IB World Religions 4.3.3. Interpretation and Language: Darshanas, Sampradayas, Sanskrit and the Vernaculars Notes

4.3.3. Interpretation and Language: Darshanas, Sampradayas, Sanskrit and the Vernaculars

The commentarial tradition

1. Hindu texts are rarely read alone. The normal mode is commentary, and a school states its position by writing on an older text rather than composing a treatise of its own.
2. A bhashya is a full commentary expounding a text line by line, and a tika is a further commentary on a bhashya. Such layers can run three or four deep on one root text.
3. Interpretation is unavoidable because the texts do not agree on their surface. The Upanishads say both that the self is Brahman and that the self draws near to Brahman, and every school must account for both.
4. Schools accepting the authority of the Vedas are called astika, and those rejecting it, including the Buddhists, the Jains and the materialist Charvaka, are called nastika.
5. A settled rule gives shruti priority over smriti, and within shruti gives knowledge statements priority over ritual ones. Schools then differ over which statements fall into which class.
6. A second rule holds that a passage whose plain sense conflicts with an established conclusion is read figuratively, and this is where most disagreement between schools occurs.

The six darshanas

1. Darshana (viewpoint, from a root meaning to see) is the term for the six orthodox systems, so called because each of them accepts the Vedas as authoritative.
2. They are traditionally listed in three pairs: Nyaya with Vaisheshika, Samkhya with Yoga, and Mimamsa with Vedanta.
3. What separates them as readers of scripture is their theory of pramana, the valid means of knowing, since each must say where scripture ranks among those means.
4. Nyaya accepts perception, inference, comparison and testimony, and files scripture under testimony, so the Veda is reliable because the one who speaks it is.
5. Samkhya accepts fewer means and argues largely from an analysis of ordinary experience, so it reads the texts as confirming conclusions that reasoning can reach on its own.
6. Mimamsa and Vedanta give scripture the highest place, holding that their subject matter, ritual duty for one and Brahman for the other, cannot be reached by perception or inference.

Mimamsa and Vedanta

1. The two schools that read the Veda most closely divide it between them, and they take the same word to mean quite different things.
2. Purva Mimamsa, the earlier inquiry, reads the Veda as a body of vidhi (injunction). A scriptural sentence carries weight only insofar as it prompts action, so the ritual portion is the Veda proper.
3. Uttara Mimamsa, far better known as Vedanta, reads the Veda as culminating in knowledge, and holds that the Upanishads state what is the case rather than what is to be done.
4. Vedanta commentators work on a fixed set of three texts, the prasthanatrayi or three points of departure: the principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita.
5. Commenting on all three is what establishes a teacher as founding a Vedanta position, so Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each produced a complete set.
6. Their commentaries diverge sharply on the same verses, which the tradition treats as ordinary. Disagreement about the meaning of shruti sits alongside complete agreement about its authority.

Sampradayas and their readings

1. A sampradaya is a teaching lineage, a community that hands on one particular reading of scripture from teacher to pupil through initiation.
2. The line of transmission is the guru-parampara, and the lineage's authority rests on the claim that its reading has descended unbroken from its founding teacher.
3. Four Vaishnava sampradayas are traditionally counted: the Sri lineage associated with Ramanuja, the Brahma lineage with Madhva, the Rudra lineage with Vallabha, and the lineage of Nimbarka.
4. Shaiva and Shakta lineages transmit their own scriptures alongside the Vedic ones, and Shaiva Siddhanta in the Tamil south works primarily from the agamas.
5. Because each lineage carries its own commentaries, one Gita verse is expounded differently in each, and a member reads the text through the lineage's teacher rather than independently.
6. Initiation, or diksha, usually includes receiving a mantra from the guru, which ties interpretation to ritual membership rather than leaving it to private opinion.

Sanskrit and shruti

1. Shruti is preserved in Sanskrit, and its older stratum, Vedic Sanskrit, differs from the later classical language enough to require separate study.
2. Hindus traditionally call it devabhasha, the language of the gods, and the claim that the Veda is apaurusheya attaches to its exact sounds and not to its sense alone.
3. Six auxiliary disciplines, the Vedangas, grew up to keep recitation exact: shiksha for phonetics, chandas for metre, vyakarana for grammar, nirukta for etymology, jyotisha for the timing of rites and kalpa for ritual procedure.
4. Panini, working perhaps in the fifth or fourth century BCE, described the language in some 4,000 rules in the Ashtadhyayi, a work still consulted to settle grammatical questions.
5. Access to Vedic study was restricted along the lines varna sets out, and the exclusion of shudras and of women is one reason vernacular devotion mattered so much.
6. For almost all Hindus Sanskrit is a ritual language rather than a spoken one, so a priest's recitation at a wedding is generally not followed in detail by those present.

The vernacular traditions

1. Smriti has never been confined to Sanskrit, and the devotional movements composed in the languages people actually spoke at home.
2. In Tamil the Alvars sang to Vishnu and the Nayanars to Shiva from around the sixth century, and the Alvar collection called the Tiruvaymoli is honoured in Sri Vaishnava temples as the Tamil Veda.
3. That title is itself an interpretive claim, asserting a vernacular text can carry the weight of shruti, and Sri Vaishnava teachers wrote formal commentaries on it.
4. In the north Tulsidas retold the Ramayana in Awadhi as the Ramcharitmanas, Kabir composed verses questioning ritual and caste in a mixed vernacular, and Mirabai sang to Krishna in Rajasthani and Gujarati.
5. In Kannada the vachanas of Basava set aside temple and Sanskrit ritual together, while in Marathi the Varkari poets Jnaneshvar and Tukaram wrote for pilgrims walking to Pandharpur.
6. The two levels coexist rather than compete. A temple service may use Sanskrit for the ritual formulas and a vernacular hymn for the congregation straight afterwards, and English now serves much of the diaspora.