Religious Language in Indian Philosophy: Neti Neti, Anirvacanīyatā, Lakṣaṇā and Tat Tvam Asi, Mīmāṃsā’s Vidhi and Arthavāda, Bhartṛhari, the Buddha’s Silence, Apoha and Jaina Avaktavya

Nature of Religious Language: Analogical and Symbolic; Cognitivist and Non-cognitive.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Section B, Unit 10

Indian philosophy faced the problem of religious language long before the Logical Positivists — and faced it from inside the religious traditions. The Upaniṣads declare that Brahman is that “from which words turn back, together with the mind, not reaching it“, yet they are full of words about Brahman. The Buddha refused to answer certain metaphysical questions. The Jainas made “inexpressible” one of the seven forms of judgement. Mīmāṃsā treated the Veda as injunction, Advaita as revelation of an existing reality reached by implication, and the grammarian Bhartṛhari made the Word itself the ultimate. This article sets out these Indian theories — neti neti, anirvacanīyatā, svarūpa and taṭastha lakṣaṇa, the three kinds of lakṣaṇā and tat tvam asi, saguṇa Brahman and pratīka, Rāmānuja’s critique, vidhi and arthavāda, śakti and convention, śabda-brahman, the Buddha’s avyākata, the two truths, apoha and Jaina avaktavya — and compares them with the Western theories of this unit.

Context & Problem

Why the Problem Arose in India

• The object exceeds all words: the ultimate — Brahman, nirvāṇa, the liberated self — is said to be beyond the categories of ordinary experience: beyond space and time, subject and object, qualities and relations.
• Yet scripture speaks: the Veda and Upaniṣads are the means of knowing (pramāṇa) the ultimate for the Vedāntin; the Buddha’s sermons and the Jaina āgamas teach the path. So the traditions had to explain how words can reveal what words cannot capture.
• Key Upaniṣadic texts:
  1. Taittirīya: “yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha” — “from which words turn back, together with the mind, not reaching it”; he who knows the bliss of Brahman fears nothing.
  2. Kena: “That which speech does not reveal, but by which speech is revealed — know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people here worship.“
  3. Bṛhadāraṇyaka: “athāta ādeśo neti neti” — “Now therefore the teaching: not this, not this” — “for there is no other and more appropriate description than this.” And its name is “the Truth of truth“.
  4. Bhagavad Gītā: the supreme Brahman, without beginning, “is said to be neither being nor non-being” (na sat tan nāsad ucyate).
  5. Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation (Nāsadīya): “Then there was neither non-being nor being” — and it ends by asking whether even the overseer in the highest heaven knows.
  6. Ṛgveda: “ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti” — “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names” — religious language as many names for one reality.

Core Doctrine

Advaita I — Neti Neti and the Silence of Bāhva

• Neti neti: Brahman is described by denying every determination — whatever can be pointed to as “this” (an object, a quality, a relation) is not Brahman. Śaṅkara reads the double negative as excluding all limiting adjuncts (upādhis). This is India’s via negativa (Article 2).
• Bāhva’s silence: Śaṅkara, commenting on the Brahma Sūtra, quotes a scriptural story. Bāṣkali asked the sage Bāhva to explain Brahman. Bāhva said, “Learn Brahman, my friend“, and became silent. Asked a second and a third time, he replied: “I am teaching you indeed, but you do not understand. Silent is that Self” (upaśānto ‘yam ātmā).
• The point: silence is not the absence of teaching; it is the most accurate teaching about what transcends speech. Compare Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — but for Bāhva the silence shows the Self rather than ending inquiry.

Advaita II — Anirvacanīyatā (Indescribability)

Anirvacanīya means “indescribable” or “indeterminable”. In Advaita it is used in two quite different senses — and keeping them apart is the key to the 2025 question.

