Re: [INDOLOGY] Yama/niyama in PÄ Å›upata and Yoga

Thu Apr 28 10:05:06 UTC 2016

Svetasvataropanishad is definitely one of the early Upanishads. May be 
the BhagavadgItA was inspired by this Upanishad. Comparison of the 
textual style of the Svetasvataropanishad and the BhagavadgItA will make 
it clearer.

Is it possible to show the popularity and textual references of the 
BhagavadgItA in other literatures and commentaries before Samkara ?
Is it possible to hold that it was Samkara who had popularised and 
propagated the Bhagavadgita by stating that it is the essence of all the 
Vedanta as he mentions quite a number of times in his commentary ? For, 
one rarely knows of any textual reference to the Bhagavadgita in the 
period earlier to Samkara......

Of course, Kalidaqsa is later than the Svetasvataropanishad. As I have 
been saying in the earlier posts, KAlidAsa and Patanjali definitely 
belong to a very early period.

Unless one accepts the view that both the Yogasutra and the Bhashya are 
a unified text composed by a single person (which does not appear to be 
strongly supported by the tradition), one cannot admit "/Patañjali 
quoted Viṣṇupurāṇa 6.6.2 in order to support his exposition of 
Mantrameditation leading to an awareness of //īśvara//in PYŚ 1.28. //"/

It is also to be noted that Saivasiddhanta authors such as Sadyojyoti 
(700-800 CE), and great commentators such as Narayanakantha, Ramakantha, 
Aghorasiva (spanning from 9-12 centuries CE) do refer only to the 
Yogasutra-s as the work of Patanjali and not the Bhashya
while referring to and refuting some of the doctrines the Patanjala Yoga 
system.

