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The Vedas, says Jack Goody,^§AS1.4.7a assumed their characteristic form as writing in Sanskrit, not speech, even though great store is laid today on their mnemonics, or the poetics of their memorization. They may have been written down as early as 500 BCE, well before writing about meaning started in the West. The oral tradition of the mantras (recitations) is rooted in the literate practices of an elite caste, the Brahmans, the supporting brahmanas, or explanatory writings. What emerges is a series of graphic devices, spatially ordered arrays of text representing meaning as elaborately structured relations. The structure of the Vedas is essentially textual, and the techniques of their memorization are secondary.¹⁹⁵ The mantras are to the brahmanas what Siri is to digital ontologies – a device for the multimodal transposition of meanings that are in the first instance structured in writing.

And taking one step further, this may have been the first place where the nature of ontologies was theorized – a metaontology, an ontology of ontologies, or to say this in philosophical terms, a metaphysics.

We have at other places in this book discussed the play of the material and the ideal in some recent modern thinking about ontology (Bhaskar^§MS3.1a and Grosz^§MS3.1.1a), as well as some earlier modern thinking (Descartes^§MS3.1.2g and Locke^§MS1.3a), and among theorists of language (Skinner^§MS3.1.2d and Chomsky^§MS3.1.2e).

In a masterwork of intellectual history covering over a thousand years and running to over seven hundred pages, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya writes an account of the origins of Indian philosophy. He traces the emergence of what are arguably the first metaontologies. If we are to follow Chattopadhyaya’s line of argument, this thinking pre-dates and then parallels metaontological thinking in the West.

Chattopadhyaya’s story is an account of a struggle between the religious-idealist structures of meaning in the Vedas and materialist accounts of meaning in everyday life captured under the name of an alternative philosophical school, Lokayata. The Vedic philosophers placed self-referential spiritual consciousness at the center of the meaning-filled universe, making fantastic promises about immortality and reincarnation. The Lokayata, on the other hand, was a this-worldly philosophy, grounded in the practical meanings of everyday existence and the primacy of sense perception. Vedic philosophy prevailed, and the texts of Lokayata were destroyed. We only know of Lokayata now as an object of criticism in the Vedic texts.¹⁹⁶

After this, within the Vedic tradition there is an ongoing intellectual struggle. On the one hand, there is Uddalaka Aruni in the eighth century BCE, who according to the great Sanskrit scholar, Walter Ruben, was the first Indian philosopher. We would argue that he was perhaps the first theorist of ontology in its modern spatio-textual forms. Uddalaka, argues Ruben, was a materialist whose thinking represented a kind of proto-science.

From the start, there was a clash between his kind of thinking and the kind of thinking represented by his nemesis, Yājñavalkya, reflecting Brahmanic idealist, ritual orthodoxy. This, Ruben and Chattopadhyaya frame as a struggle between the materialist ontologies reflecting the needs and interests of the poor and oppressed, and the mystifying idealist ontologies of the Brahman caste and their ruling-class allies.¹⁹⁷ Chattopadhyaya also traces to these ancient sources the origins of a secular medical science, free of superstition and based instead on medical ontologies that conceptualize biophysical objects and their relations in the empirical world.¹⁹⁸

These are the first inklings of the quest to define metaontology – the structures of structures of meaning – that continues today in so many places, where all too often thinkers define their position by heading to one end of the ideal/material antinomy or the other.

Our sympathies are with the materialists, but without wishing to neglect the dialectic of interplay with the ideal. The excesses of the ideal – black holes, elementary particles, and quantum mechanics – had to be imagined in theory before they were found in material reality. The excesses of immortality and reincarnation, however, remain just theories, notwithstanding the force of epistemic and institutional religious commitment – excesses of cogito, in philosophical terms, that have failed to materialize. This is not to say that the promises did not mean something, because indeed they did for a social world of painful inequality and for a species for whom death is hard to think.

