________________
Bronkhorst: Systematic Philosophy between the Empires
301
300
Reading the Past: Texts and History
Ajātivāda There is a third way to make sense of the statement the weaver weave
statement the weaver weaves a cloth" Nagarjuna had concluded that no cloth exists. The satkāryavddins maintained that no cloth can be produced because it is already there. The third solution would be to hold that no production can take place. This is the ajrivdda. Gaudapada's A gamaśāstra, a text claimed by later Advaita Vedānta as its own, but also in the Moksopāya, which was to become the kernel of the later Yogavasiştha (Bronkhorst 2001b).
have a limited life span; the universal that inheres in all of them is eternal: it has no beginning and no end. That is to say, this universal is there at the time at which the cloth is produced. Nyaya and Vaiścșika therefore accepted that words do not only refer to their corresponding individuals but to the related universals as well. This allowed them to solve the problem connected with the second "episteme" without straying too far from common sense.
Vaišeşika The two schools of Nyaya and Vaiseșika become, toward the end of our period, the most important representatives of a position known as asakaryawda, which is the opposite of sarkaryavāda. However, textual archeology reveals that, before reaching this point, Vaiseșika underwent a development during which its position was close to the satkāryavāda. Exploiting the possibility offered by the system to the extent that something may be existent without possessing existence, Vaisesika could maintain that something could exist while being produced.
Apohavāda A word must here be said about a development that took place after the end of our period. It must be mentioned because it is, if not the logical consequence of what happened before, the solution found to a problem that had occupied Buddhist thinkers for a long time. Buddhist thinkers were in no position to follow the example of Nyaya and Vaibesika. Their ontology had no place for such things as universals. However, the sixth-century thinker Dignage-whom we know had been preoccupied with the problem of production--found an elegant solution, based on his analysis of the process of referring. He introduced the apohavāda, which implies that words do not directly denote, but exclude. The technical details of this solution cannot be dealt with here, but the consequence was clear since referring is not based on a one to one relation between words and things, the correspondence principle cannot hold either. There does not have to be a cloth in the situation described by the statement the weaver weaves a cloth," because referring does not work like that (Bronkhorst 1999c).
Jainism Jaina canonical and postcanonical sources show that the attraction of a variant of sarkaryawdda was great here, too. However, Jainism gave this solution a special twist of its own. Jinabhadra's position, for example, finds expression in the following words: "a pot is being produced having been produced in the form of clay etc., because it is made of that. That same (pot) is being produced not having been produced concerning its particular shape, because that was not there before." This way of speaking is, of course, typical of the so-called anekantavdda that characterizes Jaina classical thought. What is more, the earliest canonical passages expressive of the anekantavdda all occur in a context dealing with the difficulty of production. In other words, anekantavāda appears to be the way in which Jainism responded and gave expression to the second "episteme" (Bronkhorst forthcoming-a).
Asatkāryavāda All the thinkers considered so far were willing to draw drastic and often counterintuitive conclusions from the perceived difficulties linked to statements describing the production of things. The Nyāya school of thought-soon to be followed by Vaibesika was not willing to do so. These thinkers rightly saw that the fundamental problem was related to the problem of referring. In the weaver weaves a cloth," the word "cloth" presumably had to refer to something that is present in the situation described. As long as we assume that the word "cloth" has to refer to the individual cloth that is being produced, there are difficulties. However, do words only refer to individual things?
The ontology scoepted by Nyaya and Vaišeşika allowed of another solution. In this ontology there are not only individual things but also universals. Beside countless individual cloths there is the universal that inheres in all of them. Individual cloths
Bharthari Bharthari follows Patanjali in matters grammatical. But where Patanjali saw no fundamental difficulties in statement like the weaver weaves a cloth," Bharthari did. He offers no fewer than four different solutions, some of which coincide with the ones already discussed. New is his suggestion that the objects referred to may have metaphorical, rather than real existence. Equally interesting is his proposal to attribute mental existence to those objects.
The Persistence of the First Episteme It will be clear from the preceding sections that the first and the second episteme do not behave like "real" epistemes as thought of by Foucault. The second episteme does not fully replace the first one in all cases: a number of thinkers held on to features of the first episteme even while looking for solutions for the problems posed by the second onc. Most Buddhist Abhidharma schools as well as Brahmanical Vaiseșika fall into this category. These schools remain thoroughly atomistic in character and stick to the earlier understanding of causality. This last feature confronted them with major difficulties.
Recall that in causality as conceived of in the first episteme each succeeding moment is determined by the immediately preceding one. This conception is not problematic in itself, but makes it difficult to visualize by what mechanism karmic retribution takes place. In order for karmic retribution to function, causal mechanisms must extend over long time spans: a present causal situation must determine right
