Papers by James Fitzgerald
Indo-Iranian Journal, 2025
This paper follows upon my previous study of the three earliest of the Mahābhārata’s five stand-a... more This paper follows upon my previous study of the three earliest of the Mahābhārata’s five stand-alone Sāṃkhya treatises, namely 12.187, Adhyātma, 12.211–212, the Pañcaśikhavākya, and 12.267, the Nāradāsitasaṃvāda, in which those texts were shown to present authentic, if distinct, forms of genuine Sāṃkhya philosophy (Fitzgerald 2025). The current paper addresses the two somewhat later texts—the fourth and fifth of the five, namely 12.290, Sāṃkhya, and 12.308, the Sulabhājanakasaṃvāda—with the same argument and makes a similar exegetic demonstration. However, each of these latter two texts presents Sāṃkhya philosophy in a more complex way, and in a more complicated communicative setting, than did the three older treatises. Those differences require some secondary adjustments to the demonstration and also a general discussion of the unique mode of presentation of each text. In particular, 12.290, Sāṃkhya, is the Sāṃkhya member of a designed Sāṃkhya-Yoga dyad that presents the two philosophies comparatively, and within a frame of Nārāyaṇa theology. 12.308, the Sulabhājanakasaṃvāda, addresses what seems a deliberately falsified rendition of Pañcaśikha’s instruction of King Janaka in the Pañcaśikhavākya, earlier in the Mokṣadharma. This later rendition claims Pañcaśikha taught a version of Sāṃkhya gnosis that conferred liberation and allowed a person seeking mokṣa to continue acting in the world rather than requiring renunciation. Sulabhā argues that that understanding of Sāṃkhya gnosis is wrong, and she shows it to be so by provoking Janaka to reveal that his mind is still bound to the normal categories of perception and to passions. Concluding remarks directed at all five of the early epic Sāṃkhya texts treated in these studies emphasize the prolific diversity attested in the natural philosophy of the early Sāṃkhya tradition in the epic. They further suggest that these five texts may represent precursors of Sāṃkhya as a ṣaṣṭitantra, “a system of sixty principles,” that some later Sāṃkhya thinkers may have deliberately simplified into the classical canonical list of twenty-five tattvas. Further indications of both those trends of development in the MDh are mentioned and suggestions for further study of Sāṃkhya in the epic are offered.
Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2017
The word buddhi is an important term of Indian philosophical discourse, but some aspects of its u... more The word buddhi is an important term of Indian philosophical discourse, but some aspects of its use have caused confusion and continue to occasion difficulties. This paper undertakes a survey of the usage of the word buddhi ("intellect") in general Sanskrit literature from its earliest late Vedic occurrences up to the middle of the first millennium CE. Signifying fundamentally "awareness (of something)," the word "buddhi" is shown to refer often to a being's persisting capacity or faculty of awareness ("attentiveness, mind, intelligence," etc.) and also, often, to the content of a being's awareness ("idea, notion, thought, disposition, resolution," etc.). There are also instances where it is hard to determine which of these two kinds of reference are intended in our written sources, and there are other instances where both senses seem present simultaneously. Various examples attest to the use of the word to refer to an affective and volitional capacity in a being-and to affective and volitional content-as well as to a cognitive faculty and cognitive content. One feature that occurs frequently in the word's use is that this faculty and, or, its content, regularly describe alterations of a subject's knowledge of the surrounding situation, the transformation of surrounding complexity or multiplicity into a simpler and more manageable mental construct-an understanding, an interpretation, a decision, a plan, etc. As the word buddhi is related to the primary Sanskrit word-family used to describe the concrete experience of awakeningmoving from no (or little, or muddled) awareness to clear awareness-it is not surprising that its more abstract usage would often incorporate a similar dynamic, a transition from less clear to more clear knowledge, a rendering of early knowledge to better and more useful knowledge, in short, a faculty of "intellect" that produces refined decisions, resolutions, and determinations. It is suggested that this element of its semantic profile contributed to the word's eventually becoming the preferred word for the most important of the mental functions of beings in one of the most
widespread philosophical psychologies of ancient India, that which ultimately became formally enshrined in the philosophical system “Sāṃkhya."
