NOVELTY OF FORM AND NOVELTY OF SUBSTANCE IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MĪMĀṂSĀ

The most immediately apparent and most readily explicable occasion for such use is in the conduct of interscholastic debate, either with the New Logicians themselves, or with others who make heavy use of Navyanyaya in their own arguments most notably the New Grammarians.Sanskrit philosophy of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century produced a tremendously intense debate over the nature of language, chiefly between the grammarians, logicians, and Mmam. sakas all three fields saw the production of works devoted solely to the analyzing the structure of verbal awareness (s abdabodha);3 Khan. d.adevas own.atantrarahasya, his third and last major work, is the most important entry to this debate from the Mmam. sa side.4 While the arguments deployed on all sides are complex, this debate turns ultimately on a few key questions what is the primary qualificand (pradh ana vi ses. ya) of the verbal awareness arising from a sentence? by what part of the sentence is this primary qualificand expressed? and, exactly how do theBh at.tNOVELTY OF FORM AND NOVELTY OF SUBSTANCE 483other components of a sentence meaning construe with this primary element to produce a coherent sense? [...]the positions on the most basic question rather crudely, the Logicians argue that the primary qualificannd of a typical sentence is whatever is signified by the term (or terms) marked with the nominative case what we would in English call the grammatical subject. While the sacrifice and the soma are both mentioned as instruments, and both construe as principal qualifiers (prak aras) of one and the same bh avan a, the instrumentality of the sacrifice and that of the soma are described (nir upita) by two different entities: by heaven, in one case, and sacrifice itself in the other the respective results toward which each is conducive. [...]the two instrumentalities are not identical, represent two distinct qualifications of the bh avan a, and therefore do not in any way obstruct or preclude one another. Most notably, Khan. d. adeva now openly admits what he had earlier tried to downplay that his argument completely overturns what had heretofore been the unquestioned Mmam. s a view of this issue; it seems somehow more than a coincidence that this open declaration of a new doctrine is coupled with even the limited and selective introduction of a new way of talking about the question in hand. [...]the language of describers offers Khan. dd.adeva a ready made tool for specifying what exactly it is