Bodymind as a cognitive tool in Pratyabhijñā philosophy of nondual Śaivism of Kashmir

This paper is a summary of my MA dissertation and the beginning of planned doctoral work.

How do we know what we know? If, as Marcel Mauss concluded, “the body is man's first and most natural instrument,” (‘Techniques of the Body,' 1934), it applies to knowledge generation too. This paper proposes that the bodymind system (puryaṣṭaka) as described in Pratyabhijñā philosophy of nondual Śaivism is indeed not just the first but the foremost instrument of cognition.

Pratyabhijñā means ‘re-cognition.' As a school of thought, it was founded in Kashmir circa 900 CE by Somānanda and further developed and elucidated by his disciples Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. It is referred to as a ‘path of cognising' (saṃvedanapatha) or a means of cognition (jñānopāya), of knowing the nature of things on the many levels of conceptual and absolute reality. Central to this philosophy is knowledge gained through direct experience and thus fundamental to it is the empirical ‘I' – the ‘I' equipped with puryaṣṭaka, or eight tools of intellect, ego, mind and the five senses. 

This paper draws on the foundational texts of the Pratyabhijñā tradition, primarily the Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā of Utpaladeva and its exegesis by Abhinavagupta, to present the concept of the bodymind (puryaṣṭaka) as a cognitive tool essential to knowledge generation. It critiques what Thomas Nagel (1986) called ‘the view from nowhere' and argues that the only knowable reality is one mediated by the subject. It draws parallels with Western phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, thus bridging the gap between Eastern and Western philosophy scholarship. Finally, it argues that the ultimate means of knowing – and hence the nature of consciousness, – is direct perception rather than its description through language, and in this way reinstates the bodymind in the centre of cognitive processes.