Indo-Iranian Journal, 2025
This paper addresses the three earliest explicitly Sāṃkhya texts of the Mokṣadharmaparvan (Frauwa... more This paper addresses the three earliest explicitly Sāṃkhya texts of the Mokṣadharmaparvan (Frauwallner 1925b, 187–192), 12.187, 211–212, and 267 and provides an exegetic demonstration of each text’s presentation of the essential traits of all forms of Sāṃkhya philosophy: 1) the goal of presenting sentient beings with a definitive remedy for suffering; 2) a considered survey of the general constitution of the world and of sentient beings within it; and 3) an argument that the end of suffering depends upon the cognizance of the absolute and fundamental separation (antara) between one’s Soul and one’s psyche and its experience of the world. Each of the three texts exhibits a radical individuality, and they all differ from each other (and classical Sāṃkhya) in some of their critical modes of expression. Nonetheless, attentive readings reveal that each of them manifests the essential traits of Sāṃkhya in its own idiosyncratic way.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2000
In addition to the philological, metallurgical and military clarifications this article presents,... more In addition to the philological, metallurgical and military clarifications this article presents, one of its principal contributions is that it demonstrates the value of the Pune Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata for the recovery of otherwise lost or obscure words from the South Asian past.
ABSTRACT:
Two weapons-terms of Mahābhārata battle accounts, pīta and śaikya, have been poorly understood. This paper examines the use of both words in the epic closely and concludes: 1) pīta is the past participle of the verb √pā, "drink," and refers to the treatment of "iron" with a liquid bath, i.e., the quenching of carburized iron (effectively a low-carbon steel). 2) śaikya is an allomorph of saikya, which is an adjective based on the noun seka ("pour, cast") from the root √sic, "pour, cast (molten metal)"; it is an adjective meaning "metal that has been fused, metal ready for casting, (previously) molten metal." The word śaikya/saikya must refer to India's ancient steel, famous in the classical Mediterranean world, made by a process essentially the same as that of the famous crucible-fused wootz of South India, long the basic steel of "damascene" blades.
Epic and History, 2010
The MBh is an intricately plotted, multi-layered narrative woven against a background of inherite... more The MBh is an intricately plotted, multi-layered narrative woven against a background of inherited themes and patterns. When examined together with the large, chronologically differentiated corpus of Vedic texts that precedes the epic [Witzel 2005 ], we are able to discern the vague outlines of the oral epic tradition, probably known as the Bhārata, that preceded the received text of the Mahābhārata, the Great Bhārata. (I accept the possibility that some epic narrative themes may well have descended from Indo-European heroic traditions [Allen 2005 and Jamison 1994 ], but I reject the argument that there is a textual ‘kernel’ in the received text of the MBh that goes back to Vedic and Indo-European times [Smith 1992, the ‘Vedic triṣṭubh’ hypothesis].) However, what is most striking about the received Sanskrit text of the Mahābhārata is its dramatic departure from its first-millennium BCE past, principally through its introduction of a stunning pentad of semi-divine heroic protagonists (the Pāṇḍavas), an innovation which transformed the old Bhārata epic into the Pāṇḍava Bhārata epic. There are other striking innovations that distinguish the Great Bhārata from the putative prior Bhārata, but this paper will focus upon the construction of the Pāṇḍava heroes and the way they were fitted into the Bharata lineage. It will present and examine hypotheses about possible historical figures behind the epic Pāṇḍavas [Parpola 2002 and Witzel 2005], and it will discuss possible political motives for the outright invention of the Pāṇḍavas by the epic poets. Salient aspects of the Pāṇḍava figures and other major epic innovations (e.g., the framing of the epic narrative with the story of Rāma Jāmadagnya, the contestation and legitimation of kingly violence) will be discussed against what we know of the history of North India in the first millennium BCE in an effort to specify the historical-political aperture which the epic might best fit. These points will be developed against a general presentation of the Mahābhārata that addresses the broader questions raised by the conference hosts, questions concerning the basic features, operations, functions and historical situation of the narrative tradition called “Mahābhārata.”
