Assistant Professor- Position in South Asian Religions, School of Religious Studies 

The School of Religious Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) invites applications for a tenure-­track faculty position in the area of South Asian Religions, with a focus on gender and/or sexuality, at the rank of Assistant Professor. Exceptionally qualified candidates may be considered at the rank of Associate.  

Position Description:
We seek a dynamic colleague capable of expanding and enriching an already strong program in Asian Religions at McGill who is prepared to teach at undergraduate and graduate levels. 

The appointment begins August 1, 2023.  

Job Duties: 

The candidate will also be expected to teach at undergraduate and graduate levels; to contribute to graduate seminars in theory and method offered by the School of Religious Studies.  

Qualifications and Education Requirements:
The candidate is expected to have received the PhD prior to appointment.  

This position calls for specialization in the study of South Asian Religions alongside substantive engagement with the wider fields of Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, and Gender Studies, including relevant theoretical and methodological approaches.   

Preference will be given to candidates who have an excellent overall research profile; research competence in at least two South Asian languages, ideally, one modern and one classical; and the ability to teach broad courses that cover South Asian religious traditions in interreligious and regional perspectives.

Faculty/Department/Unit:
School of Religious Studies 

For further information about the School of Religious Studies, visit: http://www.mcgill.ca/religiousstudies.   

For more information on the study of Asian Religions at the School of Religious Studies, visit:  

Job Type:
Tenure-track

Rank:
Assistant Professor

Salary:
Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Posting Period: 

Applications should be received by November 1, 2022 to guarantee full consideration, but will be accepted until the position is filled.   

Applications must be submitted online through Workday, McGill’s employment portal    

(https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/mcgill_careers).  

Required Documents: 

Applicants should submit the following:  

a letter of application (addressing qualifications, research, and teaching interests);  

a Curriculum Vitae; relevant teaching materials;  

and one representative writing sample or scholarly publication.  

Shortlisted candidates will be asked to submit three letters of recommendation at the relevant stage of review. 

Inquiries: 

Inquiries may be addressed to Ms. F. Maniaci, Administrative Officer, School of Religious Studies (francesca.maniaci@mcgill.ca), or to the chair of the search committee, Prof. Hamsa Stainton (hamsa.stainton@mcgill.ca). 

McGill University is committed to equity and diversity within its community and values academic rigour and excellence. We welcome and encourage applications from racialized persons/visible minorities, women, Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as from all qualified candidates with the skills and knowledge to engage productively with diverse communities. 

At McGill, research that reflects diverse intellectual traditions, methodologies, and modes of dissemination and translation is valued and encouraged. Candidates are invited to demonstrate their research impact both within and across academic disciplines and in other sectors, such as government, communities, or industry. 

McGill further recognizes and fairly considers the impact of leaves (e.g., family care or health-related) that may contribute to career interruptions or slowdowns. Candidates are encouraged to signal any leave that affected productivity, or that may have had an effect on their career path. This information will be considered to ensure the equitable assessment of the candidate’s record. 

McGill implements an employment equity program and encourages members of designated equity groups to self-identify. It further seeks to ensure the equitable treatment and full inclusion of persons with disabilities by striving for the implementation of universal design principles transversally, across all facets of the University community, and through accommodation policies and procedures. Persons with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations for any part of the application process may contact, in confidence, accessibilityrequest.hr@mcgill.ca. 

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. 

Further information on this application: https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/mcgill_careers/details/Assistant-Professor–Position-in-South-Asian-Religions–School-of-Religious-Studies_JR0000031192

The Department of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY, is seeking applicants for an Assistant Professor position, tenure track. The position will involve teaching introductory-level undergraduate courses as well as elective courses in the applicant’s area of expertise. We are seeking a philosopher with a strong research profile.

Area of Specialization: Non-Western Philosophy OR Value Theory
Area of Competence: Philosophy of Mind & Psychology (preferred)

Baruch College, located in the historic Gramercy Park/Flatiron district of Manhattan, is one of eleven senior colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY). We are proud to serve a diverse and engaged student body of over 18,000. Our students represent a wealth of racial, ethnic, economic, religious, linguistic, and national origin backgrounds, and include many recent immigrants as well as individuals who are the first in their family to attend college. Baruch is ranked among the top institutions of higher education in the nation by The Chronicle of Higher Education for promoting student social mobility. Baruch is also listed among the nation’s top public colleges for academic excellence. Baruch seeks staff and faculty members who thrive in multicultural academic environments and are committed to access and excellence in higher education. Visit us at https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/.

Qualifications: Qualified candidates will have a PhD in philosophy, and demonstrated teaching excellence at the post-secondary level. 

Compensation and Benefits: CUNY offers faculty a competitive compensation and benefits package covering health insurance, pension and retirement benefits, paid parental leave, and savings programs.  We also provide mentoring and support for research, scholarship, and publication as part of our commitment to ongoing faculty professional development.

Further details, including instructions on how to apply, can be found at the Philjobs listing.

Thanks to Hagop Sarkissian for sharing this ad with us.

I only recently became aware that Michael Jerryson passed away last year – far too young, barely older than myself. I would like to offer my tribute to him here.

I knew Michael personally because of a wonderful biannual invite-only conference that brings together scholars of Buddhist ethics. He and I certainly clashed, for he would claim that scholars – even in ethics! – should not themselves be taking normative positions. I am not exactly friendly to that view. But the debates themselves were friendly and warm, as they should be – and as Michael himself was.

I know why Michael took the position he did, that Buddhism scholars should only describe and not evaluate. His work was in a genre with the works of Stephen Jenkins and Brian Victoria: providing a much-needed corrective to the too-often-held view that Buddhism is a necessarily peaceful and pacifist tradition. As it turns out, there has been violence aplenty committed in its name. And when we focus on the nonviolent Buddhist ideals that we ourselves admire, we must not blind ourselves to that.

Michael’s work was particulary poignant for me because it explored Buddhist violence in Thailand, where I’d had my life-changing epiphany. That epiphany was in the north and northeast of the country (along with neighbouring Laos), whereas Michael’s work focused on the south. Now to most Western visitors like me, southern Thailand and its sunny beaches typically play the role of a vacation getaway. But proceed further south than most Westerners go, near the Malaysian border, and one finds a different, more violent world. The southern Thai situation is not the situation in Burma where there are clear-cut good guys and bad guys: impoverished Muslim refugees and Buddhist monks urging their butchering. It is a more standard situation of ethnic conflict, where a dominant political majority group treats a minority in ways that make them chafe, the minority wants to split off politically and violence ensues. But since the groups are marked as Muslim and Buddhist, Buddhists commit violent acts in the name of Buddhism.

So while I do agree with Sallie King that violent extremism is “not a valid expression of the dharma”, I think King and I have to be clear that when we say this, we are speaking as theologians, engaging in the proper academic activity of developing normative philosophical positions grounded in our faith commitments. We are not providing a sociological description of those extremists, who see themselves as expressing the dharma perfectly validly. We think they’re wrong about that, just as academic Christian theologians might think creationists are wrong about evolution – but those theologians need to be clear that those creationists see themselves as Christian.

The descriptive and the normative get especially conflated in discussions of engaged Buddhism. There has never been real agreement about what “engaged Buddhism” means. Is it a specific modern movement, progressive in a broad sense, starting with Dharmapala and Taixu? Or is it an older and more general tendency within Buddhism toward political action, Steven Collins’s non-disengaged “mode”, including classical works on kingship? (Such as the Mahāvaṃsa, which urges the killing of unbelievers?)

Engaged Buddhist scholars tend to confuse the two: collapsing Buddhist political engagement in general into the views of the modern progressive left. In so doing, it makes invisible the people who Michael Jerryson studied: people who do things that we leftists find bad, and do so in the name of Buddhism. Michael studied people who call themselves Buddhists and who are politically engaged, but are rarely considered “engaged Buddhists”. His work was a much needed corrective.

I’ll close with my personal memory of Michael that most stands out: of his preparedness. The accommodation provided by the conference in its first year was in a campus residence; the organizers had noted that this arrangement meant shared rooms, but not that it meant there would be no toiletries! I was left fecklessly without any soap or shampoo. Michael, however, had brought so much of these that he could not merely lend me his own supply, but lend me additional bottles to last me through the conference while he used his own. I owed my comfort there to him.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Submission deadline: August 15, 2022

Conference dates: November 4-8, 2022

Hosted by: IIT, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

Keynote speakers:
Purushottama Bilimoria (Uni Melbourne, San Francisco State Uni, RUDN University),
Sachchidananda Mishra (ICPR, BHU Varanasi)

Details:
The aim of this workshop is to explore the philosophical and logical aspects pertaining to religion coming from the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain perspectives. The participants will inquire into how the relations between logic and religion are supported by rational inquiry on religious matters. They will scrupulously examine a wide range of arguments postulated by Indian philosophers, logicians, and theologians. The main themes will center around: the doctrine of karma and the related concepts of suffering, accumulation of merits, and detachment, the belief in an afterlife, rebirth, and/or liberation, the main arguments for the existence and non-existence of a permanent self, and the disputes between the theists and atheists over the existence of the divine realm(s) and God.

