Faculty of classical and modern pfilology

In the focus of the current paper is Kenopaniṣat, composed in the circles of the Sāmavedic ritual experts and sages. The current paper aimed at interpreting the question of the metaphysical discourse in the Upaniṣad in the perspective of the contemporary European pragmatics and speech-act theory.
An attempt is made to point out the capacity and significance of the question and the questioning in the process of the radical transformation of the disciple from the condition of ignorance (avidyā) into condition of insight and enlightenment (vidyā).

Introducing the teaching of “Māṇḍūkya upaniṣad” concerning the code sound OM/AUM, understood as a primordial, metaphysical foundation and model of the Universe and of the individual consciousness, the present article is aimed at interpreting it, the one hand, as a crossroads of ideas about sound, speech and language, evolved over a period of many centuries in Vedic culture and encoded in the texts of Vedic canon preceding the Upanishads, and on the other – as a starting point of remarkable philosophy of language, whose most significant achievements are associated with the linguistic theories of Bhartṛhari (V?) and Abhinavagupta (X–XI c.). The proposed analysis is focused on the definition of Ātmán as catuṣpāt (“fourfold”, "consisting of four parts"), which is crucial for understanding the relation of Ātmán with the syllable OM. It functions, according to my view, as a kind of intertext through which we could trace the different associative chains of “Māṇḍūkya’s ideas with insights into the nature of the speech and language encoded in some emblematic hymns of the Ṛgveda, especially with the Ṛgvedic concept of the fourfold Speech (catvāri vāk).

Gadjanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–1964) is one of the most prominent writers in Hindi Literature of twentieth century. The sophisticated poetry of this strange and enigmatic poet has been recognized by the critics today as an unique achievement of the contemporary Indian Literature.
One of his works is entitled “The History of one soul”. In this title is encoded the deep meaning of all poetic works of Muktibodh. In his poetry he “writes” the biography of the lone and distraught human soul, suffering from a feeling of a guilt. The last and most dramatic “chapter” of this biography is the poem “In the Darkness” (अँधेरे में), written in the last months of his life. The present paper examines some aspects of the intertextuality in the poem, which can be viewed as a complicated mixture of tradition and modernity. The literary analysis in the current article is focused on the ancient myth of the Vedic priest Śunaḥśepa, functioning as an intertext in Muktibodh’s poem. My interpretation is aimed at answering the question about the way, in which the author uses the power of quoting and the whole potential of the suggested meaning of “foreign text” in the structure of his own, in order to enlarge and to enrich its semantic space and to provoke the recipient’s imagination.

The article attempts at analyzing the cosmogonic riddles, called brahmodya, appearing a key component of aśvamedha – a sacrifice of a horse – one of the most significant royal rituals in the Vedic age. The brahmodyas, attested in the prescriptions of “Śatapatha brāhmaṇa” concerning the carrying out of the ritual, are not only some of the most ancient, but are viewed as an invariant of the philosophical debate in the Upaniṣads.  In the focus of the current analysis are the performativnite features of the riddles of the brahmodya type, which I examine as ritual speech acts with extremely high transformative capacity. The main purpose of the article is to interpret the essence of brahmodya, shaped as an exchange of formulaic questions and answers between the priests, in the perspective of the communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of ritual language.

Kāma is one of the most complex, multivalent and dynamic concepts, ever articulated in Indian culture. It is because of this that the concept of the desire functions in a specific way in different contexts and has been interpreted in different perspectives: cosmological, metaphysical, religious, psychological, ethical, aesthetical, sociological, etc. The discourse on the desire in Indian culture has been initiated still in the age of the Vedas in the unique Creation Hymn of Ṛgveda (10.129) to be deployed further in-depth in the religious, philosophical, psychological and ethical doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc. 
In the focus of the current article is the "original" viewpoint, concerning the concept of desire expressed in different parts of the Vedic Canon. The main aim is to analyse the paradoxical, but only at first glance, coexistence in the sacred texts of two contradicting each other attitudes to the desire – simultaneously as a constructive and a deconstructive phenomenon.

