Page #1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
________________ JOHANNES BRONKHORST WATER AND OCEAN In an interesting recent article Walter Slaje (2001) has examined the way salt was conceived of in ancient and classical India. He comes to the conclusion that "(salt was conceived of as being ... substantially the same as water, albeit in a particular crystallized state of water, similar to. e.g., ice or hailstones as frozen states of water" (p. 42). In support of this conclusion Slaje presents some textual passages from classical philosophical literature. One of these passages will here be reconsidered. It may not provide the backing it is believed to provide. The passage concerned occurs in the Padarthadharmasangraha of Prasastapada (WI $34-40), the classical presentation of the Vaisesika philosophy. Here, as Slaje observes (p. 35), in treating the elemental substance 'water' Prasastapada gives a fuller account of all the perceivable manifestations (visaya) of water. This account includes "rivers (sarit) and the ocean (samudra)". On the following page Slaje concludes from this that samudra must have been regarded as a particular, objective manifestation of the elemental substance 'water": "although salty tasting, the ocean (samudra) was considered water in its very essence". This is remarkable, he thinks, for elsewhere in the same passage of the Padarthadharmasangraha the only taste allowed for water is 'sweet' (madhura). Slaje believes that "[t]he clue to this problem of sweetness comprising salty taste... might be found in Jaina sources where 'saltiness' has been treated as a variety of sweetness' since canonical times". He also strongly suggests that the very mention of the ocean in the enumeration of perceivable manifestations of water may be due to the different taste which water from the ocean has, viz. salty. In other words, salty water is water in its very essence, and solid salt is a particular crystallised form of water. I do not think that the Padarthadharmasangraha allows of such an interpretation. It overlooks some of the fundamental tenets of Vaisesika ontology. Let me repeat here the main points, which I have more elaborately dealt with elsewhere. All that exists is either substance (dravya), quality (guna), action (karman), universal (samanya/jati), particular (visesa) or inherence (samavaya). Nothing that exists can combine these so-called categories (padartha): nothing can e.g. be both substance and quality, for this would Indo-Iranian Journal 45: 45-49, 2002. 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Page #2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
________________ JOHANNES BRONKHORST WATER AND OCEAN 47 . imply the fault of jatisarkara, 'mixture of universals'. Most of these categories have subdivisions. In the case of substance, for example, there are nine subdivisions, nine kinds of substance; these include the five elements: earth, water, fire, wind, ether. Once again, nothing can be more than one of these at the same time; nothing, e.g., can be both earth and water. These elements again have further subdivisions; in the case of earth these subdivisions are particularly numerous: they cover most of the objects denoted by common nouns, such as trees, pots, etc. etc. Trees in their turn can be divided into different kinds of trees. But however far one descends in this ontological scheme (which looks like a genealogical tree), the prohibition of jatisamkara is valid at every single level. For example, a certain tree cannot be both a Simsapa tree and a Palasa tree, a beech and a fir. This way of interpreting reality raises some obvious questions. Many, perhaps most of the things we are familiar with do combine several categories. The most obvious example is the body, be it human or animal, or indeed the body of a tree. The body consists (from a Vaisesika point of view) of earth and water (plus other substances, such as the digestive fire). How then is a body to be categorised, given that it cannot belong to more than one category? The Vaisesika takes in this respect the following position: the body is earth, whereas water and whatever other substances there may be are not part of the body: they are merely connected with it (through samyoga 'contact', not samavdya 'inherence'). This is equally true of the organs: they are connected with the body though contact. This applies even to the organ of touch. That is to say, normal bodies are earth in essence, but they are in contact with other substances. Because real physical bodies always combine different elements, Prasastapada does not hesitate to speak of bodies of water, fire, and wind. All of them are fortified with earth, which does not however strictly belong to those bodies; it is merely in contact with them. The bodies themselves are, in their very essence, water, fire and wind respec vely. Another example is gold, Gold, Prasastapada tells us, is a form of fire. However, he also tells us that the touch of fire is hot and hot only. Yet the touch of gold is not hot. And gold has other features, too, that do not belong to fire but which do belong to earth, such as taste. How is one to explain this? Prasastapada has his answer ready: such other qualities inhere in the other substance or substances with which fire is here in contact. In his account of creation Prasastapada describes the golden egg from which the universe is created as made from fire atoms together with earth atoms. Once again, gold is fire in its very essence, but it is accompanied by one or more other elements that do not strictly speaking belong to it, but that are in contact with it. Another point has to