• We invite submissions of contributed papers on topics related to these questions, including but not restricted to:
• Philosophico-logical arguments for the possibility of liberation and reincarnation.
• Retributive dimension of the doctrine of karma.
• Logic and the concept of God, especially the arguments for and against the existence of God.
• Theism and Atheism in the Indian religious-philosophical traditions.
• Arguments for the existence and persistence of a self.
• Ethical implications of religious beliefs.

Paper proposals drawing upon original sources written in classical Indian languages (Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit) and papers with comparative and/or cross-cultural components are particularly welcome.

Abstracts must have a maximum of 600 words and be written in English according to our template; they must be submitted via Easychair (note that prior registration with EasyChair is required). In the submission, one of the keywords must be “Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Logic”. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the congress. Accepted abstracts will be published in the congress proceedings, which will be available during the congress. After the meeting authors will be invited to submit a complete version of their works, which will be peer-reviewed and published in a book and/or special issues of journals with publishers of international recognition. Peer-reviewed papers of previous WoCoLoR’s appeared as special issues of Logica Universalis (Springer), Sophia (Springer) and the Journal of Applied Logics (College Publications).

https://www.logicandreligion.com/workshops
https://philevents.org/event/show/101962?fbclid=IwAR0YXyedu1WbQuMcWjAYzq-JxN–3YAzKl4GdQc2Ep-bbtvRY_UEYWk2kuA

Douglas L. Berger. Indian and Intercultural Philosophy: Personhood, Consciousness, and Causality. viii + 231 pp., London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. $115 (hardback).

In the introduction of Indian and Intercultural Philosophy Berger notes: “In certain respects, a number of the chapters in this volume will . . . strike some readers as controversial and provocative” (p. 11). This claim is demonstratively true in Berger’s reading of Śaṅkara as a dualist (Chapter 1) and Berger’s rejection of Candrakīrti’s exegesis of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18 (Chapter 4). While such claims oppose traditional readings and scholarship, Berger provides convincing arguments that call for critical responses (or continuation of response as in the case of his reading of MMK 24:18).

The book is divided into three sections: (i) Brahmanical philosophy, (ii) Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, and (iii) intercultural philosophy. Since the book is a collection of independent papers, I will provide a cursory synopsis of each chapter.

The First Section

Chapter One focuses on an analysis of Śaṅkara through Daya Krishna’s Indian Philosophy: A Counter-Perspective. Berger argues that Śaṅkara propounds only a non-dualism of the self: there are no multiple selves; there is only one self, Brahman. He argues that Śaṅkara accepts Sāṃkhya’s tattva and Sāṃkhyin dualism, but disagrees over the number of puruṣa-s.

Chapter Two is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Kuznetsova, Ganeri, Ram-Prasad’s (eds.) Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue. In this chapter, he provides a defense of the Naiyāyika argument that self-consciousness continues through time. He does so through a phenomenological argument grounded on the subjectivity and agency required for memory, but he notes that the argument is limited by the unchanging nature of ātman.

Chapter Three focuses on the Buddhist/Naiyāyika debate over vikalpa. He argues that the Buddhist accounts of vikalpa create a division between imagination and perception, while Vācaspati Miśra’s account shows that the interconnection of imagination and memory help guides us to perceive external objects correctly.

The Second Section

Chapter Four is a reworking of Berger’s “Acquiring Emptiness: Interpreting Nāgārjuna’s MMK 24:18”.  In this chapter, Berger builds off Joseph Walser’s Nāgārjuna in Context and argues against Candrakīrti’s claim that neither ‘emptiness’ nor ‘causally conditioned co-arising’ should be understood as referential. Berger argues that Candrakīrti has taken several missteps in his exegesis of MMK 24:18. This leads Berger to claim (i) that ‘emptiness’ and ‘casually conditioned co-arising’ are synonymous, (ii) that following the middle way is understanding that all things are causally conditioned co-arisings, and (iii) ‘emptiness’ and ’causally condition co-arising’ are referential and not mere conceptual constructions.

Chapter Five expands B. S. Yadav’s account of Nāgārjuna’s and Candrakīrti’s deconstruction of svabhāva as inherently targeting the essentialism of Nyāya and Advaita. This attack on essentialism expands to a further attack on the elitism (e.g. the caste system) imbedded in Brahmanical soteriology.

Chapter Six is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Wang’s (ed.) Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought. In this chapter, he argues that Nāgārjuna’s “deconstruction” is not comparable to Derridean deconstruction, but, instead, Nāgārjuna provides a potential critique of Derrida by dissolving the tension between law and justice or giver and recipient through prioritizing and equalizing nirvāṇa with saṃsāra.

The Third Section

Chapter Seven is an expansion and rewriting of Berger’s “Relational and Intrinsic Moral Roots”. This chapter compares Mencius’ account of 孝 xiao (trans. filial piety) and Geoffrey Ashton’s analysis of the Bhagavad Gītā’s “call to social duty”. Berger argues that Mencius provides a better resolution for moral dilemmas, in which one’s family duty and social duty conflict, through a relational model of the self.

Chapter Eight builds off Berger’s Encounters of the Mind and provides his own account of luminous awareness between the practical models (prabhāsvaram cittaṃ or 明心 ming xin) and the metaphysical models (prakāśatva or 清浄心 qing jing xin).

Chapter Nine is a reprint of Berger’s “The Unlikely Commentator”. This chapter focuses on Dārā Shukōh’s attempts at synchronizing Islamic philosophy and Upaniṣadic philosophy. Dārā bases this move on Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Upaniṣads.

Chapter Ten is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Conard’s (ed.) Nietzsche and the Philosophers. This chapter explains Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism and develops into a critique of Nietzsche’s understanding of the Buddha as a nihilist, in which Berger ultimately claims that Nietzsche’s philosophy would belong to what the early Buddhist called ‘nihilism’.

In short, the chapters of Indian and Intercultural Philosophy highlight Berger’s career and shows the impact he has had on the contemporary study of Indian philosophy. Each chapter is well-argued and compelling–his continuation of the debate over Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:8 (Chapter 4) and his continued analysis of luminous awareness (Chapter 5) are of special interest.

My main criticism is that the “intercultural” element of the book is restricted to the last four chapters, which leaves most of the book engaging with only Indian philosophy. With Berger’s expertise in intercultural philosophy, a further engagement of Indian philosophy with Islamic philosophy or Chinese philosophy would have been of great addition to much-needed scholarship.

One thing that may be disappointing for some readers, who are familiar with Berger’s work, is the number of reprints in the book (Chapters Two, Six, Nine, and Ten), but such readers will likely find the other six chapters as a worthwhile read (especially the reworked Chapters Four and Seven).

Reviewed by Chris Rahlwes, University of Connecticut (website here)

In a number of publications, I have had the audacity to propose an explanation for certain developments in the history Indian philosophy.1 A simple assumption made clear how and why Indian thinkers had adopted a number of at first sight counterintuitive views, including the satkāryavāda, ajātivāda, śūnyavāda, anekāntavāda, etc. Very simply put, the thinkers concerned found it problematic that in situations described by statements such as “the potter makes a jar” there is no jar. The above-mentioned views were believed to solve this problem.
It goes without saying that these solutions will convince few modern readers, because most of them do not find it problematic that there is no jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. And without problem there is no need for a solution. Most modern readers will therefore conclude that the problem of the ancient thinkers was ill conceived and perhaps based on a somewhat naive understanding of the relationship between language and reality.
Given all this, it is not a little surprising that some scholars attribute naiveté, not to the Indian thinkers referred to above, but to the researcher who drew attention to their way of thinking, i.e., to me. Consider the following:

… we wish to note that naive referentialism, which is implicitly adopted by several Sanskritists who attempt to analyse the ancient Indian philosophy of language (see for instance the way the problem is framed in Bronkhorst 1999), does not, or at least not always, represent a good explanatory framework. This is so not only because it is not tenable in general, but also because, in particular, it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic (Freschi & Keidan 2017: 260).

I have some difficulty with his passage. It appears to accuse me, rather than certain early Indian thinkers, of implicitly adopting naive referentialism. This, of course, would be a case of killing the messenger, and therefore bizarre.
Let us therefore assume that what the authors of this article really wanted to say is that I attribute naive referentialism to certain early Indian thinkers. This does not in their opinion “represent a good explanatory framework … because it is not tenable in general”. This observation seems to presuppose that all the views and opinions of Indian thinkers were “tenable”. It excludes the possibility that they could ever be wrong or mistaken. I fail to believe that the authors of the article seriously accept this position.
One point remains: One should presumably not attribute naive referentialism to early Indian philosophers “because … it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic”. This point might be taken seriously, were it not for the fact that it contains a generalization that is hard to sustain. What is this “ancient Indian thinking” on cognition, language and reality that was accepted by all during all the phases of the development of Indian philosophy? What we do come across in the literature is a variety of opinions that are not always in agreement with each other (or indeed with modern thought).
My observations so far might be considered irrelevant if the attribution of more sophisticated ideas to the early Indian thinkers could provide a better explanation of the appearance of satkāryavāda and related doctrines. I cannot a priori exclude that this may be possible, but have not seen evidence that anyone has made the effort. Until and unless someone will successfully make that effort, I find it hard to see what is wrong with my explanation.
To illustrate my position, let us look at one passage that “proves” satkāryavāda. Śaṅkara on Brahmasūtra 2.1.18 states:

prāg utpatteś ca kāryasyāsattve utpattir akartṛkā nirātmikā ca syāt /
If the effect does not exist before it arises, the arising would lack an agent and would be void (taken from Bronkhorst 2011: 66).

