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India has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of philosophical thought, spanning some two and a half millennia and encompassing several major religious traditions.
In this intriguing introduction to Indian philosophy, the diversity of Indian thought is emphasized. It is structured around six schools of thought that have received classic status. Sue Hamilton explores how the traditions have attempted to understand the nature of reality in terms of inner or spiritual quest and introduces distinctively Indian concepts, such as karma and rebirth.
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©2001 Sue Hamilton (P)2021 Tantor
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY A Very Short Introduction
Sue Hamilton
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Contents
List
of illustrations ix
List
of maps x
Preface xi
A
note on languages and pronunciation xv
1 Reason
and Belief Richness and diversity in Indian thought
2 
The
Brahmanical Beginnings Sacrifice, cosmic speculation, oneness
3 Renouncing
the Household The Buddha's Middle Way
4 Issues
and Justifications Language, grammar, and polemics
5
Categories and Method Vaiśe·ika and Nyāya
6
Things and No-things Developments in Buddhist thought
8 118
Postscript From Classical Thought to the Modern Day 136
Recommended
Further Reading 141
Index 147
List of illustrations
1 
Ritual
implements used in Vedic sacrifice Photo courtesty of C. Minkowski
2 Vedic
sacrificial ritual Photo courtesty of C. Minkowski 
3
4 Mohenjo-daro
© MacQuitty International Collection 
5 Buddhist
monk © Chris Lisle/Corbis
6 The
Buddha teaching © Ann & Bury Peerless
7 Śan˙kara's
Upade·aSāhasrī © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,
MS 129 Sansk.d.152
-ix-
List of maps
1 Mohenjo-Daro
and Harappa 36
2 Sites
associated with the Buddha 43
-x-
Preface
Indian philosophy in 35,000 words? Many would consider it
impossible! And it is certain that of those who might be persuaded to attempt
it, no two would handle it in the same way. My own approach to the diversity of
the material for the purposes of this book is explained in Chapter 1. In any
case, the primary aims of a very short introduction are to give a flavour, to
lead the interested reader into a larger and more complex topic than the book
can cover comprehensively, to make such a topic accessible to the beginner.
These have been my guidelines. I hope that this book is also thought-provoking,
both in introducing very different ways of thinking about the world we
experience, and in the sense of nudging those who are interested towards
further investigation of the subject. To this end, a list of recommended
further reading is included at the end of the book.
When discussing philosophical thought in an
introductory way, and working from nonEnglish texts, one has to deal with two
practical problems: the need to use technical terms associated with
philosophical issues, and how best to translate key words and textual extracts.
Technical terms I have tried to keep to an absolute minimum, but explanatory
text boxes have been given where their usage is important enough to require the
beginner to acquire familiarity with them. It should in any case be remembered
that the terms themselves are less important than gaining an understanding of
what they are referring to.
-xi-
When it comes to translating, sometimes a key word is not
translatable into meaningful English, and in such cases I have left it in its
original Sanskrit or Pāli. I would ask the reader not to be put off by the
unfamiliarity of these words. Most disciplines and subject areas – such as
Latin, Greek, and works on other major linguistic or cultural traditions,
mathematics and physics, and nowadays technology and computing – require the
accepting and learning of a few key terms that initially might seem alien. In
this book, the number of untranslated words is small, and in each case I think
the clear context in which they are used will help the reader understand them.
When it comes to quoting longer extracts from primary
texts, a greater problem is how literally one translates them. Not only does
faithfulness to the grammar and syntax of the original frequently result in
awkward and stilted English, and not only do many component words simply not
have a meaningful English equivalent: it is also the case that literalness
often fails to convey the point of what was being said. On balance, I think it
is preferable to attempt to transpose original passages into meaningful English
wherever possible. I have therefore tried to use ordinary English in
contemporary style, and in the interests of clarity have not refrained in some
cases from paraphrasing rather than more formally translating. My purpose
overall has been to convey the conceptual point(s) of the extract as clearly as
possible. If they wish to, readers may consult other published translations of
the texts either for comparison or for alternative treatments of the material.
In this book all translations or paraphrases are my own unless otherwise
stated.
I would like to thank George Miller of Oxford University
Press for inviting me to write this book, and for his gentle guidance and
suggestions. Thanks also to Tracy Miller for invaluable advice during the
editing process. And I am particularly grateful to King's College, London for
allowing me to take sabbatical leave to write this book at a time when all
academics are under enormous pressure to publish quantities of ‘primary
research.’
-xii-
Very many thanks, too, to Muriel Anderson, Cecilia Storr,
and Gay Watson for generously giving their time to read and comment on the
draft manuscript. I accept full responsibility for the final version. To
Richard Gombrich, colleague and friend, thank you for untold advice, criticism
and support, not just in respect of this one project. And to Clare Palmer, for
so long a wonderful sounding board and exchanger of ideas and thoughts, page
107 is especially for you.
-xiii-
A Note on Languages and Pronunciation
Two languages used by the Indian tradition are referred to
in this book, Sanskrit and Pāli. As is explained in early chapters, the
tradition began when people who called themselves
Aryans migrated from central Eurasia into the north of
India, by way of what is now Pakistan, many hundreds of years BCE. The language
in which they preserved their ritual practices was Sanskrit, which at a later
date was codified into its ‘classical’ form by a grammarian called Pān˙ini (see
Chapter 4). In the history of languages, Sanskrit is known as ‘old Indo-Aryan’,
and it is the language in which most Indian philosophical material was written.
Over time, alongside classical Sanskrit, variant and more vernacular forms of
the language emerged, now collectively known as ‘middle Indo-Aryan’ languages.
One of these is Pāli, the language in which many of the earliest Buddhist texts
are preserved. The close link between the languages is illustrated in the Sanskrit
word dharma, which is dhamma in Pāli; nirvān˙a becomes nibbāna
(or ‘nirvana’ in its Anglicized form).
Both Sanskrit and Pāli are phonetic languages based on the
same alphabet. This is somewhat longer than the Roman alphabet with which we
are familiar, and many of the extra letters are represented with what are
called ‘diacritic marks’: for example ā as well as a; ñ, n˙, and n˙ as well as
n; ś and ·, and n˙ as well as s. Sometimes one finds English
works transposing, say, ś into sh, because this is how ś sounds. Pronunciation
is more accurate, however, if the diacritic marks are retained, so I have
chosen to use the full Sanskrit and Pāli alphabet in this book.
-xv-
Familiarizing oneself with the pronunciation can help in
overcoming any initial feeling of strangeness, so here are some pronunciation
guidelines.
Practising on a few examples can help in the
familiarization process, so try the following:
· · ·a,
Vaiśe·ika,
Śan˙kara, Sāan˙kara, Viśi·aādvaita-vedānta
-xvi-
Chapter 1
Reason and
Belief
Richness and diversity in Indian thought
India has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of
philosophical thought, spanning some two and a half millennia and encompassing
several major religious traditions. Religion in the context of philosophy is
particularly significant because traditionally in India it is believed that the
role of philosophizing, in the sense of attempting to understand the nature of
whatever it is one is focusing on, is directly associated with one's personal
destiny. So philosophy is seen not in terms of a professional intellectual
pursuit that can be set aside at the end of the working day, but as an attempt
to understand the true nature of reality in terms of an inner or spiritual
quest. One might say that what Westerners call religion and philosophy are
combined in India in people's attempts to understand the meaning and structure
of life – in the broadest sense. This is comparable more with the approach of
Socrates than with religion as faith in revelation and
philosophy as an academic discipline.
Thinking and Believing
This point about the nature of Indian philosophy is an
important one to grasp at the outset, so it is worth exploring it further. In
the West, certainly since the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant separated
God from what he thought could be learned about the nature of things by means
of reasoning, there has been a clear divide between
-1-
philosophy and religion. Religion has been seen as a field
in which ‘leaps of faith’ are not just permitted but sometimes required; primacy may be given to what
certain people state to be the case simply because of who they are (that is to
say, what they say is taken as true regardless of whether or not it is
demonstrably, or even arguably, true); and varying degrees of ‘otherness’ are
found, such as a transcendent God, beings whose status and/or knowledge is in
some sense superhuman or supernatural, and/or various kinds of superhuman or
supernatural power source(s). All or any of such factors are ‘believed’ by
adherents of the different religious traditions, either unquestioningly or
within a questioning framework, and as such these people are known as ‘believers.’
A key point for believers is that they also believe that
practising their religion is directly linked with their destiny. The details of
this relationship vary. Some think their lives here and now are affected by
their religious beliefs and practices. Others think the effects are experienced
only after death. Some believe that what happens to them now and/or after death
is brought about directly by their own beliefs and practices, some that their
destiny is entirely in the hands of whatever transcendent, superhumanly
powerful ‘other’ they believe in, and some that it is a combination of these
two. However the details are understood, the existence of this relationship
between religious beliefs and practices and the individual's destiny –
particularly after death – is why religions are referred to as soteriologies,
or ‘systems of salvation.’
Religion as
soteriology: from the Greek word soter
meaning ‘saviour.’ In common usage, it is not necessary for a system to hold
that there is an actual saviour figure for the system itself to be termed a
soteriology. The key point is that the destiny of the believers in question is
thought to be directly connected with their beliefs and practices.
-2-
In contrast to this, since Kant the discipline of
philosophy has been primarily concerned with the investigation of what can be
known of the nature and structure of reality by means of rational argument
alone. That is to say, whatever specific topics philosophers concern themselves
with, the way they do it must be logically watertight: no leaps of faith are
permitted, no one's word is privileged over rationality, and no part of the
exercise is anything other than a human intellectual endeavour. Furthermore,
philosophizing, whatever it is about, is considered purely as an intellectual
end in itself, and may have no effect on one whatsoever. Philosophy is simply
not soteriological – indeed, that is an important aspect of what distinguishes
it from religion.
Two things are notable about this divide between religion
and philosophy. The first is that, in spite of their differences, the two
fields share a number of common interests. The second is that even in the West
the distinction between the two was not always so clear cut. The commonality
lies in the fact that both religion and philosophy are fundamentally concerned
with the nature of reality. As an example, let us consider a religion with the
following teachings: there is a being that it calls God, that is wholly
transcendent of the cosmos as we know it; God is the creator of all things; the
created realm includes human beings with eternal souls; one's behaviour has an
effect on one's afterlife. Even from this minimal amount of information we know
that according to this religion, reality is comprised of two absolutely
distinct kinds of being (in this case, God, and not-God), and that there cannot
be anything else, because God is the creator of all things. We also know that
at least part of what is not-God is both plural (all the individual souls) and
everlasting. Less abstractly, this last point tells us something important
about the nature of human beings, in themselves a part of reality that might be
comprised in any of a number of ways. And in addition to this, we know that
some kind of system of causation links present behaviour to an unknown future
mode of existence.
Even though there are many other aspects of the nature of
reality one
-3-
might be interested in knowing, and about which the
religion might also have something to say, and despite the generality of this
example, what we have here deals with two of the key issues with which
philosophy is also concerned: how reality is fundamentally constituted, and the
nature of the human being.
Another issue of common concern to religion and philosophy
is how one arrives at knowing the answers to such key questions. If, in the
case of our hypothetical religion, the teaching is given by a superhuman being
whose word is accepted as true by believers, then one's knowledge is acquired
through ‘revelation’, or what might be called ‘verbal testimony.’ In fact, we
all rely on verbal testimony a great deal in our everyday lives. Those of us
who have never travelled to Antarctica, for example, accept as true the account
of those who have seen it that it is where the maps locate it. That childbirth
is painful is accepted by those who have not experienced it on the word of
those who have. And all of us regularly learn of all kinds of things on the
basis of the testimony of news reporters, teachers, writers, scientists, expert
researchers, and so on. In everyday situations, the information acquired in
such a way can, at least in principle, be checked. What makes the religious
situation different is not the means of knowing, but that the topics are not
open to being checked. So the information given by the religious teacher can
only be accepted on trust, or ‘believed.’ A philosopher would consider this
uncheckability unacceptable and would not regard such information about the
nature of reality as valid. Working on the same topics, a philosopher would
rely only on processes of knowing that are rational or logical. The discipline
of philosophy thus specifically concerns itself with what are known as the
‘limits of knowledge.’ That is to say, it seeks to establish the criteria
according to which data can and cannot legitimately be understood to be valid
knowledge. Theories of knowledge (how we know) are referred to as epistemology.
With regard to the second point mentioned above, that
there was not always such a clearcut separation of what is religious and what
is
-4-
Of interest to both religion and philosophy
Metaphysics
concerns the nature of reality as a whole. It questions how reality is
fundamentally constituted, and the types and natures of, and relationship
between, any constituents there may be. The world/universe/cosmos, human
beings, other beings, and causation are all important areas of interest.
Epistemology
(from the Greek episteme, meaning
‘knowledge’) is about means of knowing. Common means of knowing include logical
argument or reasoning, inference, testimony, perception.
philosophical, the Western philosophical tradition began
in preChristian Greece, in a milieu and at a time when many were seeking to
know more about the nature of reality. The aim and purpose then was to achieve
wisdom in this respect, and any relevant insight was conceived of in terms of
becoming wise: hence philosophy – ‘love of wisdom.’
Philosophizing incorporated no concept of soteriology as
we understand it. But the various hypotheses about the nature of reality put
forward by the great Greek philosophers nevertheless covered issues that might
also be found as part of religious teachings. They concerned themselves with
the nature of the world and the human being, and of the importance for the
human being of seeking to become wise. This was seen as the highest possible
activity for a human being, which should be aspired to if at all possible.
Suggestions were also made, notably by Socrates, as to how
one might combine the quest for wisdom with living an optimally good life.
After the Greeks, Western philosophy in the Christian era
was for many centuries dominated by people who were also profoundly religious,
and
-5-
who were seeking to understand more about ‘God's world.’
Philosophers of great original insight and influence such as Augustine, Anselm,
Aquinas, Descartes, and Hegel were all practising Christians, and sought to
resolve rather than separate religious and philosophical issues. While the
interests of these great thinkers were extremely wideranging, one issue that
was of particular concern was how God fitted into the structure of reality. The
existence of God as understood by the Christian tradition was taken as
axiomatically true as an article of faith, but attempts were also made to
establish his existence by means of rational argument. In this way, faith would
be in harmony, rather than at odds, with reason. It was also argued, notably by
Descartes, that the nature of God was such that one might safely rely on his
assistance in overcoming the limitations of reasoning alone. Faith thus
combined with reason in the quest for understanding, and indeed extended the
possibilities of understanding. Such philosophers were well aware of what they
were doing, but believed their approach a wholly legitimate one. The first
philosopher in the Christian West seriously to question the legitimacy of
mixing faith and reason in the quest for knowledge was Kant. Kant insisted that
what one could know for certain was strictly limited to what could be
ascertained by means of reasoning, and this did not include anything to do with
God. As a devout Christian, Kant believed God existed. But he separated that
belief from philosophical logic, and stated that one could never have certain
knowledge about issues of faith; these were and would always remain beliefs,
and certain knowledge was the province of philosophy.
Thus the Western philosophical tradition nowadays purports
to concern itself only with certain knowledge and investigates only those
issues that can be considered by means of logical argument. So rigidly has this
methodological criterion come to be imposed that since the early 20th century
the majority of philosophers have not concerned themselves with big
metaphysical questions such as What is there? What exists? What is the absolute
truth about the nature of reality? Some would say that addressing such questions
involves deductions too speculative to
-6-
be safely within the bounds of possible intelligibility
and so the issues are best left alone. Others maintain that questions relating
to anything that might extend beyond empirical human experience are
intrinsically nonsensical. Modern philosophy thus tends to be concerned with
detailed and technical questions about kinds of logic and linguistic analysis.
Topics such as ethics and goodness, that earlier philosophers had discussed in
the context of how they should live their own lives as they sought wisdom or
understanding, tend to be considered and argued for as intellectual
abstractions. Professional philosophy has become separated from the personal
quest, and for many philosophy per se is understood only in this modern sense.
In approaching the origins and development of the Indian
philosophical tradition, one needs to understand the role of philosophizing
more in its traditional or original sense, as described above, rather than as
it has come to be understood in the modern period. Philosophy in India is about
seeking to understand the nature of reality. Furthermore, the point of doing
this is that it is believed that understanding reality has a profound effect on
one's destiny. For some the goal is straightforwardly soteriological, for
others less so; but for all it is what we would call a spiritual undertaking,
an activity associated with a religious tradition. Indeed, the distinction we
make between religion and philosophy would simply not have been understood in
India until very recent times, when Western missionaries and academics began
forcing apart the various features of the Indian traditions in order that they
might more readily be accommodated within their own Western conceptual
framework.
Before elaborating some of the features of the Indian
context, a word of caution: perhaps because of the overlap between philosophy
and religion in India, there is a tendency in the West to regard its thinking
as ‘mystical’, even ‘magical’, in contrast to the ‘rationality’ of the West.
This is a mistake. Such a view derives from romanticizing thoughtsystems that
originate elsewhere and present themselves differently,
-7-
and attributing various ‘exotic’ connotations to what is
merely unfamiliar. There is in fact a strong tradition of rational argument in
India, and this has been as important to the proponents of the various systems
of thought there as it has been to the great philosophers of the West.
Westerners approaching the Indian tradition for the first
time, whether their interest be primarily in religion or in philosophy, are
faced with two equal and opposite problems. One is to find something graspable
amid the apparently bewildering multiplicity; the other is not enforcing such a
straitjacket onto the material as to overlook significant aspects of the
diversity. The classic example of the latter is ‘Hinduism’: because of the
existence of the name Hinduism, Westerners expect to find a monolithic tradition
comparable to other ‘isms.’ They remain baffled by what they find until they
discover that Hinduism is a label that was attached in the 19th century to a
highly complex and multiple collection of systems of thought by other
Westerners who did not appreciate that complexity. Imagine the area covered by
Europe and the Middle East at the time of the beginning of the Common Era – and
suppose that outsiders had attached a single label to ‘the religion’ of that
time and area. This will give an idea of what happened when ‘the religion’ of
India was labelled Hinduism, and the extent of what needs to be unpacked to
understand the tradition in its own terms.
But just as the many different aspects of European and
Middle Eastern religion and thought have certain common origins, themes, and
structures, and just as they to a great extent share a worldview and conceptual
framework, so this is the case in India. What one has to do in order to unravel
the complexity and make it graspable, then, is to find those common origins,
themes, and structures, and to familiarize oneself with the worldview and
conceptual framework within which Indian thought operates. Fortunately for such
an enterprise, India has its own equivalent of an ancient Greek period, when
its philosophical tradition began. Though these early Indian thinkers were
drawing on
-8-
and developing even earlier ideas and material, some of
which we know about, it was during the 5th century BCE that clearly
identifiable schools of thought began to acknowledge each other, interacting,
debating, seeking to refute, and sometimes merging. It was from this period
that different approaches coexisted, some remaining within the tradition that
some two millennia later was retrospectively labelled ‘Hinduism’, and some
establishing other traditions, such as Buddhism and Jainism. This early period
will be the subject of Chapters 2 and 3.
Insight of the Truth
Traditionally, an Indian philosophy is referred to as a darśana, and this term itself gives us
some indication of an underlying aspect of the worldview and conceptual
framework within which Indian philosophical thought operates. Darśana literally
means ‘view’, in the sense of having a cognitive ‘sight’ of something. What is
implicit in this is that what is ‘viewed’ or ‘sighted’ is the truth about the
nature of reality, and this reflects the fact that understanding the nature of
reality is the aim of philosophizing in India. The original teachers associated
with specific darśanas were referred to as ·is (rishis), which means
‘seers.’ Leading on from this, the term darśana also
indicates that it is widely accepted that human beings are able to gain an
actual sighting, in the sense of experiential knowledge, of metaphysical truth.
Insight, or wisdom as it is sometimes called in English, in Indian thought is
not restricted to intellectual knowledge. While rational argument and
intellectual debate play an extremely important part in the philosophies of
India – in some, almost to the exclusion of other factors – it is also accepted
that, by means of mental disciplinary exercises of various kinds, one's
cognitive perception can be developed and changed so that one can see in ways
that transcend what one is ‘normally’ capable of. We shall see that some
specific darśanas base their teachings and arguments on what ancient seers have
stated to be the case from their own metaphysical insights, and the testimony
of those seers is taken as
-9-
having absolute validity – as valid as if one had seen it
for oneself, or as if the point had been arrived at by means of logical
argument alone. For others, the point is that the teaching of the darśana is
such that anyone following it should themselves be able to ‘see’ the truth it
teaches. In principle, the ability to gain metaphysical insight is thought to
be a universal human characteristic; it is not that those who claim to do so
are regarded as in some sense superhuman. Reorienting one's cognitive faculties
so that such insight is possible is the rationale underlying the practice of
yoga, and the resulting insight is called yogic perception.
