142105 UE The Sankhya and Yoga paths to liberation as reflected in Jaina Sanskrit literature (2020W)

The practices known today under the name of yoga go back in part to a Sanskrit work by Patañjali, which he wrote around 400 CE, incorporating and reworking early sources (see Maas 2020). In Patañjali's classical yoga, these practices serve to realize a certain path of liberation, which essentially aims at separating the physical and spiritual realities. The underlying conception of a human being is based on the ontological assumptions of an older philosophical tradition of South Asia, the Sāṅkhya.
The positions of Sāṅkhya and Yoga were discussed, criticized and partly integrated by other philosophical traditions of South Asia. This course is dedicated to the discussion of the Sāṅkhya and Yoga paths to liberation in Jaina Sanskrit literature from the time between 500 and 1100 CE. Excerpts from Sanskrit texts will be read and translated in the original, the conceptual background of these text passages examined on the basis of secondary literature, and methods of philological-historical research will be applied in the comparison of similar text passages. Students have the opportunity to test and deepen their knowledge and skills in this areas and to form their own opinion on the early reception of some of the ideas of yoga, which are so popular today.

The individual working steps are as follows:

(1) Translation of a text passage in which the Jaina Vidyānandin (10th century) discusses "eight ancillaries of yoga" (yogasya ... aṣṭāṅgāni) and comparison of this discussion with that of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. (Possible short presentations by students: presentation of the eight limbs using a modern source; presentation of the role of the eight ancillaries in the historical context of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.)

(2) Comparison of the Jaina text with a presentation of the eight ancillaries in a text passage from the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa, which has a high degree of literal correspondence with the Jaina passage. (Possible short presentations: Yoga and Sāṅkhya philosophemes in early Nyāya; or in Śivaitic traditions.)

(3) Translation of another text passsage in a Jaina work that refers to ontological and cosmological ideas of Sāṅkhya.

(4) Comparison of the text passage from the Jaina work with the corresponding passages in two fundamental works of Sāṅkhya, namely, the Sāṅkhyakārikā and the Yuktidīpikā.

(5) Comparison of the text passage from the Jaina work with corresponding passages in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.

(6) Further discussion of the contents of Sāṅkhya and Yoga philosophemes in works of the Jaina authors Devanandin, Samantabhadra, Akalaṅka, Vidyānandin and Prabhācandra.