The context of this line shows that it concerns the statement “the potter makes a jar”. Śaṅkara clearly thinks that the jar is there before it arises. He links this conviction to the linguistic expression, for he then states that, if there were no jar in the situation, one would say “the potter, etc., which are causes, arise” (kulālādīni kāraṇāni utpadyante) instead of “the jar arises” (ghaṭa utpadyate).
I conclude from this example that Śaṅkara somehow believed that the presence of the word “jar” guarantees that there is a jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. This conclusion is not waterproof, of course, but I do not succeed in coming up with a more plausible and more appropriate interpretation of this passage. If this means that I attribute to Śaṅkara “naive referentialism”, so be it. I am more than willing to change my mind if a better interpretation of Śaṅkara’s remarks is proposed that attributes to him more sophisticated notions regarding the relationship between cognitions, words and things. So far I have not seen any.
The critical remarks discussed above occur in an article that makes the point that a specialist acquaintance with modern ideas can help the interpretation of ancient texts. Indeed, “[a]ncient scientific treatises can be very sophisticated and anticipate modern insights; they should therefore not be considered ‘primitive’ or ‘naive’ by default” (p. 251). This is, in my opinion, a valuable observation, and the article gives some examples of misunderstandings in modern scholarship that are due to the neglect or ignorance of this principle.
However, there is no guarantee that all that is said in ancient Indian scientific treatises anticipates modern insights. An overzealous application of the principle may induce scholars to impose interpretations on ancient texts and overlook direct interpretations that do not anticipate any modern insights. The study of Indian philosophy should not become a game in which overly clever scholars “find” one modern insight after another in texts whose authors, to the best of our knowledge, were unaware of those insights. The presence of modern ideas in ancient texts remains something that is in need of demonstration, not something that can be taken for granted.

References:

Bronkhorst, Johannes (1999): Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne. Turnhout: Brepols. (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses, 105.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2011): Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought. Translated from the French by Michael S. Allen and Rajam Raghunathan. Revised and with a new appendix. Leiden – Boston: Brill. (Brill’s Indological Library, 36.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2013): “The correspondence principle and its critics.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 41(5), 491-499.
Freschi, Elisa & Keidan, Artemij (2017): “Understanding a philosophical text: The problem of ‘meaning’ in Jayanta’s Nyāyamñjarī, book 5.” Reading Bhaṭṭa Jayanta on Buddhist Nominalism. Ed. Patrick McAllister. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Pp. 251-290.

Notes:

1. Primarily Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne (1999) and its English translation Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought (2011); further “The correspondence principle and its critics” (2013).

Author: Johannes Bronkhorst
johannes.bronkhorst@unil.ch

The philosophy department of Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Karnataka has a faculty position open in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit studies. They are looking for a young scholar to teach courses in Indian philosophy and/or Sanskrit literature. Apart from the teaching responsibilities, the potential candidate would actively participate in developing the Department as a hub of interdisciplinary dialogue in South Asia studies. For more information, please view the position announcement on LinkedIn.

I want to turn now to what I think are the really interesting questions raised by Justin Whitaker’s latest post on the Sigālovāda Sutta. These are questions of hermeneutics, of method in interpretation. As noted, the previous post was exegetical: I think everything I say there could have been endorsed by a historically oriented religion scholar with no stake in Buddhist tradition. But Justin and I are not that: we are Buddhist theologians, who consider ourselves Buddhists and seek to apply the tradition to our lives. So I now want to take the previous post’s ideas into that wider theological context.

I think there is value in the two methodological sentences that Justin returns to from his earlier post. I have been aiming throughout this discussion to follow the first piece of advice, “dig beyond the specific wording of the instructions to perceive the underlying reasoning behind them.” The reasoning, as I understand it, is that worldly pleasures, like the theatre, are inherently unsatisfactory, leading one (as the sutta says) to always want more of them, and therefore the ideal life is a monk’s life that renounces them; there are still better and worse ways to pursue a household life, but the better ones emulate monkhood, and one of the ways that one would do this is to avoid the theatre.

I don’t think Justin’s points about benefits in this life make a difference in that regard: from the perspective of the reasoning underlying this sutta and others like it, as far as I can tell, monks too are getting benefits in this life, and the benefits householders accrue are those that come from being like a monk. The sutta’s reasoning is that we benefit in this life from not attending theatrical shows because shows are as unsatisfactory as any other worldly pleasure, and we should reject them alongside other worldly pleasures – just as, if we were further along the path, we would reject familial love and get an even bigger benefit in this life from becoming monks. I derive this interpretation from looking at the sutta in the light of other suttas, and Pali texts contemporary to them, that express similar ideas. I think that is the most effective way to figure out what the reasoning of text’s authors was.

That much remains exegetical. But Justin’s next piece of advice gets constructive, and that’s where I think it gets both more interesting and trickier – for both me and Justin. That is: “Once one understands the reasoning, the difficult work of applying it to one’s own life begins.” For us as theologians, application is essential. But it is not at all clear to me that we want to apply everything in the suttas to our own lives, when there is a significant amount in there that is wrong and perhaps even potentially harmful. Consider here the Kamboja Sutta in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, whose entire text says this (in the Bhikkhu Sujato translation):

At one time the Buddha was staying near Kosambi, in Ghosita’s Monastery. Then Venerable Ānanda went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Sir, what is the cause, what is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia?”

“Ānanda, females are irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent. This is the cause, this is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia.” (Aṅguttara Nikāya II.83)

Are we going to apply that idea to our own lives? That women and girls are “irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent”, and that’s the reason why they shouldn’t work for a living? Or even, are we going to apply the underlying reasoning behind that idea? Because it sure seems to me that the reasoning here is that the author – a man observing a patriarchal society – observed women in inferior positions, and therefore reasoned that they must be of inferior capacity (a line of reasoning that still gets applied to black people). I wouldn’t want to apply that underlying reasoning to my life, and I’m willing to bet Justin doesn’t either.

From my perspective, the idea that a good householder does not frequent theatrical shows – an idea that remains in the text, no matter what anybody else has said about the text in the two thousand years since its writing – is a bad one, just like the idea that women shouldn’t work for a living because they’re jealous and dumb. I look at what’s in the texts, I infer the underlying reasoning from them and from other texts in the canon, and I conclude that we are better off not applying either of these ideas to our lives.

Now I think Justin could push me further on these points because of the interpretive stance I previously took discussing Rudolf Bultmann. Walter Kaufmann had described Bultmann as interpreting instead of saying no; I had supported Bultmann’s method as follows:

I find it valuable when Bultmann says his “criticism of the biblical writings lies not in eliminating mythological statements but in interpreting them; it is not a process of subtraction but a hermeneutical method.” (99) It is this approach, of not eliminating but interpreting, that is involved in the project of naturalizing karma.

What the present conversation is helping me to realize is how much can be involved in “not eliminating but interpreting”. I think it is exactly that approach that Justin wants to take to the Sigālovāda Sutta, and I am sympathetic to it: we want to avoid rejecting a classical text, eliminating it. We may disagree with what the sutta says or appears to say, but we can still interpret it on a different, perhaps higher, level. This sort of interpretation is what I have called reinterpretation: it is constructive, rather than exegetical, interpretation. So when I noted last time that I was not reinterpreting the Sigālovāda: well, this response would go, perhaps I should be!

Now two points are important regarding such a response. First, Bultmann is still willing to admit that, on an important level, the text does mean what it says. He believes the world picture in the New Testament actually is a mythical one, fanciful and supernatural, and he thinks that those claims are wrong as stated: the world is not really like what the New Testament authors thought it was. The point for him, though, is that there’s a deeper level of meaning, existential meaning, that was there in the mythical picture and is also there when we read it now without the myth. That deeper level is what has value to us now. We are trying to get at that deeper level without denying that the text often also had literal meaning for its authors; as responsible historians, we need to recognize the latter is real.

Second, though, it seems to me that if we really take Bultmann’s approach to the fullest and try to reinterpret everything rather than subtract it, then that doesn’t just apply to the Sigālovāda Sutta; it also applies to the Kamboja Sutta. I think that what the Sigālovāda says about the theatre is awful; I think that what the Kamboja says about women is even more awful. The simple and straightforward approach to these texts is subtraction: we just ignore the advice that we think is wrong. We can also say that these are both sacred texts of our tradition and we must take them seriously on a deeper level, but that is much harder – and we will then need to do that with the Kamboja as well as the Sigālovāda. And I’m not sure what that would involve.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The message below has been sent to us by Prof. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (thanks, Ram!).

