RELIGION Ù 283 Summary of Papers The editors would like to thank all the authors for having engaged in this project and for the fruitful and suggestive discussions that characterised the Workshop. What follows is an attempt to present a brief reasoned résumé of the contributions highlighting the richness of cues and insights that emerged from the presentation and discussion of papers. Special thanks are due to Dr Sally Davies for revising the English of the whole volume. PART I. TECHNICAL AND SPECULATIVE R EFLECTIONS SIGNLESS SIGNIFICATION ON A LBERTO PELISSERO (University of Turin, Italy). Contact: [email protected] Much Ado about Nothing: Unsystematic Notes on śūnya The paper is an overview of the themes and debates developed in India around the term and concept of śūnya ‘void’. After a brief survey on the origin of the term, Pelissero focuses on the concept of śūnya in Buddhist (mainly Mādhyamika) thought and underlines its being a kind of paradigm of discursive thought: the inherent relational nature of void is a mirror of the mutual dependent nature of any natural phenomenon. As the author timely reminds us “Candrakīrti will declare that vacuity, śūnyatā, acts for intellectual activity as a purge acts for the body”. Unsurprisingly, in a parallel way, Buddhists extend the usage of apophaticism, from it’s original mystic function of expressing the ineffable, to everyday language through the theory of (anya) apoha i.e. of framing the meaning of a word through the ‘exclusion of the other’. Other well-known devic- 284 Ù SIGNLESS SIGNIFICATION IN ANCIENT INDIA AND BEYOND es to express the ineffable show a similar problematic relationship with the otherwise well established couple sign/signified, be it for the absence of the specific sign, such as it happens in metaphorical usage of words or for its inconsistency, as it happens in paradoxes. ELISA FRESCHI (“Sapienza” University, Rome, Italy). Contact: [email protected] TIZIANA PONTILLO (University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected] When One Thing Applies More than Once: tantra and prasaṅga in Śrautasūtra, Mīmāṃsā and Grammar Freschi and Pontillo focus their attention on the usage and cultural history of two crucial terms in Sanskrit technical literature, namely tantra (for which the translation ‘centralised application’ is proposed) and prasaṅga (interpreted as an ‘automatic involvement’). Both belong to a class of devices used to ‘extend’ the validity of a given rule outside its proper domain or the application of a given element even in contexts where it is absent. As the authors point out, these devices of functioning in absentia entail an organized spatial dimension (a map following the metaphor used in Kahrs 1998), which transforms an absolute absence in a specific one. An organized space (such as language and also ritual) makes a blank grid significant. In this organised space tantra and prasaṅga represent two different strategies of filling blanks (or, which is the same thing the other way round, of granting multiple applications of a single item); the first one is grounded on ‘a common texture, of which all elements benefit’ (something akin to the modern concept of anaphora) while prasaṅga “represents an extended application, to be carried out if it makes things easier and if needed” (just as it happens in secondary signification). M ARIA PIERA C ANDOTTI (University of Lausanne, Switzerland/ Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected] TIZIANA PONTILLO (University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected] The Earlier Pāṇinian Tradition on the Imperceptible Sign The paper targets one of the fields where, for the longest time, there has been a definite awareness of the potentialities of a blank sign both in western traditions (with the different theories of zeroing) and in grammatical tradition beginning with the Pāṇinian device of lopa ‘zero-replacement’. The aim of the contribution is to prove that the lopa-device must be put in the wider framework of substitution in order to understand all its features and account for its potentialities. Substitution is the blocking of an otherwise automatically involved (prasakta, a term formed from the same basis SUMMARY OF PAPERS RELIGION as prasaṅga) element through another element specifically taught that ‘takes its place’. Yet, the functions the new element carries out are exactly those of the absent element, and this is true even when the substitute specifically taught has no phonic realisation. Again, it is the role of the organized space (here the language system in its totality) that arises as a crucial prerequisite to make absence as much significant as presence. PAOLO CORDA (University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected]. The Infinite Possibilities of Life. Interpretations of the Śūnyatā in the Thinking of Daisaku Ikeda Corda’s contribution makes us take a great leap forward both in time and space and shows the long lasting presence of Nāgārjuna’s thought on emptiness (Śunyatā) till to contemporary times. This is the case of Daisaku Ikeda, a contemporary thinker and Nichiren Buddhist leader, who interpreted vacuity as potentiality, “not as a mere physical space characterized by the absence of objects [...], but as a situational context fraught with possibilities, from which the multiple manifestations of life arise”. An interpretation in which also the well-known ‘silence of the Buddha’, the most excellent amongst the speakers, on metaphysical matters is reinterpreted not as the only possible answer to the aporias of phenomenal world, but rather as an intellectual attitude propitiating “the cessation of conceptual constructions, i.e. of the proliferations of discursive thought”. PART II. R EFLECTIONS ON SIGNLESS SIGNIFICATION LITERATURE AND A RTS IN CINZIA PIERUCCINI (University of Milan, Italy). Contact: [email protected] Presences and Absences in Indian Visual Arts: Ideologies and Events The paper offers some preliminary and foundational thoughts on the changing patterns of presence and absence that characterise the transmission of