Content varies with student interests. The course will normally focus on classical Buddhist texts that exist in multiple recensions and languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.
Spring 2022:
Limitlessness. Intertextual understanding of perceptual thresholds and liminality, between sutta, śāstra, sūtra and bhāṣya
Daily and habitual perceptual experiences exposes us to one of the most intricate and obscure cognitive dilemmas. Starting from the mere move into the spatial domain, in fact, we have to cope with the phantasmatic phenomena of thresholds, limits, borders, constrains. Each and every shape we sees, sound we hears, odour we smells, surface we touches, flavour we tastes, appear to us, simultaneously, limited as unlimited, clear and precise as blurred and indistinguishable. Everything that reaches our five senses seems to be ambiguous and double. Therefore, every single ‘thing’ looks like equivocal and uncertain: all the realia are cognised as limited and unlimited, confined and boundless, inaccessible and accessible, closed and open, finite and infinite, calculable and incalculable, comprehensible and incomprehensible. Given the cognitive relevance and practical outcomes of such a problematic situation – which is contained within the Sanskrit term of bheda (in lat. limen)–, it is not surprising to know that it was extremely important for the authors of the first mahāyānasūtras, as well as for those to whom the various works written in the form of kārikā, sūtra, śāstra, tantra and bhāṣya during the first five centuries of the common era are attributed. Authors and works that participate to different traditions and worldviews –such as sāṃkhya, yoga, vyākaraṇa, vaiśeṣika, cikitsā, abhidharma, madhyamaka, yogācāra– and that were proposing different, and often antithetical, perspectives (darśana). The totality of these works, indeed, constitutes the vast intertextual corpus to which those interested in the problem of perceptual thresholds and liminality cognition can devote their attention. During this seminar the perceptual dilemma of limitlessness will be explored and illustrated through a parallel and intertextual reading of selected passages taken from Vasubandhu’s works and from Patañjali's Yogasūtra, after the analysis of which the interpretative advantage derived from the synoptic reading of texts belonging to different intellectual traditions could be experienced and tested.
