A student asked me how to do a good Sanskrit philosophy article.
—Let us take for granted the rules for a good (generic) philosophy article, e.g. don’t start with ‘Since the beginning of time, humans doubted about x, and I just found a solution for it’.
—Some people use Sanskrit resources to solve a question being debated in contemporary debates (e.g., Kumārila in favour of epistemological externalism). (I tend to disagree with this approach, but it might have some limited use in making Analytic-philosophers interested).
—Others use Sanskrit texts to understand a debate that is relevant for Sanskrit authors only and do no additional effort to present it. (I tend to disagree, because it kills the general interest, but see the last point below).
—Still others use Sanskrit texts to understand a Sanskrit philosophical debate and (try to) show to the contemporary public that is rigorous and (possibly) exciting, perhaps exactly because no one in Euro-American philosophy ever thought about it (e.g., how to make sense of rebirth as a plant).
—Does this mean that there is no good use of Euro-American philosophical categories? Sure there is! We often are blind to possible hypotheses because they are not within our conceptual space. Thus, forcing ourselves to think about IIT or Spinoza is extremely valuable, as it may open our eyes with regard to unseen ways to understand Maṇḍana etc.
—A separate point: In the case of contemporary Euro-American philosophy, I would discourage writing articles that only describe an issue. I am less convinced that this should not be done in the case of history of philosophy, where it might make sense to present materials unknown to the public, even if one is not completely able to analyse them in full (a limit case is that of presenting a translation of a key text, though not analysing all its implications).
Thoughts welcome!
(cross-posted on my personal blog, elisafreschi.com)
Sanskrit poses its own particular challenges to the philosopher: the language is often said to be full of ambiguities, as if overburdened with vocabulary. That one can understand from its very long history as a lingua franca, reaching back millennia before Latin and Greek, comparable only to Mandarin. Yet since Sanskrit is placed with Latin and Greek among the Classical languages shaped by poetic metre, it falls under the shadow of Indo-European linguistics and thereby Orientalism.
I now find this reflex judgement of Sanskrit to be mistaken, thru importing a Latin sense of the word as an essence, independent of grammatical case. This caution usefully hooks into your concern, Elisa, with svatantra/svātantrya translating freedom/ independence: which is, of course, somewhat ambiguous!
With an eye to history and etymology, I find that svātantrya enters Sanskrit controversies thru Kashmir Saivism, with a strong sense of freedom, posed as the sovereign act of a creator god. But svatantra comes from Buddhist responses to Nagarjuna, in a parting of ways, one branch of which leads on to Santideva. So Amod’s reserve about your way with freedom has historical substance! And the Saivist influence from Kashmir filtered thru Tibetan tantra and Bedabeda on route to the latter-day theism, giving the two voices or perspectives (dual-and-non-dual) that recently surprised you!
Here we see that grammatical case in Sanskrit can make a real difference in the philosophy, and thereby resolving what seems to the Indo-Europeanist to be ambiguity! For writing Sanskrit philosophy this means simply that one needs a grounding in Panini, just recently vindicated in full at Cambridge in England! And now exercising huge, quiet influence thru the technology of AI large language models, which is now very relevant for carer development.