This is one of the most profound differences between the
worldview in which Indian thought operates and the worldview of the West, and
perhaps the one that Westerners find most difficult to empathize with. It is
perhaps because of this that Western philosophers tend to focus only on those
aspects of Indian philosophy concerned with issues of logical argument, and it
may also have contributed to why others attribute magical or mystical qualities
to Indian thought. From the perspective of the Indian worldview, though, the
possibility of changing one's cognitive perception is something to be regarded
as systematically possible by means of regular disciplinary exercises in a
manner not all that different from systematically acquiring the ability to play
a musical instrument. Both require long-term perseverance and practice and
involve the fine-tuning of various aspects of bodily and mental coordination.
There is nothing magical about either – both are regarded as skills.
Karma and Rebirth
Karma and rebirth are other characteristic aspects of the
Indian worldview. Karma is the Anglicized form of the Sanskrit word karman, which literally means ‘action.’
Implicit in the way the term is used is that actions have consequences, and
karma refers to this action– consequence mechanics, operating as a natural law.
The term itself is entirely neutral and different traditions append values to
it in different
-10-
ways. Similarly, the locus of the action–consequence
mechanism varies in different traditions. The rationale of karma as actions
having consequences originated in the actions associated with sacrificial
rituals, the performance of which was believed to bring about certain specific
consequences that contributed to the optimum functioning of the cosmos. The
ritual actions to which consequences were linked were either physical or verbal
(making a sound was an ‘act’), and accuracy was essential if the mechanics were
to be efficacious. Thus what made an action right or good was its correctness,
and the values associated with such an understanding of karma were not moral
ones.
By the 5th century BCE, alongside this earliest
understanding of karma, it was also being taught that living one's life
according to duties prescribed by religious teachers – the ‘acting out’ of
duties: including, but not limited to, the performing of sacrificial rituals –
would have beneficial consequences for individuals themselves. At this stage,
karma came to be associated with the idea of rebirth, as it was believed that
the consequences, positive or negative, of how one had performed one's duties,
might be experienced in any one of many future lives, the conditions of each of
which would be determined in this way. As with karma as ritual action, the
linking of consequences to the performing of prescribed duties also carried a
value criterion of correctness and not morality. At a later stage in the
development of this branch of the Indian religious tradition, this point was
emphasized when important teachers reiterated that it was better to do one's
own duty badly than another's duty well; and better unquestioningly to do one's
duty, however seemingly amoral it might be, than to neglect it on the basis of
moral principle.
Other interpretations of the mechanics of karma that were
taught during the 5th century BCE included those of the Jains and the
Buddhists. The Jains stated that all actions – which they classified as verbal,
physical, and mental – caused particles of matter to stick to one's soul, and
it was this that weighed it down and kept it being
-11-
reborn in the cycle of rebirth. Because Jains also
believed that one should strive to free one's soul from this predicament, their
teaching implied that all karma is bad karma: there can be no ‘good’
consequence of an action. In contrast, according to the Buddha the operating of
karma is radically moral, in that what brings about a consequence is one's
intention. As far as the law of karma is concerned, one's intentions, the
Buddha stated, are one's actions: it
is not what one does outwardly and visibly that counts but the state of one's
mind. So here the karmic mechanism is not located in what is normally meant by
‘actions.’
Karma, then, is the operation of an action-has-consequence
mechanics. While it is differently interpreted by different schools of thought,
it is nevertheless a fundamental part of the Indian worldview as a whole,
accepted by all but a relatively small school of radical materialists. And
since the 5th century BCE the notion of karma has generally been associated
with the belief that individuals experience successive rebirths. The action–
consequence mechanism acts as the fuel of the continuity of rebirth, and the
specific conditions of each rebirth are linked to the specifics of earlier
actions.
This aspect of the Indian worldview is important for us to
grasp mainly because of the way in which it is associated with insight into the
true nature of reality. Most Indian systems of thought teach that gaining such
insight brings about the liberation of the individual from karmic continuity.
This is the main aim and purpose of the philosophizing imperative and why
‘philosophy’ is associated with ‘religion.’ In presenting its ‘view’ of the
truth, each darśana is as it were describing what it is that its practitioners
will ‘see.’ And the importance of the goal – what Westerners would call
‘salvation’ – explains why each school of thought considered it so important to
establish the coherence, validity, and efficacy of its teachings.
-12-
Complexity and Variety: Choosing the Content
The polemical environment that evolved over time, in which
competing worldviews were debated, was highly complex and original,
multistranded, and varied. This means that in a very short introduction
difficult choices have to be made as to what is included and what omitted.
Notable omissions in this book include Jainism, mentioned above. Mahāvīra, the
founder of Jainism, was a contemporary of the Buddha. His teachings were
original and interesting, and the tradition has not been without influence in
the Indian religiophilosophical tradition, but the omission can nevertheless be
made without doing violence to the broader tradition as a whole. The Cārvāka
tradition, which systematized a materialistic school of thought, is also
omitted, except in passing. Its importance lay in its formulation of challenges
to opposing schools of thought, and it made interesting contributions to the
milieu of philosophical debate. As with Jainism, however, omitting extensive
discussion of it does not raise problems in understanding the broader picture.
Another major omission is Śaivism. Śaivism represents an important,
sophisticated, and highly influential strand of Indian thought, but it embraces
so extensive and internally various a field that a very brief treatment of it
would serve only to distort it.
As well as omitting these important traditions, a book of
this nature does not allow for any detailed account of the way each of the
various philosophical schools of thought developed and branched internally over
time, usually as a result of different interpretations of their own seminal
ideas and key texts. This was extremely common in the polemical climate in
which the traditions flourished, as adherents of each school sought new ways of
rejecting the claims of others without diverging from their own primary
sources. The nature of these sources also meant that different interpretations
of them were in any case likely. Often this was because they were recorded in
very brief and/or cryptic style, requiring an expert or teacher to pass on to a
student their full meaning. Sometimes, for example in the case of schools of
thought
-13-
based on exegesis of texts called the Upani·ads,
it was because the textual material was so extensive that different approaches
and differences of emphasis produced quite different overall interpretations.
Where the key features of major branches of a tradition can be clearly and
concisely presented, these are included. But for an account of the vast
majority of detailed developments the reader is advised to consult a more
comprehensive work.
Exegesis
is the interpretation of textual material. Different exegetes might interpret
the same material differently. That is, they might each claim a different
meaning from the same text or passage. This allows for the subsequent drawing
out of sometimes very different implications from the same core source.
What this book focuses on is, first, an account of the
period during which the Indian religio-philosophical tradition identifiably
began, the 5th century BCE, and the key features of the dominant ideas and
practices of the time. Why certain issues emerged as being of crucial
importance to particular schools of thought is discussed, helping to
contextualize the way different schools either focused on different things
and/or why they shared concern about common factors, while interpreting them
differently. This paves the way for an understanding of how and why polemics
became central to the way the tradition subsequently flourished. We shall see
the purpose of the polemics, the points of controversy and dispute, the
establishing of methodological criteria, and the importance to each tradition
of arguing its case.
The following discussion presents a broadly chronological
ordering of the ideas represented, so that developments can be understood in
their context. The earliest traditions and schools of thought discussed in some
detail are the Vedic sacrificial religion and the ideas and practices
-14-
recorded in the early Upani·ads. Not only do these
represent the twin ‘arms’, so to speak, of the religion of the brahmin priests
of ancient India, but they also provide the primary source material for several
subsequent philosophical schools of thought, as well as the ground on which was
based the need to establish the fundamentals of philosophical debate.
Furthermore, it was against the hegemonic orthodoxy that this tradition
established very early on that others reacted, putting forward counter-ideas
and teachings. Notable among the latter was the Buddha, who lived for 80 years
during the 5th century BCE. Because there is little Buddhism in India today,
and nor was there at the time when the religious traditions of India were
labelled ‘Hinduism’, the role of Buddhism in the Indian religio-philosophical
tradition as a whole is often not appreciated. For more than a thousand years
after the lifetime of the Buddha, Buddhism thrived in India, and from the
beginning it played an enormously important and influential part in the
challenging of the views of others and the flowering of different ideas. It in
turn was strongly criticized by others. Chapters are devoted both to the early
period of Buddhism and the way Buddhist ideas were first put forward, and to
the more scholastically and/or philosophically systematic developments in
Buddhist thought that emerged over the following centuries.
Over time, several schools of thought whose origins and
associations are directly related in one way or another with the Vedic-Upani·adic
tradition of the brahmins became recognizably systematized. Six gained
prominence and have come to be called the six classical darśanas of India.
Often they are called the six ‘Hindu’ darśanas, and while the label ‘Hindu’ is
anachronistic and will not be used in this book, it does serve to distinguish
them from Buddhist and other traditions, such as Jainism, which do not share
the same direct lineage. What makes Buddhism and Jainism separate traditions in
their own right was their outright and total rejection of the authority and
teachings of the brahmins and the claims the brahmins made regarding the status
of their primary sources. In contrast, the propounders of the six classical
darśanas, while
-15-
Ontology
Ontology is concerned with being: it is about what
there is. This can be a response on any scale from the microscopic to the
cosmic to the question What is there? However one approaches ontological (what
is there?) issues, the point is to ascertain the ‘status of being’ of what
there is. This is called ‘ontological status.’ If one considers, say, a park as
experienced in a dream and the supermarket where one does one's shopping, one
can readily see that these two have different statuses of being – their ontological
status is different. Similarly, an oasis seen in a mirage is of a different
ontological status from an oasis one can locate by means of a map reference.
Whatever there is has an ontological status. This need not be immediately
obvious: during the dream or experience of the mirage, the park and the oasis
seem to have the same status as the supermarket or mapreferenced oasis. But in
fact their status is different, and this difference can be understood in terms
of reality. The supermarket is ‘more real’ than the dream park; the
map-referenced oasis is ‘more real’ than the mirage. But the dream park and
mirage do also have some kind of reality or status: they are experienced ‘as
real’, and it is only with hindsight that one realizes they are ‘less real’
than other experiences. In the context of a worldview or philosophical system,
its ontology is what it says there really is – even if we cannot immediately
discern it – independent of any possible mistaken interpretations on our part
of the dream/mirage kind. Through the ages in East and West, many different
ontologies have been put forward. Some state that what we see is what there
really is; others that our normal waking state is analagous to a dream state,
and what really exists is different from that.
-16-
they engaged in argument and debate,
and produced teachings and viewpoints that sometimes differed wildly, accepted
Brahmanical authority and so remained within that fold. The six classical
darśanas, each of which is discussed in this book, are called
Nyāya,Vaiśe·ika,Yoga, and Vedānta. Traditionally, the six are treated as three pairs, with
each pair having compatible or similar key features: Nyāya and Vaiśe·
ontology (see the box on page 16) supplied by the latter with which the method
of the former is compatible;
Yoga and Sāmkhya to a large extent share an ontology,
again with which the method of the former is compatible; and Mīmām sā and
Vedānta share an exegetical approach to different parts of the same corpus of
material, to which they both ascribe the same primary status. This book follows
these traditional pairings, devoting separate chapters to each pair. Where
chronologically appropriate, however, chapters will contain references to key
stages in other traditions in order to maintain an understanding of the way
different schools of thought developed by means of interacting with each other.
-17-
Chapter 2
The
Brahmanical Beginnings
Sacrifice,
cosmic speculation, oneness
The beginning of the 5th century BCE: this is where we
will begin our discussion of Indian philosophical thought, by looking at the
ideas and practices established in northern India by brahmin priests at that
time. This is a good place to start for several reasons. First, the milieu of
north India at this period was dominated by the Brahmanical tradition, and it
remained the only tradition to secure a lasting hegemonic grip on the country's
socioreligious structure. No matter how influential the ideas and practices of
others became at certain times, it was the Brahmanical tradition that retained
control of normative criteria. Second, by the beginning of the 5th century BCE,
two clearly identifiable approaches coexisted within this tradition, and we
know enough about both to be able to highlight their key features and concerns.
Third, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, from a discussion of
these two approaches we can see how they jointly contributed to the subsequent
proliferation of questioning, debate, and attempts to refute the ideas of
others. In establishing these points, we shall also see the way in which the
two approaches emerged from earlier stages of the tradition.
Sacrifice
The brahmins of the 5th century BCE were the descendants
of people called the Aryans, who came from central Eurasia and settled in
-18-
Chronology
c.2000–1500
BCE: The Vedic sacrificial tradition, based on ritual actions, was brought
into north-west India by the Aryans. This tradition was preserved and
administered by brahmin priests.
c.800–500 BCE:
The teachings recorded in the early Upani·ads, in which knowledge is said
to be of ultimate importance, were embraced by the Brahmanical tradition.
By 500 BCE:
these two branches – ritual and gnostic – of the Brahmanical tradition
coexisted.
north-west India many centuries earlier, bringing their
practices and ideas with them. For a very long time they had a sacrificial,
ritual-based religion, the sacred details of which were carefully memorized and
preserved in ritual ‘manuals.’ As writing was as yet unknown to them, different
lineages of brahmin priests, each of which contributed to the rituals, had
responsibility for the oral preservation of the material relating to their
particular ritual duties. They took this responsibility extremely seriously,
because it was on accuracy that the efficacy of the sacrifice depended.
Memorization techniques of various kinds were perfected, and from the evidence
we now have it is thought likely that a very high degree of accuracy was
achieved.
Though it is now regarded as a religious activity, the
performance of the Vedic sacrificial rituals was largely for this-worldly ends.
That is, the primary purpose of the sacrifice was the maintenance of the cosmos
at its optimum level of status quo. The sacrifices were addressed to aspects of
the natural order of the cosmos, such as sun, rain, lightning, wind, and so on,
as well as abstract principles, such as contract and vow. Collectively,
addressees of the sacrifice were referred to as devas. The
-19-
The
sacrificial rituals of the Aryans were performed by specialized people
(brahmin priests), on behalf of those who had both a right and a duty to employ
them. The sacrifice took place in a specially prepared space, arranged around a
central fire or fires. To the accompaniment of spoken, chanted, and muttered
words and sounds, special implements were used to make an offering into a fire
of substances such as cooked grains and oil. All aspects of the sacrifice, from
the measurements of the space to what substance should be offered and which
words used, were prescribed in the ritual manuals.
rationale of the exercise was that if man performed
the sacrificial rituals correctly, the devas would reciprocate by performing
their cosmic function in the most beneficent way. Thus cosmic order – which
later came to be known as Dharma –
was maintained. The necessity to do this was enjoined upon the brahmins by the
ritual manuals. These form the earliest parts of the corpus of material known
as the Veda, so they can be referred to as the Vedic ritual manuals, and the
sacrificial religion is sometimes referred to as the Vedic sacrificial
religion.
The word veda
means ‘knowledge.’ It refers to the belief that ancient ancestors of the
5th-century BCE brahmin priests knew or ‘saw’ the truth the Vedas contain
(which is why they were called seers). This is understood not at all in terms
of revealed, teacher-specific truth, but as impersonal and eternal cosmic
truth, not of human origin, that the seers were merely instrumental in
recording for posterity. As such, the status of the Vedic sacrificial texts is
primary. And anything enjoined on man by this corpus of material is considered
self-validating – it must be done because it must be done: this is part of
eternal truth. The concern with accuracy to ensure efficacy was thus reinforced
by the belief that the correct performance of each ritual act was part of
cosmic duty.
-20-
1. Ritual
implements used in Vedic sacrifice.
-21-
2. Vedic
sacrificial rituals are still performed today, little changed from ancient
times.
-22-
As well as physical ritual actions, the ritual manuals
prescribed a variety of words and sounds, which can be referred to collectively
as formulas, that had to be spoken, muttered, or chanted at the sacrifice. Both
physical act and sound contributed to the results of the sacrifice: both were
consequential ‘actions’, or karma. The language in which formulas were
constructed was Sanskrit, and as a result the language was regarded more as a
highly potent sacred tool than as a means of communication. It was seen, in
effect, as the representation in sound form of the manifestation of the
universe.
The language of Sanskrit
The word shares a
verbal root, with the word karma. The
prefix sams gives the word the
meaning ‘well-formed’ or ‘well-constructed.’ This suggests the correlation
between the correct sounding of Sanskrit words and the manifest universe to
which they refer.
Because of the status and power of the Vedic material and
the Sanskrit language, knowledge of both was closely guarded by the brahmin
priests. They may have sought to legitimate this exclusivity on the grounds
that such material needed protection, but at the same time it put the priests
themselves in a position of supreme authority in the society of the time, and
society itself was ordered in such a way as to maintain this authority. The
origins of what is now called the caste system of India are recorded in the
Vedic ritual manuals, where people are classified according to a hierarchy of
ritual purity, with the brahmins, the purest, at the top. Their purity both
entitled and enabled them to associate safely and effectively with the sacred
actions and language of the sacrifice.
So the main characteristics of the Vedic sacrificial
religion were that it was based on ritual actions, both physical and verbal,
the precise
-23-
-24-
accuracy of which was essential to ensure efficacy, and it
was wholly preserved and administered by brahmin priests. The purpose of the
performance of ritual practices was the maintenance of cosmic continuity, and
the various actions of the sacrifice – physical and verbal – were believed to
be correlated with their effects accordingly.
Cosmic Speculation
This-worldy though the system largely was, many of the
Vedic texts record that some of the ancient ritual specialists were also
sophisticated speculators about the nature of the cosmos they sought to
sustain. They realized that the parts played by the devas to whom the
sacrifices were addressed were limited to the particular place and role each
had in the cosmos, and they speculated as to whether there might be something
greater. They also wanted to know more about the origins of the cosmos itself.
How did it all begin? Who or what (if anyone or anything) created it? Did it
begin as a golden embryo? Was it constructed by a heavenly architect? Did it
emerge out of a cosmic sacrifice? What role did speech play (that is, the sound
of the sacred language)? Was breath the animator of all things? Or was it time
that began it all? What was there before? and perhaps most important: Who knows
about it?
This ancient speculation is extraordinary in its extent
and profundity, and suggests a considerable degree of analytical thinking on
the part of the ritualists about the nature of what it was they were doing. We
have no evidence that the speculation affected the rituals themselves; indeed,
it would be unlikely that it did because the rituals were so precisely
codified. But it is possible that ongoing questioning contributed to a second
strand of ideas and religious practice being embraced by the Brahmanical
tradition. Alongside the continuing practice by the majority of outward and
visible sacrificial rituals, the Vedic texts record that some began to go on
retreat to contemplate the nature of the sacrifice in more depth. Eventually,
some of these people
-25-
There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was
neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In
whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep?
There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no
distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its
own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no
distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with
emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat. …
Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence
was it produced? Whence is this creation? The devas came afterwards, with the
creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself,
or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven,
only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.
( 10.129, from The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. and trans. by Wendy Doniger
O'Flaherty, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)
The dating of the
is uncertain, but is thought to be considerably earlier than the 5th
century BCE – possibly as early as 1500 BCE.
-26-
came to think that the sacrifice could be ‘internalized’,
practised by means of concentration and visualization techniques.
The gradual development of this trend is recorded in books
of the Vedic corpus of material known as Brāhman˙ads that teachings are found
which might specifically represent its culmination. The Upanis ads form the
final part of the Vedic canon – they are called the ‘end of the Veda’ – and
their contents were gathered in the same Brahmanical lineages as the ritual
material.
The Vedic material was preserved in different Brahmanical
lineages. Four
‘strands’ of ritual
manual, used by different kinds of brahmin priests, were supplemented over
time by Brāhmanas, Āranyakas, and
finally, Upanisads:
The four ritual strands were:
Into these lineages were incorporated and texts, which
contained ideas on the nature of the sacrifice and of ‘internalizing the
sacrifice’.
The Upani·ads form appendices to the earlier
material:
-27-
The Upani·ads contain a great deal,
speculative and instructive, on the nature, purpose, and necessity of the
performance of sacrificial rituals. But what distinguishes them from earlier
Brahmanical texts is that they also contain teachings and ideas that subordinate
the rationale of the ritual to an imperative to seek to understand the nature
of the human being. Further, the knowledge that was sought was subjective and
esoteric – inner, ‘spiritual’ knowledge – in contrast with the exoteric, ritual
knowledge of the sacrifice. This marks a shift in the tradition from its
previous cosmos-centred concerns to more personcentred issues – or rather it
brings the individual person into more specific focus within the broader cosmic
picture of the earlier purely ritual period. The early Upani·The
Upani·ads contain the first known record of the idea that
human beings are reborn again and again into circumstances conditioned by their
actions in previous lives. They state that the dutiful and correct performance
of sacrifices will not only bring about the consequences to which the
sacrifices are addressed, but will also beneficially affect the conditions of
one's next life. This is the law of karma (action) applied not just to ritual
but also to the mechanics of human experience.
