The New Attitude

This chapter features Vijayīndratīrtha, the grand-pupil of Vyāsatīrtha, author of Conquest of the Closing (Upasaṃhāravijaya), which attacks Appayya Dīkṣita’s monograph. However, he and his nemesis had much more in common than either was prepared to acknowledge. Appayya Dīkṣita had pioneered the technique of inverting any principle that prioritizes the closing by showing that it cuts both ways and could be used to support the power of the opening. Vijayīndratīrtha adopts this technique and shows that Appayya Dīkṣita’s arguments can work against him in the same way. He thereby effectively defuses Appayya Dīkṣita’s arguments for the power of the opening, without decisively confirming the counterposition. This method leaves him, possibly by design, with a strong debater’s argument against his opponent but with a weak and possibly insincere defense of his own position. This mode of argumentation gives Vijayīndratīrtha’s work a distinctly flippant tone, rarely seen in earlier Sanskrit scholastic thought.

The New Hermeneutics

This chapter explores the response to Vyāsatīrtha by Appayya Dīkṣita, one of India’s most influential intellectuals in the sixteenth century. In his Power of the Opening (Upakramaparākrama), Appayya Dīkṣita responds to Vyāsatīrtha’s case law argument by showing that each case Vyāsatīrtha presents as decided by the power of the closing is really decided by some other factor. He then proceeds to develop a new cognitive model of interpretation based on a set of hermeneutic (and sometimes psychological) needs, in which sequence plays hardly any part. While ostensibly defending the traditional position of Mīmāṃsā, Appayya Dīkṣita can be seen as undermining it, rendering the whole question of sequence moot. He also brings the debate back home to Vedānta interpretive cases. In doing so, he constructs for the first time a general defense of the entire body of existing Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā, leaving only the Dualists out in the cold.

A Microhistory of a South Indian Monastery: The Hooli Bṛhanmaṭha and the History of Sanskritic Vīraśaivism

This article explores neglected currents in Vīraśaiva intellectual history by way of narrating an institutional microhistory of a single monastic lineage, situated in the village of Hooli in northern Karnataka. The lineage of what is today known as the Hooli Bṛhanmaṭha exemplifies Vīraśaivism’s contribution to Sanskritic thought particularly through its close connection with the emergence of Śivādvaita as a philosophical school, best known for its expression in the writings of the sixteenth-century polymath Appayya Dīkṣita. As attested in understudied works of Sanskrit and Kannada, moreover, pontiffs of the Hooli lineage from the sixteenth century onward were actively involved in the early systematization of what is now the Pañcācārya Vīraśaiva community, a project that drew no hard and fast boundaries between Sanskrit and the vernacular, or śāstric philosophy and devotion.

Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara’s Advaita Vedānta

The Sanskrit author, Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, was active in the seventeenth century. His idiosyncratic works are representative of the lively intellectual scene in Benares in India’s early modern moment, the later era of the Great Mughals. In his writings, Nīlakaṇṭha sought to define an intellectually defensible boundary for the Vedic nondualist philosophy of Advaita Vedānta. His philosophical works are notable for their focus on other nondualist thinkers of the recent past, particularly the south Indian polymath, Appayya Dīkṣita. Nīlakaṇṭha’s philosophical efforts reveal the contentious theological and social context, in which philosophical and exetical arguments about the soul’s relationship to God and its final destiny were central.

Blaming the messenger: a controversy in late Sanskrit poetics and its implications

The last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.