Knowing or Contemplating as 'Attending to': The Body and its Immaterial Other in Sāṃkhya, Advaita and Trika

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.