The most important thing to aspire to, however, is gaining
insight into the nature of one's essential self or soul, called ātman in Sanskrit. The Upanis ads teach
that self and cosmos are one, repeatedly stating that one's ātman is
inseparable from all that there is. This is famously expressed as tat tvam asi: ‘you are [all] that’ (Chāndogya Upanis ad 6.8 ff). Gaining
experiential insight of this identity is to be aspired to because such
knowledge effects one's release (in Sanskrit, moksa was quickly established as the supreme goal of human
existence. It was seen in the wholly positive sense of knowledge which enabled
one to escape from the treadmill of rebirth and experience immortality: ‘One
who sees this does not experience death, sickness, or distress [any more].’ (Chāndogya Upani·ad 7.26.2)
-28-
Oneness
Looked at from the point of view of the universal rather
than the particular, the teaching that self and cosmos are identical also
responds to earlier speculation as to the nature of the cosmos. In the early
Upani·ads, the universe is referred to by the neuter term Brahman (not to be confused with its
masculine form, Brahmā, which is the
name of an important deva in the tradition). Brahman is the equivalent of an
impersonal absolute that might also be called Oneness or Being. An important
passage, in which a father is instructing his son, states:
In the beginning, this world was just Being – one
only, without a second. It is true that some people say ‘In the beginning this
world was just nonexistence – one only, without a second; and from that
non-existence’
The teaching that the universe is One is referred to
by the ontological term monism. This
means that there is only one existent thing, and there is nothing that is not
that thing. So whatever there is is ultimately the same thing, even if this
does not appear to us to be the case: we do not have to be able to see it for
it to be true. Monism is a numerical, not a qualitative, term. Other
information is required in order to know the nature and characteristics, if
any, of the oneness.
Monism is not a theistic term either, and should not
be confused with monotheism.
Monotheism states that there is one God, but tells us nothing else about what
there is per se. It is not stating there is only oneness. If the universe is
monistic, within that oneness it is possible that there might be thought to be
something that appears as God – or, indeed, many gods – but this would have no
more bearing on the underlying oneness than the apparent plurality of the
empirical world does.
-29-
Being emerged. ‘But how could that possibly be the case? How
could Being come from non-existence? On the contrary, in the beginning, this
world was just Being – one only, without a second.’
(Chāndogya Upani·ad 6.2.1–2)
The early Upani·ads are full of statements
drawing out the implications of such oneness: ‘It is by seeing, hearing,
reflecting, and concentrating on one's essential self (ātman) that the whole
world is known.’ ( 7.25.2). Mostly
straightforwardly, the expression west, east, south, and north; the ātman is,
indeed, the whole world.' (Chāndogya
Upani·hadāran˙ ‘ātman is Brahman’
unequivocally identifies essential self with cosmos, ultimately not two things
but one.
The focus on the identity of inner self and cosmos
suggests that the teachings contained in the Upani·ads
might be seen as the culmination of the internalization of the sacrifice, as
suggested above. The outward and visible practices directed towards the
external world are simply transposed to an inner understanding of the world.
The Upani·adic teachings could coexist alongside each uphold
the tradition of the sacrificial ritual in that at no point do they suggest
that rituals should be abandoned. On the contrary, they reinforce both the need
to perform rituals and the hierarchical social structure, based on ritual
purity, within which they operate. Thus it was that both ritual and Upani·
other within the Brahmanical tradition. The primary status accorded to the
Vedic ritual manuals is similarly accorded to the Upani·ad 2.4.5). ‘The ātman is below, above,
to the both are considered to contain teachings about the truth.’
One can also immediately see, however, the way in which these two strands
of the tradition embrace issues and views that are potentially divisive or
internally contentious. Not only do the focus and emphasis shift in the Upani·ads
in that ads from the this-worldly concerns of the ritual to the nature and
destiny of the person, as described above; it is also the case that the
attaining of esoteric knowledge is considered of superior
-30-
significance and purpose than the performing of ritual
actions. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the Vedic practice of
rituals and the Upani·ads suggest, is only adic
seeking of knowledge are each underpinned by a different understanding of the
nature of reality. The Upani·ads make it clear that
rituals, while important, are merely what should take place within a worldview
which assumes the transcendental reality of the plural world: indeed, the
purpose of the rituals is to maintain that plural world. But such plurality,
the Upanis empirically (or conventionally) real, and it is knowledge of the
greater reality of the underlying oneness of the world that leads to the higher
goal of immortality:
‘There is really no diversity here. He goes from death to
death who perceives diversity here. One must see it as just one … by knowing
that very one, a wise brahmin can obtain insight for himself.’
( ·ad 4.4.19)
Those who state that the plurality of the world
around us is ultimately real are pluralists.
Other terms for this ontology are pluralistic
realism and transcendental realism.
This means that what we see – the plurality of the empirical world – is real in
itself, transcendent (or ‘outside’) of anything to do with human perception.
Those who state that empirical plurality is not
transcendentally real (and this would include those who state that reality is
one) are not denying empirical reality. Rather, what they are stating is that
there is a greater degree of reality – absolute reality – that differs from
what we see on the surface. Empirical reality in this case is ‘conventional.’
-31-
In the early decades of the 5th century BCE, these two
approaches do not appear to have been mutually contentious or to have given
rise to incompatible worldviews vying for supremacy. But as we shall see in
following chapters, this soon changed. Not only did this century see the Buddha
and others challenge Brahmanical teachings based on the
Upani·ads, as well as by others.
This meant that not ads, but it soon became necessary for ritual specialists to
defend their realistic worldview against those who sought to refute or ridicule
the point of the sacrifice. And in doing so they themselves had to refute any
notion of the merely conventional status of the empirical world such as
suggested in the Upani· only did the Brahmanical
tradition have to grapple with criticism from outside, but it also became
increasingly exposed to internal divergence based on its two branches of
primary material.
Later, some who were concerned not to question the
legitimacy of the presence of both approaches within the same tradition sought
to overcome their incompatibility by suggesting that ritual duties should be
carried out during the period of one's life when one was married and producing
children. This would mean both that the maintenance of the ritual-dependent
world would be ensured, and also that succeeding generations of sons, on whom
the continuity of the brahmin-led social hierarchy depended, would be produced.
Once this stage of life had passed, attention could then be focused on the
quest for liberating knowledge. To this day, those whose primary concern is
religious practice rather than philosophical debate see this as the path of
Brahmanical orthodoxy that acknowledges the primary status of the whole of the
Veda.
As the more philosophical and polemical debate developed,
thinkers from a variety of traditions became involved, but in the direct
lineage of this early material, two of the classical darśanas – Mīmām sā and
Vedānta – based their different teachings and worldviews on exegesis of the
Vedic ritual material and the Upanis ads respectively. These two bodies of
material, on which were based the ritual and gnostic branches
-32-
of the Brahmanical tradition that coexisted during the early
part of the 5th century BCE, came to be known by challengers, reconcilers, and
exegetes alike as the ‘action section’ ( ) and the ‘knowledge section’ ( ) of
the Veda.
-33-
Chapter 3
Renouncing the Household The Buddha's Middle Way
Renouncer v. Householder
The correlation between religious power and social
hierarchy, administered and guarded by the brahmins with the same degree of
rigidity as the sacrificial ritual itself, was such that some found the
prospect of living within the strictures of the Brahmanical fold oppressive.
Such people sought alternative socio-religious paths, and collectively became
known as renouncers (s´raman˙a). What
they rejected was everything to do with the authority and prescriptive norms of
the brahmin priests, but ‘renouncer’ tends to be understood more specifically
as the polar opposite of the ‘householder’ status prescribed by the Brahmanical
tradition in order to ensure its continuity. Householders had a duty not just
to sacrifice but also to be economically productive and sexually reproductive,
within group lineages which excluded those not of the same status of ritual
purity. Renouncers, in contrast, tended to be peripatetic, mendicant, and
celibate. Some grouped round leaders whose teachings and insights they accepted
and agreed with, but many were solitary wanderers. Many also practised severe
austerities, subjecting themselves to extremes of temperature, hunger and
thirst, painful bodily distortions, and various other kinds of self-denial.
Such asceticism was believed by renouncers to be purposeful in that it was
thought to contribute to gaining spiritual insight by focusing the mind in
certain non-normative ways. -34-
Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500 BCE:
the early Upani·ads.
by 500 BCE:
ritual and gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted.
5th-century BCE
milieu: in polar contrast to the householders of the Brahmanical religion
were the renouncers – peripatetic, mendicant, and celibate wanderers, in search
of knowledge about the world and the self. Renouncers rejected all Brahmanical
norms.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha. Texts record that the Buddha challenged Brahmanical
practices and teachings, and their claims to authority, and found no
satisfactory alternative among the teachings of the renouncers.
Based on insights gained at his own Enlightenment,
he taught a Middle Way between those of the householders and the renouncers.
We do not know exactly how or when renouncers became a
significant presence in the milieu of north India in which the worldview of the
brahmins was becoming dominant in the period before the 5th century BCE. During
the 20th century, excavations of a previously unknown, extremely ancient
civilization in the Indus Valley produced evidence which suggested that there
had been a very early indigenous tradition, thriving long before the Aryans
arrived, that the renouncers might have been the inheritors of: that is, the
approach and practices of the renouncers might not have originated within the
Aryan tradition. Whatever the source, it nevertheless might have been the
-35-
Map 1.
Map showing the two main city centres of the Indus Valley Civilization,
MohenjoDaro and Harappa.
-36-
4. A view of Mohenjo-daro. 
-37-
case that as some of those within the brahmin fold sought
to internalize the purpose and practice of sacrificial rituals, they also
sought to bypass the strictures of priestly involvement within a prescribed
social structure. It is also possible that the trend to internalize the
sacrifice might itself have been triggered by contact with indigenous
practices.
What we do know, from various sources that corroborate one
another, is that, by the time the Brahmanical tradition was embracing the new
teachings recorded in the Upani·ads. That is to say, it was
not that theads, there was a significant number of peripatetic renouncers who
were seeking their own answers to religiophilosophical questions. In many
respects, the questions themselves related to the same issues as those addressed
both in Vedic speculative material and in the Upani·
renouncers were seeking truth of a wholly different kind, only that they sought
answers by their own means rather than as taught by the brahmins. The concern
of virtually all of them was to understand the nature of the world and the
nature of the human being, expressed in terms of selfhood.
The Nature of Self
Our sources suggest there was a wide variety of theories
relating to the nature of self and world, the emphasis on either or both
varying with each point of view. The plethora of questions on selfhood is
summed up in an early Buddhist text as follows:
Did I exist in the past? Did I not exist in the past? What
was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what did I become
in the past? Shall I exist in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having
been what, what shall I
become in the future? Am I now? Am I not, now? What am I? How
am I? Where has this being come from? Where will this being go?
It goes on to give putative answers:
-38-
‘I have a self. I have no self. I perceive [my] self by means
of [my] self. I perceive no self by means of [my] self. I perceive [my] self by
means of no self. This self of mine which speaks and feels, that experiences
the consequences of good and bad actions now here and now there, this self is
permanent, stable, eternal, unchanging, the same always.’
(Majjhima Nikāya I 8)
So numerous were the speculative questions on both self
and world that all possibilities came to be subsumed in a formula in Buddhist
texts:
Is the world eternal or not? Is the world finite or
not? Is the self different from the body or not? On achieving liberation from
rebirth, does one exist or not exist, exist and not exist, neither exist nor
not exist?
( II 223, for example – paraphrase)
From this and other generalizing evidence can be drawn
certain broad streams of thought. Some held to a strongly materialist view,
proclaiming the radical physicality of human beings in a wholly finite and
temporally limited world. Others stated that while there might be some kind of
immaterial self associated with one's physical body during one's lifetime, it
ceases once and for all at death. People who held this view were referred to as
annihilationists in early Buddhist sources: death involves the ‘annihilation’
of the self. Neither annihilationists nor strong materialists saw any point in
taking seriously the idea that a law of karma operated for human beings. But
many, possibly most, of the renouncers contextualized their views within a
framework which posited human beings experiencing a series of lives. Some,
along with the Upani·adic brahmins, held that the
self is permanent and unchanging, and were called eternalists by Buddhists.
Others were not eternalistic, but did believe in some kind of continuity. All
such people believed that actions have consequences for future lives, and for
them the whole point of seeking answers to these questions was that this
-39-
particular knowledge – knowledge of the nature of the self
and its ontological context – was believed to effect liberation (mok·a)
from rebirth. It was for this reason that their search for answers was so
crucial, and that it was on questions relating to these issues that their
attention remained focused.
This is an important point to grasp, as it represents a
key characteristic of the milieu we are attempting to understand. To draw it
out more clearly, it might help if we consider the picture from a slightly
different angle. What we have, broadly speaking, is a milieu in
which one can see that different practices and concerns
are directly correlated with respectively appropriate worldviews.
On the one hand there were those following the ancient
Brahmanical tradition of the Vedic sacrificial religion, in which the
performing of rituals was directly linked to the maintaining of a universe
which, if not entirely empirical, was certainly plural and real. Concern
centred on the precision of the sacrifice because of the link between act and
effect. This ancient tradition was at this time on the verge of being
overshadowed by other approaches, represented by the teachings of the Upani·asd
and the concerns of the nonmaterialist renouncers. But it had already become
the standard-bearer of orthodoxy, establishing social norms which endure to the
modern day. Its presence and influence were thus not going to be brushed aside
no matter how strongly alternative approaches claimed superiority.
Others, such as materialists and annihilationists, held to
a worldview which precluded focusing on anything other than the here and now.
These people concerned themselves primarily with defending their standpoint and
attempting to refute what they saw as the absurd claims and practices of both
ritualists and non-materialists alike.
At the other end of the spectrum were those who thought
life was a karmically determined round of rebirths and the world something
other
-40-
or more than its empirical appearance. Their concern was
with gaining knowledge of the precise structure of the world as it is in
reality and the place of human beings within it. This not only enabled them to
make lofty claims of knowledge of metaphysical truth, but also gave them the
existential imperative to realize the means of effecting release from bondage
to rebirth. If they wished to attain this highest of prizes, what they had to
know about above all else was the nature of the self. This quest thus dominated
their approach, effectively excluding any other concerns or issues.
Gotama – the Buddha
This is the milieu into which was born, around 485 BCE, a
man named Siddhartha Gotama, later to become known as the Buddha. The word buddha literally means ‘awake’, and
alludes to the occasion of the Buddha's Enlightenment. This is described in
texts as the attaining of insight (or rather three insights), the nature of
which was significant enough to be understood as analogous to waking up after
having been asleep. This point draws attention to the structure of the Buddhist
path, which, in common with that taught by the Upani·adic
brahmins and many of the renouncers, is to progress from ignorance to
knowledge. Ignorance is the prime conditioning factor in fuelling ongoing
rebirth, with each life characterized by the profound unsatisfactorinesses
associated with the transience of everything one can experience. Knowledge is
the enabling factor in bringing about the cessation of this continuous rebirth.
It was because the early teachers in these traditions claimed to have gained
access to such knowledge that we have such an abundance of different
metaphysical theories from this period.
Notwithstanding the free circulation of many popular
stories, based on the Buddhist tradition's didactic and hagiographic narrative
literature, we have no certain facts regarding the Buddha's early life, except
that he was born into a family who lived in the town of Kapilavatthu (in what
is now Nepal) and that it seems likely that the family was well-to-do
-41-
with high connections. The texts recount that he left home
in his early 30s in order to seek an answer to questions concerning the
existential nature of the human lot: Why is human existence as it is? Why is it
characterized by disease, ageing, and death? Is it inevitable that it is like
this? Can one do anything about it? Can one, indeed, escape such an existence?
Whether or not the Buddha had any knowledge of any of the
teachings recounted above prior to leaving home (we do not know either way),
the earliest Buddhist texts tell us that once he set out on his quest he
encountered people with a very wide range of views. Indeed, these texts are one
of our most important sources of information, alongside early Jain texts, about
the range of views in the milieu. Searching as he was for answers to big
questions, the Buddha was actively interested in encountering others on similar
quests and in learning what they thought was relevant to the situation and what
one might do about it. It seems that he spent some years listening to,
learning, and testing their theories by following their example in various
kinds of practices. He did not feel that any of them provided the certain
answers he was in search of, and eventually he decided to try his own technique
in an attempt to gain the deeper insights he sought.
Using a penetrative form of meditation he was later to
teach, the Buddha claimed he had gained three insights, which together gave him
understanding of how and why human existence is as it is. He also claimed that
he had, through these insights, achieved release from bondage to its
continuity. First, he was able to see his previous lives, and the way in which
each had influenced the quality and conditions of subsequent lives: that is, he
could see his own rebirth history. Second, he saw the way other beings were
born and reborn, again according to the conditioning effects of actions in
previous lives. The Buddha's acceptance and teaching of rebirth and karma were
thus not based on his adoption of features of a prevailing worldview: rather,
they were
-42-
Map
2. Sites associated with the Buddha.
-43-
5. A Buddhist monk meditates. 
-44-
based on his own experience. The third insight was how to
uproot from his psychoconceptual framework those factors which he could see
most deeply bound him to worldly continuity: appetitive desires, the desire for
continued existence, ignorance of the true nature of reality, and the holding
of opinionated ‘views.’
The Buddha's Enlightenment
‘With my mind concentrated, clarified’, purified,
free from interferences, supple, and focused, I directed my mind towards
knowing how to uproot the ‘continuity tendencies.’ I could see as it really is
the primary characteristic of human existence, how it arises, that it can
cease, and the way leading to its cessation. I knew as they really are the
continuity tendencies, their arising, their ceasing, and how to achieve their
cessation. Knowing and seeing thus, my mind achieved freedom from the binding effects
of all appetitive desires, my mind achieved freedom from the binding effects of
desiring continued becoming, my mind achieved freedom from the binding effects
of holding to opinionated views, and my mind achieved freedom from the binding
effects of ignorance. I then knew for certain that I was liberated from
rebirth, I had practised what was necessary, done what had to be done, and my
present state would generate no further continuity.'
(Vinaya III 4 – paraphrase) (See also Majjhima Nikāya I 23 and An˙guttara
Nikāya II 211 and IV 179.)
According to the texts (see the box above), prior to
describing the third insight the Buddha summed up what he could see in a
fourfold formula: (1) human existence is intrinsically characterized in a
certain way; (2) specific factors fuel its continuity; (3) cessation of that
continuity is possible; (4) there is a way leading to cessation. Seeing and -45-
6. Image of the Buddha teaching. 
-46-
understanding the key aspects of this situation is what is necessary if
what one is seeking is to gain liberation from bondage to it. So fundamental
was this that it became his first actual teaching to others, known as the Four
Noble Truths, said to have been given in a deer park in Varanasi.
The Four Noble Truths
The structure of the Four Noble Truths is simple and
clear: X is the case because of Y, and will cease if Y ceases, where X is
intrinsic to human existence. What they refer to in conceptual terms is less
easy to draw out, partly because of their cryptic nature and partly because dukkha, the Pāli term used to refer to
the intrinsic characteristic of human existence identified in the first Noble
Truth, is far from clear in its meaning. Dukkha has often been translated as
‘suffering’, ‘pain’, or ‘ill’, but it is now widely recognized that this
wrongly attributes to the Buddha a deeply negative, and readily refutable, view
of human existence. A better translation is ‘unsatisfactoriness’, which
conceptually relates dukkha to the Buddha's teaching that all of the factors of
our phenomenal world of existence are impermanent. In direct contrast to the
claims of the Upani·adic teachers of his day – that in spite of apparent
pluralities the universe is in fact a permanent and unchanging essential
oneness that it was possible to gain insight of – the Buddha taught that all of
the factors of experience were impermanent. And because they are impermanent,
they are ultimately unsatisfactory (even the best of experiences and situations
do not last) in contrast to the assumed blissfulness of immortality, or
essential permanence. Thus the Four Noble Truths are understood to identify
this unsatisfactoriness-based-on-transience as the fundamental characteristic
of cyclical life. It is because one does not accept impermanence, and constantly
seeks and desires that things be permanent – youth, healthiness, loved ones,
treasured possessions, and so on – that one fuels the continuity of
unsatisfactoriness, as one's very desires are doomed to disappointment. In
reiteration of the second
-47-
The
Buddha's Teachings
The Four
Noble Truths
Human existence is intrinsically characterized by
dukkha. Dukkha arises because of appetitive cravings and desires (negative and
positive).
There can be a cessation of dukkha, known as nirvana. Nirvana is achieved by
following the Noble Eightfold Path.
( V 420, for example – paraphrase)
Nirvana means ‘blowing out’, and refers to the cessation of
the fuel of continuity.
Dependent
Origination
‘What I teach is dependent origination, that all knowable
things are dependently originated; this is the way things are, the regularity
of things.’
(
II 25)
When this is, that is; This occurring, that occurs;
When this is not, that is not; This ceasing, that ceases.
(Majjhima Nikāya III 63, for example)
The Three
Marks of Existence
All conditioned things are impermanent. All conditioned
things are [therefore] unsatisfactory. All knowable things are not-self.
