TheVādakautūhalaof Svāmiśāstrin and Bhāskararāya (Part I): A Debate in Late Mīmāmṃsā

While the theory and practice of debate have been major parts of traditional Sanskrit intellectual culture for more than two millennia, actual transcripts or records of debates in the precolonial period are extremely rare.From the earliest śāstras available to us, paradigmatically Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya (c 150 BC), the presentation of one's claims involves staging a quasi-debate with an imagined opponent, who may or may not correspond to an actual interlocutor.Dating at least back to the early 1st millennium AD, there was a genre of texts on debate theory amongst Sanskrit intellectuals, and we have numerous literary references to actual debates between rival scholars.Despite this, however, we have virtually no transcripts of debates before the eighteenth century that we are aware of.Around the middle of the 2nd millennium, single-authored texts that mimic formal debates more closely begin to appear.Appayyadīkṣita's Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā presents a series of investigations into hermeneutical questions staged as debates between what he describes as a proponent (vādin) and opponent (prativādin).