be emphasised here. In order to find out what entities exist, Vaisesika uses a simple instrument: the words of the Sanskrit language. Indeed, Prasastapada draws sometimes ontological conclusions from the use of certain words. With few exceptions, the nouns of the Sanskrit language provide a good inventory of the substances that exist. Most of these substances are, of course, earth from the point of view of the Vaisesikas: trees, pots, houses, etc. etc. There are far fewer common nouns that denote objects constituted of water, fire and wind. But there are some. In the case of water, there are words like river, lake, pond, and ocean. This, and nothing else, is the reason why Prasastapada enumerates rivers and the ocean as manifestations of water. With the preceding reflections in mind, we can try to apply Vaisesikastyle reasoning to the ocean: where does it fit in the ontological scheme of that school? The first observation to be made is that the ocean exists, because there is a word for it. Once we know it exists, it has to be determined whether it is a substance, a quality, or any of the remaining principal categories. The answer is not problematic: the ocean is a substance. Which substance? Again, there are no serious candidates apart from water. Being water, the taste of the ocean should be sweet (madhura). It is however salty. How is that possible? According to Prasastapada's Padarthadharmasangraha there are six tastes, two among them being 'sweet' (madhura) and 'salty' (lavana)." Most of the substances have no taste at all; water is sweet and nothing else; only earth can have all the six tastes. The conclusion is straightforward the salty taste of the ocean cannot but be explained by the presence of earth that is in contact with the ocean. More precisely: because different manifestations of earth can have different tastes, there must be a form of earth in the ocean (i.e., in contact with the ocean) which is salty. Whether this form of earth is the substance salt or something else that has a salty taste, the Prasastapada does not permit us to know. What we can know is that this admixture of earth does not strictly belong to the ocean, that it is only in contact with it. The salty taste, too, therefore, does not strictly belong to the ocean, just as the cold touch of gold does not really belong to the essence of gold, which is fire. This is, as far as I can see, the correct Vaisesika way of accounting for the saltiness of the ocean. Any other explanation does not do justice to the internal logic of the system. Vaisesika philosophy is often strange, sometimes outrageous, but permeated by the urge to be precise and logically coherent. This does not exclude the possibility that traditional beliefs
Page #3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
________________ * 48 JOHANNES BRONKHORST WATER AND OCEAN - ABBREVIATIONS have occasionally been preserved in it. Yet it would be a mistake to invoke such traditional beliefs in order to explain features of the system without first exploring all systematic possibilities offered by the texts. It may therefore well be true that some, or even many, Indians of ancient and classical India looked upon salt as being substantially the same as water. However, Prasastapada the author of the Padarthadharmasangraha was not one of those. Ny Nyayakandali (of Iridhara), with three subcommentaries, ed. J.S. Jetly and Vasant G. Parikh, Vadodara: Oriental Institute, 1991 Vy Vyomavati of Vyomasivacarya, ed. Gaurinath Sastri (2 vols.), Varanasi: Sampurnananda-samskrta-vi svavidyalaya, 1983-1984 WI Word Index to the Prasastapadabhasya: A complete word index to the printed editions of the Prasastapadabhasya, by Johannes Bronkhorst and Yves Ramseier, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994 NOTES . Section de langues et civilisations orientales Universite de Lausanne BFSH 2 CH-1015 Lausanne I WI 840: visayas tu saritsamudrahimakarakadi'. 2 WI 836: suklamadhurasita eva ruparasasparsa'. 3 See Bronkhorst 1992, 1999: 24ff. 4 WI $192: tvagindriyasarirayo' ... yutesv asrayesu samavayo 'stiti parasparena samyoga' siddha'. 5 See for the water body WI $38: sariram ayonijam eva varunaloke parthivavayavopastambhac copabhogasamartham; for the fire-body WI $45: sariram ayonijam evadityaloke parthivavayavopastambhac copabhogasamartham; for the wind-body WI $52: ayonijam cva sariram marutam loke parthivavayavopastambhac copabhogasamartham. 6 WI $47: akarajam (teja') suvarnadi. 7 WI $43: usna eva sparsah. 8 WI $47: tatra samyuktasamavayad rasadyupalabdhir iti. The Vyomavati (Vy I p. 87 1. 8) explains: samyuktam suvarnadau parthivam dravyam, tatra samaveta rasadaya upalabhyante. The Nyayakandali (Ny p. 117 1.9-118 1.2) goes further: katham tarhi gandharasayor anusnasitasparsasya ca gurutvasya copalabdhir ata aha: tatreti / bhoginam adsstavacena bhuyasam parthivavayavanam upastambhadanudbhutarupasparsam pindibhavayogyam suvarnadikam arabhyate, tatra parthivadravyasamaveta ime rasadayo gshyante! 9 WI 859: taijasebhyo 'nubhyah parthivaparamanusahitebhyo mahad andam arabhyate. 10 See the references given in note 3, above. 11 WI $119: raso ... madhuramlalavanatiktakadukasayabhedabhinnah. 12 WI 829: rasah sadvidho madhuradih. REFERENCES Bronkhorst, J.: 1992, Quelques axiomes du Vaisesika, Les Cahiers de Philosophie 14 ("L'orient de la pensee: philosophies en Inde"), 95-110. Bronkhorst, J.: 1999, Langage et realite: sur un episode de la pensee indienne (Turnhout: Brepols) (Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Religieuses, 105.) Slaje, W.: 2001, Water and salt (1): Yajnavalkya's saindhava drstanta (BAU LI 4,12), Indo Iranian Journal 44, 25-57.