(Dhammapada 277–9, for example)
-48-
The formulaic form in which key teachings of early Buddhism
have come down to us reflects the fact that until they were written down in
approximately 40 BCE, the early guardians of the tradition used mnemonic
devices in order to preserve them orally.
Noble Truth, Buddhism teaches that this is where the
mechanism of the karmic process lies: in one's appetitive cravings and desires,
one's intentional state of mind.
The reason one continues to desire and crave what cannot
be attained is because one is ignorant of the true nature of reality. In
reality, everything within the cycle of lives is conditioned by something else.
The Buddha made this point in another of his key teachings. There is, he
stated, a ‘way things are’, a ‘regularity of things’, which is that all things
are ‘dependently originated.’ This is generic to all of the factors of our
cyclical experience: nothing at all, of whatever nature – material or mental,
sensory or conceptual, concrete or abstract, organic or inorganic – occurs
independently of conditioning factors. Indeed, this is the reason for the
impermanence of all things.
Dependent Origination
Dependent origination is a profoundly radical metaphysical
teaching. It is not stating that nothing exists, but that the manner in which
all things occur is different from either existence, which implies
independence, or non-existence, which implies a denial of occurrence. The point
of the Buddha's teaching on dependent origination is that it takes the ‘middle
way’ between existence, non-existence, existence-and-non-existence, and
neither-existence-nor-non-existence. This logic-defying formula, which we have
already seen above, is designed to include and reject all possible permutations
of metaphysical positions taken by others.
-49-
The
Buddha's ‘Middle Way’
The Buddha said that what he taught took a middle way
between the teachings and practices of the householders and the renouncers.
This can most clearly be seen in three areas:
1. The
Buddhist monastic community functioned in a manner between the extremes of
fully upholding the social structure and wholly rejecting it:
members
lived apart from society, but were interdependent with the laity.
2. The
monastic Buddhist's daily regime and way of life were between the sensory
indulgence associated with family life and the severe self-inflicted
austerities endured by the renouncers: they were celibate, but all other needs
were met in order to maintain the healthy well-being thought important for full
commitment to the path.
3. The
metaphysics of dependent origination took a middle way between all possible
permutations of the ontological theories offered by others: it could not be
expressed in any combination of terms relating to existence or nonexistence.
It is frequently stated that what the Buddha was teaching
in this context, in direct contrast to the Upanisadic brahmins and others, was
that there is no self. This view arises from the use of the Pāli term anattā (Sanskrit anātman), which involves the attaching of a negative prefix to the
word for ‘self.’ Selfhood, as we have seen, was of central concern to most
others in the Buddha's milieu. The dominant Brahmanical group, teaching from
the Upani·ads, were claiming that knowledge of the self's
immortal identity with the essence of the universe brought liberation. The
Buddha, in contrast, stated that all knowable things -50-
(dhammā) are
anattā, ‘not-self.’ And Buddhists and scholars alike have taken this as a
radical denial of selfhood: no self exists.
Recent scholarship has pointed out, however, that
the context is one of generic, and not just subjective, applicability. The
point is that if all things are dependently originated, between all
permutations of existence and non-existence, then the manner in which all
things occur – including selves in the same way as musical notes, toenails,
thoughts, laughter, aromas, cats, trees, chairs, and stones – is generically
the same, not that they are non-existent. Indeed, nonexistence is specifically
denied. Because of its subjective connotations, the term anattā can act as a
red herring. The Buddha was denying not people's selves, but that anything
exists independently. This clearly is in contrast to the claims of others of
the permanence of selfhood, but that it is stating that there is no self is
questionable.
Its questionability is supported by the fact that the
Buddha urged that one should refrain from taking any such ontological position
with regard to the self or of the world. He stated that all and any of these
were ‘mere opinions’ – contributing to the most deeply binding continuity
factors needing to be uprooted on gaining insight into the nature of reality.
He himself refused to answer questions on such issues, and his silence when
questioned on the ‘fourfold logic’ formula referred to above gave rise to their
appellation as the Unanswered Questions of Buddhism. In great contrast both to
his contemporaries and to most other teachers, no information on the
ontological status of self and world is given by the Buddha – or at least not
directly. What the Buddha does teach – in order to ‘see things as they really
are’, as it is put in Buddhist sources – is that the focus of one's
investigation and understanding should not be ontological issues, but the
operation of one's cognitive faculties.
These are referred to in Buddhist sources as a fivefold
interacting apparatus, called the five khandhas,
a word which has no exact English
-51-
equivalent in this context. If an interlocutor appears to
be directing attention elsewhere, the Buddha frequently reiterates that it is
the operating of the khandhas that needs to be understood. Furthermore, and
most importantly, it is repeatedly stated in the early texts that the five
khandhas are what constitute dukkha, the primary characteristic of human
existence identified in the first Noble Truth. This association suggests that
the full import of the Truth is, therefore, not confined to the psychological
state of unsatisfactoriness, but includes the point that where an investigation
of human existence must start is with one's cognitive apparatus. This is the
means whereby one has any experience at all, and thus nothing specific can be
investigated or known about without first understanding the means by which one
experiences it, or has any notion of it in the first place.
In ‘religious’ terms, the purpose of the investigation of
one's cognitive apparatus is to understand the link between the way it normally
operates and the way one's cravings and desires affect it: appetitive response
is dependent on cognitive processes that operate normatively, but in fact,
according to the true nature of reality, erroneously. In particular, the
failure to understand the implications of dependent origination lead one to
continue to respond as an independent desirer, having individual desires for
separate objects of desire. In this way is continuity fuelled by a combination
of ignorance and appetitive cravings. Conversely, the appetitive cravings will
atrophy if and when ignorance is replaced by understanding that the perception
of independence and separateness is false.
From the Nature of Being to the Nature of
Experience
From the ‘philosophical’ point of view, what this teaching
does is to shift the focus of investigation from ontology to epistemology. That
is to say, into the milieu of intense metaphysical questioning and ontological
theories relating to the self and the world, the Buddha interjects the claim
that all one has access to is one's own subjective
-52-
cognitive process. One cannot get outside of this to see
or check what might be the case external to it, but one can nevertheless
understand how it works. This involves understanding how it is involved in the
structuring of the way we experience the world about us. The texts make
reference to the way one's perceiving apparatus processes the
‘raw’ data of experience into increasingly
identifiable, refined, and sophisticated categories, the whole process
involving ‘making manifold what is not really manifold’ (An˙guttara Nikāya II 161).
The cognitive process
Visual sensation occurs when there is contact between
consciousness, eye, and visual object; that preliminary sensation is then
identified, conceptualized, and made manifold.
(Majjhima Nikāya I 111 – paraphrase)
This pattern is identical for hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching or thinking (six senses, including one relating to non-sensory mental
activity, are recognized in Buddhism and other Indian schools of thought).
Dependent
origination again
‘Understanding dependent origination means one will no longer ask questions about the
existence of the self, past, future, or present, such as Is it? or Is it not?,
What is it?, Why is it?, this Thing that it is – Where has it come from? Where
will it go?’
( IV 93 – paraphrase, my italics)
Two implications arise from this teaching that are not made
explicit in the texts (indeed, little is made explicit). One is that if it is
one's perceiving apparatus that processes all experiential data, then this is
what forms the matrix of dependent origination: whatever one
-53-
experiences is dependently originated in subjective
experiencing processes. This means not only that there is a direct correlation
between subjectivity and objectivity, but also that what makes the dependently
originated phenomena of cyclical existence impermanent is their experiential
nature. This implication was to become more fully drawn out and discussed in
later Buddhism, particularly in Yogācāra Buddhism, but in the early period
largely remained latent.
The other is that if the focus lies in understanding the
nature of knowing as opposed to the nature of things, as it were, independent
of our knowing faculties, then it follows that nothing one knows is one's self.
Whatever might be its nature or ontological status, a knowing subject cannot
objectify itself in order to be known by itself. Thus one reads in the last
line of a formula known as the Three Characteristics of Existence (shown in the
box on p. 48): ‘All knowable things (dhammā)
are not-self (anattā).’ This implication has also largely remained latent, in
this case because of contrasting claims that the anattā doctrine is stating
that there is no self.
The Buddha was a harsh critic of the views and claims of
others in many respects. If his anattā teaching was stating there is no self,
this alone would be in radical contrast to the claims of at least the dominant
Brahmanical group, teaching from the Upani·ads. If, in fact, its
purport was that nothing one can know is one's self, then he would most
profoundly have undercut not just the teaching of the dominant Brahmanical
group, but the very rationale of the quest as seen by the vast majority of his
contemporaries. In any case, in teaching dependent origination he rejected
outright all of the various ontological stances taken by others.
In drawing out the various features of what he taught,
however, it is important to remember that at the time his purpose both in
teaching, and in rejecting the teachings of others, was entirely directed
towards helping others to gain insight in order to achieve liberation from the
-54-
vicissitudes of human existence. One cannot read the early
Buddhist texts without being constantly reminded of this motive, and to ignore
or omit this point would be to do violence to the way the teachings are
preserved. The Buddha was concerned to undermine the brahmins not because he
wished to win a philosophical point but because he saw their claims to
exclusivity and supreme authority as pernicious to people's well-being.
Furthermore, he considered their dependence on tradition for how they claim things
are, rather than drawing on their own individual experiential understanding, to
be deeply unreliable, to the extent of being inherently self-invalidating: he
saw no reason why anyone should believe a teaching given by someone who has
never experienced what they are making claims about. He also objected to their
self-importance and lack of concern for the liberation of others. He regarded
all priestly ritual activity as purposeless: the action – consequence mechanism
that mattered lay in one's state of mind, he said, and no one had access to
that but oneself. He saw the focus on remembering sacred formulas precisely,
and guarding a sacred language from others, as diverting attention away from
the need to understand the structure of existential mechanics to the minutiae
of sounds and utterances: what mattered, he stated, was not the letter but the
spirit, not the detail but the overall picture, not one's memory but one's
understanding.
The style of early Buddhist material is that of a
‘religious’ rather than a ‘philosophical’ tradition. Concerns that might be of
philosophical interest to us at an intellectual level were overwhelmingly of
existential and not abstract concern at that time. Indeed, the Buddha and his
immediate followers, and other contemporary seekers of the truth, would all
have been bemused by an attempt merely to intellectualize their ideas. The
5thcentury BCE context nevertheless was the crucible in which the ideas and approaches
of many different schools of thought were clearly formulated and established in
relation to one another. Furthermore, it was from this century onwards that the
assertions of the more influential approaches increasingly needed more
systematic
-55-
claims to validity. While the 5th-century BCE milieu might
not itself have necessitated any formal explication of the theoretical
underpinnings of the various different teachings, it was not long before formal
explications were vying with one another for superiority and acceptance, and
what had been taught either because of the injunctions of longestablished
tradition or for purely practical soteriological purposes acquired more
scholastic and theoretical formulations and interpretations. -56-
Chapter 4
Issues and
Justifications
Language,
grammar, and polemics
The Threat to the Brahmins
From the point of view of the brahmin priests, the
developments that took place during the 5th century BCE posed a serious threat.
The descendants of the Aryan invaders had been highly successful in
establishing a dominant position both culturally and religiously, but the
challenges of others during this period prompted the need for them to take
serious steps to defend their practices and worldview. Most at risk was the
sacrificial tradition. The competing views of others not only suggested that
the rituals associated with the sacrifice were pointless, but would, if widely
accepted, render the brahmins themselves redundant, and thus topple them from
their place at the head of the hierarchy. What emerged in the brahmins' attempt
to protect all aspects of their position was a reinforcement and formalization
of a variety of technical arguments intended to demonstrate the validity and
status of the sacrifice.
As with the developments of the 5th century BCE described
in previous chapters, the formalizing of the Vedic ‘defences’ built on earlier
trends. The ritual tradition was organized, preserved, and operated on the
basis of specializations: different lineages were responsible for, and expert
in, different specialist areas of the sacrifice as a whole. Thus the need to
establish detailed arguments in defence of the ritual could draw on extant, as
well as develop new, expertise: the act of defence was
-57-
Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500 BCE:
the early Upani·ads.
by 500 BCE:
ritual and gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted.
5th-century BCE
milieu: householders and renouncers.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha.
4th–2nd
century BCE: In the face of proliferating counter-claims to knowledge of
the truth, if the brahmins were to retain their hold on their dominant position
they needed to clarify the issues which both justified their practices and
confirmed their authority. As the ancient guardians of the sacrificial ritual
and the language of Sanskrit, they sought to establish the criteria by which
their practices and concerns would be validated, not just for themselves but
also to refute the claims of others. In so doing they set the agenda for what
each school of thought needed to establish in support of its own position.
Key figures
include:
4th century BCE:
the grammarian Pān˙ini.
3rd–2nd century BCE:
Kātyāyana and Patañjali, commentators on Pān˙ini's grammar.
2nd century
BCE: Bādarāyān a, author of the Brahma
Sūtra, an important exegetical text on the Upanis a of the Veda.
2nd century BCE:
Jaimini, author of the first known exegetical text on the ritual
-58-
intricately interleaved with ongoing studies and
supporting arguments within the Brahmanical tradition as a whole.
The Lines of Defence
Put simply, the threat to the ritual was primarily seen as
a threat to the Veda itself – specifically the ‘original’, pre-Upani·a).
Two lines of defence were thus necessary. The first was to reinforce and
protect the continuity of the social hierarchy based on the ritual purity of
its participants, on which depended the future of the Veda. Evidence of this
social reinforcement is contained in treatises known as Dharma-Śāstras and Artha-Śāstras,
which minutely detail and enjoin on each member of society their place,
roles, duties, rights, aims, potential, and so on. Thus was fixed the social
structure, and while extreme rigidity and exclusivity might be criticisms
levelled against it, it nevertheless attained quite astonishing success in
terms of longevity, persisting as it does to the present day. (It is perhaps
worth noting that one reason for this is that in any given lifetime a person's
position in the social hierarchy is believed to be determined by his or her
actions (karma) in previous lives. This means that to insiders the system is
based on the operating of a natural law rather than the accidentally elitist
structure that Western eyes perceive it to be.)
The second was to preserve and defend the full extent of
the material relating to the performance of ritual. Thus the specialisms that
developed in this respect were based on disciplines known as the vedān˙gas – ‘limbs of the Veda’ – of
which there were six. Phonetics was
concerned with the correct pronunciation of the sounds uttered, chanted, or
spoken at the sacrifice. Metrics was
the classification of the metres of the various hymns or formulas of the
sacrifice. Grammar was the
establishing of the relations between component parts of sentences. Etymological analysis sought to explain
the meaning of individual words within sentences. Astronomy established the most auspicious day and time for the
performing of rituals. Ceremonial rules
-59-
laid down the proper way for the various rituals of the
sacrifice to be performed.
Astronomy and ceremonial rules apart, what the
vedān˙gas also lent themselves to, that is of more interest to us, was the
relating of the content of the Veda to an understanding of reality by means of language. That is to say, in
establishing the rules of the language of the Veda, the way that language was
operational in the world maintained by the sacrificial ritual was also
established. This further meant that the nature of the world was explained, and
that the relationship between language and knowledge of that world could be
articulated – if only from this particular point of view. What follows will, I
hope, show how these points emerge from the language debate.
Language and Reality
As became commonplace in many strands and aspects of the
Indian traditions, over the centuries different theories and arguments were put
forward within the Vedic tradition in support of the most important points in
the debate on language: we need mention only some of the more significant of
these here. Perhaps the most influential single figure was the great Indian
grammarian Pān˙ini wrote one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated
grammars in the history of linguistics, highly respected to this day. His
seminal work, the A·ādhyāyī, comprises eight chapters
containing 4000 rules. Together with appendices, the work covers all aspects of
semantics, syntax, derivations, phonological rules, the classification of
nominal and verbal roots, and rules for special cases. Pān˙ini, who lived during
the 4th century BCE. Pān˙ini thus incorporated etymology and phonetics, also
vedān˙gas in their own right and studied and written about separately by
others, within his comprehensive grammar.
The language described by Pān˙ini's grammar was Sanskrit,
the language of the Veda and the language of the ritual. Sanskrit was
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considered ‘ritually pure’ speech, and of central importance was its
creative aspect: the sound of the Sanskrit uttered at the sacrifice was
believed to be what brought about the intended consequences of the sacrifice.
Pānini's grammar explained this process as one of agency plus activity. Thus,
for example, the creative import of a sentence such as ‘water wets grain’ is
indicated by understanding it as ‘wet grain is brought about by water.’ For us,
two things are noteworthy here. First is the point that the nominals (the
naming words), in this case grain and water, are understood as substantives –
actual things or beings. Second is that the agent, in this case water, need not
be a conscious or intending actor: the sounds of the sacrifice are creatively
effective as it were automatically, and certainly impersonally – the role of
the priests in ‘sounding the Vedic verses’ being analogous to the water's in
wetting the grain. Thus the language itself indicated the reality of the plural
world in which the sacrifice was performed. And the essential part played by
the priests preserving and guarding the texts of the ritual was confirmed: it
was the language that was the creative instrument.
Of slightly tangential interest is the point that in
codifying the grammatical rules of Sanskrit as he did, Pān˙i waS instrumental
‘closing’ the language. This is an unusual factor in the history of any
language, as most continue to change and adapt in the context of cultural
developments. Sanskrit, by contrast, has a specific ‘classical’ form, which
provides a clear guide as to what is correct or incorrect, how it should or can
be used, and so on. While it has had a rich tradition of use in the literature and
drama of India as well as in other ‘religious’ writings, the point and
justification of the rule-bound nature of Sanskrit is its unique status in the
creative process of the sacrifice.
Two important followers of and commentators on Pān ini were
Patañjali and Kātyāyana, both of whom lived during the 2nd century BCE, whose
contribution was to relate the Pān˙inian theoretical rules specifically to the
way Sanskrit was used in practice. Usage constituted an additional
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grammatical authority, they stated. Indeed, usage
constituted an authoritative means of knowledge. This was an important point
because it meant that even apparently incomplete or imperfectly formed
sentences could be understood by means of syntactic links. That is to say, if a
sentence or series of words does not conform precisely to the minutiae of
grammatical rules, it can be considered to be meaningful by means of usage
conventions. It was an important assertion not only in extending the criteria
by which language operated, but also more particularly for the defenders of the
Veda. This was because not all of the material in the ritual texts was of a
clear or consistent nature. A large part of it was comprised of injunctions
(or, indeed, prohibitions), which were clearly indicated for the purposes of
the ritual, and here the applicability of grammatical rules was obvious. But
also contained in the texts were various supplementary descriptions whose
meaning either was not self-evident or might be thought to be in conflict with
statements made elsewhere in the texts. By means of usage criteria such
passages could be interpreted as metaphors, or in other non-literal ways,
ensuring the overall validity and coherence of the sacred language in which the
texts were recorded.
Jaimini's Defence of the Veda
Eventually, theorizing on language and its role led other
defenders of the Veda to much more specific attempts to establish the meaning
and validity of the Veda's content. The work of the grammarians initially
enabled them to ensure accurate preservation of the material and precision at
the sacrifice itself. But it was also necessary to be able to argue that the
entire corpus of material was meaningful and coherent. The first known
important exegete of the Vedic texts, who attempted to understand the nature
and purpose of the sacrificial ritual, was Jaimini, who lived during the 2nd century
BCE. This was the
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Meaning and grammar
‘Fire cooks rice.’ This is a clear sentence, with
two nominal substantives – fire and rice, an activity – cooking, and an agent –
the fire which brings about the cooked rice. One can understand this as the ‘creating’
of cooked rice by means of the interaction between substantive entities and
activity.
The meaning of individual words is linked to the
overall grammatical form of the sentence. For example, if the above sentence
was ‘Fires cook rye’, the different meaning of ‘fires’ (more than one fire) and
‘rye’ (a different substance is indicated by the different word) means that the
sentence as a whole states something different from ‘Fire cooks rice.’ It is
thus important to know both what each word means, which is the function of
etymology, and how the grammatical rules work, if one is to understand the
whole sentence.
‘Her hair was pure sunlight.’ This sentence cannot
be taken literally, as it is not possible that hair can actually be sunlight.
If the sentence was analysed according to etymological/ grammatical rules
(meaning of words linked with grammatical form), it would have to be rejected
as erroneous. It can, however, be understood, by means of ‘usage’ rules, as a
metaphor. It would thus be known that the point was that the hair in question
was bright, shining, yellowcoloured, probably glowing or sparkling with light –
and that no claim to its being actual sunlight was being made.