1. Brahman’s indescribability — beyond all categories:

• Brahman is nirguṇa (without qualities), nirviśeṣa (without distinctions), advaya (without a second). Every word works by classifying — by genus (jāti), quality (guṇa), action (kriyā) or relation (sambandha). Brahman has none of these, so no word can denote it directly.
• Brahman is the subject — the witness (sākṣī) of all speech and thought — and can never become an object of speech: “that by which speech is revealed” (Kena). As light shows everything but cannot be pointed at as an object, the Self is never described.
• Yet Brahman is supremely real (pāramārthika sat) — indescribable because it is more than any category, not less.

2. Māyā’s (and avidyā’s) indescribability — between the categories:

• Māyā is “indescribable as either real or unreal” (sad-asad-vilakṣaṇa, sadasadbhyām anirvacanīyā):
  1. Not real (sat) — it is sublated (bādhita) by knowledge, and what is real is never sublated.
  2. Not unreal (asat) — it appears and produces the world of experience; the utterly unreal (a hare’s horn, a barren woman’s son) cannot even appear.
  3. Not both — that would be self-contradictory.
• So the world is mithyā (false): neither the absolute reality of Brahman nor the nothingness of the hare’s horn. The rope-snake is the model — the snake is neither there (it vanishes) nor nothing (it was seen and feared).
• Indescribability is not inability: it does not mean that nothing can be said about māyā — much is said. It means it cannot be classified as real or unreal. “The inexplicability of avidyā is its ornament, not its fault“: if it were consistent and explicable, it would be real.

How anirvacanīyatā bears on religious language:

1. It marks the limit of literal language: words work with the pair real/unreal, this/that, subject/object; at the top (Brahman) and in the middle (the world of appearance), these pairs break down.
2. It is not agnosticism: Advaita does claim knowledge — Brahman is known, but not as an object of description; it is realised (aparokṣānubhūti) as one’s own Self.
3. It turns language into a pointer: scripture works by negation, implication and correction, not by literal description (below).
4. It explains why religious talk is “two-level”: at the empirical level (vyavahāra), words about God, worship and the world are valid; at the absolute level (paramārtha), they are transcended.
5. Comparison: it parallels the Western via negativa (Article 2), Tillich’s insistence that literal speech makes the infinite finite (Article 3), and the early Wittgenstein’s “showing” — while differing from all three in claiming a direct, non-verbal realisation at the end.

Advaita III — How Words Still Reach Brahman

1. Two kinds of definition (lakṣaṇa):

• Taṭastha-lakṣaṇa — definition by an accidental mark: “That from which these beings are born, by which they live, and into which they return — that is Brahman” (the Brahma Sūtra‘s “janmādy asya yataḥ“). Creation is not Brahman’s essence; it is like pointing out Devadatta’s house “by the crow sitting on its roof” — the crow is not part of the house, but it identifies it.
• Svarūpa-lakṣaṇa — definition by essence: “satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma” — “Brahman is truth, knowledge, infinity“. Even here, the words are read negatively and by implication: “truth” excludes unreality, “knowledge” excludes inertness, “infinity” excludes limitation.
• Western parallel: taṭastha resembles Aquinas’s analogy of attribution (God known through effects); svarūpa resembles the analogy of proportionality joined to the via negativa (Article 2).

2. The three kinds of lakṣaṇā (implied meaning): Indian theories of meaning distinguish a word’s primary power (śakti or abhidhā, literal denotation) from lakṣaṇā (secondary, implied meaning), used when the literal meaning does not fit the context.

3. Tat tvam asi — “That thou art”:

• The great saying (mahāvākya) of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad identifies tat (That — Brahman, Īśvara, omniscient, remote, cause of the world) with tvam (thou — the individual, limited, near, of little knowledge).
• Read literally, as in “the blue lotus” (where blue and lotus simply belong to one thing), the sentence is absurd — the omniscient Lord cannot be identical with a limited person.
• So Advaita applies jahad-ajahal-lakṣaṇā: the contradictory elements — remoteness and nearness, omniscience and limited knowledge — are dropped, and the pure consciousness common to both is kept, exactly as with “this is that Devadatta”.
• The lesson for religious language: scripture gives determinate, non-literal meaning. It is neither literal description (univocity) nor empty sound (equivocity) — a rigorous Indian theory of how religious words work.

