Abstract
Contemporary scholars have begun to document the extensive influence of the sixth to seventh century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti on Pratyabhijñā Śaiva thought. Utpaladeva (925–975) and Abhinavagupta’s (975–1025) adaptation of Dharmakīrti’s apoha (exclusion) theory provides a striking instance of the creative ways in which these Śaivas use Dharmakīrti’s ideas to argue for positions that Dharmakīrti would emphatically reject. Both Dharmakīrti and these Śaivas emphasize that the formation of a concept involves both objective and subjective factors. Working within a certain perceptual environment, factors such as a subject’s desires, habits, and conditioning lead him or her to form a concept (vikalpa) based on excluding what is not relevant to the accomplishment of his or her goal. However, the two differ in their account of the relationship between concepts and subject/object duality itself. While Dharmakīrti claims that the division of a cognition into subject, object, and awareness is nonconceptual, the subtly shifted definition of a concept that these Śaivas employ allows them to claim that the error of subject/object duality is actually conceptual. This seemingly small difference in their respective evaluations of the nature of subject/object error has surprisingly large consequences. If, as these Śaivas claim, any awareness involving a duality is conceptual, then subject and object are concepts. Moreover, if the formation of a concept requires desire, then some kind of desire must be inherent to consciousness itself before the formation of a limited subject/object pair. In short, ultimate consciousness must be Śiva, who possesses the freedom to will any and all possible realities.
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Acknowledgments
This research was assisted by a dissertation fellowship from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. I would also like to thank Isabelle Ratié, who read Chapter Six of Abhinavagupta’s Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī with me while I was a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science’s Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia during the summer of 2014. Her insight and guidance have been invaluable. Additionally, I would like to thank my doctoral advisor John Dunne for his patience and detailed feedback over many years, and particularly on this article itself. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Indian Philosophy, whose critiques and suggestions greatly improved this work.
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Prueitt, C. Shifting Concepts: The Realignment of Dharmakīrti on Concepts and the Error of Subject/Object Duality in Pratyabhijñā Śaiva Thought. J Indian Philos 45, 21–47 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-016-9297-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-016-9297-8