Yoga in Practice, 2011
This piece is the pre-publication submission of my contribution to David White’s volume, Yoga in ... more This piece is the pre-publication submission of my contribution to David White’s volume, Yoga in Practice, David White, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011): “A Prescription for yoga and Power in the Mahābhārata,” pages 43-57. It grew out of both my presentation, “The Sāṃkhya-Yoga ‘Manifesto’ at MBh 12.289-290” (initially at the memorable 13th World Sanskrit Conference in Edinburgh in 2006 and ultimately in the conference volume for the Epics Section, Battle, Bards, and Brāhmins, John Brockington, ed. [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2012]: 259-300) and a fruitful collaboration with David White on yoga in 2006.
I should mention here that since those two pieces were published, I have modified my translation of “Sāṃkhya,” the name of the school of philosophy (pace F. Edgerton) that first appeared publicly with five stand-alone treatises collected in the MDh, including 12.290. Formerly I rendered or glossed the name Sāṃkhya “Total Knowledge,” as I tried to emphasize a striving toward complete and comprehensive knowledge of all things that seemed to me to be part of 12.290’s presentation of Sāṃkhya. I gave 12.290 more weight as a form of Sāṃkhya than I now think correct, in part because it was the single most explicit and sustained use of the label for a separate treatise of the Mokṣadharmaparvan. (Hence, my referring to that dyad as a manifesto of Sāṃkhya and Yoga.) I have now concluded that that element of this truly remarkable, but sui-generis, text comes to it from its affiliation with the theology of Nārāyaṇa and the developing Vaiṣṇavism that came ultimately to be the dominant school of thought in the Mokṣadharma. I now render and gloss the name of the school Sāṃkhya with Sāṃkhya “(Enumerative) Discrimination.”
Lastly, regarding the “Manifesto” paper: my somewhat experimental translations of “yoga”—when that word referred to the cultivation of the powers of control within oneself—with “linking” and related phrasings, has been superseded completely with phrasings based on “harnessing.” Also, I have adopted this sense of “yoga” as one of the few words that it can be safe merely to transcribe when joined to a specifying English word in such phrasings as yoga-harnessing, yoga-meditation, yoga-power, yoga-control, yoga-practice, etc. Also “Yoga,” when referring to the school of thought that teaches and elaborates on these matters.
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt Raaflaub (Malden [Mass.] and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell): 41-60., 2013
Addressing the ingrained colonial dismissal of India’s lack of a sense of history, this paper dis... more Addressing the ingrained colonial dismissal of India’s lack of a sense of history, this paper discusses the nature and background of the two main genres of history-writing in ancient India, itihāsa and purāṇa, particularly in relation to their different roles in the Mahābhārata. It explores the roots of itihāsa as factual reports in Vedic textual analysis of “That’s how it was,” and contrasts that with purāṇa, “a primordial account of primordial things.” Though purāṇa does contain segments that do have value as genuine historical sources, it is not history in the modern Western academic sense of the word. It is rather a prolific species of history-writing that is grounded in a powerful vision of universal natural history that does provide places for recent terrestrial history and the histories of regions and locales and much else.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2023
The "greatness" of the Mahābhārata, its mahat/mahā quality, refers primarily to its intended dyna... more The "greatness" of the Mahābhārata, its mahat/mahā quality, refers primarily to its intended dynamism as a powerful engine generating the spread of Brahminic teaching throughout the world, casting "heathen" (nāstika) teachings and their patrons into shadow for all time. The Brahmin authors worked to accomplish this end in two main ways. First, they devised a tremendously engaging tale that depicted the decisive victory of a king (Yudhiṣṭhira Pāṇḍava) who accepted Brahmin claims to deserve monopoly-control over teaching the norms of society. Second, they made this tale an extensive magisterium of Brahmin ideology and philosophy, affording to all in society, women and śūdras as well as Aryan men, encouragement to seek the forgiveness of past wrongs at tīrthas and access to the teachings of mokṣa without Vedic initiation .
Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History, Sheldon I. Pollock, ed. (Delhi: Manohar, 2010): 31 59, 2010
This article studies a tale (MBh 12.258, the Story of Cirakārin, "Slowpoke") from the Non-Violenc... more This article studies a tale (MBh 12.258, the Story of Cirakārin, "Slowpoke") from the Non-Violence segment of the Mokṣadharma Collection of the Mahābhārata. It is a parable deliberately constructed as a counter-argument to an amalgamation of two famous stories of uxoricidal violence against a wife for actual or imagined adultery--the story of Ahalyā's seduction by Indra and the story of Paraśurāma's killing his mother Reṇukā at the behest of his father Jamadagni. Commanded by his father Medhātithi to kill his mother, "Slowpoke" ponders at length his connections to both his father and mother. In the meantime, his father changes his mind, decides there was no fault with his wife, and regrets his jealous rage. He is relieved to find that his son has not yet acted on his command. Though this story describes a significant resistance to patriarchal authority, and contemplates the situation of married women with more nuance than is usual, it is not a declaration of women's freedom and autonomy.
www.knaw.nl, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020
27th Gonda Lecture: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, November 2019.
Once an epic ... more 27th Gonda Lecture: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, November 2019.
Once an epic arguing the good of manly heroism in battle, the Mahābhārata (MBh) remains an immensely popular narrative three thousand years later, long after the bold self-assertion of heroism expired as an ideal. The MBh still argues the good, that is dharma, but it is a greater Good than individual heroism. Rather than juxtaposing the human and the divine antagonistically, as did Homer’s Iliad, the ingenious poets of the Indian epic fused the human and the divine to argue that there is a greater Good than everlasting glory, that dharma is about larger matters as well—society and the world itself. And it made this move twice. My paper argues that its inspired emplotment invested the MBh successively with two different divine registers to make lasting arguments about the Good.
Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 2010
This list of changes restores this article on the Mahābhārata to the state in which I submitted i... more This list of changes restores this article on the Mahābhārata to the state in which I submitted it for publication. My manuscript did have the erroneous citations corrected in rows 6 and 7 below (I gave 1.67 in each case; 1.61 is correct). All other departures noted here occurred after submission and I was not consulted on them.
RELEASE FROM LIFE RELEASE IN LIFE lndian Perspectives on Individual Liberation, 2010
Uñchavṛtti (living by gleaning) and āpaddharma (“exigent dharma”) are two important constructs th... more Uñchavṛtti (living by gleaning) and āpaddharma (“exigent dharma”) are two important constructs that eventually made their way into the ancient Brahminic Religious Law (dharmaśāstra) that bespeak some of the economic, social, and political stress some brahmins experienced or perceived in ancient India in the couple centuries either side of the turn into the Common Era. The brahmin head of household who lived on grain left in fields after the harvest (the uñchavṛttin) was a particularly important culture-hero among brahmins, because he refused to earn his living from non-brahmin occupations. If he was unable to secure enough appropriately pure clients for his ritual and teaching functions or his 'sin'-removing function of receiving donations, he chose to eke out a living by gleaning, rather than become a king's minister, a merchant, a soldier, or take up any other allowable non-brahmin occupation. That this decision could lead to actual death by starvation is implied in some of the uñchavṛtti narratives of the Mahābhārata, several of which are presented and discussed in this paper after a general discussion of the overall dharmaśāstra context. The stories on uñchavṛtti also stand in tension with the ethics of liberation oneself through yoga and controversies regarding wealth and poverty.