Sītā, the devoted wife of king Rāma in Vālmikī’s Rāmāyaṇa functions as a timeless incarnation of the Hindu ideal of woman in Indian culture. Even today the phrase “She is the second Sītā” is generally accepted and widely used cliché, expressing the classical Indian idea of accomplished female behavior and life fulfillment.
Ahalyā, the extraordinary beautiful wife of the sage Gautama, captivating the God Indra himself, is a kind of her counterpoint and even denial. At the same time, however, both of them become later an immanent component of the archetypical Hindu paradigm of the ideal women and wife, called pañcakanyā ("five girls/virgins", "the five daughters"). 
The current paper aims at presenting and analyzing the images of two epic characters in the perspective of Hindu ethical model of the perfect wife, known as pativratā (“following religious vows in the name of the husband"), being the core of the ethical doctrine of Hinduism concerning the behavior and social roles of the women in the traditional Indian society, known as strīdharma (“the woman’s duty”).
The presentation will also focus on the question of the relevance of this traditional, patriarchal model in the modern Indian society, given the fact that the epics Rāmāyaṇa cannot be narrowed down to a specific historical narrative or literary text, because it is a living tradition in India, which is modeled by the specific historical, cultural, and religious context in which fits the telling of the story of Rama. In this sense, the epics serves nowadays as a foundation of a certain type of social behavior, ethical norms and principles and even of certain political platforms and ideologies. It sets the paradigm of the cultural identity, lineal memory and national self-awareness of the modern Indian.

The teachings of Buddha about the ten wholesome acts (daśakuśala karma) became of great significance in the Mahāyāna Buddhism in the perspective of the doctrine of the six perfections (pāramitā) in bodhisattva’s career and particularly as a core of the concept of the morality (śīla) of the individual, aiming at enlightenment. One of the major Mahāyāna didactic texts in Sanskrit interpreting the idea of daśakuśala was the “Pāramitāsamāsa” or “Compendium of the Perfections” attributed to Āryaśūra, a Buddhist philosopher and preceptor whose life has been dated to the period around the 7th or 8th Century A.D.
The aim of the present paper is to analyse the idea of daśakuśala as a product of the in-depth knowledge of Buddhist philosophers and scholars, concerning the psychology of human conduct. In the focus of my special interest is the relation intention – acting– result. The concept of daśakuśala has been interpreted in the context of the Buddhist attitude towards the roots of the psychic and bodily pain of the human being and towards the way of their eradication.

I share in the paper some reflections of mine, concerning the figure of  jester (vidūṣaka) as significant character in the classical Sanskrit drama. A argue that the in-depth interpretation of the aesthetic, philosophical and ethical messages of the classical Sanskrit theater is impossible without the proper understanding of the actual function of this character and in a more general sense of the function of the humorous in the theatrical culture of India. An atemt is made to analyze this key character of the Sanskrit drama in the perspective of dharma - the very foundation of Indian worldview, etics and religion. Dharma crosses into a complex, multi-layered and harmonious whole the ideal and the real, the beautiful and the ugly, the perfect and the mediocre. This ethical-philosophical idea, in my view, was unfolded in the Sanskrit drama through the characters of the protagonist (nāyaka) and his faithful friend, fulfilling above all his love longings - the vidūṣaka.

This is the very first monograph on Vedic literature and culture, written in Bulgarian language. It consists of two parts. The first one, entitled "Shruti: from Teacher's lips," includes three chapters and briefly outlines the main stages in the compilation and codification of the four Vedas. It introduces briefly the prehistory of the composers of the Vedas.  It is focused on the peculiarities of the content, language and style of the of the texts, shaping the Vedic canon. The analysis of the content and structure of the sacred Vedic knowledge is made entirely from the viewpoint of its function and significance in the context of the Vedic public rituals (shrauta yajna).
The philological analysis of the texts in the first part serves as a point of departure for the detailed interpretation of the fundamental mythological, ritual, religious and philosophical ideas of the ancient Vedic poets, priests and thinkers, proposed in the second part of the book, consisting of four chapters.This part is entitled "The Vedic culture: a paradigm of the worldview and of the value system".