Dear all,
I would like to bring to your notice a new post in Comparative and Non-Western Thought, in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University. Details are below:

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CPV800/lecturer-in-comparative-non-western-thought

We would particularly like to encourage women and ethnic minority candidates to apply. I would be happy for potential applicants to be in contact with me at c.ram-prasad@lancaster.ac.uk.
Best wishes,
Ram

There is a lot to do in the European intellectual history, with, e.g., major theories that await an improved understanding and connections among scholars that have been overseen or understudied. Using a simile, one might say that a lot of the territory between some important peaks (say, the contributions of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Heidegger) is still to be thoroughly investigated.

When one works on the intellectual history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis*, by contrast, one still needs to map the entire territory, whose extension still escapes us. Very few elements of the landscape have been fixated, and might still need to be re-assessed.

What are the mountains, main cities as well as rivers, bridges, routes that we would need to fix on the map? Key authors, key theories, key schools, as well as languages and manners of communication and how they worked (public debates? where? how?).
I mentioned authors before schools because for decades intellectual historians looking at the Sanskrit cosmopolis emphasized, and often overemphasized the role of schools at the expense of the fundamental role of individual thinkers, thus risking to oversee their individual contributions and to flatten historical developments, as if nothing had changed in astronomy or philosophy for centuries. This hermeneutic mistake is due to the fact that while the norm in Europe and North America after Descartes and the Enlightenment has been increasingly to highlight novelty, originality is constantly understated in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. It is not socially acceptable to claim to be novel and original in the Sanskrit world, just like it is not acceptable to be just “continuing a project” in a grant application in Europe or North America.
Still, schools are often the departure point for any investigation, since they give one a first basic understanding of the landscape. How does this exactly work?
For instance, we know that the Vedānta systems were a major player in the intellectual arena, with all other religious and philosophical schools having to face them, in some form of the other. However, it is not at all clear which schools within Vedānta were broadly influential, where within South Asia, and in which languages. Michael Allen, among others, worked extensively on Advaita Vedānta in Hindī sources, but were they read also by Sanskrit authors and did the latter react to them? Were Hindī texts on Vedānta read only in the Gangetic valley or throughout the Indian subcontinent? The same questions should be investigated with regard to the other schools of Vedānta (Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śaivādvaita…), the other vernacular languages they interacted with (respectively: Tamil and Maṇipravāḷam, Kannāda…), and the regions of the Indian subcontinent they originated in. And this is just about Vedānta schools.
Similarly, we still have to understand which other schools entered into a debate with philosophy and among each other and which interdisciplinary debates took place. Scholars of European intellectual history know how Kepler was influenced by Platonism and how Galileo influenced the development of philosophy. What happened in the Sanskrit cosmopolis?
Dagmar Wujastyk recently focused on the intersection of medicine (āyurveda) alchemy (rasaśāstra) and yoga. Which other disciplines were in a constant dialogue? Who read mathematical and astronomical texts, for instance? It is clear, because many texts themselves often repeat it, that Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vyākaraṇa (hermeneutics, logic and grammar) were considered a sort of basic trivium, to be known by every learned person. But the very exclusion of Vedānta from the trivium (it cannot be considered to be included in “Mīmāṃsā” unless in the Viśiṣṭādvaita self-interpretation) shows that the trivium is only the starting point of one’s instruction and is not at all exhaustive. And we have not even started to look at many disciplines, from music to rhetorics.

One might wonder whether it is not enough to look at reports by today’s or yesterday’s Sanskrit intellectuals themselves in order to know what is worth reading and why. However, as discussed above, such reports would not boast about innovations and main breakthroughs. Sanskrit philosophy (and the same probably applies to Sanskrit mathematics etc.) is primarily commentarial. That is, authors presuppose a basic shared background knowledge and innovate while engaging with it rather than imagining to be pioneers in a new world of ideas. In a commentarial philosophy, innovations are concealed and breakthroughs are present, but not emphasised. Hence, one needs a lot of background knowledge to recognise them.

I would like to map the territory to realise who was studying what, where and how. How can this be done? The main obstacle is the amount of unpublished material, literally millions of manuscripts that still remain to be read, edited, translated and studied (I am relying on David Pingree’s estimate). Editing and translating them all requires a multi-generational effort of hundreds of people. However, a quick survey of them, ideally through an enhanced ORC technology, would enable scholars to figure out which languages were used, which theories and topics were debated, which authors were mentioned, and who was replying to whom.

This approach will remind some readers of the distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti. I am personally a trained philologist and a spokesperson for close reading. However, moving back and forth between the two methods seems to be the most productive methodology if the purpose is mapping an unknown territory. Close reading alone will keep one busy for decades and will not enable one to start the hermeneutic circle through which one’s knowledge of the situation of communication helps one better understanding even the content of the text one is closely focusing on. As hinted at above, this is particularly crucial in the case of a commentarial philosophy, where one needs to be able to master a lot of the author’s background in order to evaluate his contribution.

*As discussed several times elsewhere, I use “Sanskrit philosophy” or “Sanskrit intellectual history” as a short term for “philosophy in a cosmopolis in which Sanskrit was the dominant language of culture and everyone had to come to terms with it”, as with the use of “philosophy in the Islamic world”, that includes also thinkers part of the Islamic world but who were not themselves Muslims.

(The above are just quick notes. Any feedback is welcome!)

I return now to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker about the Sigālovāda Sutta, the Pali text so often viewed as a guide to the household life. Justin helpfully begins his latest post with a list of the previous correspondence we have exchanged on the topic so far, so I won’t repeat the list here. (The opening list unfortunately doesn’t include hyperlinks to the earlier posts, but those links can be found at the bottom of the latest post.)

From my previous post on the more general philosophical issues, I think we can now return to the sutta itself. Justin is correct that I read the Sigālovāda Sutta as “an overly strict and dour text that sucks the joy out of householder life”. He claims that this is a misreading. Is it? Let us take a look at the feature of the Sigālovāda that most leads me to such a reading: what I characterize as its prohibition on attending theatrical shows. I will examine that prohibition in detail this time, and next time talk about we do with it as Buddhist theologians – a topic that I find more interesting. (Since Justin and I have been pursuing this debate at a slow pace, I will post the next one on my usual schedule in two weeks, and I recommend he wait for it before posting a reply.)

I will start with a point about reinterpretation, which will be relevant again next time. I think it is important to head off a confusion here between exegetical and constructive analysis. The focus of my next post will be constructive – about how we as Buddhists should apply these passages now – but this one is just exegetical, about the meaning of the text itself. Justin says “Later, Lele agrees that I’ve pushed the point that he is reinterpreting the sutta, referring to this post. I’m not quite sure what Justin means by this sentence; it sounds like he means that I agreed that I was “reinterpreting the sutta”. That is not true, and if you read the post) you will see that I did not say that. I said that “my own take on Buddhism is a reinterpretation, a departure from the classical Pali suttas”. That is to say, my constructive take on Buddhism in general is a reinterpretation, in that there are points where I openly admit disagreeing with what many of the classical sutta themselves say. (I’ll say more about this point’s implications next time.) I think Justin disagrees with classical Buddhism, and reinterprets it in this constructive sense, at least as much as I do; the question may be how much we’re ready to admit it.

What I have not been doing is reinterpreting the Sigālovāda Sutta itself, and I never claimed to be. At least, not beyond a very basic (and in this case trivial) sense that every interpretation is a reinterpretation by virtue of putting things in words that hadn’t been used before. I am presenting what the sutta actually does say, in a way aiming to be as faithful as I can be to the original text and its authors; I reinterpret the tradition by leaving the sutta out of the tradition as I take it. It is Justin who I think is reinterpreting the sutta, as I said before. I hope it was clear that my previous title, “Reinterpreting the Sigālovāda’s prohibition on theatre“, was referring to what I thought Justin was doing – because, as I said there, that is a departure from what the sutta actually says.

Here’s what I mean by “what the sutta actually says”:

inasmuch as the noble disciple is not led by desire, anger, ignorance, and fear, he commits no evil…. What are the six channels for dissipating wealth which he does not pursue? Indulgence in intoxicants which cause infatuation and heedlessness; sauntering in streets at unseemly hours; frequenting theatrical shows…
There are, young householder, these six evil consequences in frequenting theatrical shows. He is ever thinking:
(i) where is there dancing?
(ii) where is there singing?
(iii) where is there music?
(iv) where is there recitation?
(v) where is there playing with cymbals?
(vi) where is there pot-blowing?…
In four ways, young householder, should one who brings ruin be understood as a foe in the guise of a friend:
(i) he is a companion in indulging in intoxicants that cause infatuation and heedlessness,
(ii) he is a companion in sauntering in streets at unseemly hours,
(iii) he is a companion in frequenting theatrical shows,
(iv) he is a companion in indulging in gambling which causes heedlessness.