What I have written about the āpaddharma appeared in the introduction to my translation of the Śāntiparvan (The Mahabharata: Book 11: The Book of the Women, Book 12: The Book of Peace, Part One. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 152-64. Another, more broadly contextualized discussion of āpaddharma will appear in my forthcoming paper, “Why So Many ‘Other’ Voices in the ‘Brahmin’ Mahābhārata?” which will appear in the volume to be published from the conference Asia Beyond Boundaries: which was held in Leiden at the end of August, 2018.
Stages and Transitions: Temporal and Historical Frameworks in Epic and Purāṇic Literature, Proceedings of the Second Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas, August, 1999, 2002
This paper on Rāma Jāmadagnya anticipated and prepared the way for my later “No Contest between M... more This paper on Rāma Jāmadagnya anticipated and prepared the way for my later “No Contest between Memory and Invention: The Invention of the Pāṇḍava Heroes of the Mahābhārata,” Epic and History, David Konstan and Kurt Raaflaub, editors (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 103-121. The exposition in the Rāma article is a dense recital of information and often couched—necessarily, if unfortunately—in many irritatingly tentative statements. But it tries to articulate general perspectives and ideas as well, particularly in its concluding points (113-119) and tables III and IV, which map and segment the MBh. The Appendix (130-31) also joined Robert Goldman’s earlier discussions of the Indian Epics in terms of their possible representations of the dramas, and traumas, arising from humans’ prolonged maturation in family groups. I pursued this discussion further in a paper “Bhīṣma beyond Freud: The Fall of the Sky: Bhīṣma in the Mahābhārata, 1,” in Epic Constructions: Gender, Myth, and Society in the Mahābhārata, edited by Brian Black and Simon Brodbeck (London: Routledge, 2007): 189-207, which ended up arguing in favor of adopting the perspectives of Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Work of Culture (Chicago: 1990) for the cross-cultural conceptualization of generalizations about family dynamics and culture.
There is one judgement in the paper that I have since discarded: in note 2 on p. 89 I characterized the Mahābhārata critical edition of Pune as an “unsuccessful effort to arrive at a critical edition” of the text. As I have since written in a couple of places, I now regard Sukthankar’s eclectic edition of the written Sanskrit tradition to be a “critical edition” in the fundamental sense of the word critical. Not very much aware of textual editing in other literary traditions at the time, I naively idealized mechanical models of editing too much.
Devadattiyam: Johannes Bronkhorst Festschrift, 2012
This paper presents and discusses in depth the deployment in the Sanskrit epics of two tropes of ... more This paper presents and discusses in depth the deployment in the Sanskrit epics of two tropes of illusion. It begins with Arjunamiśra’s invocation of the alātacakra, “the circle of fire,” a trope for visual illusion, to gloss Mahābhārata 12.195.23 and asks what he intended with that explanation. It moves to a brief discussion of this trope generally, discusses its possible application to 12.195.23, and then presents, translates and discusses all instances of the alātacakra trope and its companion illusion-trope, the gandharvanagara, the mirage of “a town of the Gandharvas (floating in the sky on the horizon)” in the Critical Texts of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. The discussion of the epic uses of these tropes concludes with (p. 795): "If we compare the way the alātacakra artifice is used by the epic poets to their use of the gandharvanagara, we find that both commonplaces are used for their potential to suggest marvels to the poets’ audiences. In the case of the alātacakra, however, this direct, sensory use of it was less than, or subordinate to, the poets’ exploitation of the more abstract delight inherent in its complex basic reality. But it was still narrative delight that the poets created with it, though as we shall see shortly with Gauḍapāda, the dynamic generation of marvels from the single moving firebrand provides a powerful image with which to think about fundamental issues of the one and the many. Though it may seem that the alātacakra actually has more potential than the gandharvanagara to be of use in abstract arguments of one sort or another, it is not used to support any argument whatsoever in the epics, as the gandharvanagara is twice. And particularly – in light of the later (?) Buddhist use of the alātacakra as a by-word for illusion – though both the tropes reviewed here are capable of emphasizing the erroneous, illusory elements of thought and experience, the alātacakra is never used to make such a criticism of knowledge or experience in either epic, while there is one, or one and one-half, uses of the gandharvanagara as a commonplace for erroneous illusion. All in all, though there is not even one directly ‘philosophical’ application of the alātacakra in either epic, the epic poets’ exploitation of the alātacakra seems much more sophisticated than is their use of the shimmering evanescence of the gandharvanagara – but that appearance is basically an artifact of the inherent complexity of the alātacakra itself."
