Was Bhartṛhari a Buddhist?

[Zhen Li]

Reading Bhartṛhari is like reading the Udanavarga. Yijing claimed he was a Buddhist, but some scholars disagree. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I prefer being bitten by a terrible serpent,
Long, wanton, tortuous, gleaming like a black lotus
To being smitten by her eye.
Healers are everywhere to cure one of a serpent bite,
But there is no spell or remedy for me;
I was struck by the glance of a beautiful woman! (129)

All desire for pleasure has waned,
The esteem of men has ebbed;
Beloved friends and peers of life
Now are lost to heaven;
The simplest movement requires a cane;
These eyes are veiled in darkness.
How bold this body is to fear
The final blow of death! (153)

My face is graven with wrinkles
My head is marked with grey,
My limbs are withered and feeble -
My craving alone keeps its youth. (156)

Her breasts, those fleshy protuberances,
are compared to golden bowls;
her face, a vile receptacle of phlegm,
is likened to the moon;
her thighs, dank with urine, are said
to rival the elephant's trunk --
mark how this despicable form
is flourished by the poets. (159)

Hope is a river
Whose water is desire,
Whose waves are craving.
Passions are crocodiles,
Conjectures are birds
Destroying the tree of resolve.
Anxiety carves a deep ravine
And makes the whirlpool of delusion
Makes it difficult to ford.
Let ascetics who cross
To the opposite shore
Exult in their purified minds. (173)


While his body's vigor is whole
And old age is remote;
While his sensuous powers are unimpaired
And life not yet exhausted;
Only then would a wise man
Strive to perfect his soul.
Why attempt to dig a well
When the house is already burning? (194)


I failed to master the knowledge
Needed to conquer the host of polemists
Abroad in the world.
I did nothing to spread my fame
Across the sky on the rapier
Made to pierce martial elephant's heads.
I never sipped the moonrise nectar
From women's beautiful,
Tender, blossom lips.
Alas, I passed a futile youth
Like a flaming lamp
In an empty house. (195)

A man lives long who lives a hundred years:
Yet half is sleep, and half the rest again
Old age and childhood. For the rest, a man
Lives close companion to disease and tears,
Losing his love, working for other men
Where can joy find a space in this short span? (200)

More.

[Wayfarer]

I was alerted to Bhartrihardi on another forum, and found an interesting article on him in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which says he is not Buddhist, but was 'mistaken for a Buddhist by Yijing'. The intro to the article says:

Bhartrihari may be considered one of the most original philosophers of language and religion in ancient India. He is known primarily as a grammarian, but his works have great philosophical significance, especially with regard to the connections they posit between grammar, logic, semantics, and ontology. His thought may be characterized as part of the shabdadvaita (word monistic) school of thought, which asserts that cognition and language at an ultimate level are ontologically identical concepts that refer to one supreme reality, Brahman. Bhartrihari interprets the notion of the originary word (shabda) as transcending the bounds of spoken and written language and meaning. Understood as shabda tattva-the “word principle,” this complex idea explains the nature of consciousness, the awareness of all forms of phenomenal appearances, and posits an identity obtains between these, which is none other than Brahman. It is thus language as a fundamentally ontological principle that accounts for how we are able to conceptualize and communicate the awareness of objects. The metaphysical notion of shabda Brahman posits the unity of all existence as the foundation for all linguistically designated individual phenomena.

I would have thought that these kinds of notions about the reality of language and signifiers put him well outside Buddhist philosophy, which is basically nominalist, i.e. denies the reality of universals.

Article is here.

[Sherlock]

Some verses in those poems seem to call to mind Buddhist metaphors.

"ascetics who cross to the opposite shore" = Buddhists as opposed to tirthika ascetics.

I think it is difficult to state outright that Buddhist philosophies of language were all strictly "nominalist" in the Western sense, look at what Kukai says for example:

[Answer:] Sanskrit script originated in the ever-present principle [i.e., of
emptiness, the originally nonarising], and Chinese script arose from delusions
( miizii). Therefore, Sanskrit script is true and Chinese script is false.
[Question:] Sanskrit script may have arisen from the ever-present principle.
However, the same script is used by heretical schools in India. These are
false teachings. On the other hand, Chinese script may have originated in
delusions, but it is used in Buddhist scriptures, which represent the true
teaching. How is it possible, then, to identifY Sanskrit script as true and
Chinese script as false?
[Answer:] Sanskrit script is formed from the originally pure, untainted principle.
Its use by heretics does not affect this inherent quality. After all, a
piece of rubbish floating on the sea does not alter the purity of the water.
By contrast, although Chinese script is used by both non-Buddhists and
Buddhists, its essentially delusive quality, which can only produce further
delusions, remains unchanged. Therefore with regard to these two scripts,
there is a clear distinction between the true and the false.

[Zhen Li]

Jeeprs: What you say makes much sense -- but what if the grammarian Bhartṛhari and the poet Bhartṛhari are two different people? This is always a possibility and has been theorised before. Moreover, he could also very well have converted, you see the verses clearly show a lot of world-weary experience that seems to speak from the perspective of someone who is aged, perhaps when he was advanced in years he converted. Then, there's also the possibility that he very well may have believed in both traditions at once -- an early manifestation of what is a very common, almost ubiquitous trend in the late-Indian Buddhist phase.

Sherlock: That's very interesting, I had no idea Kukai held such views.

[Wayfarer]

What if the grammarian Bhartṛhari and the poet Bhartṛhari are two different people?

Actually, now you mention it, I don't know. I might have jumped to a conclusion. However the article I linked to says that the one who was the grammarian was mis-identified as Buddhist by a Chinese traveller called Yijing, so I think it would be a bit much of a co-incidence if Yijing had mis-identified two different 'Bhartrihari's' as Buddhist!

[Greg]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106624592/Bha ... 986-600dpi

May be worth a look . . .

[Zhen Li]

Actually, now you mention it, I don't know. I might have jumped to a conclusion. However the article I linked to says that the one who was the grammarian was mis-identified as Buddhist by a Chinese traveller called Yijing, so I think it would be a bit much of a co-incidence if Yijing had mis-identified two different 'Bhartrihari's' as Buddhist!

There is, moreover, the question of precisely how common the name Bhartṛhari was, or how much we can say that each of the texts attributed to him are actually by a single author, let alone one called Bhatṛhari. I recall reading that many of the verses in the śatakas are likely of late addition.

And thanks Greg for the link. I certainly don't have time these days to go into the topic in much depth, but it'll be a nice reference if ever I were to at a later date.