The Grammatical Practice of Tantric Nonduality

Indian nondual philosophies are particularly amenable to reconfiguring our conceptions of sentience and insentience. Or rather, one might suggest, with the 9th  -10th century Kashmiri Hindu Tantric philosopher Somānanda that “insentience simply does not exist.”  For this paper, I suggest that this idea, that “insentience simply does not exist” is actually taken up as a contemplative practice, specifically insofar as it was helpful for allowing a practitioner to attain a glimpse into a higher state of enlightenment, an experience of nonduality. Moreover, I suggest that even as this nondualist Pratyabhijñā philosophy entails that everything is ultimately sentient, what allows us to make practical, heuristic distinctions between what we, in ordinary life, think of as sentient and insentient derives from a grammatical formulation, where being sentient is tied to a first-person perspective and being insentient is tied to the third-person expression.