The paper moves onto and closes with presentations, translations, and discussions of the uses of the tropes found in the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad (6.24) and Gauḍapāda’s Māṇḍūkyakārikās (4.47-52).
Two of this paper's most important contributions are on the matters of the vexed word anīśvara fo... more Two of this paper's most important contributions are on the matters of the vexed word anīśvara found at 12.289.3 (discussed on pp. 270-73 of the published version and pp. 10-12 here) and the "Nārāyaṇization" of the manifestos of Yoga and Sāṃkhya presented in this text pair (discussed on pp. 261-65, 280-83, and 292-98 of the published version and pp. 2-6, 17-19, and 26-29 here). Important too, in my judgment, are the discussion of the text-pair's structure, composition and history, enabled in part by attention to the contrasts between anuṣṭubh and triṣṭubh segments of the text. Lastly, the highly motivated defense of Sāṃkhya as a system of gnosis over against Yoga as a system emphasizing control of the manifested and embodied world (īśvaratva) suggests strongly that the philosophy calling itself "Sāṃkhya" originated as a rebellious movement within Brahminic ādhyātmika circles to separate itself from Yoga. The frequently encountered averrals of the equivalence of the two systems of thought imply such a rebellion and a desire on the part of some to minimize the rift.
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2015
This paper, the first of a set of three focused on "buddhi," focuses upon a brief and unusual cha... more This paper, the first of a set of three focused on "buddhi," focuses upon a brief and unusual chapter in the history of the word buddhi. There are three remarkable instances of what I call “saving buddhis” that occur at the very beginning of the Mokṣadharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata. A close examination of them shows the word functioning very distinctively to convey a core element of the mokṣadharma taught in the Mahābhārata (MBh). These three instances also give us an opportunity to see the buddhi-complex of ideas developing into one of the most central and important components of the map outlining the path to ultimate beatitude in Brahminic traditions of thought. Finally, as these three instances occur at the very start of the Mokṣadharmaparvan (MDh), this examination of them will also furnish a brief introductory look at the MBh’s self-conscious presentation of “mokṣadharma.” All three of these topics—mokṣadharma philosophy in the MBh, the theory of the buddhi and related ideas, and the creation and redaction of the MDh are all issues that present seemingly hopeless tangles of multi-colored threads of varying lengths. This paper focuses upon the most manageable of these three issues—buddhi, buddhis, and the buddhi: it is the first of three papers I’ve written that chart the word and idea “buddhi.” Its two successors were published in the Journal of Indian Philosophy in the fall of 2017, issue 45.4, a special issue of the journal entitled “Locating Philosophy in the Mahābhārata:” “A Semantic Profile of Early Sanskrit ‘buddhi,’” (pp. 669-709) and “The Buddhi in Early Adhyātma Discourse (the Dialog of Manu and Bṛhaspati),” (pp. 767-816).
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Papers by James Fitzgerald
widespread philosophical psychologies of ancient India, that which ultimately became formally enshrined in the philosophical system “Sāṃkhya."
