The Great Awakening of Life: an Existential Phenomenological Interpretation of the Mahat-Buddhi in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā
| Autor: | Geoffrey Ashton |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
060303 religions & theology
Interpretation (philosophy) Philosophy 05 social sciences 0507 social and economic geography Metaphysics 06 humanities and the arts Tattva 0603 philosophy ethics and religion 050701 cultural studies Existentialism Epistemology Existential phenomenology Discernment Meaning (existential) Transcendental number |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Dharma Studies. 1:97-109 |
| ISSN: | 2522-0934 2522-0926 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s42240-018-0010-8 |
| Popis: | The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s “mahat-buddhi” appears to be riddled with obscurity. Standard realist interpreters struggle to explain its cumbersome, textually unsupported bivalence, namely, how the mahat-buddhi can represent both a cosmological entity and a psychological capacity. Idealist readings, meanwhile, neglect the historically deep ontological meaning of this tattva by reducing it to a power of the transcendental ego. This paper moves beyond the impasse of the realism-idealism framework for interpreting the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and examines the mahat-buddhi through the existential phenomenology of Jose Ortega y Gasset. It begins by re-framing classical Sāṃkhya metaphysics as an existential phenomenology of life, whereby life—as lived reality, not an external physical world or a field of mental experience—conveys the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti. From this, the paper then argues that the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take other-beings-as. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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