This paper explores the epistemology of contemplative practice through three texts representative of three distinct contemplative traditions: the Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta (a Śaiva Trika manual), Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (a Sāṃkhya text) and the Pañcadaśī of Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya (an Advaita Vedānta manual). It approaches them to unravel a common underlying methodological framework of the managing or governance of attention (avadhāna) and awareness as the primary mode of self-knowledge. It further develops the tight mutual relationship obtaining between the material body and its immaterial other articulated differently in each tradition, but resting on a common structure of movement from the palpable and corporeal to the impalpable/incorporeal. In doing so the paper engages scholarship in new materialism as well as attention studies to argue for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between the material and immaterial dimensions of being; steering clear of both materialist reductionisms and idealist reifications of self, such as the very dichotomy of soul or mind and body that undergird these schemes. I particularly draw upon Elizabeth Grosz’s articulation of the ‘incorporeal’ as ‘the subsistence of the ideal in the material or corporeal’ as an intrinsic feature of the three traditions under consideration.
Early Indian philosophical mappings of the body and articulations of the difference between the material and its immaterial ‘other’—a distinction that does not quite map on to the Western distinction of body/matter and mind/spirit/soul—both presuppose and imply a network of contemplative practices that necessarily begin at certain corporeal points of inhabitation and experience, slowly transitioning to more immaterial dimensions in a graded phenomenal itinerary. To go with the metaphor of the bodily ‘landscape’, each of procedure magnifies, so to speak, the texture of bodily inhabitation, as if under a lens, bringing into relief hidden features of the subjective terrain. Then, slowly and successively, each mapping of embodied being mediates certain movements of attention through various layers of corporeality.
How each text executes this epistemological program, however, is vastly different. The Sāṃkhyakārikā conceives its project as a program of exhausting the known and countable to arrive at the ‘uncountable’, that is, a process of sāṃkhyāna. Advaita conceives this task as the transference of attention (avadhāna) from the body (śarīra/deha) to the embodied (śarīrin/dehin). And the Paramārthasāra conducts a ‘reversion’ of the elements (tattvas) as a means of access or ascent to realizing one’s identity with/as Śiva.
These and other philosophical as well as polemical and identitarian differences amongst these contemplative traditions can give the impression of three entirely separate and dissonant paths or soteriologies and, indeed, their respective philosophical and ideological commitments support this view. However, the paper asks whether we can nonetheless recuperate an underlying Indic framework of bodily being—and the relationship of the body with its spiritual/ immaterial other—that can help us to think with the nature and task of contemplative practice through a coherent meta-framework. It will be argued that such a framework reveals a commitment to a thoroughgoing entanglement of the immaterial and material dimensions of self, of the self as subject and object, as the existential horizon of any search for realizing or attaining greater subjective depths, freedom or liberation.
Three issues directly bear upon the attempt to ground such a framework. Firstly, the question of non-dualism (advaita/advaya) with respect to which Advaita and Śaiva non-dualism fall on one side—even if their non-dualisms tend to run in opposite directions—and Sāṃkhya on the other. Secondly, the question of action and agency, and its relation with non-action or the attainment of quietude or stillness (conceived as the absence of all activity). This issue again distinguishes the positions of the three traditions, the non-dual Śaiva committed to embracing the full implications of the premise of Śiva’s (and therefore every self’s) agency as primitive and significant. But the precise relational dynamics of movement and stillness, action and non-action, remain central to each tradition. Lastly, it is necessary to explore how each text applies the metaphor of light and illumination to articulate its path, practice and epistemological framework of knowing or realizing one’s self.
The paper will also consider some implications of the results arrived, particularly the role of the body and embodied being in traditions usually considered to be dismissive or at least negligent of the role of embodied practices, such as Advaita. It thus considers the Advaitic articulation of its own project as a a hermeneutics of embodiment (śārīraka-mīmāṃsā) deeply sensitive to bodily being in its articulation of the subtle attuning of attention to various aspects of embodiment. Differences from the Śaiva Trika articulation of the body will also be explored.
This paper explores the epistemology of contemplative practice through three texts representative of distinct contemplative traditions: the Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta (Trika), Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (Sāṃkhya) and the Pañcadaśī of Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya (Advaita Vedānta). It approaches them to unravel a common underlying methodological framework of the managing or governance of attention (avadhāna) and awareness as the primary mode of self-knowledge. Engaging new materialist scholarship, it further develops the tight mutual relationship obtaining between the material body and its immaterial other articulated differently in each case, but resting on a common structure of movement from the palpable/corporeal to the impalpable/incorporeal.