________________
Dr. B.R.Sharma Felicitation Volume (The editors never cared (Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha,
to send proofs, and I Tirupati Series No. 46)
have equally to apoloTirupati 1986
gize for the rather poor quality of the printing. 1
Wezler -.... Patañjalayogaśāstravivarana
173
It is against this background that the passage to be discussed in what follows deserves especial attention.
ON THE VARNA SYSTEM AS CONCEIVED
OF BY THE AUTHOR OF THE PATANJALA-YOGA-SASTRA-VIVARAŅA (Studies in the Patañjalayogaśástravivarana IV)
by Albrecht Wezler, Hamburg
1. The credit for having critically re-examined the old contention that society as such, social facts and problems, etc., did not arouse the interest of classical Indian philosophers, entirely goes to W. Halbfass. Unfortunately, however, his perceptive article "On the Theory of the Caste System in Indian Philosophy" has not yet been translated into English, and its reception must hence be regarded as rather limited. In his introduction Halbfass rightly states that the time has come to collect and interpret without bias all the relevant passages found in philosophical texts, albeit they are found only sporadically. He himself did not, however, aim at a complete inventory of such passages, but starts from the assum. ption that the material selected and discussed by him is nevertheless "representative and authoritative and that it forms "a basis sufficient for the characterization of the principal lines of develop ment and the problems involved":
2. It is found in the Pātañjalayogaśast ravivarana, viz. on the Yogabhâsya on YS 2.28 : yogārgānusthänad asuddhik saye jñana. diptir i vivekakhyateh. The problem of the authorship and consequently of the probable date of the Vivarana can by no means be regarded as settled. This was not only shown by me on an earlier occasion, but emphasized by Halbfass' also who bas recently called attention to additional material which I had failed to notice and which is indeed apt to render the chronological problem still more puzzling. I do not want to enter here again into a discussion of this question, but in passing I should like to make just one remark. Halbfass concludes his "Notes..." by stating : "Hacker's challenging and intriguing hypothesis' that Sankara, the author of the Brahmastrabhāsya, wrote this text as a Yogin and before 'converting' to Advaita Vedanta is just this: a hypothesis, One possibility among others". However, T on my part am not any longer convinced that this can for the time being be regarded even as a serious possibility, and I should think that we are not at all in a position to maintain with Halbfass' that "there is nothing in the form or contents of the Vivarana that would exclude the possibility that it is a work by the author of the Brahmasūtrabhāsya." For, the more I get acquainted with this text, the larger grows the number of quotations of which I notice that they were not yet identified or even recognized as such by the editor, and some of them seem to stem from texts quite conceivably later than Sankara: So long as not all of them have been systematically collected and traced to their original sources, I should, otherwise than Halbfass, prefer to regard the argument "that Kumärila is the latest author explicitly referred to in the Vivarana as extremely weak, especially since I am unable to persuade myself to believe that for solving problems of relative chronology we should concentrate on explicit references only.
Yet inspite of the continuing uncertainty about the date of the Vivarana and inspite of the fact that "basic questions concerning
I do not by any means want to query the theoretical and practical legitimacy of his procedure nor to dispute that he has indeed succeeded in redeeming his promise to an impressive degree. Yet, when going through the 3. chapter of his article which bears the heading "Caste-theoretical Applications of the Doctrine of the three gunas", one cannot, I think, but be rather disappointed at the scarcity of the material Halbfass was able to adduce from Samkhya (and Yogi) sources proper, though the heading itself prepares the reader to reckon rather with passages from texts which do not belong to Samkhya in the sense of the Samkhya school of thought,