I’m quoting Narada Thera’s online translation; if Justin thinks there’s anything wrong with that translation I’m happy to use another or refer back to the Pali. These passages are why I think the text prohibits theatre. Justin refers to this as my “reading quite literally”.

I’m not clear what the alternative to “reading quite literally” is supposed to be in this context. Are we to take these passages as a metaphor or similar figure of speech? Are we to understand that when the sutta says that the noble disciple does not frequent theatrical shows, that frequenting theatrical shows has six evil consequences, and that to be a companion at theatrical shows is to bring ruin as a foe in the guise of a friend, it means something else? (Justin, you do agree that it says all of these things, right? That these phrases are there in the text of the sutta?) If so, what exactly would these passages mean instead, and why would we think that that the sutta means that other thing instead of taking the simpler interpretation that the sutta actually means what it says?

The greatest non sequitur in Justin’s post is to say my interpretation is somehow “not traditional” because “theater exists and has existed in relatively conservative Theravāda countries such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand…” Uh, sure. Theatre existed in the time the sutta was composed as well: that’s how the sutta can tell you not to go there! If theatre hadn’t existed, there would be no need for a prohibition on it. (Thus the sutta includes no prohibition on spending one’s days at home playing video games: since there were no such games when it was composed, there was nothing to prohibit.) Some other things that also exist and have existed in some or all of those “relatively conservative Theravāda countries”: the capitalist pursuit of excesses of wealth, the murder of non-Buddhist minorities, exploitative prostitution. If I were to say that Buddhist suttas frown upon these things, would that make my interpretation untraditional?

I hope you see my point: what happens to exist in Theravāda countries, now or in the past, has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the ancient suttas. It doesn’t even necessarily have anything to do with their interpretation by later tradition. People frequently ignored the suttas’ advice at the time of their composition, they frequently ignored it in Buddhist countries in the intervening centuries, and they frequently ignore it now. That’s a pretty basic observation of the field of religious studies, in a way hardly limited to Buddhism.

Justin would have more of a leg to stand on here in calling my interpretation “untraditional” if he could point to premodern historical commentaries that interpreted the sutta as saying it was fine to go to the theatre. If he knows of any, I’d be interested to read them. (He says “I have seen no evidence that monastics and laity throughout history have read the sutta in terms of any kind of ‘prohibition of theater.'” Does he have evidence that they haven’t? Without such evidence, I don’t think it’s responsible to just make up an interpretation that’s convenient to us and privilege that over what the sutta actually says. That is what I would call a misreading.) Modern commentaries are relevant too, but they do less to establish what is a “traditional” interpretation: people who write modern commentaries are part of the tradition, sure, but so is Justin and so am I.

So, I feel very comfortable in saying, exegetically, that the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibits laypeople from attending the theatre. Obviously this is not a legal prohibition, since the sutta was never intended to have the force of anything like law – unlike vinaya rules for monks, say, which are enforceable. But there is a prohibition in an ethical sense: if you know what’s good for you, you won’t go to theatrical shows or hang out with friends who recommend you do. On the grounds that that is indeed what the sutta actually says, I’m happy, too, to take the hypothesis that that is a traditional interpretation of the sutta, unless and until I see evidence that it isn’t – and so far I’ve seen none.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The case of combination variants like dadhi and dadhy is used by Nyāya authors as an evidence of the fact that words are produced and modified. Mīmāṃsā authors, who think that language is without beginning, need to respond to that and explain therefore that dadhy is not a modification of dadhi, but an alternative word, and both are used in specific phonetic contexts.

Veṅkaṭanātha in his commentary on PMS 1.1.16 elaborates thereon and explains that they are described as archetype and ectype of each other for pedagogical reasons only (in order not to further multiply the number of words to be learnt). At this point, he faces two very different objections.

The first opponent says that the archetype-ectype relation could be reverted according to a different grammatical analysis. This probably means that dadhy could be considered as the archetype and dadhi as the ectype. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that one should choose the grammatical analysis based on its pedagogical merits, and the one suggested by the opponent is not pedagogically easier.

The other opponent says that the ectype-archetype relation is real and based on the similarity between the two. The “similarity” is not further elaborated upon, but we can guess something more about it through Veṅkaṭanātha’s reply. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that if similarity were the ground for real archetype-ectype connections, then there would be no way not to avoid over- and under-extensions. On the one hand, one could over-extend it to other cases of similarities, like yogurt (dadhi) and jasmine flowers, that are similar insofar as they are both white, although they are not considered to be archetype and ectype of each other. On the other hand, cow-dung and beetles are dissimilar, but are considered one the ectype of the other (beetles are believed to be a transformation of cow-dung).

Now, my problem regards a terminological choice. The first opponent says: vyākaraṇāntareṇa prakṛtivikṛtivaiparītyam. In his answer to the second opponent, Veṅkaṭanātha says na ca sādṛśyāt prakṛtivikṛtibhāvaḥ śaṅkhyaḥ, vaiparītyasyāpi prasaṅgāt. However, vaiparītya in the first case seems to be the opposite of what should be the case (the inversion of dadhi and dadhy as archetype and ectype). By contrast, in the second case vaiparītya seems to indicate just a different set of consequences. Comments welcome!

(Cross-posted on my personal blog, elisafreschi.com)

The concept of mental health – and even more so its converse of mental illness – has become ubiquitous in the modern West, and it deserves serious examination by philosophers. Many, probably most, cultures would not recognize the claim that a mind that sees demons or refuses to speak or commits suicide is in a condition analogous to a body with a fever or a broken limb.

The idea of mental health and illness is the central idea in the psychological approach that we typically refer to as the medical model. The term “medical model”, in its most basic sense, means that one approaches a given field of human endeavour in the manner associated with medicine: that field may then be considered a part of medicine, or simply analogous to it. I believe the term was coined by R.D. Laing, the prominent critic of psychiatry, and so it often takes on a negative cast, for the application of specific aspects of modern medicine in areas where it is inappropriate to do so.

It does not have to, though. Unless we reject modern medicine in its entirety (which would be a stupid idea), we are going to accept some aspects of the medical model for at least the practice of medicine itself. Modern medicine has accomplished a great deal, even in its application to phenomena of the mind: antipsychotics and antidepressants are not cure-alls by any means, but for a great many people, their mental lives are much improved as a result of these medicines.

Moreover, the term “medical model” is used, and I think rightly used, to describe certain philosophical approaches from long before the rise of modern medicine. The medical model as we know it was certainly a shift from earlier Western ways of viewing harmful mental abnormalities, sometimes regarded as sin or as demonic possession. But it is important that medical models of the mind as such are not a modern Western invention.

Consider the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, often stated in the one-word summaries of dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, magga: suffering, origin, cessation, path out. These four could describe the components of medical practice: diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, treatment. In both medicine and the Buddhist dhamma, one identifies the basic problem, its cause, its future course, and what to do about it. And I’m hardly the first to observe this similarity. The observation doesn’t just show up in a lot of Western introductions to Buddhism; it was made by Buddhaghosa, the preeminent Theravāda philosopher, himself. He proclaims that “the truth of suffering is like the disease, the truth of origin is like the disease’s cause, the truth of cessation is like the relief of the disease, and the truth of path is like the medicine.” (Visuddhimagga 512.8-9)

Buddhaghosa, then, explicitly treats a core teaching of the dhamma as analogous to medicine. We have a medical model for our mentally caused suffering and how to get out of it. And Buddhaghosa is hardly alone in this. An article by Albrecht Wezler (Indologica Taurinensia 12 (1984)) goes into marvelous detail on how this fourfold model shows up not only in Buddhist texts but in medical literature (the Caraka Saṃhita) and non-Buddhist philosophical texts like the Yoga Bhāṣya and Nyāya Bhāṣya. Intriguingly, though, Wezler notes that the Four Noble Truths are the earliest attested form of this model: that is, it appears in them before the medical literature. So it could be that rather than Buddhist treatment of the mind being originally modelled on Indian medicine, it was vice versa.

Nor was the idea of a medical model unknown in the West. The Hellenistic philosophers (the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics), referred to their philosophies as therapeia, the Greek word for medical care, and the root of our modern word therapy. Thus Martha Nussbaum entitled her excellent book on these thinkers The Therapy of Desire. In it, she shows how the Hellenistics believed that we are in some significant way sick, and philosophy offered a way of treating it.

The Hellenistics and Indians did not model their philosophical paths on modern experimentally based medicine, but they did see the paths as analogous to medicine nonetheless. There remains one big difference from the modern medical model of mental health, though. And that is that the Four Noble Truths are a diagnosis, etiology, prognosis and treatment of the normal human condition. That is also how the Hellenistics viewed their philosophical therapy: it could benefit everyone. The modern medical model, by contrast, has viewed “mental health” as the normal state of being. And, it seems to me, that is what it gets wrong!

Even when applied to physical health, there is something a little strange about the word “health” being used as a binary: you’re healthy or sick. As one goes through one’s forties and fifties and the daily medications one takes for minor troubles begin to add up, it’s hard to see the divide being so clear-cut. Surely health is more of a continuum. But even if one can accept that a typical twentysomething is physically “healthy”, it’s still not so clear how that term can apply to the mind.