4. Adhyāropa–apavāda — attribution and withdrawal:

• Advaita’s teaching method: first attribute qualities to Brahman (creator, lord, inner controller — adhyāropa, deliberate superimposition), then withdraw them (apavāda, rescission) once they have done their work. Words are a ladder kicked away after climbing.
• Saguṇa Brahman (Īśvara) is this attributed form — fully valid for worship and practice (vyavahāra), transcended in liberation. It functions as the highest symbol of nirguṇa Brahman (Article 3).
• Pratīka — meditation on Brahman through a symbol (mind, sun, space, Oṃ) — keeps the rule: the symbol is a support, not the Self.

5. Scripture remains the means of knowledge:

• For Advaita, Brahman is known only from scripture (śāstra-yonitva): perception and inference cannot reach it. So the Upaniṣads are cognitive — they reveal an existing reality (siddha-vastu), not merely commands. Words reach Brahman indirectly, by implication, and their fruit is direct realisation.

Rāmānuja’s Critique — All Words Denote a Qualified Brahman

• No knowledge of the attributeless: every cognition and every word grasps an object as qualified — a thing with characteristics. A nirguṇa (attributeless) Brahman could be neither known nor spoken of.
• Scripture speaks of qualities: the Upaniṣads call Brahman omniscient, all-powerful, the abode of auspicious qualities (kalyāṇa-guṇa). “Satyaṃ jñānam anantam” lists real attributes of a qualified Brahman, not implied negations.
• Neti neti denies only that Brahman is limited to the forms just mentioned — not that it has any qualities.
• Anirvacanīyānupapatti — one of his seven objections to Advaita’s avidyā: every cognition is of the real or the unreal; there is no third. To call avidyā “neither real nor unreal” breaks the law of excluded middle, and to call it “indescribable” is already to describe it.
• Advaita’s reply: “real” means never contradicted, “unreal” means never appears; the shell-silver both appears and is contradicted, so the third category comes from experience. And “indescribable” means “not describable as real or unreal“, not “not describable at all”.
• All words name God: since souls and matter are the body (śarīra) of Brahman, every word in its full reach denotes Brahman as qualified by that body (coordinate predication, sāmānādhikaraṇya). Even tat tvam asi is taken literally: Brahman as the inner Self of the individual soul — no need for lakṣaṇā.
• Western parallel: Rāmānuja stands close to the cognitivist and partial-univocity positions — religious language describes a real, qualified God literally, if imperfectly (Articles 2 and 9).

Mīmāṃsā — The Veda as Injunction

• Five kinds of Vedic sentence: injunction (vidhi), sacrificial formula (mantra), name of a rite (nāmadheya), prohibition (niṣedha) and explanatory or eulogistic passage (arthavāda).
• The Veda is for action: its primary purpose is to enjoin dharma — “one desirous of heaven should perform the sacrifice”. Only the injunctions are primary.
• Arthavāda: passages of praise, blame or story do not give independent information about the world; they are meaningful as supplements to injunctions — they commend the enjoined act and encourage the performer. This is strikingly close to Braithwaite’s stories that energise a policy of action (Article 6) — an “action-guiding” view of scriptural language.
• The deity as word: in Mīmāṃsā the deity of a sacrifice is that to which the offering is made as named in the mantra; the gods have little reality beyond the words of the rite — a near non-realist reading of the Vedic gods.
• Words are eternal and the same as ordinary words: the relation of word and meaning is eternal (autpattika), not man-made; the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya) and self-valid. Vedic words carry the same meanings as everyday words — there is no special “religious dictionary”.
• Words mean universals: “cow” denotes the universal cowness, applied to individuals in use.

