Speaking of the individual: the work of Prakāśātman and the beginnings of a theory of language in classical Advaita-Vedānta

Vedānta is generally known as one of the six “systems” (darśana) of classical Brahmanical philosophy, mainly defined by its metaphysical and soteriological positions. However, its proponents – Maṇḍana Miśra and Śaṅkara to begin with, who initiated its “non-dualist” trend – considered themselves first of all as specialists of Vedic exegesis (mīmāṃsā) and, at least for some of them, of general linguistics. In this lecture, Hugo David will present this by now largely forgotten line of thought on language in its first systematic formulations around the 10th century AD. Attention will be drawn on one of its main figures, Prakāśātman, the author of an important synthesis on this topic, the Śābdanirṇaya (“An enquiry into verbal knowledge”). A brief consideration of two of its main theses will allow us to catch a glimpse of the intellectual context in which they were conceived, and of the misinterpretations to which they gave rise in later tradition, as they became the common heritage of the school in the first centuries of the second millennium. Hugo David, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des sciences religieuses, is a Gonda Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)