Martin Seligman founded the flourishing field of positive psychology out of frustration with this approach. Psychology had traditionally viewed itself as “curing” the “sick”: taking you from an unusual state in which you had a “disorder” into a normal state of “health”. But when Seligman, a lifelong “grouch”, observed that his five-year-old daughter had done more work on improving her mood than he had as a trained psychologist, he realized something was wrong. One could be perfectly “mentally healthy”, on 20th-century psychology’s model, and still be miserable – or still be a jerk.

It is for this reason that a stigma has long been attached to seeing a therapist: to do so was to indicate that you were “crazy”. It seems that these days the stigma is diminishing – many current pop songs mention seeing a therapist – and I think that is a great thing. The ability to talk out one’s mental problems and find solutions is valuable for most if not all people, not just “crazy” ones. But the “crazy” view of therapy is the logical conclusion of a model that views mental health as normal, and “mental illness” as a deviation from that norm: a model that divides the world into normal people and crazy people. The classical Buddhist model is much wiser when it tells us: we are all crazy. Some of us are just crazier than others.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The book on Veṅkaṭanātha I am working on is an attempt of doing history of philosophy in the Sanskrit context, given that no agreed canon, chronology, list of main figures or main questions has been established for the history of Sanskrit philosophy. Therefore, in the Sanskrit context, doing history of philosophy does not amount to reconstruct some aspects within an established picture, but rather to understand what is the picture altogether. This also means that it is impossible or counter-productive to do history of philosophy in just an antiquarian way in the Sanskrit context.
The book also takes on the challenge of talking about Sanskrit philosophy without reducing it to ahistorical “schools” which are depicted as unchanging through time, so that while talking of Nyāya one can mix 5 c. CE sources with 11 c. ones. In contrast to this approach, the book focuses on the role of individual philosophers within such schools.

Accordingly, the book reconstructs the intellectual figure of Veṅkaṭanātha and his philosophical and theological contribution to what we now call “Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta”. Its main thesis is that Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as we know it now is mostly a product of Veṅkaṭanātha’s brilliant mind. He connected various texts and theories into a harmonious whole, so that readers and practitioners looking at the time before Veṅkaṭanātha now recognise them as pieces of a puzzle. Once Veṅkaṭanātha’s contribution is in place it is in fact easy to look back at authors before him and recognise them as pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. However, it is only due to Veṅkaṭanātha that the entire jigsaw puzzle exists and the various texts and ideas could have remained disconnected, or could have led to different developments without him. The book analyses Veṅkaṭanātha’s contribution in shaping the school, a con- tribution that goes so deep that it is hard to imagine Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta through a different lens. Veṅkaṭanātha’s synthesis was not, or not just, the result of a juxtaposition, but itself a philosophical enterprise. Veṅkaṭanātha re-interpreted a large amount of texts and ideas connecting them in a higher-order theory. In this sense, he is a philosopher doing history of philosophy as his primary methodological tool.

The book investigates this synthesis, its range and its theoretical foundations. In this way, it also attempts to reframe the usual understanding of Veṅkaṭanātha’s impact on Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, shifting him from the position of a learned successor of Rāmānuja to that of a builder of a new system, with a different scope (ranging well beyond Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and incorporating much more into it) and possibly with a different basis. Consequently, this book deals with philosophical themes in connection with their intellectual development.

Among the tools used by Veṅkaṭanātha in crafting his synthesis, of particular interest is his emphasis on the unity of the system holding between Vedānta and another school, called Mīmāṃsā. This is a school focusing on the exegesis of the Vedas and therefore on epistemology, deontics, philosophy of language and hermeneutics. Veṅkaṭanātha borrowed from it the tools to reconcile sacred texts seemingly mutually contradictory, as well as a well- developed dynamic ontology and account of subjectivity. However, the Mīmāṃsā school was also atheistic and considered the Vedas to be only enjoying a deontic authority, not an epistemic one. Both claims (especially the first one) contradict basic tenets of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. Therefore, in crafting a single system out of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta Veṅkaṭanātha needed to find a way not to deny these claims while at the same time transcending them. Last, some readers not too familiar with Sanskrit philosophy might find a lot of topics Veṅkaṭanātha deals with “non-philosophical” or at least “non-philosophical enough”. For instance, why does he spend so much time on the injunction to learn the Vedas by heart? As an interpreter, I might have just used the debate in order to extract from it what is relevant for what is recognised today as “philosophy of action”, e.g.: Can someone be motivated to undertake an action whose results will only take place after years ? Does this even count as an action? What at all counts as motivation with regard to a course of action involving multiple years? Can a cost-benefit analysis still work in such cases? Which concept of subjectivity is needed for complex actions extending over multiple years? Alternatively, I might have just depicted the relevance of the debate in the historical setting in which it took place. In general, I gave hints going in both directions, but I primarily tried to reconstruct the debate in its own terms, because a global approach to philosophy means being open not just to new answers to old questions and to new questions within known fields, but also to altogether new fields of investigation. The unitary Mīmāṃsā system is in this sense a treasure house of ideas leading to a philosophy of exegesis and a philosophy of ritual.

Comments and criticisms, as usual, more than welcome!

Scholars of Sanskrit (as well as ancient Greek, classical Tamil, Chinese…) are familiar with translations oscillating between the following two extremes:

• A translation which closely follows the original and is chiefly meant as an aid to understand the Sanskrit text (as in Kataoka 2011)
• A translation which smooths the text, so that it sounds as if it had been originally written in the target language

It seems that the choice of approaching more the one than the other partly depends also on one’s target language and on the cultural expectations linked to a certain literary civilisation, since readers of, e.g., English or German appear to have very different expectations concerning what counts as a good translation, with the former being much more positively impressed by texts which sound as if they had been composed in their own language, whereas the latter tend to expect from the translation that it transmits part of the flair of the original language, as if it could be partly transparent and let one glimpse the original through it (see Venuti 1995). The other element of the choice is the reader one has in mind. The first model presupposes a reader who knows Sanskrit fairly well and uses the translation only as an auxiliary, the second one assumes the reverse.

A third element worth considering regards the translator themselves. They need an extremely good command of English in order to translate in the second way (which is not my case). Moreover, they need to think of the duration of one’s translation. Each language rapidly evolves so that translating in a very idiomatic way runs the risk of rendering the text less understandable for non-native speakers or speakers who will live in a not so distant future. As a non-native speaker of English, I have, for instance, had problems deciphering the English idioms used in a translation by Anand Venkatkrishnan (in Venkatkrishnan 2015, see the discussion here: http://wp.me/p3YaBu-jz) and many readers of mine had asked me what “ones” in Edgerton 1929 or “ain’t” in other authors could mean. In other words, a strongly idiomatic translation is restricted —in at least some aspects— to native speakers of the present
and immediately following decade.

My translation of the SM aims at being close enough to the text to make it conceptually understandable to a public of Sanskritists as well as to scholars of the history of philosophy and theology. It does not reproduce the complexity of Vedānta Deśika’s prose, nor does it attempt at capturing the beauty of his verses. I tried to make the translation readable also to non-Sanskritists, while being at the same time extremely cautious in not over translating the Sanskrit text. As a rule of thumb, I used the concept of functional equivalence, which was used, e.g., by Raimon Panikkar in discussing comparative theology. Accordingly, I changed passive forms (which are the rule in scholarly Sanskrit) into active ones, since the latter are the rule in scholarly English. I also made pronouns and copulae explicit and avoided causative clauses when possible, since this is the rule in scholarly English. I also broke long sentences into shorter ones, since the length of an acceptable sentence varies massively between scholarly Sanskrit and scholarly English. Nonetheless, the resulting text will not be smooth, because the source text is extremely complex and causes real head-aches to its readers. Smoothing it completely would have meant unpacking all the points it presupposes and hints at.

Whichever type of translation one favours, translating a Sanskrit text always remains a difficult task. In my opinion, this is due especially to the fact that contemporary readers lack almost completely the background assumptions which are required in order to understand each instance of communication, including philosophical texts. While reading a text by Plato, a contemporary reader educated in Europe will automatically be able to identify most of the trees, places (e.g., the Piraeus, at the beginning of the Republic), social institutions (e.g., the role of theater, the names of gods and goddesses, the presence of slaves) and the other realia he mentions. Readers will not be scared by reading geographic or ethnic names (e.g., hoi Thrâkes, in Republic A 327), nor by proper names (e.g. Socrates or Glaucon, ibid.). This familiarity is also reflected in the fact that there are English (as well as French, German, Italian, Spanish…) versions of these terms. Even more, readers will likely be at least slightly familiar with many of Plato’s ideas, such as the maieutic method or the realm of ideas.

The situation is completely different in the case of Sanskrit texts, where Euro-American readers often need to deal with unfamiliar terms, contexts and ideas. Let me call the lack of familiarity with names, works, contexts, customs, etc., circumstantial unfamiliarity and the lack of familiarity with philosophical ideas philosophical unfamiliarity. The unfamiliarity with ideas might be something readers are willing to live with —after all, they started reading a book about an unfamiliar philosopher. What they are probably not prepared to have to overcome, is the additional effort required to just overcome the circumstantial unfamiliarity.

