Michaelmas Term 2026

Thursday 22 October

2.00–3.00pm

Week 2, OCHS

Was Sāṃkhya non-Vedic?

Professor Knut Jacobsen

As late as in the 8th century CE, the philosopher and promoter of Advaita Vedānta, Śaṅkara argued strongly and repeatedly in his Brahmasūtrabhāṣya that the Sāṃkhya system of religious thought was a non-Vedic system, that it had no support in the Veda and was even fundamentally opposed to the Vedic views. He argued that the two main doctrines of Sāṃkhya, the independence of pradhāna or prakṛti (principle of matter) and the plurality of puruṣas (principle of consciousness) were unacceptable and opposed to the Veda because they were contradicted by the doctrine of the oneness of brahman. There are good reasons to accept that Śaṅkara was right, that Sāṃkhya was non-Vedic. However, Sāṃkhya did later appear as an āstika tradition and was included among the so-called six darśanas and this inclusion gives the impression of Sāṃkhya having a Vedic origin. In this lecture I evaluate the arguments for a non-Vedic origin of Sāṃkhya in scholarship and in the Sanskrit sources and its appearance as an āstika tradition.

Thursday 19 November

2.00–3.00pm

Week 6, OCHS

Non-theism in Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga

Professor Knut Jacobsen

The Sāṃkhya system of thought is a non-theistic tradition as is evident from its foundation text the Sāṃkhyakārikā and its commentaries. The Pātañjala Sāṃkhya of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (Yogasūtra and Vyāsabhāṣya) originated as part of Sāṃkhya. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra nevertheless includes a figure called īśvara. In this lecture I argue that interpretations of īśvara in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra need to take seriously that Pātañjala Sāṃkhya originated as part of the non-theism of Sāṃkhya philosophy. I argue that īśvara was included only in connection with descriptions of a meditation practice and that the Yoga system remained non-theistic in its ontology. Īśvara did not constitute an additional tattva, and when the structure of the divine worlds is described in Pātañjalayogaśāstra, īśvara is not included at all.

How is it then that the idea of a monotheistic-like God became so central in some later and contemporary interpretations of Yogasūtra and in traditions of yoga connected to that text? The lecture will suggest some reasons for the tendency to give monotheistic readings of īśvara in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, which have implications for the contemporary understanding of Yoga.

Tuesday 10 November

2.00–3.00pm

Week 5, OCHS

The Nātha Who Moves the City: Buṅgadyaḥ (Karuṇāmaya, Rāto Matsyendranātha), Tantric Kingship, and Ritual Placemaking in Nepal

Dr Rajan Khatiwoda

Each spring, the deity Buṅgadyaḥ is drawn through the streets of Patan, Nepal, on a towering wooden chariot — a procession that has, over centuries, absorbed the identity of Matsyendranātha, founding guru of the Nātha-siddha lineage and a figure already present in the eleventh-century Kaulajñānanirṇaya. This talk traces how a deity worshipped by Buddhists as Avalokiteśvara came, under late medieval Malla kingship, to be identified with this pan-Indic tantric master, and how that identification served as an idiom of royal legitimacy within a largely Buddhist ritual frame. Drawing on epigraphic and ethnographic material from a volume forthcoming from Heidelberg University Publishing, which I have co-edited, the talk follows the procession’s own choreography — its halting-points, crossroads, and guthi-administered ritual labour — to ask what it means for a tantric siddha to become a mobile, city-making presence, and situates this Himalayan case within broader Hindu-Śākta histories of siddha-cults and sacred urban geography.

Thursday 3 December

2.00–3.00pm

Week 8, OCHS

Tathya and Satya: Tagore’s Two Truths

Dr Natasha Chawla

What kind of truth does a fact miss? Across the Śāntiniketan discourses (1908–14) and, more explicitly, in his later writings on literature, Rabindranath Tagore distinguishes between tathya and satya: the world apprehended as fact and the world encountered as truth. A river measured, mapped and catalogued is tathya; that same river met within larger unity of relation approaches what Tagore calls satya.

This lecture reconstructs that distinction from Tagore’s Bengali and English writings, where it has received little sustained philosophical attention, and asks what work it does in his religious thought. At first glance, tathya and satya can look rather like the Advaita distinction between vyāvahārika and pāramārthika reality. I argue that something important is lost when we assimilate the two. Advaita asks about the ontological status of the world from empirical and ultimate standpoints. Tagore’s tathya/satya distinction asks what happens when the fragment is apprehended in isolation and when it is disclosed within a larger unity of relation. Satya does not simply negate tathya or expose it as unreal. It discloses what the fragment cannot disclose in isolation.

That difference matters beyond the interpretation of Tagore: the stakes are ecological. Climate change, species loss and ecological degradation are measured, modelled and documented in extraordinary detail. Yet such knowledge has not produced commensurate action. Tagore’s distinction offers one way of thinking about why. The problem may not simply be that we lack knowledge of the living world, but that knowledge has not yet become relation. The passage from inventory to address, I suggest, does not ask for more information about the living world, but for a different way of standing before it.

Thursday 15 October

2.00–3.00pm

Week 1, OCHS

Lecture 1: The Metaphysics of the Act

Sacrifice is at the foundation of the history of Indian thinking about the nature of the world, God, and human beings. There is a large literature that focusses on ritual action from early Vedic texts to ritual manuals (paddhatis) in the medieval period. This emphasis on action in the Brahmanical imagination led to the development of the school of Vedic exegesis, the Mīmāṃsā, which presents a philosophy of action that the lecture will explore. For the Mīmāṃsā, the most significant feature of human reality is that we act: action is the most distinctive human feature, more important than cognition, because action has consequences in the world. Above all, as human beings we need to be concerned with action as enjoined by scriptural revelation, thus ritual action. The ritual act for the Mīmāṃsā, namely the sacrifice, is performed not to achieve a specific purpose, such as going to heaven at death, but because it is enjoined by scripture. The Mīmāṃsā is thus reflection not so much on ritual per se but on the nature of Vedic language. We should act in conformity to dharma, truth or duty, and the founding text of the philosophical school, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, opens with the statement: ‘Now the inquiry into Dharma’.