Ganesan

On 28-04-2016 13:22, Philipp Maas wrote:
>
> Vācaspatimiśra I lived later than the eighth century. He can be dated 
> to around 950 CE (see Diwakar Acharya, /Vācaspatimiśra/’/s 
> Tattvasamīkṣā//,the Earliest Commentary on Maṇḍanamiśra’s 
> Brahmasiddhi, /Critically Edited with an Introduction and Critical 
> Notes, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006 (Nepal Research Centre Publications 
> 25), p. xxviii 
> <https://books.google.at/books?id=IlswAAAAYAAJ&dq=V%C4%81caspatimi%C5%9Bra%E2%80%99s+Tattvasam%C4%ABk%E1%B9%A3%C4%81%2C+the+Earliest+Commentary+on+Ma%E1%B9%87%E1%B8%8Danami%C5%9Bra%E2%80%99s+Brahmasiddhi&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=950>).
>
> The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad is by no means one of the earliest 
> Upaniṣads. Thomas Oberlies dated it to a period between the beginning 
> of the common era and 200 CE, and, in any case, after the 
> Bhagavadgītā. (Oberlies, Thomas. “Die Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad: 
> Einleitung – Edition und Übersetzung von Adhyāya I.” /Wiener 
> Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens /39 (1995): 61‒102, p.66‒67. See 
> also Cohen, Signe. /Text and authority in the older Upaniṣads/. 
> Leiden, 
> <https://books.google.at/books?id=dUKwCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA293&dq=Text+and+authority&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false>Boston: 
> Brill, 2008 (Brill’s Indological Library 30 
> <https://books.google.at/books?id=dUKwCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA293&dq=Text+and+authority&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false>, 
> p. 213–246.)
>
> Kālidāsa, who can be approximately dated to 400-450 CE according to 
> Ingalls (see Ingalls,Daniel H. H. “Kālidāsa and the Attitudes of the 
> Golden Age”. Journal of theAmerican Oriental Society 96.1 (1976): 
> 15–26 
> <http://www.jstor.org/stable/599886?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents>, p. 
> 15, n. 1), is clearly later than the Bhagavadgītā and the Śvetāśvatara 
> Upaniṣad. He is also slightly later than the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, i.e. 
> the Yoga Sutra together with the so-called Yogabhāṣya which can be 
> dated to the end of the fifth c. (see Maas, Philipp André. 
> /Samādhipāda. Das erste Kapitel des Pātañjalayogaśāstra zum ersten Mal 
> kritisch ediert, = The First Chapter of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra for 
> the First Time Critically Edited./ Aachen: Shaker, 2006. (Studia 
> Indologica Universitatis Halensis Geisteskultur Indiens. Texte und 
> Studien 9), p. xix. For a general survey of scholarship on yoga 
> philosophy and for arguments concerning the unitary nature of the 
> /Pātañjalayogaśāstra/, you may find also my article “A Concise 
> Historiographyof Classical Yoga Philosophy”. Periodization and 
> Historiography of IndianPhilosophy. Eli Franco (ed.). Vienna: Institut 
> für Südasien-, Tibet- undBuddhismuskunde, 2013. (Publications of the 
> de Nobili Research Library 37) 53–90 
> <https://www.academia.edu/3520571/A_Concise_Historiography_of_Classical_Yoga_Philosophy> 
> relavant.
>
> The question of the religious orientation of Patañjali is difficult to 
> answer. It appears to me that Patañjali consciously created a work on 
> spiritual liberation in a Brahmanical religious setting that avoided 
> any obvious sectarian commitment in order to make his work widely 
> acceptable. However, the reference to Kapila as the first teacher of 
> yoga in PYŚ 1.25 (to which Eliot Stern referred in his mail to the 
> present discussion) may actually indicate that Patañjali had a 
> Vaiṣṇava background. An additional indication for the same may be the 
> fact that Patañjali quoted Viṣṇupurāṇa 6.6.2 in order to support his 
> exposition of Mantrameditation leading to an awareness of /īśvara/ in 
> PYŚ 1.28.
>
>
> Best,
>
>
> Philipp
>
>
>
>
> 2016-04-28 7:45 GMT+02:00 Dr. T. Ganesan <ganesan at ifpindia.org 
> <mailto:ganesan at ifpindia.org>>:
>
>
>     Samkara, Vachaspatimisra, etc. all belong to 8th century; whereas
>     my point is Patanjali, Kalidasa are all much earlier to them. As
>     mentioned in the earlier post, beginning from Svetasvataropanishad
>     (which is indisputably one of the earliest Upanishad-s),
>     Kaivalyopanishad, Atharvasikhaa, Atharvasiras, (where the words
>     ISAna, ISa are also used) and in the Amarakosa, also one of the
>     earliest Kosa-s, Ishvara denotes only Siva.
>
>     Note the Amarakosa passage:
>
>             śambhur_īśaḥ_ paśupatiḥ śivaḥ śūlī mahēśvaraḥ .
>
>     _īśvaraḥ _śarva _īśānaḥ_ śaṃkaraścandraśēkharaḥ.
>
>
>
>     The period of BhagavadgItA as we have it now, cannot be so earlier
>     or contemporaneous with Patanjali or Kalidasa. And, definitely BG
>     has been inspired by the Svetasvataropanishad for its stress on
>     Bhakti.
>
>     Samkara appears to be mostly leaning towards VishNubhakti; it is
>     is very much evident in many of his interpretations and comments
>     in the BhagavadgiitA: at BG II.51, VI.31,Samkara states the
>     liberated state as “the supreme state of Vishnu” (padam paramam
>     vishnoH); in BG XIII.18, he clearly identifies paramAtmA with
>     VAsudeva.
>
>
>     Ganesan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     On 28-04-2016 05:40, Elliot Stern wrote:
>>     Vācaspatimiśra, generally understood to favor Śiva, acknowledges
>>     that adherents of the Pātañjalayogaśāstram consider Viṣṇu to be
>>     their īśvara. He says, in concluding his comment
>>     on ādividvānnirmāṇacittamadhiṣṭhāya
>>     kāruṇyādbhagavānparamarṣirāsurāya jijñāsamānāya tantraṃ provāca
>>     (yogabhāṣyam to yogasūtram 1.25):
>>
>>      sa eveśvara ādividvānkapilo viṣṇurna<:> svayambhūriti bhāvaḥ~|
>>     svāyambhuvānāṃ tvīśvara iti bhāvaḥ~|
>>
>>     James Haughton Woods translates this as: [The reply would be
>>     that] this same Īśvara, the First Knower, the Self-existent
>>     Vishnu [is] Kapila. "But [He is] the Īśvara of those descended
>>     from the Self-existent." This is the point.
>>     Note that Vācaspati frequently refers to adherents of the
>>     Pātañjalayogaśāstram as svāyambhuvaḥ (for example, in nyāyakaṇikā).
>>
>>     Elliot M. Stern
>>     552 South 48th Street
>>     Philadelphia, PA 19143-2029
>>     United States of America
>>     telephone: 215-747-6204
>>     mobile: 267-240-8418
>>     emstern at verizon.net <mailto:emstern at verizon.net>
>>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20160428/ac506711/attachment.htm>