For this reason, one might decide to strongly alter the text, in order to substitute the background assumptions with ones more familiar to the contemporary reader. This substitution may regard minor details, e.g., the substitution of “Devadatta” with “John Smith” as the placeholder for whoever a person, or the inclusion of pronouns, copulae, punctuation and other elements which can be deduced out of the context or of the literary usage of scholastic Sanskrit. I have been generous in making implicit linguistic units explicit, but I did not dare translating proper names and terms referring to realia and to culturally specific elements into more familiar ones. This is because I want to create a reliable translation of the SM that is readable for at least some decades —also given the fact that I do not foresee new translations
of the SM being prepared in the short- and mid-term. Furthermore, I did not want to limit my assumed readership to European readers, and I am not sure that “John Smith” will remain the standard way of expressing the same thing as the Sanskrit Devadatta for all future and remote readers.

Coming to philosophical unfamiliarity, there are again two kinds of it. On the one hand, there is the unfamiliarity of the main thesis one is reading about, in the present case, the idea of aikaśāstrya. On the other hand, there is the unfamiliarity of other philosophical ideas being mentioned only in passing. In the former case I believe I can expect the reader to be patient enough to tolerate some Sanskrit words and some translations sounding alien,
and give themselves enough time to understand what is being discussed. In the latter case, by contrast, I would like to provide the reader with enough information to go forward with the text without having to engage deeply with each of the ideas and theories being mentioned in it without extensive explanations. This means, that in a chapter focusing on the instrument of knowledge called śabda, I might expect the reader to bear with my complicated translation of it as linguistic communication as an instrument of knowledge', whereas I will not hesitate to translate anumāna just asinference’ and adding a word of caution in, e.g., a footnote only. Vice versa, I would translate śabda just as `testimony’ (with a word of caution in, e.g., a footnote) while translating the chapter on anumāna by a thinker of the Nyāya school.

If this principle is followed, a reader will receive a lot information about some key terms and only minimal information about less relevant ones. How can one organise this information so that a reader can find all the information they need to go forward with the main thesis while understanding enough of the other philosophical ideas mentioned?

For this purpose, one needs more than just a reader-friendly translation. One might decide among at least three options:

1. Adding extensive comments in footnotes or endnotes (as it has been done in Preisendanz 1994)
2. Adding the same comments within the text in separate paragraphs, perhaps in smaller font size (as it has been done in Taber 2005)
3. Adding the same comments in an extended introduction (as it has been done in Bilimoria 1988)

The choice partly depends on one’s target readers. Philologists are more likely to appreciate the first solution, whereas the latter two are more likely to appeal to a public of more general readers, who might be more interested in the philosophical content than in the text itself. In this book, I adopt the third model (as I did already in Freschi 2012), although I will recur to the first one whenever the text demands a punctual explanation of a specific point having little bearing with its major concerns.

A specific paragraph needs to be dedicated to the use of parentheses and brackets. I used parentheses:

1. to indicate which Sanskrit word I am translating in specific cases (i.e., while introducing for the first time the translation of a technical term, or whenever a term has to be understood in an unexpected way).
2. to insert short explanations which are needed to understand a specific point of the text and cannot therefore be postponed in an explanatory footnote nor advanced in an introductory study.

As for square-brackets, I used them to insert words which were not present in the Sanskrit original and which could not be directly inferred on its basis. In other words, I would not put I'' inI am going” within brackets if this translated gacchāmi, since the first-person subject is obviously present in the verb form. I also did not put within brackets obvious complements, such as “sacrifice” while translating sacrifice’s names such as darśapūrṇamāsau or citrā as the full- and new-moon sacrifices' andthe citrā sacrifice’. By contrast, I used brackets to highlight for the reader that a certain concept is not actually found in the text, so as to make them aware of the fact that I am suggesting an interpretation of it. For instance, God’s attribute vimuktipriya (within the opening verses of the SĀṬ) literally means who is fond of liberation'. I rendered it asHe who wants [people to achieve] liberation’.
I also use brackets to introduce identifications of speakers.

Comments from fellow translators and/or readers of philosophical texts from afar welcome!

Veṅkaṭanātha follows the standard śāstric style when it comes to the
general way of asking questions, discussing answers, and of providing
rationales for each claim.

To that, he adds his command, evident in his non-śāstric works, of figurative language, so that the dry style of śāstric reasoning gets populated by powerful metaphors, like that of scholars clinging to a Rahu or to a Kabandha kind of Veda only.¹ Other metaphors are even more difficult to decipher (e.g., “butt by the horns of the Prābhākaras’ head” (SM 1971, end of p. 86)), since we lack their original context and perhaps also the pragmatic context of an actual debate.

Similarly, Veṅkaṭanātha’s style, though often similar to Rāmānuja’s one, is terser. There are more compounds, often built of more members, possibly because Veṅkaṭanātha presupposes some familiarity with basic tenets of Rāmānuja and other authors, and summarises them in a handy compound, like a contemporary scholar would do by just referring to, e.g., “Hume’s view on religion” or “the liar paradox”. Finally, Veṅkaṭanātha’s poetical inclination makes him at times choose to use uncommon words (e.g., dārḍhya, present both in the SM and in the ŚD 3) in what seems like a conscious choice to be expressive and to have his readers pause and consider what he is saying.

Veṅkaṭanātha comes back to the same topics in several of his śāstric works and at times repeats the same metaphors (e.g., comparing in SM and ŚD 3 the unitary teaching of Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā to a building done by more than one person, but still unitary). Nonetheless, in most cases the focus of the argument varies, possibly in accordance with the target readership and the general agenda of the work. Metaphors can therefore become less cryptic by looking at cross-references in Veṅkaṭanātha’s works. Arguments, however, are neither verbatim repeated, nor conceptually reproduced, but rather adapted to a new context and
reshaped in it. Consequently, the parallel passages from other works by Veṅkaṭanātha are interesting, but not really significant to reconstruct the actual reading of a given passage in the SM.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is opening a position (check later today for the updated page) for history of philosophy with a focus on a non-European and non-African tradition (since they are already covered for these):

https://www.academictransfer.com/en/310260/assistent-professor-in-history-of-philosophy-tenure-track/

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

I haven’t heard anyone use the phrase “blogosphere” in a long time. That in itself is no problem: neologisms come and go. More concerning is the reason it isn’t used: the referent of the term “blogosphere” has faded from view, and may not even exist at all. Circa 2010, even though I didn’t yet identify as a Buddhist, I was still in dialogue with a “Buddhist blogosphere” that contained the likes of the Bitterroot Badger and Marcus. That is, there was a network of many Buddhist blogs whose authors read each other’s. But most of those blogs are gone now, and I haven’t seen others come up to replace them.

This isn’t a coincidence. In the ’00s, when I started Love of All Wisdom, blogging was an exciting new technology – but no technology stays new and exciting for long. Already at educational-technology conferences around 2012 I was hearing people disparaging blogging as “old tech”. (I replied “What’s wrong with old tech?” But in those days edtech was too often about getting dazzled by the latest shiny thing.) It feels hard to believe now, but as Twitter started getting popular – around the same time – one of the most common terms to describe it was “microblogging”. That is, in order to explain and understood what Twitter was, people thought of it as “like blogging, but shorter”.

What happened next, of course, was that the immediacy and ease of Facebook and Twitter drove blogs to the sidelines. The positive side effect of this development was that, where blogs had been viewed as frivolous ephemera in the ’00s, in the ’10s they became a site for serious reflection by comparison. By 2012, if you had a quick and goofy hot take, you no longer needed a blog for that; you had Facebook and Twitter. Blogs, by contrast, had become a space left for serious essays. The problem, though, was that people seemed to have less attention span for that serious long-form reflection. Facebook was enough. And so, it seemed, the world came to pass blogs by. They came to seem like a relic of an earlier time.

And yet. Technology’s moving-on didn’t stop with Facebook and Twitter. Young people across the generations want to have places to interact without their parents and teachers watching, and they come to find such places in the newer technologies the parents hasn’t found. That had already been true for me and my friends in the 1990s when we started an email list together, and it remains so: once parent-age people like me got established on Facebook and Twitter, the young quickly moved on to Instagram. Now that we’re on Instagram, they’re moving to TikTok. (And to Snapchat, where they can wisely keep all their naughtiness away from the eyes of posterity.)

As for us adults, in the mid-’00s, especially around 2016, most of us came to discover just how toxic the culture on Facebook and Twitter could become. Twitter’s length restriction – without which it would not be Twitter – makes serious reflection impossible; Facebook’s algorithm actively promotes hostile interactions and delivers users to conspiracy theories. Even though the written word is a medium I prefer over pictures, I moved most of my own social media presence from Facebook to Instagram, because it turns out that the pictures were more likely to be wholesome and positive. If you must have the fast interactions of social media, better they be smarm than snark.