artistic works and monuments in India. In the modern representation of Indian art different types of absences can be identified, primary ones (such as – at least in part – in the “aniconic” Vedic culture), fortuitous (due to the material used/ to historical vicissitudes), deliberate (pillage and destructions) or induced (e.g. by modern excavation trends and programmes). It is interesting to note how some unintentional absences (such as absences due to usage of perishable material) nevertheless become significant a posteriori helping, for example, in drawing a divide between public works of art made with costly and durable material and private articrafts. Ù 285 286 Ù SIGNLESS SIGNIFICATION IN ANCIENT INDIA AND BEYOND MIMMA CONGEDO (University of Milan, Italy). Contact: [email protected] PAOLA ROSSI (University of Milan, Italy). Contact: [email protected] Rethinking the Question of Images (Aniconism vs Iconism) in the Indian History of Art The authors address from an innovative point of view the vexed question of the use of images in Indian arts and of the supposed deep divide between a Vedic aniconic cultural and religious context and Hindu image worship. To these well-known categories – whose limits in accounting for Indian culture and art have been recently highlighted – the authors attempt to substitute Umberto Eco’s 1984 re-interpretation of ‘symbolic’ and ‘allegoric’ medieval meaning modalities. Modern categories nonetheless echoed in terms and concepts as, for example, in the pair pramā/pratimā analyzed in the second part of the paper. In the symbolic modality the (ritual) object is just a means to attract the divine into the ritual arena, a divine “that is revealed as fully present when its presence is not taken for granted, but evoked to fill an absence”. The allegory, on the other hand, is a sclerotization of the symbol, where the presence of the divine is taken for granted, substituted by the object. Even though the authors rightly insist in denying a perfect equivalence ‘symbolic’ = ‘aniconic’ and ‘allegoric’ = ‘iconic’, it is interesting how some specific traits of the symbolic modality, such as its inherently impermanent bond with the divine it evokes, match well with some typical ‘zero’ linguistic phenomena such as metaphor. The impermanence and relativity itself of signless signs are core factors of their semantic creativity, of their being evocative more than denotative in nature. PATRIZIA MUREDDU (University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected] Denotation in absentia in Literary Language: The case of Aristophanic Comedy The paper presents a savoury review of the artistic and comic potentialities of what Mureddu calls ‘defective communication’, that is a communication that asks for an active participation and integration from the hearer to come to fruition. Among the most striking devices of this defective communication, the author presents a) some cases of extreme metonymy where a single word stands for complex set of information coming from previous parts of the comedy asking for an active involvement of the spectator in the comic mechanism b) some cases of extension of a well-known adverbial construction with zero of the adverbial suffix and c) some lengthy compounds where even the active participation of the hearer is not sufficient to focus on the intended sense out of a chaotic bundling of heterogeneous elements. In all these cases “the lack of explicit determination is part of the game, of the challenge that the comic SUMMARY OF PAPERS RELIGION author proposes to his audience” and “the laughter (or at least the smile) that results, serves as recognition of the author’s expertise, but perhaps derives also from the interpreter complimenting himself on his own perspicacity”. RUBEN FAIS (former Curator of the Museo Civico d’Arte Siamese Stefano Cardu, Cagliari). Contact: [email protected] The Birth of the Buddha in the Early Buddhist Art Schools The contribution focuses on the yet unsolved issue of the aniconic representation of the Birth of the Buddha, the first of the so-called Great Miracles. The author concentrates on three different but sometimes co-existing iconic themes – the lotus, the vase and the sprinkling of the woman by the elephants – and look for testimony of such images in coeval and later Buddhist texts to help in their interpretation. Instead of looking for a one-to-one relationship between a single iconic element and the miracle of Birth, the author propounds a dynamic interpretation of the three elements that together are able “to subsume the entire cycle of the birth into a single framework.” The lotus in the vase (with the occasional addition of the elephant theme) is thus not a mere sign used to denote so to say the birth of the Buddha but it is a complex symbol that, though in an aniconic way, describes it. P REMA BHAT (Emory University, Atlanta, U.S.A.). Contact: [email protected] PAOLO BRAVI (Conservatorio Pierluigi da Palestrina, Cagliari). Contact: [email protected] IGNAZIO M ACCHIARELLA (University of Cagliari, Italy). Contact: [email protected] Untranslatable Denotations. Notes on Music Meaning Through Cultures The contribution here presented is a sort of the transcription of a continuative “intercultural” dialogue held by the three authors on the themes of the meaning of music and on the translatability of that meaning. Starting from Claude Lévi Strauss powerful insight that music combines the contradictory character of being at the same time comprehensible (universally comprehensible, following a wide spread stereotype) and untranslatable, the authors identify one of the causes of this untranslatability in the vagueness and volatility of musical meaning. In fact music cannot be interpreted in jacobsonian terms as “support”, capable of transferring meaning from a sender to a listener, that is it is not comparable with language, since only its “morphological” level is always available, while its “meaning” has to rely on something else, which is not included in the sign itself. Its strong communicative power shall find another frame of description. Ù 287