Prachi Prajna (Jun 2019)
On The Contemporary Understanding of Ākāṅkṣā
Abstract
Ākāṅkṣā is one of the necessary auxiliary causes (sahakāri kāraṇa) for a successful verbal cognition (śābda-bodha). There is a marked disagreement between scholars of the recent past, writing predominantly in English, concerning the nature of ākāṅkṣā. Some of them understand it as a syntactic concept while others as a semantic one. There is also an inconsistency in the writing of those who explain it as syntactic since they switch carelessly between ‘word’ and ‘meaning’ while explaining this concept. Based on a survey of such scholarship, this paper highlights the confusion in explicating this concept. It concludes that it is conceptually sound to understand ākāṅkṣā as primarily psychological and semantic or syntactic only derivatively.