ABSTRACT:
Two weapons-terms of Mahābhārata battle accounts, pīta and śaikya, have been poorly understood. This paper examines the use of both words in the epic closely and concludes: 1) pīta is the past participle of the verb √pā, "drink," and refers to the treatment of "iron" with a liquid bath, i.e., the quenching of carburized iron (effectively a low-carbon steel). 2) śaikya is an allomorph of saikya, which is an adjective based on the noun seka ("pour, cast") from the root √sic, "pour, cast (molten metal)"; it is an adjective meaning "metal that has been fused, metal ready for casting, (previously) molten metal." The word śaikya/saikya must refer to India's ancient steel, famous in the classical Mediterranean world, made by a process essentially the same as that of the famous crucible-fused wootz of South India, long the basic steel of "damascene" blades.
I should mention here that since those two pieces were published, I have modified my translation of “Sāṃkhya,” the name of the school of philosophy (pace F. Edgerton) that first appeared publicly with five stand-alone treatises collected in the MDh, including 12.290. Formerly I rendered or glossed the name Sāṃkhya “Total Knowledge,” as I tried to emphasize a striving toward complete and comprehensive knowledge of all things that seemed to me to be part of 12.290’s presentation of Sāṃkhya. I gave 12.290 more weight as a form of Sāṃkhya than I now think correct, in part because it was the single most explicit and sustained use of the label for a separate treatise of the Mokṣadharmaparvan. (Hence, my referring to that dyad as a manifesto of Sāṃkhya and Yoga.) I have now concluded that that element of this truly remarkable, but sui-generis, text comes to it from its affiliation with the theology of Nārāyaṇa and the developing Vaiṣṇavism that came ultimately to be the dominant school of thought in the Mokṣadharma. I now render and gloss the name of the school Sāṃkhya with Sāṃkhya “(Enumerative) Discrimination.”
Lastly, regarding the “Manifesto” paper: my somewhat experimental translations of “yoga”—when that word referred to the cultivation of the powers of control within oneself—with “linking” and related phrasings, has been superseded completely with phrasings based on “harnessing.” Also, I have adopted this sense of “yoga” as one of the few words that it can be safe merely to transcribe when joined to a specifying English word in such phrasings as yoga-harnessing, yoga-meditation, yoga-power, yoga-control, yoga-practice, etc. Also “Yoga,” when referring to the school of thought that teaches and elaborates on these matters.
Once an epic arguing the good of manly heroism in battle, the Mahābhārata (MBh) remains an immensely popular narrative three thousand years later, long after the bold self-assertion of heroism expired as an ideal. The MBh still argues the good, that is dharma, but it is a greater Good than individual heroism. Rather than juxtaposing the human and the divine antagonistically, as did Homer’s Iliad, the ingenious poets of the Indian epic fused the human and the divine to argue that there is a greater Good than everlasting glory, that dharma is about larger matters as well—society and the world itself. And it made this move twice. My paper argues that its inspired emplotment invested the MBh successively with two different divine registers to make lasting arguments about the Good.
What I have written about the āpaddharma appeared in the introduction to my translation of the Śāntiparvan (The Mahabharata: Book 11: The Book of the Women, Book 12: The Book of Peace, Part One. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 152-64. Another, more broadly contextualized discussion of āpaddharma will appear in my forthcoming paper, “Why So Many ‘Other’ Voices in the ‘Brahmin’ Mahābhārata?” which will appear in the volume to be published from the conference Asia Beyond Boundaries: which was held in Leiden at the end of August, 2018.
There is one judgement in the paper that I have since discarded: in note 2 on p. 89 I characterized the Mahābhārata critical edition of Pune as an “unsuccessful effort to arrive at a critical edition” of the text. As I have since written in a couple of places, I now regard Sukthankar’s eclectic edition of the written Sanskrit tradition to be a “critical edition” in the fundamental sense of the word critical. Not very much aware of textual editing in other literary traditions at the time, I naively idealized mechanical models of editing too much.
The paper moves onto and closes with presentations, translations, and discussions of the uses of the tropes found in the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad (6.24) and Gauḍapāda’s Māṇḍūkyakārikās (4.47-52).