142249 SE Why the Highest Good is Worth Pondering (2025S)

This course focuses on the translation, analysis, and contextualization of South Asian texts from the second half of the first millennium CE. It is designed for students who have completed at least seven semesters of training in Sanskrit.

The South Asian paradigm of transmigratory existence evoked an outlook on life in which liberation from transmigration figures as the highest good. Reflections on the precise nature of the transmigratory subjects and their liberation lead to controversial discourses on the nature of reality.
In addition to Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions, the Jainas also contributed to these discourses. In the first extant Jaina Sanskrit work, the Tattvārtha (circa 3rd century CE), the analysis of reality is summarized in seven principles that culminate in the conditions necessary for a potential liberation of living beings. Several commentaries on this work explicate the inherent presuppositions of these principles before the backdrop of the Jaina doctrine and other schools of thought. In one rather late commentary, the Tattvārtha-Ślokavārttikālaṅkāra (10th century CE), the author Vidyānandin reintroduces the fundamental question: Why is necessary to reflect on the precise nature of liberation at all? And how can it be established rationally that Jainism, above all traditions, would in fact render a thorough vision of reality?

After reading of short introductory passages from other Sanskrit works of the period, the course will focus on the beginning of the introduction to the Tattvārtha-Ślokavārttikālaṅkāra. An important didactic component of the course will involve practising the understanding and translation of scholastic Sanskrit texts.