142019 UE Yogic perception in medieval Vaisesika: Readings in the Padarthadharmasangraha and its commentaries (2022W)

Content and aims:
One of the two major streams in the development of Indian philosophy identified by Erich Frauwallner is the stream of philosophy of nature. The thinkers who represent this stream show a pronounced interest in the natural external world, which they seek to understand especially in its inner connections in the course of their analyses and classifications. Early natural philosophical teachings have come down to us primarily in the epic Mahābhārata, in Buddhist Abhidharma, in the form of the diverging positions of Brahman philosophers reported in early Buddhist philosophical literature, and in early-classical medical works. In the Vaiśeṣikasūtra, whose basic form may have gradually originated during the first centuries of our era, we find a first comprehensive doctrinal framework that forms the basis of the philosophical tradition of classical Vaiśeṣika, formulated in succinct mnemonic sentences and phrases. Its ontology, or a closely related one, significantly influenced the ontology of the philosophical tradition of Nyāya that emerged soon afterwards.

The three large components that make up a full-fledged philosophical tradition, namely ontology, epistemology and ethics (including soteriology), are all addressed in the Vaiśeṣikasūtra in the form in which it had reached medieval commentators. In the area of epistemology, both sensory perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna), as the two central means of knowledge (pramāṇa), are extensively treated. Thus, one would also expect some reference to the special phenomenon of extraordinary cognition on the part of persons who have attained unusual cognitive capacities through meditative, spiritual and other practices which are often summarily designated as yoga (“intense application of oneself [to something]”). Through diverse references, this phenomenon can be traced from early on in South Asian cultural and intellectual history, and eventually it became a topic and controversial issue in the history of philosophy in South Asia. In many philosophical works and in modern scholarship, where it has gained considerable prominence as a multi-faceted topic, the phenomenon is briefly called yogipratyakṣa (“perception of yogis” or “yogic perception”) because the extraordinary cognition attributed to these exceptional persons was considered to be a special type of direct sensory cognition or awareness.

Even though the term itself does not appear in the Vaiśeṣikasūtra, the phenomenon is alluded to in a short series of sūtra-s, and elsewhere in it we even find a characterization of yoga in Vaiśeṣika terms. Starting with a critical reading of these sūtra-s, together with the brief commentaries on them by Candrānanda (9th c.?) and Śaṅkara Miśra (16th c.), we will turn to the Padārthadharmasaṅgraha by Praśastapāda (5th to 6th c.), commonly called Praśastapādabhāṣya because this systematically organized, comprehensive and nevertheless concise work can be read as a kind of commentary on many sūtra-s of the less systematically shaped Vaiśeṣikasūtra. In it, we find a brief presentation of the perception of yogins as a kind of appendix or afterthought to Praśastapāda’s description of perception before he turns to its analysis in terms of the fourfold formal division into what, in the process of perception, may be considered the means of knowledge, the object of knowledge, the agent involved in very act of knowing, and its result, i.e., the resulting knowledge, and then proceeds to treat inference, as a further means of knowledge.
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