When one thing applies more than once: Tantra and prasanga in Srautasutra, Mimamsa and Grammar

Freschi and Pontillo focus their attention on the usage and cultural history of two crucial terms in Sanskrit technical literature, namely tantra (for which the translation ‘centralised application’ is proposed) and prasaṅga (interpreted as an ‘automatic involvement’). Both belong to a class of devices used to ‘extend’ the validity of a given rule outside its proper domain or the application of a given element even in contexts where it is absent. As the authors point out, these devices of functioning in absentia entail an organized spatial dimension (a map following the metaphor used in Kahrs 1998), which transforms an absolute absence in a specific one. An organized space (such as language and also ritual) makes a blank grid significant. In this organised space tantra and prasaṅga represent two different strategies of filling blanks (or, which is the same thing the other way round, of granting multiple applications of a single item); the first one is grounded on ‘a common texture, of which all elements benefit’ (something akin to the modern concept of anaphora) while prasaṅga “represents an extended application, to be carried out if it makes things easier and if needed” (just as it happens in secondary signification).