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came at a later date. But an understanding of its
beginnings is helpful for us at this stage because of its influence on other
schools of thought in intervening centuries. Jaimini's concern, recorded in his
Mīmām sā Sūtra, was to understand the
Vedic ritual texts as the codifiers of dharma. Dharma, as mentioned in Chapter
1, is the cosmic order maintained by the correct performance of the sacrifice,
in turn dependent on the maintaining of the requisite social hierarchy. As an
exegete of the ritual/dharma manuals, Jaimini defined dharma as having the
nature of an injunction. That is to say, he interpreted the Vedic texts
primarily in terms of their injunctive meaning: they told one what to do, or
indeed not to do, at the sacrifice. The key point here was that he saw the
texts in terms of their being solely the instigators of action(s). Everything
contained in them, therefore, should be understood either literally as
instructions to act, or as representing something related to this purpose. He
accordingly used grammatical criteria to explain the way sentences should be
understood to have injunctive meaning. He questioned the meaningfulness, and
certainly
Dharma
Dharma is of central importance in the Brahmanical
tradition. It is hard to translate into English without being misleading, so it
is best to try to understand it conceptually. This has to be done on two
‘levels.’ Macrocosmically, it refers to cosmic order as a whole. Whatever there
is is part of dharma in this sense. If things are not as they should be, or not
arranged as optimally as they can be, a state of disorder or a-dharma exists: a breakdown in dharma.
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Dharma is maintained in two ways: by means of the
performing of sacrifices according to Vedic injunctions, and by means of
individuals living according to their ritual social status and doing what they
should do to maintain the optimum level of status quo in the social hierarchy.
These constitute the second ‘level’, where one can see the microcosmic aspect
of dharma, which refers to the duties of the individual. Individual dharma is
called sva-dharma, one's
‘own-dharma.’ The correct performance of one's own-dharma is thus crucial if
macrocosmic dharma is to be maintained and a-dharma prevented.
The rules of own-dharma were codified in great
detail from the 2nd century BCE in texts known as the Dharma-Śāstras: the treatises on dharma-duty.
At a more philosophical level, the 2nd century BCE also saw
the Vedic exegete Jaimini working on the primary dharma manuals – the much
older Vedic ritual manuals. He stated that all of the Vedic texts consisted of
injunctions to act, and he defined dharma in these terms: dharma is ‘what
should be done’.
From a more exclusively ‘religious’ perspective in
the Hindu tradition, it is a breakdown in dharma (i.e. a-dharma) that
necessitates and prompts divine intervention. In the text known as the Bhagavad Gītā, for example, an
incarnated form of the supreme Godhead states: ‘Whenever there is a breakdown
in dharma I will come into being, in age after age.’
(Bhagavad Gītā IV, 7–8 – paraphrase)
the authority with regard to Vedic purpose, of anything
that could not be explained in this way.
Jaimini took it that the injunctions related directly to
actual substantives
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in the plural world. Drawing on the work of grammarians,
he understood the meaning of a word to be correlated with the existence of the
thing to which it refers. If one says ‘cow’, for example, in order for it to
have meaning there must exist such a thing as a cow. Thus by definition the
injunctions contained in the Veda meant that there must exist the necessary
ingredients to bring them about: in each case at the very least the agent and
the product. This meant that the Vedic texts reliably established both the
reality of the cosmos to which they referred and the validity of the
injunctions which must be performed in order to maintain the continuity of that
cosmos.
Of the Upani·adic teaching that liberation is effected by
knowledge of the essential identity of self and universe, Jaimini stated that
it should be taken as an injunction to know one's self as performer of the
sacrifice in relation to the universe one's actions were maintaining.
He interpreted apparently monistic passages as metaphors,
thus denying their incompatibility with the realism of the ritual material.
Rather, he stated, the Upani·ads established the reality
of a plurality of individual selves, each of which needs to know that it exists
as an agent.
The Primacy of the Upanis
Alongside Jaimini's exegetical endeavours focused
primarily on the ritual manuals, the Upani·ads as they should be
understood, was written by Bādarāyan contemporary of Jaimini. Bādarāyan˙a's
text is commonly known as the Vedānta
Sūtra, reflecting the fact that the Upani·ads themselves were also
specifically subjected to interpretation by those more interested in the
non-ritual, ‘know thyself’ teachings expressed in them, but who were also
concerned to establish the Vedic material as authoritative and superior to any
other. An early version of an extremely important text (later adapted by
others), purporting to summarize the key teachings of the Upani·a,
aads form the ‘end of the Veda’
(vedānta). The
text is also known as the Brahma Sūtra,
indicating that its major concern is not ritual but understanding what
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the Upani·ads ads have to say about
Brahman, the ground of the cosmos. The first verse of the text proclaims: ‘Then
[there is] the enquiry into Brahman’, and the second verse continues: ‘that
from which [occurs] the origin, maintenance, and dissolution [of all that there
is].’ This suggests not just a different focus, but also a profoundly different
understanding of the nature of reality. In place of the plurality insisted upon
in Jaimini's work, the Vedānta Sūtra
indicates that all things are part of the one Brahman. This implies that ritual
injunctions should not be taken, as suggested by Jaimini, to indicate the
reality of what they refer to: for Bādarāyan˙ads state that what one should
‘do’ is know Brahman. The Upani·a, language does not have
this substantively indicative nature. Furthermore, as injunctive texts in their
own right, the Upani·ads state that what one
should ‘do’ is know Brahman.
Text and Testimony
respectively. For this reason Mīmām sā and Vedānta are
sometimes referred to as Purva (early) and Uttara (late) Mīmām sā (exegesis) –
that is, exegesis of the early and late sections of the Veda respectively.
Between them they also established two important features of the Indian
tradition as a whole. First was their style of writing, the extremely cryptic
‘sūtra’ form. Each verse consists of just a few words whose meaning and context
are often far from selfevident, and the texts require further interpretation if
they are to be understood. It is possible that this reflects the fact that the
tradition was primarily an oral one, the key points argued by important figures
merely being recorded in the form of an aide-mémoire. It might also reflect a
tendency to exclusivity of understanding in each tradition, indicating the
superiority of those ‘in-the-know.’ Whatever it was that prompted its use, an
important consequence of the cryptic style was that over time more than one
school of thought emerged within each tradition as later exegetes added their
own commentaries to the early texts.
The second feature that was established by these two early
exegetes
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The cryptic nature of the Sūtras
It must in fact be eternal, as it is spoken for another's
sake. There is always correspondence. Because there is no number. Because it is
independent.
( 1.1.18–21 – on the nature of language)
Then there is the enquiry into Brahman. From which is the
origin, etc., of this. This from its being the origin of the texts. And that
because it is associated with their purpose.
(Vedānta Sūtra 1.1.1–4 – on the subject
matter of the Sūtra)
was the beginnings of what was to become an extremely
important, and controversial, epistemological criterion in the Indian tradition
– testimony. That is to say, rejecting absolutely the teachings of the Buddha
and others, both Jaimini and Bādarāyan˙a stated that the Vedic sources
represented an unquestionably valid source of knowledge: what they said was to
be taken as wholly reliable. Epistemological criteria came to be known by the
Sanskrit term pramān˙a, literally
‘knowing by means of word.’ From this time on, the extent to which testimony
could be accepted as a valid means of knowledge had to be considered by each
systematic thinker, whether the source in question was the Veda, something
else, or someone else's ‘word.’ Those who either rejected the reliability of
testimony, or gave it low epistemological priority, had to establish the
primacy and validity of at least one other epistemological criterion, such as
perception, inference, or reasoning/ logical argument. Related ontological
issues also had to be considered and argued for: in particular, the nature and
‘reality status’ of self – in relation to knowing and agency, and the nature
and ‘reality status’ of world – in relation to what is known and/or acted upon.
In some cases, consideration was also given to whether or not these were
related to, or could be determined by, the use of language.
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The investigation of issues to do with the self came to be
known by the term ātma-vidyā – the
‘knowledge of the self.’ And the activity of philosophizing in general was
referred to by the term ānvīk·ikī was concerned with how this
enterprise was conducted.
In the milieu of debate that ensued, it was common for the
proponent of a theory to put forward first an alternative view, which he would
then proceed to deny. The alternative view (sometimes more than one are
included for denial in a single argument) was referred to as that of the pūrva-pak·ikī, which means something like ‘looking at’, or even ‘what to look
at.’ It is usually understood as a technical term for ‘logical reasoning’, but
the term in fact reflects the early stages during which the tradition was
literally deciding and establishing what should be ‘looked at’, ‘kept in view’,
‘the subject of enquiry.’ Any theory put forward needed to be, or at least to
claim to be, internally coherent and consistent in these respects. Further,
criticisms of others' views focused on their handling and understanding of
these issues. Ānvīk·in, the
‘earlier proponent.’ Commonly, this was expressed as: ‘If it is said [i.e. if
the pūrva-pak·in says] that X (or Y, or Z), then this is wrong.’
Though precise details varied from system to system, the denial and argument
would then proceed, focusing not just on the alternative views as such but also
on the epistemological criteria by which they have been arrived at. The current
proponent would also put forward his own position with whatever supporting
evidence was appropriate to
his approach
and view, and explain his own epistemological criteria. -69-
Chapter 5
Categories and Method Vaiśe·ika and Nyāya
Vaiśe·ika Thought: the Categories of
the Cosmos
One of the first systems of thought to emerge from the
early milieu of deciding ‘what to look at’ was that of Kan˙ika Sūtra, written during the 2nd century BCE. Though his origins
and background are of uncertain orthodoxy, Kan concerned with understanding
dharma.
For Kan˙āda, dharma was supreme, to the extent that unlike
Jaimini, who believed the Veda itself to be self-validatingly supreme, Kan˙āda
upheld the Veda (only) because it upheld dharma. That is to say, while Jaimini
was primarily a Vedic exegete and defender of the Veda, Kan˙āda was most
interested in the nature of reality, which he understood as dharma, and which
happened to be maintained by the putting into practice of the Vedic
injunctions. Thus the opening verses of the Vaiśe·ika Sūtra state:
We shall now consider the nature of dharma. It is from dharma
that the highest and supreme good is achieved. The Veda has its authority
because of its concern with dharma.
(Vaiśe·ika Sūtra 1–3)
The Vaiśe·ika Sūtra represents a system of
pluralistic realism: the independent reality of each of the objects of the
world about us, outside of and separate from ourselves. What it is concerned
with is the
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Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500 BCE:
the early Upani·ads.
by 500 BCE:
ritual and gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted.
5th-century BCE
milieu: householders and renouncers.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha.
4th – 2nd
century BCE: grammarians and early exegetes establish what should be
‘looked at.’
3rd – 2nd century BCE:
Kan˙ika Sūtra – concerned with the
ontological status of the ‘particulars’ (viśe·āda's Vaiśes āda sought to establish of
what ‘particulars’, or types of entity, the world is comprised.
c.3rd century
CE: Gotama's Nyāya Sūtra –
adopting Kan āda's ontology of pluralistic realism, Nyāya was concerned with
how one can arrive at certain knowledge of that realism – what are the valid
means of knowledge? Its main contribution was an epistemological method, based
on inferential reasoning.
investigation of that plurality in order to
classify it according to the different types of entity of which it is
comprised. This is where the system gets its name, as ‘Vaiśe·under
investigation. The lasting influence of Vaiśes ika's approach and ontology is
felt by virtue of its close association with the Nyāya system of thought, first
propounded by a man named Gotama, whose dates are uncertain but who probably
lived around the 3rd century ce. Combined together into what tends to be known
as Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika’ indicates the particularities (viśe·a)ika, they have
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played an extremely important and influential role among the
classical darśanas, making major contributions to Indian thought. Even though
the more dominant Nyāya is often referred to or studied on its own, such an
approach presupposes its adoption of Vaiśe·ika position and claims
before looking at Nyāya, as well as a feeling of the detailed extent to which
their claim to realism was analytically presented.
The classification of particularities with which Vaiśes
ika was concerned was undertaken in terms of ascertaining the fundamental
‘categories’ of all existent entities. The Sanskrit term for such categories
was padārtha, which literally means
‘what is predicated by the word’, in itself taken as indicating the
transcendental reality of the entities under investigation. That is, by virtue
of being verbally referred to, an object is understood to have independent
existence. According to Vaiśe·ika realism. So it is
absence or negation.
Substance and Quality
The most important of these categories is substance,
because all the other categories in some way relate to it. All substance of
whatever nature is reducible to one or other of nine different kinds: earth,
water, fire, air, ether, space, time, self, and mind. Each is characterized by
different qualities, and of the first five the Vaiśe·ika
Sūtra states:
Earth possesses colour, taste, smell, and touch [as
well as solidity], Water possesses colour, taste, touch, and fluidity, Fire
possesses colour and touch [as well as heat], Air possesses touch [as well as
mobility]. Ether possesses no perceivable qualities.
(Vaiśe·ika Sūtra
II.1.1–5 – paraphrase) -72-
Vaiśe·ika ontology is one of pluralistic
realism. It breaks down the fundamental constituents of reality into 7 categories: substance, quality, action,
universality, particularity, a relation of inherence, and absence or negation.
Substance is
further subdivided into 9 different kinds of ‘atoms’: earth, water, fire, air,
ether, space, time, self, and mind.
Earth, water, fire, and air are material substance atoms; ether, space, time, self, and mind are immaterial substance atoms. All atoms
are eternal.
Earth, water, fire, and air atoms group together to
form recognizable objects, in association, where appropriate, with one or more
of the other atoms. Ether, space, time, and self are, as well as being eternal,
all-pervading. Mind, however, is only atomic in size, and one mind atom is
associated with a single self atom in each individual human being.
Substance is
the most important category as it is only in relation to substance that the
other categories occur.
There are 24 qualities,
and 5 kinds of action, that inhere in substances. Each individual occurrence of a substance is a particular example
of a universality. Absence allows
for various kinds of negation, non-presence, or non-existence to be understood
as part of reality.
Though unperceivable, the principal quality of ether is that it is the
medium through which sounds, for example, travel and reach the senses. As such
it is a substance in its own right.
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All substances occur in atomic form, each atom being
eternal and indestructible. It is in joining together in varying proportions
that these atoms produce all the various objects of the universe, which are in
turn finite and reducible to their constituent atoms. Unlike earth, water,
fire, and air, which constitute material substance, the atoms of ether, space,
time, self, and mind are immaterial. Of these five immaterial substances, mind
is particular to each individual self and is itself of atomic size, whereas the
remaining four, as well as being eternal, are omnipresent substances.
The plurality of selves is indicated by the plural
manifestation of the quality of
consciousness (or cognition), and each self is further characterized by
the qualities desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, and effort. The part mind
plays, and its existence is inferred from its activity, is in processing
sensory information: it is also instrumental in allowing the self to be
internally perceived. This distinct separation of self and mind is not uncommon
in Indian thought.
In outlining the category of substance, we have already
referred to examples of the second category listed, quality. Qualities can only
reside in substances and cannot occur on their own. Between 17 and 24 qualities
are listed in different Vaiśe·ika texts, and they are
subdivided into those qualities that can reside in material substances, those
that can reside in immaterial substances, and those that can reside in both.
Thus those such as colour, taste, smell, touch, fluidity, and solidity, for
example, reside in the material substances earth, water, fire, and air; those
such as cognition, happiness, unhappiness, desire, and aversion reside only in
the immaterial substances; number, magnitude, and conjunction, for example,
reside in any substance. Sometimes more than one substance needs to be present
for a particular quality to inhere, such as conjunction, otherness, and plural
number.
The importance of qualities is that they characterize
substance in such a way as to render substance identifiable to us as this or
that
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object. Without qualities, substance would not be
distinguishable in terms of the world as we know it. Thus substance always has
at least one quality inhering in it. And this inherence is itself a further
category in the Vaiśe·ika schema, acting as what
one might call a kind of ‘glue’ between two other categories, which otherwise
could not exist on their own. An example often given to illustrate this point
is the impossibility of the quality ‘colour’ occurring on its own, or the
composite substance ‘rose’ occurring without the quality colour. Thus if we
take in this case a red rose, the colour red necessarily inheres as a quality
in the substance rose. In spite of the necessity of the relationship, however,
quality (in this case colour) and substance (in this case rose), as well as
inherence, are categorially separate aspects of reality. The colour red can
also be used to illustrate the categories of universality and particularity.
The red inhering in an individual red rose is a particular example of the universal
‘redness.’ A universal may be common to any number of particulars, and it is
the particularity of the individual occurrence of the universal that
differentiates one rose, say, from another. Moreover, it is only by means of
particularity that universality can manifest. Even individual ontologically
identical atoms, ranging from all earth atoms to all self atoms, are
differentiated by particularity in this radically pluralistic schema: in spite
of being categorially alike, and sharing in common universality, each is in
some sense unique, and this is separately categorized as its particularity. The
importance of universality is that without it, there would be no way of knowing
that certain particulars – say, all roses – share in a common rose-ness: that,
while each is particular, they all are in fact roses.
Of the remaining two categories we need to discuss,
action and absence, action is the more important, since it represents the
active and dynamic aspect of substance where qualities are passive and
inactive. Action accounts for all obvious activity, as well as the way in which
atoms become, and cease to be, composite objects. In this latter respect,
action is required in addition to inherence, acting as the -75-
‘causative’ factor. It is action that accounts for
causation as a whole, and one could almost conceptually substitute ‘causation’
for ‘action’ as the name of this category – though the Vaiśe·ikas
themselves never did so.
The counting of absence as a separate category might be
considered surprising in such a wholeheartedly realistic school of thought. It
was added to the original list of six categories in order to include the
indication of absence or non-existence as a true and ‘real’ state of affairs in
a system in which existence was thought to be an intrinsic attribute of the
object under investigation – reality. Thus the category ‘absence’ allowed for
statements such as ‘there is no rose here’ and ‘ether possesses no perceivable
qualities’ to have real meaning. Five kinds of absence were identified: there
is no rose here (absence); a rose is not a cow (difference); there is no flower
yet on the rosebush (non-existence prior to existence); the rose is no more
(non-existence following existence); roseness is never found in a cow
(something that never exists). It was because absence is as it were a part of
reality in this way that it was accorded its own separate category.
It is not known exactly how the Vaiśe·ikas arrived at their
ontology: that is, it is unclear whether they were attempting to describe
reality, or whether they were attempting to construct a reality-structure
system. So it is not known where they got the categorial system from, or what
criteria they used in order to determine the inclusion in the system of its
different factors. When the Naiyāyikas adopted Vaiśe·ika's
ontological system they do not seem to have questioned this either. What one
can say of both schools, however, is that they sought to establish the ultimate
reality of the plural world of common sense, and that they accepted
common-sense perceptions as providing a true representation of that world,
however they then chose to categorize it. They thus gave high priority to sense
perception as a means of knowing, in contrast with Jaimini's and Bādarāyan˙a's
dependence on testimony. This acceptance of the validity of the everyday world
of sense perception did,
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however, endorse the ontological stance of the Vedic
exegetes, but it was subsequently questioned by others – notably by Buddhists,
as we shall see in the next chapter.
The Contribution of Nyāya
The Nyāya thinkers, beginning with Gotama in his Nyāya Sūtra, added to the Vaiśe·ika
system was that they stated that the knowledge gained in this way was
soteriologically efficacious (that is, its acquisition affected the destiny of
believers) – something the Vaiśe·ikas had not explicitly
concerned themselves with, possibly because Kan˙ika system two highly
significant factors. The first is that they established clear criteria
according to which it could be logically demonstrated that each factor of the
system is as it is described as being. That is, they introduced a particular
‘method’, based on specific rules of reasoning, by which certain knowledge
could be arrived at with regard to the object of enquiry. This allowed them to
claim that they had ‘proved’ the pluralistic reality that perceptions present
to us. It is worth mentioning that as well as sense perceptions, Nyāya accepted
the validity of the yogic perception mentioned in Chapter 1, as well as other,
what one might loosely call ‘intuitive’, kinds of perception. But of all of
these, it is sense perceptions that play the most important epistemological
role for Naiyāyikas. Nyāya's formal method was the earliest to emerge in the
flourishing milieu of debate in ancient India, and the rules it established had
a lasting influence on the tradition as a whole. It also contributed to the
rules of debate more generally, in the sense of stating what makes an argument
invalid or disallowable.
The second significant factor the Nyāya thinkers added to
the Vaiśe·a (liberation). In introducing his method for
arriving at certain knowledge, Gotama states that it should only be used in
certain circumstances. He gives a list of ‘objects of true knowledge’, which
consists of those things the
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existence and nature of which it is legitimate to enquire
into – because knowledge concerning them contributes to attainment of the
‘highest good’, understood in this tradition to mean liberation.
Certain knowledge concerning the proper means of
valid knowledge and those objects it is legitimate to enquire into … [and other
relevant factors with regard to method and procedure in debate] leads to the
attainment of the highest good.
It is the removal of false knowledge that …
[eventually, after several stages] leads to liberation.
(Nyāya Sūtra 1.1.1–2)
We will discuss the Nyāya method with reference, first, to
the criteria it laid down for the undertaking of an enquiry, and, second, to
its list of the valid objects of enquiry. This will lead us into a discussion
of the way it deals with specific examples from that list.
