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THE MEANING OF DHARMA AND THE RELATIONSHIP OFTHE TWO MIMAM: SAS: APPAYYA DIKS: ITAS DISCOURSE

ON THE REFUTATION OF A UNIFIED KNOWLEDGESYSTEM OF P URVAMIMAM: SA AND UTTARAMIMAM: SA

Among Sanskrit intellectuals active in the last centuries prior to theconsolidation of colonialism and the introduction into South Asia ofradically different knowledge systems, the most remarkable insouthern India, for the breadth of his learning and his strikinginnovation in multiple disciplines, was Appayya Diks: ita.

1 His literaryactivity fell in the last half of the 16th century, possibly extending intothe early 17th. But astonishingly little hard information about his lifeis available, despite the fact that scores of works attributed to him areextant.2 What is known more or less for certain can fit on a singleprinted page (and that page has recently been written, in the intro-duction to a new edition and translation of one of Appayyas lin-guistic treatises).3 Both the breadth of his learning and the quality ofhis innovation are fully on display in two works, one truly grand, theother more modest, that deserve to be far better known than they are.The first is the Caturmatasarasam: graha, Compendium of EssentialTenets of the Four Schools, a monumental review of the four majorVedanta systems of Appayyas time, and, so far as I am aware, theonly such systematic account ever produced in the premodern period(it is the Humvee to the Kia of Madhavas doxographical epitomes inthe Sarvadarsanasam: graha). These remarkable verse compositions(except in the case of the second, which is in prose) set out inaccordance with the topics of the Brahmasutra (BS) text the majortenets of Dvaita (in the Nyayamuktavali), Visis: t:advaita (Nayamayukhamalika), Saivadvaita (Nayaman: imala), and Advaita (Nay-amanjari), in what is probably an evaluative sequence.4 The second isthe work under consideration here, the Purvottar-amimam: savadanaks:atramala, The Milky Way of Discourses onMimam: sa and Vedanta. We might better capture the spirit if not theletter of the title by translating it Collected Essays in the Prior andPosterior Analytics, or perhaps instead, with a nod toGadamer ratherthan Aristotle, . . . in Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics.

Journal of Indian Philosophy 32: 769811, 2004. 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Essays, however, I mean quite seriously: the genre here is a new one,presenting a series of independent studies (a set of twenty-seven) ofparticular and often very abstruse topics in the two systems.5

The relationship between Purvammam: sa and Uttarammam: saflagged in Appayyas title is the object of a long-standing debate inmany Vedanta schools.6 Both knowledge systems ground themselveson the authority of the Veda, and employ many of the same exegeticalprinciples to make sense of the Vedic textual corpus. Yet theirsemantics and pragmatics, so to speak what they understood thetexts to mean and how they proceeded to act upon that under-standing appeared to many traditional thinkers to be radicallyincommensurable, and finding a way to reconcile them was a seriouschallenge. Indeed, their problematic relationship is embodied in thevery nomenclature that links them, in the differentiation itself of aposterior from a prior darsana, like that of a new from anold testament. Viewed more historically, the nomenclature seemslikely to have emerged out of the dispute that hinges on this rela-tionship and that forms the central problem of Appayyas essaytranslated here.

Whatever may be the earlier history of the terminology (and I amunaware that it has ever been clearly traced), we find it distinctly ifstill inchoately articulated in the text that forms the purvapaks:a ofAppayyas account, namely the Sribhas:ya of Ramanuja (1112thcentury). Ramanujas summary of the purpose of the first sutra of theBS (the jij~nasasutra) runs as follows: Since the fruit of works knownthrough the prior part of the Mmam: sa (mimam: sapurvabhaga) islimited and non-permanent, and since the fruit of the knowledge ofbrahma which knowledge is to be reached through the latter part(uparitanabhaga) of the Mmam: sa is unlimited and permanent; forthis reason brahma is to be known, after the knowledge of workshas previously taken place.7 It may not be without some furthersignificance to determining this terminological history that in thesummary contained in Bodhayanas vr: tti (early centuries C.E.?)reproduced by Ramanuja there is no mention of prior and latter.But that does not mean that the problem of the relationship of thetwo knowledge systems was not already on the table. Indeed, whatthe Vr: ttikara insists on is precisely the unity (aikasastrya), asRamanuja puts it: He [Bodhayana] will declare later on This sari-raka-doctrine is integrated (sam: hitam)

