Introduction: Sankara, Possession, and the Self

Extract

The articles published here arose from a panel at the 2010 meeting of the Dharma Academy of North America with the title ‘Selves and Experience: Śaṅkara and The Self Possessed’. This discussion was inspired by Frederick M. Smith's monumental and influential study of possession in South Asia. In that book, the reader encounters two Śaṅkaras. One is an austere philosopher whose writings seem to accord scant importance to any worldly experience, even one as powerful as possession. The second Śaṅkara is the hero of ‘popular’ hagiography, who himself possesses someone, bringing back to life the just dead king Amaruka to learn about erotics in his harem. Taken together, these articles explore the role of experience in the attainment of saving knowledge (and other kinds of knowledge) and the nature of the self conjured up in writing by and about Śaṅkara.

In ‘Śaṅkara, Smith, and “Experience”€’, Andrew O. Fort says that he writes as ‘an Advaitin pūrvapakṣin’, who does nothing less than question the conjunction of Śaṅkara and experience which all these articles address. He parenthetically clarifies that a pūrvapakṣin is a ‘first objector’. Philosophical works in South Asia have often been written as if they are transcripts of arguments, with the exposition of a point pushed along by objections, which are resolved by the author to establish his own position. Fort's objection is that the ultimate truth in Śaṅkara's philosophical works is the realisation of an ‘impersonal and unchanging self’ divorced from any ordinary experience, even an experience as potentially profound as possession. Fort does allow that thought provoking questions can be asked about the nature of the worldly self both in Indian and in western traditions, but he still insists in the end that they are irrelevant to Śaṅkara's highest concerns. In Sanskrit philosophical works, the pūrvapakṣa is often a more or less naïve prima facie argument that is quickly demolished on the road to the author's own siddhānta, the finally established truth. To the extent that Fort holds to his objection at the end of his paper, it reads more like a siddhānta than a pūrvapakṣa.