Dear Jan,

Your first point is of much interest to me: "1. Already in Vedic times the name/concept índra was meant to be open to an adhyātman interpretation which is largely neglected in modern accounts although it was lexicalized in some derivations and by grammarians understood in that way." I do not at present have access to this conference report of yours. Could you briefly summarize, if possible, the adhyātman interpretation of indra? Thanks.

In modern times there was an attempted resuscitation of the adhyātman interpretation of the Vedas by Vasudeva S. Agrawala, who wrote in English, and his teacher Madhusudana Ojha, who wrote in Sanskrit (in verse, too hard for me to understand). Agrawala regarded the adhyātman as one of the ancient schools of Vedic interpretation that Yāska referred to in his Nirukta, but that had long ago fallen into oblivion. However, I did not notice any essay by Agrawala specifically on indra.

Best regards,

David Reigle

Colorado, U.S.A.

On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Jan E.M. Houben <jemhouben@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear List members, 

Since conferences at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes combine teaching with original research, EPHE conference reports may contain contributions of interest to those working in the respective fields. 

Three points may be singled out from my conference reports over 2011-12, 2012-13, 2013-14 (http://ashp.revues.org/1748).

1. Already in Vedic times the name/concept índra was meant to be open to an adhyātman interpretation which is largely neglected in modern accounts although it was lexicalized in some derivations and by grammarians understood in that way.

2. Pānini's Astādhyāyī, understood as a reconstitutive grammar (rather than as a "wildly generative" grammar), shows a "triple dichotomy" structure; the first dichotomy is the one into:

(A) the first part (chapters 1-5), which provides elementary conceptual tools and (through the gaṇas: ALL) linguistic elements needed for PARSING a preliminary Vedic or current statement (which may show some variation, expected to be mostly within the range of Vedic and then current Sanskrit-Prakrit usage)

(B) and the second part (chapters 6-8), which gives the rules for the prakriya "progressive development" of the form, including its accentuation (this includes the remaining gaṇas concerning mostly accentuation, cerebralisation, lengthening, vrddhi), as finally used in the (verified or perfected, samskrta) language utterance.

3. Both the unduly neglected shorter Vrtti (I propose to call it laghuvrtti) and the longer vrtti (brhatī) give information on the teachings of Bhartrhari author of the Vakyapadiya, but neither the one nor the other provides a secure access to his statements:

only the karikas, i.a. because of their tight inner structure involving regularities of syntax, metrics and sense,  have a reasonable chance to have reliably traversed the centuries and the transfer from mss to mss, although even here, as is well known, we find a relatively small number of textual problems.

Since not everyone may easily read French, I have introduced an innovation in the report by summarizing, for each year, some original point in the form of one or two sanskrit verses.

This may contribute to demonstrate the wide expressive function not limited to any specific conviction or worldview which Sanskrit has (and which it has fulfilled over the centuries), next to its well known archival function which has been (passionately but still insufficiently) explored in two centuries of indology.

Jan Houben

      

Jan E.M. HOUBEN

Directeur d’Études

Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite

École Pratique des Hautes Études

Sciences historiques et philologiques 

54, rue Saint-Jacques

CS 20525 – 75005 Paris

johannes.houben@ephe.sorbonne.fr

https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben

www.ephe.fr

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