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Reading the Past: Texts and History
to designate something that is not yet there. Most, if not all, thinkers belonging to the era characterized by the second episteme? draw very different conclusions from very similar statements: conclusions not about the use of words but about the nature of the world. The reason is that those later thinkers all shared a presupposition which clearly was not yet part of Patanjali's intellectual baggage.
The shared presupposition which came to steer the subsequent development of Indian philosophy is the correspondence principle. Those who, explicitly or implicitly, accept the correspondence principle accept that there is a close relationship between statements and the situations described by those statements, or more precisely: between the words of the statement and the things that make up the situation described. A possible example is the statement "John reads a book," it describes a situation where there is John, a book, and the activity of reading. A similar analysis is possible in the case of numerous other statements.
Severe problems arise in the case of statements that describe the production of something, or its coming into being. The statement "the weaver weaves a cloth" can illustrate this. It describes a situation in which there is a weaver, the activity of weaving, but no cloth. Patanjali the grammarian (and his weaver) had already realized this, but had not been particularly puzzled by it because they did not yet accept, implicitly or explicitly, the correspondence principle. They had not yet fallen victim to the second episteme, which characterizes the next era.
It is difficult to understand how and why this major conceptual change had to take place, some time after Patañjali. For him and no doubt for most of his contemporaries, a simple statement like "the weaver weaves a cloth" was not disturbing in any manner, and might at best tell us something about the way how in actual practice words are used. This same simple statement, on the other hand, confronted all thinkers of the succeeding era with profound ontological questions of the kind: where is the cloth? All of them were convinced that the word "cloth" had to refer to something present in the situation described. Since common sense sees no cloth here, many were ready to discard common sense and replace it with a vision of reality in which there is something in the situation described corresponding to the word "cloth."
Nāgārjuna
The first episteme appears to have entered Indian intellectual history through Buddhist thinkers; the same may be true of the second one. It is possible, though not certain, that Nagarjuna was among the first to draw attention to the internal contradictions marring commonsense statements of the kind "the weaver weaves a cloth" or "the cloth comes into being." Indeed, contradictions do not just mar such commonsense statements, they also mar many statements describing reality as conceived of by the Buddhist Abhidharma specialists, among them the Sarvästivädins. The statement "the cloth comes into being" is problematic because there is no cloth in the situation described (if there were, it would not need to come into being); the same difficulty attaches to
7 On this episteme in general, see Bronkhorst 19996.
8 This, of course, is an argument against assigning too recent a date to the Mahabharya, see note 5 above.
Bronkhorst: Systematic Philosophy between the Empires
statements describing that a dharma comes into being. Nägarjuna concludes that in reality nothing exists. This position is known by the name sunyavāda.
One verse from the Malamadhyamakakärikä will here be cited because it clearly illustrates Nagarjuna's procedure:9
If any unproduced entity is found anywhere it could be produced. Since that entity does not exist, what is produced?
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What, indeed, is produced? Nägarjuna's answer is: nothing, for nothing really exists,10
Samkhya
Denying that anything exists is not the only possible way of dealing with the problem. Another solution would be to maintain that, contrary to appearances, the cloth is present in the situation described by "the weaver weaves a cloth." It could be held to be present in the thread from which the cloth is being woven. This is the position that is known by the name satkāryavāda, and which systematic Samkhya chose in order to deal with the problem.
In an attempt to make this counter-intuitive position plausible, Samkhya henceforth emphasizes the continuity of the material cause that remains present before, during, and after the production of a particular object: the thread precedes the cloth, clay precedes the pot, gold precedes the ornaments made of it. However, this emphasis on the continuously existing material cause is difficult to reconcile with the early notion that substances are mere collections of qualities. This may be the reason why this earlier notion was abandoned and is no longer present in the surviving texts of philosophical Samkhya. In other words, under the influence of the second episteme Samkhya abandoned the few links it had had with the first episteme.
Sarvāstivāda
The Sarvästivada Buddhists were better equipped than most to deal with the problems connected with the production of things. As a matter of fact, they already had a solution before the problem made its appearance. We have seen that this school of thought had introduced the notion that the past and future exist in order to solve the problem connected with the perception of one's own mental states. This same notion could now solve the new problem. Since the future cloth exists, each of the terms in the sentence "the weaver weaves a cloth" denotes an existing thing. (Strictly speaking all this must of course be translated into terms of the dharma theory, for dharmas are the only things that really exist.) The sarvästivada, though not created in order to solve the difficulties connected with the second episteme, provided a solution which in essence coincides with that provided by the satkäryavāda.
9 MadhK(deJ) 7.17: yadi kaścid anutpanno bhavaḥ samvidyate kvacit I utpadyeta sa kim tasmin bhave utpadyate 'sati II.
10 Bronkhorst 1997. Walser (2002) gives a long and detailed argument in support of a date around 200 CE for Nagarjuna.