Nyāya — Meaning by Convention, Scripture by a Trustworthy Speaker

• Śabda (verbal testimony) is a pramāṇa — the statement of a trustworthy person (āpta). The Veda is authoritative because its author, Īśvara, is omniscient and trustworthy.
• Meaning by convention: the relation of word to meaning (śakti) is fixed by convention (saṅketa) — ultimately by God’s will (“let this word mean this thing”). Meaning is learnt chiefly from usage (vṛddha-vyavahāra): a child watches one elder say “bring the cow” and another bring it.
• Conditions of a meaningful sentence: expectancy (ākāṅkṣā), compatibility (yogyatā), proximity (sannidhi) and intention (tātparya). A sentence like “he wets the ground with fire” is meaningless for lack of yogyatā — an Indian test of sense, very different from verification.
• Lakṣaṇā is accepted when the primary meaning fails to fit the speaker’s intention.
• Western parallel: Nyāya is a firm cognitivist and realist: religious statements are true reports by a trustworthy speaker about a real God.

Bhartṛhari — the Word as Brahman

• The grammarian-philosopher Bhartṛhari (Vākyapadīya, around the fifth century CE) opens: “Brahman, without beginning and end, whose essence is the Word (śabda-tattva), imperishable, appears (vivartate) as objects, from which the world proceeds.“
• No cognition without language: “There is no cognition in the world that is not accompanied by the word; all knowledge appears as if shot through with the word.“
• Sphoṭa: the meaning-bearing word is a single, indivisible whole (sphoṭa) manifested by the sounds, which in turn reveals the meaning — like a whole flash of meaning rather than a string of letters.
• Levels of speech: from audible speech (vaikharī), through the inner mental word (madhyamā), to the undivided “seeing” word (paśyantī) — later traditions add a supreme level (parā).
• Significance: for Bhartṛhari, religious language is not a problem of fitting words to a wordless God; the ultimate is Word, and the deepest religious knowledge is a return from spoken word to its undivided source. This is the boldest Indian answer — the very opposite of the positivists’ view.

Buddhism — Silence, Two Truths and Apoha

1. The unanswered questions (avyākata):

• The wanderer Vacchagotta asked the Buddha ten questions: Is the cosmos eternal or not? Finite or infinite? Are the soul and body the same or different? After death, does the Tathāgata exist, not exist, both, or neither? To each the Buddha answered “no” — he did not take that position.
• The fire simile: “If a fire burning in front of you went out, in which direction did it go — east, west, north or south?” — “That doesn’t apply,” says Vaccha; it is simply called “out“. So too the liberated one: “freed from the classification of form… the Tathāgata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea“. The categories of the question do not apply.
• The poisoned arrow: a man struck by an arrow who refused treatment until he knew who shot it, his caste and the bow’s make would die first — metaphysical speculation does not lead to liberation.
• Significance: this is neither positivist “nonsense” nor agnosticism. The questions are set aside because their terms do not fit the reality (like asking where a fire goes) and because they do not conduce to freedom from suffering.

2. The two truths (Nāgārjuna):

• Saṃvṛti-satya (conventional truth) and paramārtha-satya (ultimate truth). “Without a foundation in the conventional truth the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.“
• Religious language is conventionally valid and indispensable, yet the ultimate — śūnyatā (emptiness) — is not a view to be stated: Nāgārjuna’s four-cornered negation (catuṣkoṭi) denies that reality “is”, “is not”, “both” or “neither”.
• Upāya (skilful means): the Buddha adapts his teaching to his hearers — the parable of the burning house; the teaching is a raft to be left on the further shore, a finger pointing at the moon.

3. Apoha — meaning by exclusion:

• The Buddhist logicians Dignāga and Dharmakīrti held that words do not denote real universals. “Cow” means the exclusion of non-cows (anya-apoha). Meaning is a mental construction by negation.
• Parallel: a whole theory of language built on negation — the logical cousin of the via negativa.

