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is they have no discursive meaning.6 His initial formulation of the meaninglessness of mantras was through his inquiries into Sanskrit linguistics and the philosophy of the pre-Paninian grammarian Kautsa, who argued that Vedic utterances were meaningless.7 As Staal continued to refine his thesis, he argued that mantras are intimately related to ritual within the evolution of humanity with both predating language. He suggests that language develops out of the ritual context in which these utterances had first appeared. For Staal this means that mantras are part of a ritual program that is independent of discursive meaning with form being the critical component of mantra-ness. Therefore, even when a mantra appears to have a discursive and translatable meaning, the true ‘meaning’ of the mantra is ‘ineffable and beyond language’ because the mantric form predates any semantic practice.8 Its primary role is its function within the ritual program. Though at its most well-developed stage Staal’s argument is largely based on his assumptions of cultural human evolution in which ritual and ritual utterances predate the creation of language, even without accepting this justification one cannot quickly dismiss Staal’s overall thesis that all mantras arise from a ritual complex in which the discursive meaning of the word, phrase, sentence, and the like, is not as important as its role in proper completion of the rite. Staal’s thesis, however, is not without its detractors.9 For our purposes, the critique of Staals’s theory by Harold Coward is most pertinent. Like Staal in his initial work on meaning and mantra, Coward attempts to explore this phenomenon through the traditional Indian texts, framing his essay through the lens of not only Kautsa, but also Vasubandhu—‘meaning of mantras is to be found in their absence of meaning’—and Shabara and Jaimini—‘mantras
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express the meaning of dharma’ and ‘where the meaning is not intelligible, it is not that there is no meaning … people are ignorant of it’.10 To fully engage Staal’s theory of the meaninglessness of mantra, however, Coward thoroughly analyses Bhartrihari’s Vakyapadiya, which he interprets to offer a broader view of ‘meaning’ and ‘language’. Coward argues that ‘meaning’ in relation to mantra cannot be confined to ‘word meaning’, but for the initiate the meaningfulness of mantra is its encapsulation of a reality that is beyond word meaning occurring on a ‘mystical level’ in which the practitioner has direct perception of the ‘truth of the mantra’ (169–72).11 Therefore for Coward ‘the meaningfulness of mantras is not merely intellectual, this meaning has power, shakti, for ‘purging ignorance and revealing truth, and [as an] effective instrument for realization of release (moksha)’.12 For both Coward and Bhartrihari, meaning is much more than discursive and translatable, but it is meaningful for its latent ability to affect results—the secret and ‘true’ meaning. These discussions of meaning and/or lack thereof do not sufficiently show how mantras are understood within a tantric tradition or its indigenous scholastic traditions. In order to understand more fully the role of mantras within a tantric tradition, let us now turn to the Shakta Srividya philosopher Bhaskararaya and his Guptavati, an eighteenth century commentary on the Durga Saptashati or the Devi Mahatmyam. Bhaskararaya, Srividya, and Guptavati Bhaskararaya Makhin was born in the town of Bhaga in present-day Maharashtra in the last quarter of the seventeenth century after his father Gambhiraraya of Vishvamitra Gotra had completed a recitation of the Mahabharata for the ruler of the kingdom, who conferred PB January 2016