How to Proceed
Enquiry should be undertaken, Nyāya states, only if some
doubt exists as to what is to be enquired into. That is, there is no point in
conducting an enquiry if something is already known for certain. What is
enquired into must, therefore, be something about which there might be
different understandings. Furthermore, there must be some possibility of a
certain outcome to the enquiry. The aim of the enquiry is certain knowledge,
which constitutes a ‘conclusion’ of the enquiry, and if it would be impossible
to arrive at this then conducting the enquiry is itself pointless. It is the
possibility of arriving at hitherto unknown certainty that both indicates the
required previous state of uncertainty, or doubt, and is one of the key
validating points of undertaking the enquiry. -78-
Doubt and the possibility of certainty are not, however,
on their own enough to legitimate undertaking an enquiry. If they were, then
one might be motivated by mere curiosity, and such ‘aimlessness’, Gotama
states, is contrary to man's ‘rational behaviour.’ Rather, there must also be a
proper ‘purpose’ to the undertaking. Though open to different interpretations
at various stages of the tradition, the implication of this statement in the
Nyāya Sūtra, that the enquiry must contribute to the attaining of the ‘highest
good’, is that the purpose should be to contribute to gaining liberation from
rebirth.
Another requirement for the undertaking of an enquiry is
that there must be some observational data that can be used in support both of
the proposition made at the outset of the enquiry and of the supporting
criteria of the argument establishing certainty. It is here that the Nyāya
system most specifically relates itself to drawing on what it takes to be the
reality of the plural world about us. The point, for Naiyāyikas, is that in
making use of observational data, such as ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’,
they claim to be establishing support that is beyond dispute, thus cementing
the validity and finality of the conclusion of the argument. This feature of
the system also shows the importance for Nyāya of linking observational data,
or the empirical world, into their system of logical argument. There is no
place for philosophical abstractions based only on, say, mathematical logic, as
found in modern Western philosophy. Rather, their logical method is grounded in
the world around them, and the human beings in it, in a much more existential
or experiential sense.
The Method Itself
This brings us to the method itself, which is given as an
argument with five stages or ‘limbs’, which lead the enquiry to a certain
conclusion. The five stages are: first, a statement of the thesis which is to
be proven; second, the statement of a reason for the thesis; third, the giving
of an example which acts as a ‘rule’ which can be drawn on in support of
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proving the thesis; fourth, the relating of the ‘rule’ to
the thesis; and fifth, a restatement of the thesis as thus proven. The example
given by Gotama in the Nyāya Sūtra
is: (1) There is fire on the hill; (2) Because there is smoke there; (3) Where
there is smoke there is fire (as one can see in the kitchen); (4) There is
smoke, which is associated with fire, on the hill; (5) Therefore there is fire
on the hill.
From this five-limbed method can be seen the crucial
importance attributed by Nyāya to inference: it can be inferred that there is X
(fire on the hill), such inference being based on observational evidence Y
(smoke) and rule Z (where there is smoke there is fire). Inferential reasoning
and the use of data acquired by means of perception constitute the primary
means of arriving at certain knowledge for Nyāya. Later in the Indian tradition
as a whole, notably by Buddhist logicians as well as later Naiyāyikas, more
attention was paid to ascertaining the reliability of the examples or ‘rules’
on which inference was based, such as whether smoke is in fact a reliable
indication of fire. This development was important because the rule was meant
to be invariable, such that it constituted absolutely reliable support for the
proving of the thesis proposition. But notwithstanding the loophole in his
system, it was the author of the early Nyāya
Sūtra, Gotama, who, as well as contributing the first formal philosophical
method, first laid down the central place of inference in a logical argument in
this way.
We can now turn to the valid objects of enquiry as listed
by Gotama. The list is in addition to the Vaiśe·ika categories of substance
and so on, and is given in Nyāya Sūtra
1.1.9 as: self, body, sense organs, sense objects, cognition, mind, action,
defects, cyclical birth and death, consequences, suffering, and liberation.
Vātsyāyana, an important successor of Gotama, clearly wishing to establish the
coherence of the list, comments on it as follows:
Here, the self is the seer of all
things, enjoyer of all things, omniscient, experiencer of all things. Body is
the place of the self's pleasure and pain. -80-
The sense organs are the means by which pleasure and
pain are cognized. The internal sense ‘mind’ is that which knows all objects.
Action is the cause of all pleasure and pain; so are the defects of desire,
envy, and attachment. The self had earlier bodies, and will have other bodies
after this one, until liberation is achieved. It is this that is the
beginningless cycle of birth and death.
‘Consequence’ is the experiencing of pleasure and pain, along
with their means, pain being inextricably linked with pleasure. In order to
achieve liberation, one has to understand all happiness as the same as pain;
this gives rise to detachment and, eventually, liberation.
(Nyāya Sūtra Bhā·ya: Commentary on Nyāya Sūtra 1.1.9)
In the context of the criteria given by Gotama for
undertaking any enquiry, this list informs us of those things he thought it was
justifiable to want to arrive at certain knowledge of, and about which there
is, prior to any enquiry, an element of doubt as to their existence and/or
nature. Knowledge about these things would, further, contribute to the ‘highest
good’, which is the main purpose of the enterprise.
Proof of the Self
As an example of the way Gotama applies the method he lays
down in his Nyāya Sūtra to the items
on his list of valid objects of enquiry, let us look at his ‘proof’ of the
existence of the essential self (ātman). This object of enquiry clearly fulfils
the criterion of doubt, since there was far from being a consensus as to its
existence and nature. On the contrary, it featured high on the agenda of those
engaged in the religiophilosophical quest. The Naiyāyikas believed that the
application of their method would produce conclusive certain knowledge of the
existence of an essential self, and that acquiring this knowledge would be
beneficial in the quest for the highest good. In looking at this example, one
can also see the way the Naiyāyikas drew on the Vaiśe·ika
system of substance and qualities. -81-
Gotama puts forward the thesis that there is a plurality
of selves. The reason he gives is that there is a plurality of consciousnesses,
and there also exist plurally the qualities of desire, hatred, effort,
pleasure, and pain. The example or rule cited is that a plurality of
consciousnesses, together with these particular qualities, indicates
immaterial, eternal selves that are separate from both the mind and the body:
precisely these, in other words, are the characteristics of this kind of self.
All of these characteristics are the case, indicating a plurality of selves.
Therefore there is a plurality of selves. The sūtra in which the existence of
the self is proclaimed (Nyāya Sūtra
1.1.10) is very cryptic, and its commentary, in which the argument is more
fully stated, is not a model of clarity, so each methodological point requires
a degree of drawing out. But this nevertheless is the shape of the ‘proof’
given for this object of enquiry. It is also stated that the qualities only
inhere in the self prior to liberation from rebirth, after which each self is
free from all qualities but retains its individuality, which is eternal. In a
clear reference to the Vedic textual exegetical traditions, Nyāya claims that
this is a far more certain way of knowing about the self than relying on
testimony.
Needless to say, this and the other ‘proofs’ given in the Nyāya Sūtra and its commentaries, such
as those for the separate plurality and nature of ‘minds’, were subjected to
all manner of critiques by contemporary and later thinkers. The method,
however, has been taken seriously to this day, both within the Indian tradition
and also in Western philosophical circles, where it has provided one of the
most accessible aspects of the Indian tradition to extrapolate for
consideration in the context of Western thought. Among other things, modern
scholars have debated its structure and relative methodological merits in
comparison with Aristotle's syllogism, frequently exemplified as: ‘All men are
mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.’
To sum up, the Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika view of the world is one
of pluralistic realism. They take it that the perceiving of something conveys
to the perceiver knowledge of the independent existence of that thing: if one
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sees, say, a rose, then one can take it that the rose is
transcendentally real. This means that it is not just the qualities that inhere
in the rose, such as redness and a sweet smell, that are knowable by means of
sensory perception, but also the rose itself as a separately existing
substance. This realism is reliable enough for it to function as the basis of
the Nyāya system of inferential reasoning in order to acquire certain knowledge
of the existence and nature of other, more important and soteriologically
significant, things such as eternal selves and minds, that are not knowable by
means of perception alone. Thus the main means of knowing utilized in the
Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika darśana(s) are perception, reasoning, and
inference.
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Chapter 6
Things and
No-things
Developments
in Buddhist thought
We saw in Chapter 4 the way in which the advent of
challenging alternative teachings and ideas prompted orthodox brahmins to
attempt to defend the validity and authority of the Vedic material, both the
ritual manuals and the Upani·ads. And we have seen how
this was to influence the pluralistic realism of the more systematic
Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika discourses. Alongside these developments taking
place under the umbrella of the Brahmanical tradition, Buddhist thought and
teachings were also being subjected to scrutiny, adaptation, study, and
revision. Before embarking on a discussion of these, it is worth mentioning
that, both internally and in relation to other schools of thought, many of the
ideas and arguments put forward by Buddhist thinkers can seem very difficult
for the beginner to grasp. I hope, however, that the broader context this
chapter will cover will help in clarifying any problems the reader may
encounter. The profundity of Buddhist philosophy is also worthy of
perseverance: it contains some of the most radical propositions in the history
of human thought.
Varieties of Buddhist Thought
Within the Buddhist tradition the first serious debates concerned the
monastic disciplinary rules, leading both to their acceptance and codification
by some and to their rejection and revision by others. In this so-called
‘schismatic’ way began the early splintering of Buddhism into
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different ‘schools’: their initial disciplinary
differences paved the way for differences in doctrinal outlook to emerge and
take root among likeminded communities. Texts refer to some 18 schools which
existed in India at various stages during the 800 years or so following the
death of the Buddha. Of these, which might collectively be referred to as
representing ‘early’ or ‘pre-Mahāyāna’ Buddhism, only Theravāda Buddhism
survives to the present day, but others about which we have
Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500
BCE: the early Upani·ika and Nyāya combine an
ontology by 500 BCE: ritual and
gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted. 5th-century BCE milieu: householders and renouncers.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha.
4th–2nd
century BCE: grammarians and early exegetes establish the criteria of what
should be ‘looked at.’
3rd–2nd
century BCE: Vaiśe· of pluralistic realism and
a formal method by which to arrive at certain knowledge.
4th–1st century BCE:
the early Buddhist tradition undergoes division into different schools.
Initially based on different disciplinary codes, these gradually developed
distinctively different doctrinal views.
3rd century
BCE–2nd century CE: development of the Buddhist Abhidharma (in Pāli Abhidhamma)
tradition: the scholastic activity of the investigation and categorizing of
phenomena (dharmas/dhammas) in order to understand the nature of reality.
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1st century BCE–1st
century CE: the emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism and the early Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’) Sūtras.
c.2nd century CE:
drawing on Prajñāpāramitā literature,
Nāgārjuna's
Madhyamaka Kārikā
focus on the ‘emptiness’ (s ´ūnyatā)
of all phenomena, and establish the basis of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school
of thought. Of central importance to Nāgārjuna's teachings is the Buddha's
doctrine of
‘dependent origination.’
c.4th century
CE: the Cittamātra (‘Mind Only’), or Yogācāra (‘Practice of Yoga’), school
of Buddhism establishes an alternative interpretation of the import of the Prajñāpāramitā teachings, seeking to
redress the apparent nihilism of the ‘emptiness’ school. As suggested by the
terms ‘yoga’ and ‘mind’, its approach centres on understanding meditative
processes, or ‘consciousness events.’
information include the Lokottaravādins, the Sammatīyas,
the Sautrāntikas, and the Sarvāstivādins.
The criteria on which schools were doctrinally divided
related to the ontological status of persons (in this case either the Buddha
specifically or all human beings) and the world, themes common to the wider
Indian milieu. The brahmins and the Nyāya-Vaiśe·ikas in some respects had a
simpler starting point because their position accorded with a common-sense view
of reality. But the Buddhists had to contend with initial teachings that
focused on mental processes rather than the external world, and, what is more
problematic, the teaching of ‘not-self.’
For Lokottaravādins, the main issue was the status of the
historical Buddha. Most
Buddhists accepted that he was a man of the same status
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as any other, but the Lokottaravādins held that in some
way he transcended normal humanity, and thus was not subject to the Buddhist
metaphysical criterion of impermanence. (Lokottara
is a compound of the words loka,
‘world’, and uttara, ‘beyond’ or
‘above.’) Many later Buddhists came to believe in the transcendence of the
Buddha, as well as that of other great figures of compassion and insight known
as Bodhisattvas, but the Lokottaravādins were alone among early Buddhists in
holding this view. Its significance for adherents was that the goal they hoped
to achieve by following the teachings was a supramundane one.
Schools and texts of Buddhism
Textual sources suggest that during the 500 years
following the lifetime of the Buddha, some 18 different schools of Buddhism
were established. Initial ‘schism’ in the monastic group was based on
disagreement over disciplinary rules, likeminded groups subsequently also
interpreting teachings differently. The only early school of Buddhism to
survive to the modern day is Theravāda
Buddhism. Other early schools include
the Lokottaravādins, the Sammatīyas, the Sautrāntikas, and the Sarvāstivādins.
Canonical texts are of three kinds:
doctrinal treatises – Suttas or Sūtras monastic
disciplinary codes – Vinaya scholastic
interpretation of teachings – Abhidharma
Extant Abhidharmas relate
to the Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda schools.
The Sautrāntikas
specifically adhere only to sūtra texts
and reject the scholastic approach of other schools.
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The Sammatīyas claimed that, notwithstanding the
‘not-self’ doctrine (which most interpreted as ‘there is no self’), all human
beings did have some kind of personal selfhood. No evidence remains of how this
was thought to be constituted, but the views of Sammatīyas were roundly
rejected by other Buddhists.
Abhidharma
The name of the Sautrāntika school (sūtra-āntika) indicates that the corpus of teachings this group
accepted as most authoritative was that contained in the doctrinal treatises or
Sūtras. They saw this distinction to be necessary because of the development of
more scholastic, interpretive treatises contained in works known as the
Abhidharmas. Both the
Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda schools had their own
Abhidharma: that of the Theravādins is extant in Pāli (the Abhidhamma Piaka) and that of the Sarvāstivādins is in Sanskrit.
(As the brahmins engaged with others in defending their material, Sanskrit
became the lingua franca of debate and text-writing in India, but all extant
Theravāda works, preserved in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) rather than in mainland
India, are in Pāli.)
The Abhidharma tradition was concerned with (abhi) dharma(s). This ‘concern
with dharma’ is seen in two ways. First, it relates to the understanding and
definitive interpretation of the teachings (Dharma) as a whole. This was
thought necessary because of the cryptic or ambiguous nature of the way the
teachings were first presented, leading some to feel that the tradition
required some kind of codified clarification. Words, phrases, sentences, and
doctrinal teachings were subjected to close analysis and ‘correct’ definitions
and interpretations were recorded. Second, the Abhidharmikas investigated the
nature of reality in terms of ‘dharmas.’ Whatever there is, of whatever nature,
can be referred to neutrally and non-predicatively as a dharma. That is to say,
the term dharma does not in itself confer on to its referents any quality or
status whatsoever. In Chapter 3 we saw the term used in this
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way (in Pāli) in the third line of the Three Marks of
Existence formula: ‘all dhammas are not-self.’ The Abhidharmikas sought, then,
to establish the nature of reality in the context of the Buddha's teachings in
much the same way that Gotama's Vaiśe·ika Sūtra sought to do in the context of
Vedic Dharma (confusingly, yet another use of the word Dharma).
Dharma again
In Brahmanical thought, dharma means both cosmic
order and one's personal duty, as explained in the box on page 64–5. In
Buddhism, dharma (Pāli dhamma) also
has two important meanings. In the first instance, it refers to the teachings
of the Buddha. On becoming a Buddhist, a person agrees to ‘take refuge in’
(i.e. accept, respect, and be loyal to) the Buddha, his teachings (the Dharma),
and the community. Second, and of more importance to us here, dharma is the
term used to refer loosely and generically to ‘everything’, without indicating
anything about it. It is an umbrella term, applicable equally to concrete and
abstract, immediate or remembered, sensory or conceptual, subjective or
objective, sentient or insentient, organic or inorganic, and so on. The term
first appears in this way in the early Buddhist teaching that ‘all dhammas are
anattā (not self)’, discussed in Chapter 3.
The Sautrāntikas did not reject the validity of the
efforts of the Abhidharmikas, but they gave priority to analysing and
understanding the nature of reality as suggested in the teachings contained in
the earlier doctrinal treatises (known as Sūtras), rather than developing a
scholastic tradition. Their analysis centred on explaining the relationship
between one's cognitive experience of the world and karmic continuity. The
constituents of this experiential process (dharmas) were, they stated,
impermanent, changing, and ‘momentary’, without any kind of
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inherent existence. In taking this stance the Sautrāntikas engaged
particularly with the Sarvāstivādins, whose worldview was based almost entirely
on their Abhidharma, a comprehensive work that seeks to establish that
‘everything exists’, which is the meaning of sarva asti.
In proceeding in their investigations, the Abhidharmikas
of both schools attributed the
‘not-self’ doctrine in effect exclusively to human beings
rather than to all dharmas alike. They did this by stating that human beings
were comprised not of an independent self but of five coexisting constituent
parts called skandhas (in Pāli, khandhas) – the same fivefold structure
that was explained in Chapter 3 as the cognitive apparatus. These constituents
were themselves subject to dharma analysis, but constituted the doctrine by
which Buddhists rejected any claim by others to any kind of independent or
persisting human selfhood. The Sarvāstivādins were also exercised particularly
by the reality status of dharmas in relation to continuity. How could there be
any kind of causative link between impermanent dharmas, how could one
understand the mutual relationship between impermanence and continuity? They
answered such questions by claiming that while all dharmas are momentary,
existing long enough only to effect continuity, they are also actually existent
in all ‘time modes’ – past, present, and future. They attributed to dharmas a
continuing fundamental ‘essence’ (svabhāva,
‘own-being’), going so far as to refer to them as
‘substance.’ The Theravādin Abhidharmikas pursued
their investigation of dharmas not in terms of time-modes but by categorizing
all aspects of experience in terms of kinds of dharmas. In this way they sought
to make sense of why there are phenomenologically significant distinctions
between, say, concrete and abstract aspects of experience. In all, the
Theravādins categorized dharmas into some 28 ‘physical’ and 52 ‘mental’
categories, plus consciousness. The point for practitioners was to learn to
observe and analyse them in meditative states, thus facilitating the attainment
of insight.
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The decline of Buddhism in India
For about a millennium after the death of the
Buddha, Buddhism flourished in India. During the reign of the Maurya king
Aśoka, in the 3rd century BCE, Buddhism became the official state religion of
India and its monastic communities were heavily endowed. This led to the
establishment of a strong community base in which ideas could proliferate and
from which the Buddhist teachings could be spread. For centuries, Buddhist
thought played a major role in the religio-philosophical life of India,
contributing a variety of original and sophisticated ideas, critiques, and
points of view. Many of these were conveyed to other countries, such as Ceylon
(now Sri Lanka), China, and Tibet (and via these to South East Asia and the Far
East), establishing Buddhism as a major world religion. It is not known for
certain how or why Buddhism virtually died out in India. There are a number of
possibilities: that it became top-heavy, with insufficient lay members to
sustain its continuity; that the proliferation of devotional cults within what
we now call Hinduism attracted the masses away from Buddhism; that there was
some kind of self-destroying long-term degeneration in monastic community life.
Certainly when Muslims settled in India, from the 8th century ce onwards, they
were able without difficulty to eradicate what remained of Buddhism in India:
by then the monasteries were vulnerable to the wholesale destruction they
suffered at the hands of the Muslim iconoclasts.
While the Theravādins never attributed any kind of essence
to dharmas as the
Sarvāstivādins did, both schools of Abhidharmikas
challenged the Nyāya-Vaiśe·ikas on how they understood
the relation between the cognitive appearance of objects and their ontological
status, as well as
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the status of qualities, universals and particulars, and
so on. The Abhidharmika critique centred on the nature and prolific quantity of
the atoms postulated by the NyāyaVaiśe·ikas. They stated that it
was erroneous and superfluous to categorize so many factors as separate types
of atoms: qualities and universals, for example, were part of the cognitive
event – necessary to it, but not separate ontological categories. In their
critique of the absolute independence and eternality of atoms, a key argument
of the
Abhidharmikas' centered on the impossibility of partless
atoms becoming joined with one another to form the various objects of our
experience. If partless, how can part of atom X abut or join with part of atom
Y? Furthermore, they denied both the claim that perception established the
external reality of what is perceived, and also that what was perceived was
atoms inhering together to produce discrete ‘particular’ wholes. The latter
claim, the Abhidharmikas pointed out, denied the possibility of ever perceiving
parts as well as wholes. And in any case, what is perceived has only temporary
phenomenological status. Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika literature contains
responses to these and other critiques, and indicates the way in which they
either revised or reinforced some of their doctrinal points accordingly.
