And I do not know where I am heading. Will I restrict myself to the knowing, being, objectivity categories? Will I go on to the metaphysical categories? And will I be able to say something on creation, acosmism, illusionsism, pantheism? Maybe I could hint at these.

In the meantime, I have sent the title to Fred Lawrence: "Retrieving Good Work: De Smet on Sankara."

De Smet, articles for Telugu Encyclopedia

Yet another chance discovery: two articles: CHRISTIAN RELIGION / SCHOLASTICISM; and SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. These are probably for The Telugu Encyclopedia (Madras, 1964).

The second article contains a Suggested Sanskritic Equivalents of Terms, indicating that the articles are for some encyclopedia in an Indian language. See Collected Papers B 328-339.