Jainism — Avaktavya, the Inexpressible

• The Jaina saptabhaṅgī (seven-fold predication) gives seven ways of speaking about any object, each prefixed by syāt (“in some respect”): it exists; it does not exist; it exists and does not exist; it is inexpressible (avaktavya); it exists and is inexpressible; it does not exist and is inexpressible; it exists, does not exist and is inexpressible.
• Avaktavya (the fourth) arises when we try to affirm existence and non-existence simultaneously: no single word can say both at once — so in that respect the thing is inexpressible.

• Anekāntavāda (many-sidedness): reality has infinite aspects; every statement is partial (a naya, standpoint), true from its viewpoint.
• Significance: Jainism does not make the inexpressible mystical; it makes it a logical limit of language, and it treats all religious (and other) statements as conditionally true — a valuable model for interreligious understanding.

Critical Evaluation

Criticisms of the Indian Approaches

1. Self-refutation of ineffability: to say “Brahman is ineffable” is itself to describe Brahman. If no concept applies to it, then not even “ineffable” or “exists” applies — and “it exists but has no properties” is contradictory. Serious, literal ineffability is self-defeating.
   • Advaita’s reply: Brahman is not “a thing with no properties”; it is the subject that cannot be objectified. “Indescribable” means “not describable by object-categories“, and the words used are pointers by implication, not descriptions.
2. Rāmānuja’s objection: knowledge and language always concern the qualified; the attributeless is unknowable and a “neither real nor unreal” third is unintelligible.
3. Lakṣaṇā can be arbitrary: who decides which part of a meaning to drop? The Advaitin seems to drop exactly what conflicts with his prior non-dualism.
4. Mīmāṃsā reduces scripture to ritual command and leaves the gods as words — a near non-realism that Vedāntins rejected.
5. The Buddha’s silence can be read as agnosticism or evasion; and “two truths” invites the charge that the ultimate is simply inexpressible nothing.
6. Avaktavya and anekānta are accused (by Śaṅkara and others) of indecision — one cannot act on “in some respect it is, in some respect it is not”.

Defences

• Rigour: lakṣaṇā and the conditions of meaningful sentences (expectancy, compatibility, proximity, intention) are precise theories of meaning, not vague mysticism.
• Practice-oriented: Indian schools tie language to sādhanā — words are verified in realisation, not left hanging.
• Two levels without nonsense: the conventional/ultimate distinction keeps religious language valid where it applies, avoiding both literalism and the positivist verdict of meaninglessness.
• Plurality: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names” and Jaina many-sidedness offer resources for pluralism that Western theories of language lack.

Critics and Defenders

Cross-Tradition Comparison

Synthesis (Siddhānta)

• The Indian traditions met the problem of religious language from within: the ultimate is “that from which words turn back“, yet scripture is a means of knowing it.
• Advaita answers with neti neti, Bāhva’s silence, anirvacanīyatā in two senses (Brahman beyond categories; māyā between real and unreal), taṭastha and svarūpa lakṣaṇa, the three kinds of lakṣaṇā applied to tat tvam asi, adhyāropa–apavāda, saguṇa Brahman and pratīka — words as pointers culminating in realisation.
• Rāmānuja holds that all words denote a qualified Brahman and rejects the indescribable third; Nyāya grounds scripture in a trustworthy speaker and meaning in convention; Mīmāṃsā treats the Veda as injunction with arthavāda as encouragement; Bhartṛhari makes the Word itself Brahman.
• Buddhism sets aside questions whose terms do not apply (the fire that goes “out”), distinguishes two truths, and builds meaning on exclusion (apoha); Jainism makes avaktavya a logical limit and every statement conditionally true.
• Against the charge that ineffability is self-refuting, Advaita replies that “indescribable” means beyond object-categories, not beyond all reference. The Indian contribution is a graded theory of religious language — literal, implied, suggested and silent — that complements the Western theories of analogy, symbol and language-game.

“From which words turn back, together with the mind, not reaching it.” — Taittirīya Upaniṣad