Professor Raffaele Torella, Chair of Sanskrit, Sapienza Universita di Roma, lists out his favourite brilliant Indian minds - Bhartṛhari, Dharmakīrti, Abhinavagupta (and his mentor Utpaladeva), Kumārila. Among them - Bhartṛhari, he says, is probably the greatest linguist in the history of mankind.
In an earlier conversation he told us that “While most of the Tantras just feature endless descriptions of rituals and prescriptions without any direct bearing on intimate insight into human psyche, here and there we also meet with sudden flashes of extremely keen penetration into the depth of ourselves. Just to give one example: if our language is meaningful it is only because, when we speak, our human phonemes are embraced by the divine ones (Mālinīvijayottara-tantra).” In the same light he talks about Bhartrihari’s idea of language leading to metaphysical knowledge.
As a linguist and Professor of Sanskrit, please could you share your thoughts on Bhartrihari's idea of language being not just a means of communication but more importantly leading to metaphysical knowledge.
To be more precise, I am not a linguist but a philologist… Bhartṛhari, whom I consider the greatest linguist in the history of mankind, follows a very ancient thread of Indian speculation on language, which we can see summarized in the sentence of Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa VIII 1.2.7 vāg vai matir vācā hīdam sarvaṃ manute “Indeed, thought is language, because it is through language that every being in this world thinks'. The main tenet of Bhartṛhari’s work is that knowledge essentially consists in laying a linguistic net over the object. Only after many centuries, western linguistics arrived at similar positions, particularly with Ferdinand de Saussure. The consonance of Saussure’ideas with Bhartṛhari’s (and other Indian philosophers) are so striking as to make the leading expert of Saussure, Prof. Tullio De Mauro and myself propose a PhD research on the possible Indian sources of Saussure. The metaphical implication found in Bhartṛhari’s work were further developed by nondual Śaivism of Kashmir.
What led you to explore Utpaladeva, particularly with his Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vivṛti, and what place do you wish to assign to him in Indian culture.
Even though I have a great admiration for the great polymath Abhinavagupta, now more and more popular also in India, I have always had the suspicion that in most cases his Pratyabhijñā philosophy mostly developed ideas originally due to his predecessor Utpaladeva. The discovery of significant fragments of Utpaladeva’s long commentary on his own Īśvarapratyabhijñā-kārikā and svavṛtti, edited and translated by me in a series of articles, has been the proof of this. Utpaladeva holds a unique place in Indian philosophical literature: his Pratyabhijñā corpus became the foundation stone for the whole of nondual Śaiva Tantrism (with its penetrating and elegant criticism of Buddhism), being in my opinion the peak of Indian speculation as a whole, while his hymns collected in the Śivastotrāvalī are the most outstanding example of Indian mystical poetry. One could wonder why the Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vivṛti, for sure one of the most important works of Indian philosophy, has survived only in fragments, while we have plenty of manuscripts of much less significant works. This was the fate of many other deep and problematic works (for one the Sāṃkhya Ṣaṣṭitantra), which were superseded by more compact, and easier, works. Our modern times know something about this…
Where do the practices and study of Tantra stand today in Italy? Which school is most dominant?
There are so many schools both of Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist tantra, scattered all over Italy. The one I find particularly interesting is that based on the teaching of Eric Baret, inspired by the nondual tradition of Kashmir.
What is the dialogue happening between the scholarly study of Indian traditions and the practices?
A telling example is a private course I have been giving for several years, first in presence, then online. After each lecture of two hours in which I offer an in-depth reading (along with many philosophical digressions) of texts of nondual Śaivism with ancient commentaries (Vijñānabhairava, Tantrāloka, Śivasūtra, Pratyabhijñāhṛdaya, etc.), the yoga teacher Gioia Lussana conducts a two-hour practice inspired by the texts we have read. More in general, I should like to add that the practice has its ultimate basis on texts written in Sanskrit a thousand years ago, and texts are to be treated with textual tools. Unlike most of the Buddhist tantric texts, those of nondual tradition of Kashmir are very complex both culturally and spiritually, and written in high-standard Sanskrit. A serious practice should be based both on the texts and the living tradition, but without mixing these two equally important levels. To put it more clearly, Dr. Lussana does not translate Sanskrit texts and I do not lead yoga sessions, while she is deeply interested in the literature of nondual Śaivism and so am I regarding spiritual search.
What insights do we have on the impact of the practice of Tantric rituals on the human psyche?
One day, after a seminar I offered to yoga practictioners, a young lady told me of her disappointment with traditional yoga (Pātañjala-yoga) and intention to give up with yoga practice. “It is true that I feel very good and relaxed in this comfortable ashram, but it is enough to enter again into ordinary life after the practice that all the wellbeing evaporates”. At the end of the course, she left the practice of Pātañjala-yoga and turned to nondual Śaiva yoga in which the totality of the human person is involved – the body, mind, passions, emotions – and ordinary daily life ceases to be “ordinary”…
What according to you is the most importantly work being done by Indologists in the field of Sanskrit today.
Let me mention at least three major achievements in modern Sanskrit studies:
- The investigation on the “history” of one of the fundamental texts of Vedānta tradition, the Yogavāsiṣṭha-Mahārāmāyaṇa, the longest spiritual epics in world literature (24.000 verses). The years-long research work based at University of Halle-Wittenberg, led by Prof Walter Slaje (along with Prof Jurgen Hanneder, Prof Roland Steiner and others), has shown that this nowadays very popular text has been the outcome of a systematic correction and adaptation of the original Mokṣopāya, a Kashmiri text of X century: a text with evident anti-brahmanic lines has eventually been transformed into an “orthodox” Vedāntic work.
- The discovery among the Sanskrit manuscripts kept in Chinese libraries (taken from Tibetan monasteries) of fundamental texts of Indian Buddhism which were deemed to be lost in the original Sanskrit (among them works by Diṅnāga, Dharmakīrti, Jinendrabuddhi, etc.). The main responsible for this ongoing research work, which is revoluzioning international Buddhology, is Prof. Ernst Steinkellner, University of Vienna.
- The investigation on the huge corpus of the so-called Kashmir Śaivism (both dual and, especially, nondual), with editions, translations and studies on one of the most important cultural and religious traditions of India, which had been practically unknown until the middle of XX century. The main centres have been Oxford (with Prof. Alexis Sanderson), Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle (with Prof. Isabelle Ratié), Rome Sapienza (with Prof. Raniero Gnoli and myself).