This tradition continued into the first millennium of the common era, with the Sämkhya (“reckoning,” “summing up,” “numeration”), a metaontology in the Vedic tradition, first committed to writing in the fourth to the sixth centuries of the common era.¹⁹⁹ The Sämkhya says

IV. The attainment of reliable knowledge is based on … three means: (a) perception, (b) inference, (c) reliable authority …

V. Perception is the selective ascertainment of particular sense-objects …

VI. The understanding of things beyond the senses is by means of (or from) inference by analogy.²⁰⁰

This carefully ordered text goes on to lay out distinctions between “purusa,” manifest and unmanifest consciousness, and “prakrt,” or materiality, consisting of “sense-capabilities” such as hearing and seeing; “action-capacities” such as grasping, speaking, and walking; “subtle elements” such as sound and touch; and “gross elements” such as space and earth. Meaning is in the interplay of the ideal (“purusa”) and the material (“prakrt”).²⁰¹

Chattopadhyaya and Ruben’s insights arose in an encounter between a tradition of Indian philosophy millennia long and the historical materialism of Marx.²⁰² They were articulated for a moment in 1980 at a strange intersection, a seminar sponsored by the Indo-GDR Friendship Society of West Bengal held in Calcutta. The society had brought Professor Walter Ruben from Humboldt University in East Berlin, so honoring his eightieth birthday.

Ruben, the book of conference papers explains euphemistically, had to flee Germany when the Nazis came to power because he had “a Jewish name” as well as communist connections. After that, he taught at universities in Turkey and Chile. At the end of the war he returned to East Berlin, where he founded the Institute of Indology at Humboldt University in 1949.

Among those participating in the seminar for Ruben were the Secretary of the West Bengal Council of the Communist Party of India, and Yuri M. Pavlov from the Department of Historical Materialism at Moscow State University,^§MS1.1.3g who spoke on “Leninism and Indology.” Ruben, mentioning historical materialism in his paper, footnoted Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.^§MS0.2.9a Chattopadhyaya had by that time been honored with membership of the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic and the USSR.

Not long after the seminar, in a crossing of paths just as peculiar, we met Mother Teresa in her convent in Calcutta. The state headquarters of the Communist Party of India was next door. The party was to govern West Bengal continuously for thirty-four years and had named one of the city’s principal streets Lenin Sarani.

When we asked Mother Teresa about the relation between the needs of her poor and the political agenda of the state government, she just said that her neighbors kept their lights on very late into the night. In the nexus of the ideal and the material, it’s an odd thing to have met a saint,^§AS2.5b and one so grounded in the ephemera of the flesh.²⁰³ After Calcutta, we traveled to East Berlin.^§AS2.3d

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¹⁹⁵ Jack Goody, 1987, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 110–22; Frits Staal, 2008, The Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights, Gurgaon, India: Penguin Books.

¹⁹⁶ Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, 1959, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, New Delhi, India: People’s Publishing House, pp. 3–4, 28–30.

¹⁹⁷ Walter Ruben, 1981, “Uddalaka and Yājñavalkya: Materialism and Idealism,” pp. 13–27 in Marxism and Indology, edited by D. Chattopadhyaya, Calcutta, India: K.P. Bagchi and Company.

¹⁹⁸ Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, 1981, “Science and Society in Ancient India,” pp. 231–62 in ibid.

¹⁹⁹ Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, 1959, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, New Delhi, India: People’s Publishing House, pp. 448–56; Gerald James Larson, 1979, Classical Sämkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and Meaning, Santa Barbara, CA: Ross/Erikson.

²⁰⁰ Gerald James Larson, 1979, Classical Sämkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and Meaning, Santa Barbara, CA: Ross/Erikson, pp. 256–57.

²⁰¹ Ibid., p. 237.

²⁰² Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, 1964, Indian Philosophy: A Popular Introduction, New Delhi, India: People’s Publishing House; 1990, Anthropology and Historiography of Science, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; 1991, Philosophy and the Future, Bangalore, India: Navakarnataka Publications.

²⁰³ Christopher Hitchens, 1995, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, London, UK: Verso.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 318–321. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s “Lokayata” §MS3.3d