Frits Staal

Johan Frederik "Frits" Staal (3 November 1930 – 19 February 2012) was the department founder and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Staal specialized in the study of Vedic ritual and mantras, and the scientific exploration of ritual and mysticism. He was also a scholar of Greek and Indian logic and philosophy and Sanskrit grammar.

Quotes

• [A Hindu] may be a theist, pantheist, atheist, communist and believe whatever he likes, but what makes him into a Hindu are the ritual practices he performs and the rules to which he adheres, in short, what he does.
  • Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning, quoted in An Introduction to Hinduism by Gavin D. Flood, p. 12.

• As Frits Staal wrote in 1982 in “What is happening in Classical Indology?”, “Some chocolates can only be sold if they are wrapped up in gold- speckled papers. Books about the Rigveda will only be read through the medium of some fashionable theory”.
  • quoted in Thomson, Karen. 2016. “Speak for itself: How the Long History of Guesswork and Commentary on a Unique Corpus of Poetry has Rendered it Incomprehensible.” Times Literary Supplement, 8 January: 3–4.

• Frits Staal reminds us of three special chariots. First, the composer of a hymn describes himself as “he who constructs the high seat of the chariot in his mind” (with reference to 7.64.4). The second instance comes from the famous hymn of the wedding of Sµuryå, daughter of the Sun (Sµurya), which “relates how travels in a chariot made of mind (manas), whether it is to her future husband, immortality or the abode of Soma” (with reference to 10.85). The third comes from a deeply enigmatic dialogue between a (possibly dead) father and his (possibly alive) son; the former tells the latter about “the new chariot without wheels, which you boy have made manaså, which has one draught pole and goes in all directions, standing on it you are seeing nothing” (with reference to 10.135).
  • Frits Staal in Danino, M. (2019). Demilitarizing the Rigveda: a scrutiny of Vedic horses, chariots and warfare., STUDIES IN HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Journal of the Inter-University Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences VOL. XXVI, NUMBER 1, SUMMER 2019

• ‘Western civilization […] produced a science of language only belatedly, after being influenced by the Sanskrit grammar of Panini.’ (Staal 1988: 48)
  • quoted in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189

• ‘the notion of “context-sensitive-rule” was not […] recognized as such in Western linguistics until the twentieth century, whereas it had been discovered in India before 500 BCE […] We can now assert, with the power of hindsight, that Indian linguists in the fifth century BCE knew and understood more than Western linguists in the nineteenth century CE. Can one not extend this conclusion and claim that it is probable that Indian linguists are still ahead of their Western colleagues and may continue to be so in the next century?’ (Staal 1988: 48)
  • quoted in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189

External links

Encyclopedic article on Frits Staal on Wikipedia