In his celebrated treatise of Navya-nyāya, the Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa offers a detailed formulation of the inference of God’s existence. Gaṅgeśa’s inference generated significant commentarial literature among Naiyāyikas in Mithilā, Navadvīpa and Vārāṇasī, but also attracted the attention of South Indian scholars, notably Vyāsatīrtha, who comments on it extensively in the Tarkatāṇḍava. In the wake of Vyāsatīrtha’s pioneering critique, the 16th-century Sanskrit polymath Appaya Dīkṣita developed a revised version of Gaṅgeśa’s inference in his magnum opus of Śivādvaita Vedānta, the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā. This (...) article highlights that Appaya was thoroughly acquainted with the technical idiom of Navya-nyāya and sufficiently conversant with its literature to address authoritatively one of its key problems. Appaya’s contribution sheds new light on how the Navya-nyāya tradition continued to flourish in South India during the late medieval period. (shrink)

This article explores the way in which Madhva (1238–1317), the founder of the Dvaita Vedānta system of Hindu thought, reformulates the traditional exegetic practice of nirukta or “word derivation” to validate his pluralistic, hierarchical, and Vaiṣṇava reading of the Ṛgvedic hymns. Madhva’s Ṛgbhāṣya (RB) is conspicuous for its heavy reliance on and unique deployment of this exegetical tactic to validate several key features of his distinctive theology. These features include his belief in Viṣṇu’s unique possession of all perfect attributes (guṇaparipūrṇatva) (...) and His related conveyability by all Vedic words (sarvaśabdavācyatva). Such an understanding of Vedic language invokes the basic nirukta presupposition that words are eternally affiliated with the meanings they convey. But it is also based onMadhva’s access to a lexicon entitled Vyāsa’s Nirukti with which his critics and perhaps even his commentators seem to be unfamiliar.While the precise status of this text is the subject of ongoing debate, Madhva’s possession of special insight into the sacred canon is established in part by his unique claim to be an avatāra of the wind god Vāyu and a direct disciple of Viṣṇu Himself in the form of Vyāsa1. Thus, Madhva’s use of nirukta invokes his personal charisma to challenge not only conventional understandings of the hymns but traditional exegetic norms. Madhva’s provision of an alternative tradition of nirukta provoked sectarian debate throughout the Vijayanagara period over the extent to which one could innovate in established practices of reading the Veda. Articulating the Veda’s precise authority was a key feature of Brahmin debates during this period and reflects both the empire’s concern with promoting a shared religious ideology and the competition among rival Brahman sects for imperial patronage that this concern elicited. By looking at how two of Madhva’s most important commentators (the 14th-century Jayatīrtha and the 17th-century Rāghavendra) sought to defend his niruktis, this article will explore how notions of normative nirukta were articulated in response to Madhva’s deviations. At the same time, however, examining Madhva’s commentators’ defense of his niruktis also demonstrates the extent to which Madhva actually adhered to selected exegetic norms. This reveals that discomfort with Madhva’s particular methods for deriving words stemmed, in part, from a more general ambivalence towards this exegetical tactic whose inherent open-endedness threatened to undermine the fixity of the canon’s very substance: its language. (shrink)

Although today Appayya Dīkṣīta enjoys a reputation as the preeminent Śaiva polemicist of the sixteenth century, it must be remembered that he also wrote works from a distinctively Vaiṣṇava perspective, in which Viṣṇu is extolled as the paramount god rather than Śiva. This paper examines one of those works, the Varadarājastava and its autocommentary. It places special emphasis on how the poem is patterned on the Varadarājapañcāśat of the fourteenth-century Śrīvaiṣṇava poet and philosopher, Vedānta Deśika, with close attention to the (...) Varadarājastava’s use of the Vaiṣṇava imagery of the dahara-vidyā or meditation on brahman as the small space within the lotus-shaped heart. While this meditation was the central devotional practice for Appayya Dīkṣita and for his Śaiva predecessor Śrīkaṇṭha, in the Varadarājastava, Appayya is able to develop a more overtly Advaita dahara-vidyā, unfettered by hermeneutic fidelity to Śrīkaṇṭha’s Śaiva approach. The paper also considers the anomaly of Appayya writing as a Vaiṣṇava in the context of the institutional conflicts that took place between Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas at sites close to where Appayya received patronage. (shrink)