Thursday 29 October

2.00–3.00pm

Week 3, OCHS

Lecture 2: The Existence of God

Although the Mīmāṃsā reflected on action and language as the essential components of any account of what it is to be human, there were also systems that presented more abstract arguments for the existence of a putative theistic reality, particularly the Nyāya or Logical School and the Śaiva schools. We will describe these arguments and place them in relation to wider cultural concerns about the act and raise the question as to what these arguments sought to achieve and for whom they were written.

Thursday 12 November

2.00–3.00pm

Week 5, OCHS

Lecture 3: Implicit Metaphysics in the Netra-tantra

A focus on action and drawing from it a metaphysics or proto-philosophy, is found in the Netra-tantra, originally composed in the seventh or eighth centuries. This text is replete with suggestions for performance in different deity systems, yet retains a conceptual and textual coherence. We will examine the idea of a trans-cosmic reality in the text, how this manifests in and as world, and how different systems of action (ritual and meditation) lead to that reality.

Thursday 26 November

2.00–3.00pm

Week 7, OCHS

Lecture 4: Explicit Metaphysics of Non-Dual Śaivism

The dualist school of the religion of Śiva, the Śaiva Siddhānta, is rooted in ritual action which it regards as salvific. Through certain acts following initiation by the master who embodies Śiva for the duration of the rite, the practitioner can be saved from suffering in the cycle of action. Metaphysics here is on the leash of the ritual act. By contrast the non-dual Śaivas regarded the distinctions of human reality to be based on a misguided cognition that needs to be replaced by the recognition (pratyabhijñā) that cognition or gnosis (jñāna), not action, is salvific. This philosophy is supported by the appropriation of the philosophy of language. We will present a description of this system and raise questions about coherence and meaning.

Friday 16 October

2.00–3.00pm

Week 1, OCHS

Jain Āsana Yoga: Textual History and Practical Perspective

Dr Samani Pratibha Pragya

This lecture examines the historical development and practical dimensions of Jain postural yoga (āsana) with particular attention to the textual traditions in which bodily postures are represented, interpreted, and practiced. Rather than investigating āsana exclusively through the categories of modern postural yoga, the study situates Jain approaches to bodily discipline within broader Jain understandings of asceticism, meditation, restraint, and embodied practice. It traces references to postures across select Jain textual sources and considers how these descriptions relate to changing conceptions of the disciplined body.

The paper also explores the practical significance of āsana in Jain contexts, including its relationship to meditation, ritual practice, and ascetic discipline. By bringing textual evidence into dialogue with embodied practice, the study highlights the distinctive features of Jain approaches to posture while also considering their place within the wider history of South Asian physical and contemplative traditions.

Wednesday 21 October

2.30–3.30pm

Week 2, OCHS

Engaged Jain Studies: Methods for Studying Engaged Jainism

Professor Christopher Jain Miller

Jains have espoused nonviolence and compassion for millennia, continually redefining and reengaging these and other principles with their changing social realities. Using case studies from contributors’ chapters in Engaged Jainism (SUNY 2026), I will present a three-fold set of inclusive methodological tendencies used in engaged Jain studies to study the field’s object, engaged Jainism.

These three tendencies include: 1) the constructive-reproductive model, through which researchers unquestioningly repeat emic Jain discourse, thereby reproducing approaches to the study of the Jain tradition initiated by romantic Orientalist scholars of the nineteenth century, 2) the critical-analytical model, which uses critical etic frameworks for analyzing emic Jain discourse, and has origins in colonial Orientalist studies of Jainism, and 3) the critical-constructive model, which draws from both the “critical-analytical” and “constructive-reproductive” models, engages etic epistemic frameworks with emic epistemic frameworks, and in the process remains open to the transformation of both scholars and Jains in the research process.

Participants will take away a renewed understanding of the ways that Jain social engagement can be effectively studied in the academy today, particularly in light of the manifold ways that scholars and universities engage with members of the Jain community supporting their research.

Wednesdays 28 October and 25 November

2.30–4.00pm

Weeks 3 and 7, OCHS

Senior Seminars in Indian Philosophy

Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier

Speakers to be announced.

Fridays

4.00–5.00pm

Faculty of Theology and Religion

Hinduism: Sources and Formations

Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and development of Hindu traditions from their early formation to the medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The lectures will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy.

Thursdays

12.00–1.00pm

OCHS

Readings in Vedānta

Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Vedānta, theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads, has for centuries been the primary discourse for Hindu thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts.

Mondays

4.00–5.30pm

Fridays

10.00–11.30am

OCHS

Sanskrit

Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.

Sanskrit Prelims. A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.

Pali Prelims. The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1–4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes.

Mondays

12.00–1.00pm

OCHS

Readings in Phenomenology

Professor Gavin Flood FBA

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will read Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (CUP, 2002).

Mondays

11.00am–12.00pm

OCHS

Readings in Elementary Sanskrit for Theologians

Professor Gavin Flood FBA

Students who have completed Sanskrit Prelims find that there is no further opportunity to continue the skills they have acquired. These readings are intended to partly address that and enable students to continue. We will read ‘the Story of Nala’ from Lanman’s Sanskrit Reader.