And in the past few years there has come a particularly interesting twist. Out of the angry social-media culture of Twitter and Tumblr arose a left-wing movement, focused on racial and gender issues, which has become the ruling tendency in mainstream journalism and is not very comfortable with opinions that dissent from it. Those who do dissent openly have often found it difficult to continue their work in established journalistic venues. For example Matthew Yglesias left the publication he founded because his coworkers there said his disagreement with them made them feel “unsafe”; Glenn Greenwald left the publication he founded because it insisted on censoring his criticism of Joe Biden during the election; Bari Weiss left the New York Times when her colleagues reacted to her dissenting opinions by calling her a Nazi and posting an ax emoji next to her name. Notably, none of these were even remotely close to the far right or to Trump; Yglesias is of the centre-left, Weiss of the centre-right, and Greenwald an unrepentant socialist.

But these various pressures against non-conforming opinions created an opportunity: in 2021 it all led to the runaway success of a new platform called Substack, which now effectively employs Yglesias, Greenwald and Weiss. Substack is a way to distribute paid newsletters, in the retro-seeming format of email distribution, and these thinkers (among several others) have made now themselves a comfortable living as independent writers, outside environments hostile to them. Substack has been growing rapidly at a time when journalism as a field is notoriously struggling. Its success even spilled back over to the mainstream media: John McWhorter, a linguist whose centrist views on race put him at odds with New York Times orthodoxy, had a Substack so successful that the Times eventually hired him as an opinion columnist.

And here’s the thing: what comes out of the shiny new technology of Substack looks a lot like… blogging! What I receive in Yglesias’s Substack email newsletter – long, informed takes on a variety of issues – would all look comfortably in place on a scholarly blog. Technologically, I’ve heard Substack described (accurately, I think) as simply “WordPress with a payment platform” – WordPress being the versatile blogging software which has always powered Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog (and which now powers a large number of non-blog websites). So the exciting buzzworthy new startup of 2021 turned out to be about – blogging, via email. Blogs are alive and well today, when we call them newsletters.

I very briefly entertained the thought of moving my writing to Substack to be where the cool kids are, but there was no real reason for me to do so. Blogs retain one key advantage over Substack, which is the community that forms around a reasonably moderated comments section; there are interactions here that could not happen in an email distribution service. Moreover, I’ve never expected to get paid for my writing. I started Love of All Wisdom during a period of career transition, so I gave it a .com domain in case there was ever some way of making money from it, but I didn’t expect that then, and I know it’s not going to be the case now. By all accounts, Substack writers do not come remotely close to making a living on their work if they are not as famous as Yglesias or Weiss.

But Substack didn’t just take off because of the money. From a reader’s perspective – aside from the obvious pent-up need to hear dissenting voices! – an advantage of Substack is that its posts get pushed to that other now-hoary technology known as email. Blogs are generally viewed as something that exists on the web, such that you have to go to the blog’s website to read it. There’s an advantage to that view with respect to old posts; many many people have found Love of All Wisdom on the web with Google searches about Asperger’s syndrome and philosophy or the difference between modernity and modernism. But only a real die-hard is likely to remember to actively visit a website every two weeks to find the new posts. Substack gained its success by sending its posts to you.

Luckily, WordPress can do that too! It requires a little technical work – Google killed the FeedBurner tool that I used to do it with, and the replacement tool was buggy for the first few weeks – but WordPress is quite capable of email distribution with the right plugins, and that is the case here. The sidebars on Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog each have an option where you can enter your email address to sign up to receive new posts as they come out. Instantly, a blog becomes a newsletter. (If you prefer; it can also still remain a blog, from which you receive updates by old-fashioned means like Facebook and Twitter.) If you want to get newsletter-style email updates from multiple blogs and manage them in one place, there’s also a site called follow.it that will let you do that.

So I end this post with an advertisement of sorts: if you like the posts on LoAW and/or the IPB and you’re not already getting them in your email, why not go to the sidebar(s) and sign up for them? It turns out blogging is cool again when you receive the posts by email. And if you were already receiving these blogs’ posts by email, well, I guess you’re ahead of the curve.

Cross-posted on Love of All Wisdom.

I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

For me there is a deeper question that underlies any answer to the questions in the previous paragraph. That is: are there any goods that it is worthy for human beings to pursue irrespective of their contributions to the allevation of suffering (and/or the pursuit of truth, correct seeing)? In more classical terms, are there proper purisatthas (puruṣārthas) other than dukkhanirodha and yathābhūtadassana? It is pretty clear to me that the Pali suttas, in general, take the answer to that question to be no. And it is that No answer that underlies both the suttas’ advocacy of monasticism as the highest goal, and their viewing of the good household life as the one described in the Sigālovāda: an imperfect approximation of monasticism. For, the suttas say, it is monasticism that truly allows one to shed the attachments and pleasures that trap one in suffering. Monasticism does not guarantee this goal by any means – as Justin notes, there are plenty of bad monks – but it advances the goal much better than the household life does.

I disagree with the suttas on this approach; I would answer that deeper question Yes. I believe that both familial love and aesthetic pleasure have value in themselves, irrespective of whether they help us reduce suffering. Justin describes a joy that he felt in the “friendships, occasional alcohol, and romance” he had as a youth. I recognize this joy and see it as something that is worthwhile and worth celebrating, not something to be shed. I do admire monks for their single-minded focus on the cultivation of a virtuous mind, and I do think we laypeople have a lot to learn from monks – but not by trying to make our lifestyles closer to theirs, not unless we are going to take the plunge and join them.

Justin says that “the family life has value as part of the path”. I would push on this point: the path to what? And how does family life contribute to it? It seems to me that what Justin is saying here is not the traditional view of the Pali suttas. In the suttas, the magga is a path to the end of suffering, and family life, if anything, interferes with that path. The Sāmaññaphala Sutta tells us: “Household life (gharāvaso) is hindered, a path of dust. Pabbajjā (going forth into ordination) is air. Not easily does one who inhabits a household enter an extremely full, extremely pure, brightly perfect holy life (brahmacariya).” (DN I.62-3) Most people will stay back in that dusty household life – because we’re not good enough and strong enough for the pure and bright life of the renouncer. It seems to me that that is what underlies the Buddha’s advice that Sigāla stay back in the household life.

By contrast, Justin says he does not see his family life as a lesser path. Neither do I. But why not? Justin says “I was and am fairly good at being a partner and now a father.” I have every reason to believe him on this. I would like to think that I am also good at being the former. But neither of these achievements takes away from the Sāmaññaphala’s claim that this path is lesser. As far as that sutta is concerned, the time and mental effort involved in being a partner and father distracts from the really important pursuit of shedding the āsavas and kilesas, the mental hindrances that keep us out of nirvana. If one must take up such a path, then by all means do it well, take care of the partners and children one is trusted to care for. But to engage in such a path is still to be limited in one’s pursuit of true liberation – a limit, again, that the Buddha noted when he named his son Rāhula, “fetter”. The son was a fetter, a tie to the dust of worldly life, an impediment to liberation.

Unlike the Buddha, I do not believe that one should think of children as impediments, and I imagine Justin doesn’t either. But that is a point of our disagreement with him. The classical texts do have their reasons for seeing children that way. Strictly speaking, having children may well increase suffering – whether in a classical sense in which there are now more beings on the wheel of rebirth, or in the modern studies that repeatedly and replicably show people get less happy when they are raising kids. But it seems to me that, properly understood, the value of having children is not because they reduce suffering – if that is the goal, they will disappoint – but rather in another goal entirely, a broader sense of fulfillment that comes from familial love.

Justin refers to “the wide Buddhist path”. I do not think that the path spelled out in the suttas is indeed wide, if “wide” means that it has two lanes, a household and a monastic, that are equally valid to travel on. In the suttas the path is not wide but long: one lives this life virtuously as one can as a weak householder, in the hopes that in the next life one will be strong enough to be a monk.

When I claim familial love and aesthetic pleasure as goods in themselves, Justin is right to question whether this claim “hangs well within a Buddhist moral or philosophical framework”. My view is a departure from the view of the suttas – just like the rejection of rebirth, which I think this departure is closely connected to. Justin is himself (rightly) ready to explicitly abandon significant elements of the suttas’ teaching, notably on gender. When Justin says his family life is not a lesser path, I think that too is a departure from the suttas. But I do think that a framework which acknowledges family life and aesthetic pleasure as intrinsic goods can still remain Buddhist in the most significant senses despite its departure from the suttas (and I think that matters). It is just that, once we depart from the suttas in acknowledging the intrinsic value of familial love, I think we should do the same in acknowledging the intrinsic value of aesthetic pleasure. And that is why I do not find the Sigālovāda Sutta a good guide.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Please see the following announcement of two post-doc fellowships in the Philosophy department at Ashoka University:

Indian Philosophy is one of the areas that the committee is particularly interested in. I apologize that I did not post this earlier, as the deadline is now imminent: Feb 10th. If you would like to apply but cannot quite make this deadline, send me an email and I will ask the search committee if they can slightly extend the deadline in your case:

alex dot watson at ashoka.edu.in