In the focus of the paper is the itivṛtta-theory, introduced in  Nāṭyaśāstra. An attempt is made to prove that the plot of the Sanskrit drama has been conceptualized in the perspective of Vedic yajña and the genetic relation between dramatic and ritual action has been encoded in the key terms, applied in the treatise to describe the structure of the dramatic plot. The main object of my interpretation is the mukha sandhi, the first "connection" or interval, according to the concept about the five sandhis in Nāṭyaśāstra.

The focus of this paper is on the notion of desire (kāma) as introduced in some of the principal Vedic Upaniṣads. My analysis starts from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.4.5), in which the sage Yājñavalkya defines man as “consisting of desires” (kāmamaya puruṣa). I seek to prove that the Upaniṣadic thinkers were probably the first in Indian intellectual tradition to introduce the notion of two levels of desiring — a desire for an object meant as something separate from and located outside of the desiring subject; and a desire without any object, transcending the subject-object duality. Briefly exploring the ambivalent attitude towards desiring in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and in some other major Upaniṣadic texts, I attempt to answer the following questions: What is the basic difference between these two levels of de siring; how were they conceptualized in the Upaniṣads; and, finally, what are the main grounds for and contexts of such an understanding of desire?

The notion of desire plays a key role in the Buddha"s teaching and it is impossible to understand properly and interpret the psychological, philosophical and ethical concepts and doctrines, introduced by the different schools and branches of Buddhism all over Asia, without grasping the paradigm of desire and desiring introduced in the Pāli Canon. According to the widespread approach to this topic the general negative attitude towards desire is one of the most distinctive and pivotal features of the teachings of the Buddha who understands the desire as an enemy to be overpowered, as the main root of the suffering to be uprooted. In brief the Buddha"s path is widely considered a path of an annihilation of desires, as a path leading to a state of absolute desirelessness, identified with a supreme happiness (sukha). In this respect it is challenging to raise the following questions: Is it reasonable enough to evaluate the Buddha"s path as a path of total elimination or repressing of all desires of all types? Is there any kind of desire recognized by the Buddha as a positive value? Isn"t the desire to eliminate the desire a desire? And finally did the Buddha demonize the desire at all? Focusing on the concept of chanda, respectively of kuśala chanda it is argued in the current paper that the Buddha didn"t demonize the desire and had recognized some very important positive aspects of desiring, which could be interpreted properly only in the perspective of the close relation and interdependence between psychology, ethics and soteriology in Theravāda Buddhism..

The Transfer of Identity as a Speech Act in
Kauṣītaki upaniṣad 2.15

The current paper is focused on Kauṣītaki upaniṣad 2.15, which is interpreted in the perspective of the Speech act theory. This approach to the Upaniṣadic text, composed in the tradition of Ṛgveda, aims at pointing out of some key features of the discourse in the Upaniṣads, related to their high communicative and performative capacity. The paragraph describes an initiation ritual, in which the elderly father "embeds" his own identity in his son, and after that becomes a hermit or keeps living at home, but now under the protection and authority of the new head of the family. Analysing the text, I try to prove that the identity of the son is constructed entirely verbally by exchanging formulaic phrases between father and son, according to a predetermined text scheme, which possesses the main characteristics of a frame (according to van Dijke), incorporating a sequence of speech acts with a clear illocutionary goal.

Pragmatics of the Dialogue in Praśna upaniṣad

The current paper is focused on the dialogue between the spiritual preceptor Pippalāda and six young brahmans, framing the narrative context in which the metaphysical content of Praśna upaniṣad is exposed. Analyzing Praśna upaniṣad, an attempt is made to prove that the dialogical pattern is used as an effective narrative and rhetorical device for completing a metalinguistic purposes, namely the radical transformation of disciple’s consciousness, making him able to grasp the “hidden connection“ between the manifested and unmanifested, between the macro-and microcosm, or between ātmán (the Self) and bráhman (the Absolute), if I use the terminology of the original texts.
The current study aims at examining and interpreting the principles and mechanism of structuring and functioning of the dialogue in the text and to analyze the communicative and pragmatic potential of the question in the perspective of modern linguistic pragmatics.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission in the framework of the Lifelong Learning programme. This publication reflects the views of the authors only and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.