Having inherited from the earliest stages of Buddhism
teachings that were far from philosophically explicit, and which were in any
case primarily concerned with their soteriological efficacy, the Abhidharmikas
were working with two concurrent situations. One was their belief that the
growing Buddhist tradition needed to establish for its practising members a
more detailed and systematic presentation of the teachings, replacing doctrinal
ambiguity with definitive interpretation. They did this by drawing on a range
of technical criteria from linguistic analysis to meditative practices. The
other was the developing tendency to present teachings systematically in order
to establish the validity and coherence of these criteria for themselves, and
also to enable them to engage more readily with the conflicting claims of
outsiders on similar matters. To some extent the Abhidharmikas were
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more or less forced into some kind of system of analysis
and categorization of dharmas in order to render their teachings comparable
with the Nyāya-Vaiśe·ikas.
Emptiness and the Perfection of Wisdom
It is highly likely, therefore, that the character of the
Abhidharmikas' work demonstrates the interacting of different schools of
thought and how these sought to present their own views in a way that conformed
to the presentation of others. While the Buddhists did offer criticisms of the
Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika views, in fact what happened over time was that
the dharmas of the Abhidharmikas became increasingly reified: what were
originally understood in more or less abstract terms gradually acquired the
status of plural and real ‘things.’ In the light of the nonrealism of the
earliest Buddhist teachings, this reification presented an open invitation to a
serious critique of the Abhidharmikas' position. When this came, it was from
within the Buddhist tradition, and it contributed to the emergence of what is
called Mahāyāna Buddhism, a pan-Buddhist movement that sought to establish a
less misleading definitive understanding of the Buddha's teachings than that of
the Abhidharmikas. Early stages of this movement are represented in literature
known as the
‘Treatises on the Perfection of Wisdom’ (the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras). These texts homed in on the dharma theories
of the Abhidharmikas and exposed them as contrary to the teaching that all
things are dependently originated and therefore lacking any kind of essence.
The Perfection of Wisdom writers acknowledged that their predecessors had
correctly recognized the non-essential nature of human selfhood, but claimed
that they had completely failed to understand the generic nature of the
‘not-self’ doctrine. The Perfection of Wisdom writers therefore claimed to have
a ‘higher’ and ‘more correct’ insight or wisdom, and so claimed that their
teachings represented the ‘superior way’, which is what Mahāyāna means.
When putting forward their critique of the Abhidharmikas,
the
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Perfection of Wisdom writers had an advantage over the
Buddha: they were not operating in a milieu in which the dominant new teaching
was the brahmins' claim that human beings have an essential self (ātman) that
is identical with the essence of the universe (Brahman). These later Buddhists
were therefore free to put forward their formulation of the Buddha's doctrine
in terms which made no mention of self, but stated rather that all things
(dharmas) are empty (s´ūnya) of ‘own
being’ (svabhāva). The neutral term ‘emptiness’ made the teaching less open to
subjective appropriation and its generic applicability more conceptually
graspable.
Nārgārjuna's Middle Way
Not long after the Perfection of Wisdom material began to
emerge, the most devastating critique of any kind of realism or pluralism was
put forward by Nāgārjuna, a brilliant Buddhist thinker who lived during the 2nd
century ce. Nāgārjuna's seminal work is the
Madhyamaka Kārikā
(MK), ‘Writings on the Middle Way’, which also gives its name to the Madhyamaka
school of thought associated with him. It is clear from the opening verses of
the MK that Nāgārjuna believed he was putting forward an interpretation of the
Buddha's teachings rather than a philosophical view of his own. It is also
clear that he believed the central import of the Buddha's teachings was to be
found in the doctrine of dependent origination: it is this doctrine that
encapsulates what is meant by the ‘middle way.’ Nāgārjuna explains that this
tied in with the Perfection of Wisdom teachings because: ‘It is dependent
origination that we refer to as “emptiness”; it is this that is the middle way’
(MK 24.18). That is (and one can see how this is a reiteration of the teachings
of the Buddha as described in Chapter 3), what is dependently originated is
‘empty’ of ‘selfessence’ (i.e. independent existence).
Nāgārjuna's critique of pluralism is as applicable to the atoms of
NyāyaVaiśe·ikas as to the ambiguous ontological status of the
Abhidharmikas' categories of dharmas (particularly to those of the
Sarvāstivādins, to
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which were attributed an essence or ‘own being’ –
svabhāva). It is likely, however, that his primary aim was to rectify what he
saw as the aberrations of the latter in their presentation of Buddhist
teachings. Picking up on their concern with dharmas, he states that not only do
dharmas not have any kind of ‘own being’, but it is also impossible that
dharmas with ‘own being’ can come about. His critique begins with the radical
statement: ‘Nowhere and in no way do any entities exist which originate from themselves,
from something else, from both, or spontaneously.’ (MK 1.1). In this statement
Nāgārjuna was neither stating nor seeking to show that nothing exists. Rather,
his concern was to establish the ontological implications of dependent
origination in order to understand correctly the status of what there is. He
believed that terms such as ‘being’ (as in ‘own being’ – what in English we
might also call ‘entity’ or ‘thing’) were being used in the sense of
erroneously implying the independent existence of what they referred to, and
that the idea of a law of causation operating between such entities – dependent
origination wrongly understood – was fallacious. His critique was aimed at
demonstrating these points. What Nāgārjuna states here can be better understood
in four stages as follows: (1) It is not the case that something with ‘own
being’ is produced from itself. (2) Nor is it the case that something with ‘own
being’ is produced from something other than itself. (3) Nor, indeed, could it
be produced from both itself and the other. The underlying point of these
stages is that it is illogical to think that anything with ‘own being’ can come
about by means of causes or conditions, because any entity that is caused or
conditioned would be contingent: ‘contingent own being’ is nonsensical, and
there is no independently existing causal ‘other’ anyway. (This is reiterated
in MK 15.1–3.) (4) The final stage is the impossibility of things with ‘own
being’ arising spontaneously, because if this were the case the world would be
one of random chaos, which it is not. Commentators on Nāgārjuna added the
further explanations that if something produced itself this would result in a
continuous unbreakable chain of production of the same thing; that
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it is impossible for something with a particular ‘own
being’ to produce something with a completely different ‘own being’ – where
could the causal connection lie?; and that a mixture of these two modes of
production would suffer from both kinds of problem.
Dependent origination, then, is not a theory of causation
with respect to bringing about a pluralistically real world. The world of which
dependent origination is the operational factor is of a different ontological
status: one of ‘emptiness.’ This cannot be understood in terms of existence or
non-existence, because neither applies to it. Existence is not the case because
the conceptual meaning of existence predicates a plurally real world. If such a
world were the case it would be fixed and unchanging for ever more because, as
Nāgārjuna has shown, no law of causation can operate in such a world:
independent constituents cannot be causally contingent. Nonexistence is not the
case because by means of dependent origination we do experience the phenomenal
world. Here Nāgārjuna introduces the notion of ‘two truths’, conventional and
ultimate, relating respectively to the empirical world of experience and to
things ‘as they really are.’
Two Truths and the Logic of Emptiness
The empirical world of experience is not unreal: we really
experience it. If one could but see it, however, from the point of view of
‘things as they really are’, or ultimate truth (and of course this is what
following the Buddhist path is intended to achieve – Enlightenment), one would
know that the nature of its reality – its ontological status – is not the
independent pluralism it appears to us as. Rather, what we take to be
independent pluralism is in fact a world of conditioning and dependence – which
in ultimate terms is conventional – and therefore ‘empty’ of any kind of
essence or ‘own being.’ It follows from this that the experiential world with
which we are familiar, characterized by seemingly separate and substantively
existing contents, is all part of the
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conventional level of truth: which is another reason why
it is erroneous to seek to understand things as they really are (ultimate
truth) in terms of any criteria relating to ‘existence.’ Misunderstanding this,
and suggesting that emptiness means non-existence, Nāgārjuna says, is to miss
the profound teaching of the Buddha and will destroy weakminded people (MK
24.9–11). In fact, he goes on, emptiness is the only logical ontological
possibility for the world of empirical existence: holding to pluralistic realism
is particularly illogical because it precludes any causation and change.
Nāgārjuna's stance on emptiness is most often referred to
by means of the fourfold formula (earlier found in material attributed to the
Buddha himself, as discussed in Chapter 3) that it is erroneous to think of
anything in terms of existence, non-existence, both existence and nonexistence,
or neither existence nor non-existence. Much has been written, by Buddhists and
scholars alike, as to exactly how the logic of this should be understood, what
its implications are, whether it leads inexorably to some kind of nihilism, or
whether it should be taken solely as a critique of the positions of others,
establishing no position of its own. For our purposes, I think it is most
helpful to see it as a way of comprehensively rejecting any possible position
of opponents on the fundamental grounds that a prerequisite of any ontological
theory posited in terms of existence/non-existence is drawing on the conceptual
framework of merely conventional truth. From the point of view of ultimate
truth it thus cannot be true: the very stating of it being self-refuting. The
best way forward, and what one should be aiming to achieve if one wants to
understand the nature of reality, according to Nāgārjuna, is the ‘calming of
all verbal differentiation.’ Whatever we verbalize about reality is bound to be
false because of the falsity of the premises of the conventional world in which
verbalization operates. One should, therefore, seek to gain insight that is not
structured in such terms (this is the aim of meditative disciplines). From
this, it follows that ‘emptiness’ is itself to be understood as conventional
and not an independently existing transcendent entity of some non-verbal kind.
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Emptiness affirms the world as we know it
To an objector who states that if everything is empty then
nothing exists, and that in propounding emptiness Nāgārjuna is denying the
existence of the Buddha and his teaching, Nāgārjuna replies:
In suggesting this, you obviously do not understand
emptiness, and are tormenting yourself unnecessarily about non-existence. One
has to understand the nature of reality in terms of two truths, conventional
and ultimate: this is the profound teaching of the Buddha, which will destroy
those of weak intelligence who understand it wrongly. Only if emptiness is
logical is the empirical world logical; without emptiness, the empirical world
is absurd. If you state that entities are independently real then you deny the
possibility of conditions and causal relationships. Nothing with which we are
familiar could occur if all is not dependently originated [i.e. empty]: nothing
could arise or cease, no knowledge could be acquired or ignorance eradicated,
no activity undertaken, there could be no birth or death, everything would be
immovable, without changing its state. It is you not I who suggest the
non-existence of the world as we know it. If you deny emptiness you deny the
world. But those who see the truth of dependent origination see the world as it
really is, and understand the Buddha's teaching of dukkha, its arising, and the
way to its cessation.
(Madhyamaka Kārikā
ch. 24 – paraphrase)
NB The last point identifies the sense of what
Nāgārjuna is saying with the Buddha's Noble Truths.
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Nāgārjuna writes of the ‘emptiness of emptiness’: it is a
description not a substratum. Furthermore, there is no ontological difference
between levels of truth: the only difference is experiential. For so long as
one is ignorant of how things really are, one is subject to the experiences and
criteria of conventional truth. When one gains insight, one sees the
conventionality and understands emptiness. In complete contrast to the Vedic
exegetes and the Nyāya-Vaiśe·ikas, what language
predicates for Nāgārjuna is not a
transcendentally pluralistic reality but a conventional
world that has to be ‘seen through’ if one is to realize absolute truth.
The calming of verbal differentiation
The very ideas of ‘entity’ and ‘non-entity’,
‘existence’ and ‘nonexistence’, are part of a fallacious attitude towards the
empirical world of conventional truth. Neither the positive nor the negative is
therefore true. Nor is it possible that anything could be both one and the
other at the same time since by any standards this is mutually contradictory.
And for something to be ‘neither one nor the other’ is meaningful only if the
initial premises are true, which in this case they are not. At neither level of
truth is it correct to think of things as existing, non-existing, both, or
neither: such conventions are erroneous at the conventional level and
inapplicable at the ultimate level. Since all dharmas are empty, what can there
be that is finite, infinite, both, or neither? what can there be that is
eternal, temporal, both, or neither? Liberating insight comes with the calming
of all such verbal differentiation. At no time did the Buddha teach anyone
about ‘things’, only about verbal differentiation.
(Madhyamaka Kārikā 11–24 – paraphrase)
Establishing Nāgārjuna's ‘means of knowledge’ is hazardous
if one is to be true to his two levels of truth: all sensory and intellectual
activity
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take place only conventionally, and therefore nothing that
comes to us by means within this framework is reliable. But Nāgārjuna is
adamant that the level of conventional truth is the realm in or from which
insight is gained, and that its reality is meaningful according to its own
criteria. In this context, one can see the importance for him of logic. But
unlike the logical methodology of Nyāya, Nāgārjuna uses logic to undermine the
fundamental premise on which all other extant means of knowledge rest: the external
reality of the empirical world. Whether Nāgārjuna sought solely to reduce the
viewpoints of everyone else to absurdity in this way, or whether he also used
logic to establish a position of his own on emptiness, was an issue that
divided his followers. Two distinct Madhyamaka schools of thought were
established along these lines, and later critics, both within the Buddhist
tradition and outside it, addressed both.
The Buddha's Enlightenment insights – a reminder
1. Seeing
the continuity of his previous lives leading to the present.
2. Seeing
other beings born and reborn in circumstances conditioned by their actions.
3. Seeing
how to uproot the deepest of the binding continuity tendencies:
i. All
sensory desires.
ii. The
desire for continued existence. iii. Ignorance. iv. Holding to viewpoints. [my italics]
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Mind-Only
An important non-Madhyamaka school of thought established
some two centuries after
Nāgārjuna was the Citta-Mātra (‘Mind Only’) or Yogācāra
(‘Practice of Yoga’) school. Associated in its early stages with two brothers
named Asan˙ga and Vasubandhu, who lived during the 4th century ce, its approach
also sought to rectify the Abhidharma reification of dharmas, but differed from
Madhyamaka in two obvious ways. First, it focused specifically on the analysing
of mental processes; second, it was concerned to present Buddhism in what it
saw as a less negative light. The teaching on emptiness propounded by
Perfection of Wisdom and Madhyamaka thinkers was thought by some to have
unattractive and potentially misleading nihilistic connotations, directing
attention away from the actual practice of understanding meditative states in
order to attain liberating insight.
The Yogācāra approach, as evidenced in Vasubandhu's and s
´ikā treatises, was to analyse the different types of ‘state of mind’, or
‘consciousness event’, which constitute one's pre-Enlightenment experiential
world. Questions they addressed included What is it about those states of mind
that bring about continuity? How does the karmic process of experiencing
consequences of one's actions work? What is it that makes us ignorant? What has
to happen in order for one to ‘see things as they really are’?
The underlying problem, we are told, is that the commonly
experienced world of self and other, subject and object, ‘grasper’ and
‘grasped’, is a mental construction, created by ‘transformations of
consciousness’, imposed on a reality which, as it really is, is not like that.
Continuity operates because transformations of consciousness as it were deposit
‘seeds’ in a ‘consciousness storehouse’, which come to fruition at some future
time, when they produce the then correlatedly conditioned mental construction.
While unenlightened, the experience of this process has the subject – object
structure with which we are familiar,
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the structure operating because the consciousness
storehouse is ‘defiled’ by ignorance as to the true nature of reality. These
defilements, which are of many kinds, construct the various characteristics of
our common experience as well as those that are specific to an individual
because of the fruition of his or her karmic ‘seeds.’
In order to overcome continuity, and as it were exhaust
the consciousness storehouse's fuel, one has to penetrate the conventionality
of the subject – object structure of mental processes. This is done by
meditative disciplines (yogācāra),
and by understanding that experience has ‘three aspects.’ The one with which we
are most familiar is the
‘constructed’ aspect: the mentally constructed subjective
– objective world. At this level, the main feature is one of reification: the
‘constructedly real’ world. The ‘dependent’ aspect is the underlying mental
activity which is as it were transformed, the ‘raw data’ of experience. This
aspect cannot be denied: experience is the common
Vasubandhu's
three aspects of experience
1. The constructed aspect: the everyday
world of subjectivity and objectivity, which is superimposed by our mental
activities on to reality, which is not itself like that; it is our own mental
processes that interpret the superimposed construction as reality itself.
2. The dependent aspect: the underlying
‘raw data’ of subjective – objective experience; that which undergoes mental
transformations and becomes the constructed aspect.
3. The perfected aspect: the flow of
experiential data unaffected by mental transformations. This constitutes
insight into reality as it really is: without any subject – object
construction.
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ground or given for all human beings that no amount of
philosophical argument can refute. The ‘perfected’ aspect is the complete
absence of any mental constructions operating on the experiential ‘flow.’
Several features of this explanation are important to
note. First, in explaining how the world of objectivity arises by means of
transformations of consciousness, it denies claims by Nyāya-Vaiśe·ikas
and others that perception of an object establishes the transcendental
existence of that object. Second, it relates to the fact of experiential
continuity in a ‘positive’ and psychologically appealing way: in insisting on
the reality of experience its starting point is familiar rather than abstract.
This was important in the psychologically baffling (and to some unacceptable)
context of the doctrine of ‘emptiness’ as radically presented by Madhyamaka.
Third, from an ontological point of view it is open to interpretation either
abstractly or substantively. That is to say, karmic ‘seeds’ and
‘consciousness storehouse’ can be understood either as
metaphors or as actual entities, as can the whole notion of ‘mindonly.’
Liberating insight might simply involve the cessation of the mental activities
which, for so long as they continue, are metaphorically indicated by the
expression ‘consciousness storehouse’ – as a kind of operation-in-progress; or
it might mean that an actual ‘consciousness storehouse’ entity becomes
purified, and has some continuing purified existence. Similarly, the ‘transformation
of consciousness’ might mean the dynamics of mental activities which each
person experiences, of a wholly non-concrete kind, or it might refer to the way
consciousness as some kind of ‘mind-stuff’ is transformed into the world of
experience in a more substantive sense, as a real substratum. The term
‘mind-only’ is appropriate to both approaches: the need to understand one's
mental activities in order to attain liberating insight, and the claim that the
experiential world consists of mind-stuff.
Yogācāra Buddhists themselves as well as scholars of
Buddhism have been divided on this last issue. Within the tradition, the
different approaches led to the establishing of different schools of Yogācāra
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Buddhism. Scholars differ as to whether the tradition was
always idealistic in the ontological sense (there is only mind-stuff), or
whether it began as an investigation of mental activities, leaving ontological
issues aside, and developed an idealistic school later. The early material is
ambiguous, open to interpretation in either way reasonably convincingly. It is
worth noting, however, that if Vasubandhu was suggesting a nonontological
investigation of subjective cognitive processes, he would have had much in
common with both the teachings of early Buddhism and, though very differently
presented, with Nāgārjuna's calming of verbal differentiation. Conversely, if
he was seeking to establish an idealistic ontology, this would constitute a
major change of direction.
Idealism
Idealism as an ontology holds that ‘all there is is
mind.’ Some kind of ‘mindstuff’ constitutes the underlying substratum of
reality. It is in some manner ‘transformed’ by mental activities. Thus, what we
see is not what there really is, because what we see is reified into objects of
varying degrees of density: we are not aware of just ‘mind-stuff.’ Because
there really is ‘mindstuff’, idealism is not the same as saying ‘there is
nothing.’ For this reason it is potentially misleading to describe it in terms
of ‘illusion.’ Idealism is the antithesis of any kind of pluralistic realism.
The latter affirms that the plurality of what we see is transcendentally real;
the former denies that this is the case.
Vasubandhu and his followers in the Yogācāra tradition
made a great contribution to the period in which Buddhist discourse flowered.
Beginning with Nāgārjuna, for some centuries Buddhist thinkers offered some of
the most original and sophisticated ideas and critiques in the Indian milieu.
In particular, they offered a serious challenge to those who attributed realism
to the world as it is appears to us by means of
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Developments in Buddhist Thought
The Buddha taught:
‘all dharmas are “not-self”; there is a regularity to things: everything is
dependently originated.’
The Abhidharmikas
attempted to understand more about the nature of reality in terms of
dharmas.
The Theravādin
Abhidharmikas categorized dharmas into 28 ‘physical’ and 52 ‘mental’ kinds,
plus consciousness. It was intended that this should help in analyzing them
during meditation.
The Sarvāstivādin
Abhidharmikas stated that all dharmas exist through past, present, and
future states. In this sense, they have some kind of momentary essence, or
‘own-being.’
Over time, the dharmas of the Abhidharmikas became reified: they acquired a real and enduring
status as ‘things.’
The Perfection of
Wisdom writers reiterated that all things are non-essential.
They presented the ‘not-self’ doctrine by stating that all
things are ‘empty’ of
‘own-being.’
Nāgārjuna stated
not only that all things are ‘empty’, but also that it is not possible for any
independent entity to arise or occur in any way whatsoever.
‘Emptiness’ is thus another way of referring to dependent
origination. Furthermore, the world as we know it is underpinned only by
dependent origination: to deny this is to deny the world.
Yogācāra thought
sought to present the metaphysics of emptiness in terms of the mental processes
that ‘construct’ to the world as we know it.