8 with Jaiminis doctrine so asto make up 16 adhyayas that is, the Treatise of Twelve Chapters,or the Mmam: sasutras (MS) of Jaimini, and the Treatise of Four

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Chapters, or the BS of Vyasa Badarayan: a, should be taken togetheras constituting a single work of Sixteen Chapters; this proves the twoto constitute one body of doctrine.9

Whereas Ramanuja provides a range of reasons in his commentaryon BS 1.1.1 why the latter part of Mmam: sa requires the earlier, henowhere seems to base this on the notion that the definition andnature of dharma, the subject of the major thesis (pratij~na) of thePurvammam: sa (Now, then, the inquiry into dharma, athato dhar-majij~nasa), comprise not only its declared topic, karma, but alsobrahma, whose definition and nature form the subject of the majorthesis of the Uttarammam: sa (Now, then, the inquiry into brahma,athato brahmajij~nasa). Arguing out this theorem appears to have beenthe contribution of Ramanujas great commentator of the early 14thcentury, Sudarsanasuri in his Srutaprakasika. It is that commentatorwhom Appayya has squarely in his sights when defining the limits ofthe term dharma and critiquing the doctrine of the unified knowledgesystems.10 There can be no doubt whatever about Appayyas con-clusion itself: Therefore, given that contradiction between the twosystems with respect to primary meanings and end-results everrears its head, even the rumor that they form a single knowledgesystem can gain no standing in the thoughts of the learned (sam: -grahasloka 13 infra). What is unclear, to me at least, is whether thisshould be taken as representing Appayyas personal view, given thecomplexities that remain to be disentangled. Not least of these is thefact that Srikan: t:ha, the founder of the Saivadvaita Vedanta system towhich Appayya apparently subscribed, declares explicitly We do nothold that the two systems, the analysis of dharma and the analysis ofbrahma, are completely different; on the contrary, we hold that theyform a single knowledge system.11 One thing beyond dispute,however, is that Appayyas rejection of the theory should not takenas intended to undermine the validity of Vedanta itself. As he declaresin his commentary on Srikan: t:hasivacaryas text, what refuting theunity of the two systems is meant in fact to provide is scope for thecommencement of the BS.12

Whatever his own views may have been on the points of inter-section and separation in the two knowledge systems, Appayyaswork is a valuable index of Purvammam: sa thinking on the problemof the scope of dharma, the systems very keyword. Indeed, the waythe essay frames the terms meaning is crucial. Here and therethroughout the history of Mmam: sa an anxiety is almost palpableconcerning the potential expansion of dharmas semantic field, about

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its slippage or spread or appropriation. The present collectionof essays is eloquent testimony to how very real the possibility of thisextension was an extension that, in the view of Mmam: sa, waswholly unwarranted. To one of the preeminent thinkers of the early-modern period in Indian intellectual history, dharma meant first andforemost what it meant for the Mimam: sa system from the beginning:ritual action based on transcendentally authoritative texts, the Veda.And it is hard not to see his Vadanaks:atramala as yet another attemptin the long history of attempts by Mmam: sa to maintain itsmonopoly over this primeval definition against actual historicalencroachments.

Rather than dismissing the development as encroachment, how-ever, we do better to link this to what the Egyptologist Jan Assmannhas called subversive inversion, a process of transvaluation ofsemantic and conceptual goods across socio-religious boundariesfound in many times and places. It is richly illustrated in Indianhistory, especially by Buddhists in their appropriation of vaidikacategories and concepts preeminent among them dharma itself.13

The most remarkable attempt in Sanskrit intellectual history to arrestthis process of subversion by delimiting in the strictest possible termswhat does and does not count as dharma and to defend the propo-sition that its sole source is the Veda is offered by Kumarila in hisTantravarttika on MS 1.3. There he observes that, like spoiled chil-dren who hate their parents, the Buddhists refuse, out of shame andresentment at any competing foundational claim, to acknowledgethat every metaphysical truth in their system anything concerningdharma must be derived from the Veda.14

We do not have to go outside the vaidika world, broadly viewed, tofind evidence of this process of extension as well as of Mmam: saangst. A well-known example is in fact the term veda itself, whichforms the textual reference point of the system. Despite Mmam: sasconstantly reiterated restrictions on the category (the vidhi, ar-thavada, mantra, and namadheya of the R: k, Yajus, and Samasam: hitas), Veda too was a category ever at risk of illegitimateexpansion. Think only of Jayant