This session brings together three papers exploring ways in which Hindu thinkers developed new positions by recontextualizing older texts and received ideas. The first considers how Bhartṛhari (ca. 5th c. CE) fashioned a coherent philosophy of time, in part by reworking elements drawn from Vedic and Epic texts. The second draws attention to Kashmiri Śaiva interpretations of the Bhagavad Gītā, focusing especially on the 10th-century commentator Rāmakaṇṭha. The third examines how Svāmīnārāyaṇa (18th/19th c.) interpreted a well-known reference in the Mahābhārata to four śāstras—Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Pañcarātra, and Veda—as indicating mutual complementarity rather than exclusivity or hierarchy.
This paper explores the category of time in the philosophy of the Grammarians, primarily in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya. It argues that thinkers of this school incorporated and adapted earlier conceptualizations of time, including ancient Vedic views and ideas from the kālavāda, and examines the resulting doctrines in detail. The Grammarians’ temporal doctrine culminates in the Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari's seminal treatise integrating grammar and philosophy. For Bhartṛhari, time is the creative power of the Absolute Word (Word-Brahman), capable of creating, sustaining, and destroying all existing objects, through which the unmanifest Absolute becomes manifest. This paper provides a comprehensive account of Bhartṛhari’s concept of time, explains why this category occupies such a prominent place in his system, and demonstrates how he resolves apparent contradictions in the conceptualization of time, including its dual nature, simultaneous divisibility and indivisibility, and its coexistence with the Absolute Word.
This paper explores the cross-philosophical and inter-religious dimensions of Rāmakaṇṭha’s Sarvatobhadra, a tenth-century Kashmiri commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. Traditionally regarded as a foundational Vaiṣṇava scripture centered on devotion to Kṛṣṇa, the Gītā has nevertheless been interpreted across multiple philosophical and religious traditions. Rāmakaṇṭha, a Śaiva thinker and disciple of Utpaladeva associated with the Pratyabhijñā tradition, approaches the text from the perspective of Śaiva non-dualism. His commentary stands alongside that of Abhinavagupta (11th century), whose Gītārthasaṃgraha offers another influential Śaiva interpretation of the Kashmiri recension of the Gītā. How does a Śaiva philosopher engage with a scripture devoted to Viṣṇu? Through selected passages from the Sarvatobhadra, this paper examines how Rāmakaṇṭha reinterprets the Gītā’s theology within a Śaiva metaphysical framework, highlighting the fluid intellectual boundaries and shared hermeneutical practices of medieval Kashmiri thought.
This paper asks if it was possible for Hindu thinkers to conceive of intellectual difference as a productive attribute of śāstric discourse rather than a problem that needed to be negotiated through exclusion or hierarchical subsumption. I direct my query towards the reception of the Mokṣadharmaparvan’s(MDh) composite theology of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Veda and the Pañcarātra among Hindu intellectuals to explore the modalities through which difference was understood and organized. A doxographical approach to the MDh’s eclectic theology can be observed in Viśiṣṭādvaita literature whereby intellectual difference was conceptualized in terms of possessing varying degrees of extraneity to the Veda. By contrast, Svāmīnārāyaṇa’s interpretive framework did not presume a confrontation with extraneity. Rather, he wielded difference to resolve the conceptual paradoxes that broadly characterized Hindu theological discourse. His approach presents an alternative to the treatment of difference within doxographical frameworks, which subsume or reject difference according to a normative hierarchy of authoritative discourse.