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sense perceptions, and to the independent existence of
selves as perceivers. Rather, Buddhists were prepared to follow the logical
implications of beginning with questioning the reliability of the cognitive
process as a means of certain knowledge, however radical the results. Apart
from his highly sophisticated and original writing on emptiness, in defence of
what he saw as the true teaching of the Buddha, what Nāgārjuna established for
Buddhism was the strength of logical argument in backing its position and its
critiques of others. This led to a flourishing tradition of so-called ‘Buddhist
logic’, in which logical arguments and refutations concerning dharmas and the
nature of existence were engaged in with others at a highly intellectually
specialized and technical level. Major Buddhist logicians included Din˙nāga and
the outstandingly brilliant Dharmakīrti, who established rules of logical
argument in debate with the later Naiyāyikas and others. While the ‘givens’ and
aims might be radically opposed between the Buddhists and the realists, their
respective arguments were of mutual meaning and interest because each followed
the rules laid down between them.
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Chapter 7
The Witness
and the
Watched
Yoga: Harmony and Control
From a very early stage in the Indian tradition, people
were practising various kinds of mental exercises, or meditative disciplines,
often known by the generic term ‘yoga.’ The earliest Brahmanical references to
yoga are to be found in the Upani·ads, but there is little
doubt that these reflect a practice that even then had been developed over a
considerable period. Over time, a great many different kinds of yoga have been
taught, but they share an underlying rationale. ‘Yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit
verbal root yuj, meaning ‘to yoke’ –
in the sense of yoking one thing to another. The point for many lay in the idea
of ‘merging’ or ‘uniting’: either self/soul (ātman) with universal essence
(Brahman), or, in theistic systems, soul with God. It can also lie more in the
linked concepts of internal ‘control’, ‘harmony’, ‘order’, or of what one might
call ‘integrity of insight.’ The overall ontology can vary from system to
system, but the common underlying principle was that normal life is
characterized by ‘being led astray’ by our senses, and by the misleading
busy-ness of everyday cognitive activity. The practice of yoga, therefore, is
for the purpose of attaining control, calm, and, in some systems, cognitive
insight. The darśana of Classical Yoga is represented in a text known as the Yoga Sūtras.
Commonly attributed to a man named Patañjali, in fact the
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Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500 BCE:
the early Upani·ads.
by 500 BCE:
ritual and gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted.
5th-century BCE
milieu: householders and renouncers.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha.
4th–2nd
century BCE: grammarians and early exegetes establish the criteria of what
should be ‘looked at.’
3rd–2nd
century BCE: Vaiśe·ika and Nyāya combine an
ontology of pluralistic realism and a formal method by which to arrive at
certain knowledge.
4th–1st century BCE:
emergence of different Buddhist schools
3rd century BCE–2nd
century CE: development of the Buddhist Abhidharma.
1st century
BCE–1st century CE: the emerging of Mahāyāna Buddhism and the early Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’) Sūtras.
c.2nd century
CE: Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka Kārikā
focus on the ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā) of all phenomena.
c.4th century CE:
the Cittamātra/Yogācāra school of Buddhism centres on mental processes.
3rd century CE:
The Yoga-Sūtras represent what is
known as ‘Classical Yoga.’ Said to have been written by one Patañjali, in fact
their authorship is uncertain.
The Yoga-Sūtras
present a detailed mental disciplinary methodology for attaining
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·khya.
4th – 5th
century CE: I his Sāmkhya Kārikā.
Human beings are bound to rebirth because they do not realize that what they
take to be conscious is unconscious, and that consciousness lies only in
ontologically separate and inactive ‘selves’ (purus is to gain insight into this dualism.
authorship of the Yoga
Sūtras is not known, and there were in any case several Patañjalis
(including the grammarian mentioned in Chapter 4). The
text incorporates a
comprehensive yoga methodology. Indeed, it seems that the
method is its main purpose, with references to the ontology to which it adheres
being included only in order to justify or elaborate the purpose and structure
of the methodology. While concerned with similar issues and similar details,
virtually no references are made to other systems of thought: if the proponents
of Classical Yoga engaged in debate with others, those encounters are not
recorded here. The text is above all a manual for practice, and its various
criteria and formulations were undoubtedly arrived at from within a long
tradition of practice as opposed to debate. Philosophical abstractions are of
less interest to the yogic practitioner than the insights of meditation, and
efficacy in practice of more importance than convincing others. This darśana
perhaps exemplifies more than any other that Indian ‘philosophy’ is part of a
tradition whose primary aim and purpose was soteriological.
The Purpose of Classical Yoga
The Yoga-Sūtras
open by stating their aim:
Now the explanation of yoga: yoga is the cessation
of the activities of the mind ( mind-activity-cessation). (Yoga Sūtra 1.1–2)
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The activities of the mind ( ) are of many different kinds, under the broad headings of valid
cognitions, misconceptions, conceptualizations, sleep, and memory. The means of
knowledge for valid cognitions are sense-perception, inference, and the
testimony of tradition. Misconceptions are invalid cognitions, not based on any
actual reality. Conceptualizations are cognitions based merely on abstract
mental activities – the tendency to conceptualize reality only in terms of ‘the
reifying of verbiage’, one might say. This actively interferes with seeing
reality as it really is. Sleep also involves its own kind of mental activity,
and memory is the carrying around with us of whatever we have experienced,
involving more mental activity. The cessation of all of these is achieved by
means of yogic practice and detachment (i.e. control). Experiences and states
of mind such as sickness, doubt, carelessness, sloth, falseness, failure, and
instability all distract consciousness and constitute obstacles to achieving cessation.
Pain, depression, trembling of the limbs, and poor breathing accompany these
obstacles. The way out lies in focusing the mind single-pointedly, practising
outward-lookingness (i.e. not being self-centred in the selfish sense),
benevolence towards others, right breathing, and mental steadiness. (This
explanation is paraphrased from Yoga
Sūtra 1.5–22, 29–35.)
From this can be seen that the author of the text denies
that ultimate reality is arranged in the way we conceive of it according to our
experience of the manifest world. Mental activities in general create
distractions which seriously distort and lead us away from clear perception of
reality. Underpinning the Yoga methodology is the aim to discriminate that the
true ‘seer’ or ‘self’, known in this system as puru· is absolutely separate from the ‘seen’ or
‘manifest’, prakr ti. Until
discrimination is achieved, each individual wrongly believes that the ‘seer’,
which is where consciousness lies, is part of what is manifest. We confuse our
manifest, unconscious ‘ego’ with our ‘higher self’, when in fact the latter is
wholly other: the manifest world is one of unconscious activity; consciousness
belongs to puru·as, which are also inactive. It is
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the ‘conjunction’ of puru·
when the distracting activities of the mind are
stilled, effects their disassociation. Thus is the true self liberated from
bondage to rebirth, which continues for so long as there is conjunction. It is
the true self (puru·a, is the central concern of the Yoga Sūtras. In spite of our ignorance
as to where consciousness lies, in Classical Yoga the manifest world is not
unreal. Prakr ti – the manifest world – is ontologically existent in its own
right, as are puru·a) that is of the highest and ‘truest’ reality; realizing
it is the summum bonum to which human
beings can aspire. Knowledge of the true nature of the self, and the reality of
one's essential puru·ti is a world both of
distraction from the true and ‘higher’ state of
Īśvara – the ‘Lord’ – in Classical Yoga
In Yoga Sūtra 1.23–8, we are told that the goal of
discrimination can also be achieved by means of ‘devotion to the Lord
(Īśvara).’ The Lord is said to be ‘a special puru·a’, untouched by karmic
activities, all-knowing, and teacher of ancient sages. Exactly what these
verses mean is not obvious, and there has been disagreement among scholars as
to the status of this Lord: whether it/he is a transcendent being, giving Classical
Yoga a theistic aspect; whether these verses refer to the fact that the
methodology of Classical Yoga was followed by adherents of theistic sects;
whether Īśvara is an abstract archetype; or whether the verses are
metaphorically indicating what each individual will find if they ‘look within’:
each person's puru·a is his or her own ‘Lord.’ In Indian religious
traditions devotion can sometimes mean ‘single-mindedness’ rather than
‘worship’; thus the expression here does not necessarily imply devotion to an
actual deity.
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The practice of yoga by the deluded individual is
necessary for two reasons. First, ignorance occurs only at the manifest level.
Second, it is at the manifest level that discrimination takes place. Being
inactive, puru·a does, and can do, nothing: its role is that of
witness.
The bulk of the Yoga
Sūtras comprises descriptive information about different states of mind,
different ways of controlling mental activities, different levels of
attainment, what contributes to the cessation of the activities of the mind and
what does not, and so on.
‘ego’ and as the discriminated puru·a.
Much of it is, in its own context, technical, and has little actual meaning to
those who have no experience of meditative states. One Western scholar of
Classical Yoga has described the material as ‘primarily practical maps for the
process of an interior journey’, which graphically suggests that the text
principally represents not a clear philosophical or ontological stance, but an
account of meditative practices by means of which all activities of the mind
that hinder discrimination are controlled.
ontology and clear discussion of its means of knowledge.
This text, the Sāmkhya Kārikā (SK),
is said to have been written a between 350 and 450 ce. It is clear from
evidence in a variety of sources that there had been a long earlier history of
Sāmkhya thought, going back to Upanisadic times, which might well have differed
in detail and from time to time in comparison with what is now taken as the
tradition's key text. No earlier Sāmkhya text survives, however.
something like ‘enumeration.’ It refers to the point that
the truth that the school purports to teach is known by means of
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enumerating, in the sense of analysing and discriminating,
the categories which constitute the manifest world. The SK opens by stating:
‘It is because of the anguish of suffering that the desire arises to know how
to overcome it.’ Following this clearly stated soteriological purpose, it goes
on to state that what is required is a special kind of discriminative
knowledge, which can discern ‘the manifest, the unmanifest, and the knower.’
The next verses establish the ontological distinction between puru·ti
(both manifest and unmanifest – but numerically one). khya, like Classical
Yoga, is ontologically dualistic in this way: reality is comprised of puru·as
(the knowers – which are numerically
ontological ‘given’, becoming manifest (its
‘created’ form) when in conjunction with a puru·
chapter, is referred to by the term satkāryavāda: the view that the effect pre-exists in the cause. In
the SK the point establishes both that the manifest world is ontologically
really existent and that it is ontologically only one. The reasons given for
satkārya in verse 9 are:
Because non-being is non-productive; because a
material cause is necessary; because things cannot arise haphazardly from
different things; because things can only be produced from what is capable of
producing them; because this is the nature of causation.
example is the inference that there must be a plurality of
puru·as ‘because there is a diversity of births, deaths,
and activities; because different things happen at different times; because
people have differently proportioned characteristics’ (SK v. 18).
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The other means of knowledge it accepts are perception and reliable
testimony. Perception is qualified as ‘the selective ascertainment of
particular sense objects’ (SK v. 5), which means that not all ‘ordinary’
perception is valid. And reliable testimony relates to the tradition's heritage
of specialization, going back to the Upani·ads as primary source.
Inference and perception, however, take precedence over reliable testimony, and
where the latter is illogical the former prevail. An example of this can be
seen in the use of inference to establish the plurality of puru·adicas,
rather than accepting as a given the Upanis suggestion that self (ātman) is one
with the universal essence (Brahman).
puru·as are ontologically identical but
numerically plural; they are eternal, unchanging, inactive, conscious witnesses
prakrti is
ontologically distinct from puru·as; it is eternal, changing,
active, unconscious
prakrti is
characterized by three qualities: goodness, energy or passion, and inertia,
which combine in various proportions in all of the manifest world.
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Qualities, Categories, and Discernment
loosely translated from the Sanskrit as goodness, energy
or passion, and inertia. The variously proportioned combinations of these three
in any given being or object serve to ‘manifest, activate, and limit; to
successively dominate, support, and interact with one another’ (SK v. 12), thus
explaining how there are different categories or species, and differences
between people and things of the same kind. For liberating discrimination to
take place, there must be no imbalance of the qualities.
categories that require analytical discernment in order to
overcome suffering. The first category is buddhi,
which acts both as the ‘will’ of the individual and as the discriminating
faculty: it is this which will ‘selectively ascertain particular sense objects’
in the quest for liberation, and eventually discriminate puru·a.
Next is which literally means ‘I-maker.’
This is the ego, that in its ignorance of purus a mistakenly thinks it is the
conscious self of the individual. After these two major categories comes mind,
as a category in its own right, followed by a series of ‘sets’: the sense
organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin); the action organs (voice, hands, feet,
excretory organs, reproductive organs); the ‘subtle elements’ (sound, touch,
form, taste, smell); and the ‘gross elements’ (space, wind, fire, water,
earth).
The ‘enumeration’ () of these categories provides a
picture both of how it is that human
occurs from within that unconscious state. The I-maker is
the constituent that makes us think we are conscious: it is phenomenologically
experienced as the thinker of thoughts, the agent of deeds, the individual
subject in the empirical world. It is, however, enveloped
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were as a blinker as to the true state of affairs. Buddhi,
the individual's will and discriminatory faculty, is drawn towards the powerful
I-maker as the focus of the individual's experiential life, which is altogether
away from the ever-present but inactive puru·a. It takes the combined
efforts of the individual's faculties (and this would be thought to be over
many lifetimes) to reorient the direction of buddhi's discriminatory
activities. The states many times that the innate purpose of
the entire structure is to seek to discriminate purusa. But this involves
overcoming the pull and distractions caused by out-of-balance qualities, in
particular by a predominance of either passion or inertia. These bring about
all manner of ignorances, inadequacies, attachments, and complacencies.
Eventually, however, it is possible for the individual's buddhi to extricate
itself from involvement with the vicissitudes of cyclical life sufficiently to
perceive that what the I-maker creates is merely a false or inferior self, and
that the true self is purusa, detached and silently waiting in the wings. This
perception effects disassociation of puru·a fromti and liberates the
individual from rebirth.
khya Kārikā
that in fact ‘nothing really is bound; no-one is reborn and no-one is released’
(SK v. 62). As it is only prakr ti are a delusion, in fact rebirth of such
‘individuals’ does not constitute rebirth of real selves. Purus as merely
witness.
No detailed methodology is given in the Sāmkhya Kārikā for achieving
discrimination. There is mention of the need to practise proper reasoning and
study, and to obtain good instruction, as well as to perfect ethical qualities
(SK v. 51). Otherwise, the system provides a structure compatible with the
practice of the meditative exercises of Classical Yoga. The different
terminology of Sāmkhya's distracting delusions could without difficulty be seen
in terms of the ‘activities of the mind’ of the Yoga Sūtras.
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khya Kārikā can
legitimately be understood as the manifestation of a real and plural world, as
it is most often taken to be.
‘matter’ (presumably in contrast to puru·khya's
ontological dualism – certainly as dualism is conventionally understood, and
also its satkārya viewpoint (effect pre-existing in the cause) – which in this
context is usually understood in terms of the transformation of prakr ti as
substance. But it would fit well with the human existential problem as stated,
and with the text's soteriological aim. And its compatibility with Classical
Yoga's method would be unaffected. It is possible that the origin of the text's
ambiguity on this issue lies as ‘soul’
or ‘consciousness’). The categories of
manifestation include all the gross elements that are
normally associated with matter, and omit nothing that one might associate with
the empirical world about us. But the order in which the manifestation occurs
is the opposite of what one might expect if it is the empirical world, peopled
by individuals in a real and plural sense, that is being described. In the
text, cognitive faculties come first. And it is from the I-maker that the
characteristics of the natural world subsequently emerge.
Furthermore, the three qualities of which the whole thing is comprised –
goodness, energy or passion, and inertia – are qualities that might well be
considered psychological rather than material. One wonders, therefore, whether
what is being described is a cognition-dependent world – each individual's own
‘world of experience’ – as described in the context of early Buddhist teachings
in Chapter 3. This interpretation of the might be problematic in the
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Chapter 8
The Word
and the Book
From the 4th century BCE onwards, orthodox Brahmanical
thinkers continued the traditions of grammatical and exegetical work on the
Vedic corpus of material which had been established by figures such as Pān˙a.
As the different strands of Indian thought developed, many sought to maintain
the supremacy of strictly orthodox practices and worldviews – whether their
primary concern was for the ritual and realism of the karmace, however, that a
significantly new and different grammatical approach was put forward,
for the knowledge and cosmic essentialism of the Upanis
ads, which constituted both the end of the Veda (vedānta) and its jñāna-kānsā
and Vedānta darśanas were established. Over time, both of the latter
incorporated under their respective umbrellas some distinctive variations which
were propounded by different important thinkers in their traditions, as well as
the ideas of those key figures discussed below.
During the 5th century ce, the grammarian Bhartr hari put
forward the view that the understanding of the relationship between the
classical language of Sanskrit and reality was not just a way of defending
first
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Chronology
c.2000 BCE–: the
Vedic sacrificial tradition.
c.800–500 BCE:
the early Upani·ika and Nyāya.
4th–1st century BCE:
emergence of different Buddhist schools.
3rd century BCE–2nd
century CE: development of the Buddhist Abhidharma. 1st century BCE–1st century CE: Mahāyāna Buddhism and the
‘Perfection of Wisdom’ Sūtras.
c.2nd century CE: Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka
Kārikā.
c.4th century CE:
the Cittamātra/Yogācāra school of Buddhism.
3rd century CE:
the Yoga-Sūtras of Classical Yoga.
4th–5th
century CE: ·ads. by 500
BCE: ritual and gnostic branches of the Brahmanical tradition coexisted.
5th-century BCE
milieu: householders and renouncers.
c.485–405 BCE:
the lifetime of the Buddha.
4th–2nd century BCE:
grammarians and early exegetes.
3rd–2nd
century BCE: Vaiśe·
5th century
CE: the grammarian Bartr hari develops an orthodox darśana alongside the
philosophical activity of linguistic analysis. Understanding the role of
language, he stated, leads to liberating knowledge of Brahman, the unifying
essence of the universe.
-119-
7th
century CE:
section) of the Vedas.’ Principal proponents include
Kumārila and Prabhākara.
8th century CE:
Śan˙kara's school of Advaita Vedānta, based on a ‘non-dual’ (advaita) exegesis
of the Upani· (knowledge section).
11th century CE:
Rāmānuja's Viśi·ādvaita Vedānta, a ‘qualified non-dualism’, also
based on exegesis of the Upani·ads.
principles – in his case the validity of the Veda and the
world it represented – but was
and the study of language as the highest of all religio-philosophical
activities. His claim was that through understanding the way Sanskrit was
correlated with the manifest world, by means of Vedic utterances, one could
arrive at knowledge of the universal absolute (Brahman): language itself is, in
a very real sense, the sound of reality.
That which is one, divided in different ways by
differences in construction: Brahman, that highest one, is known when one
attains an understanding of grammar.
Vākyapadīya 1.22)
of the components of a sentence as the means by which
knowledge is acquired. According
instantaneously conveying valid knowledge in a way
individual words and phrases do not:
the latter convey only partial and incomplete fragments of
knowledge, which are both easily
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distorted and misleading. Furthermore, as meaning and
words are united in the way we comprehend through sentences, there can be no
knowledge except by means of language: to know something is to know it as it is
expressed in language. So reality itself can be seen as knowable by means of
comprehending its expression in sentences – or, rather, in
and their constituent parts for the purpose of grammatical
analysis, in fact language, as the sound of the universe, is itself continuous
and indivisible. Here he draws out what he sees as the logical implication of
the Vedic view that the universe is actively maintained by means of the
ritually uttered sounds associated with the sacrifice. And he states that
insight into this ‘monistic sound’ (s´abda-Brahman)
is the goal one should seek to attain. reality, they were of serious interest
to Buddhist logicians, particularly Din˙nāga. The worldviews from which each
approached the language/reality debate differed: Bhartr hari's view
incorporated the maintaining of the universe by means of Vedic ritual, whereas
the Buddhists thought verbal construction perpetuated the world of ignorance
and cyclical continuity. But the issue itself was the same for both sides, and
what one might call his unifying of the soundactivity of Vedic ritual with the
apparent monism of the Upanis hari a significant figure within the Brahmanical
tradition, which tended to separate the two strands of thought and practice.
Though neither Mīmām sakas nor Vedāntins adopted his views entirely, both had
points in common with him; and some later Mīmām particular were influenced by
what Bhartr hari had said about the ontological implications of the way
language operated.
Mīmāmsā: the Philosophy of the Ritual
than grammarians per se, the main point of
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their enterprise was the proper understanding of the
nature of ritual, in particular the injunctions of the sacrifice. Indeed, for
the orthodox it was a key aspect of their svadharma (‘own-duty’) that they
should do this, for the study of the Veda is an intrinsic part
Jaimini) found the work of the orthodox grammarians to be
of crucial relevance in the way language was linked to the nature of the world.
They held that the uttering of a word indicates the existence of that which it
designates. This assisted them as they sought to demonstrate the reality and
nature of the plural world, which included a plurality of independent and
autonomous ‘selves’ as performers of the sacrifice. They denied claims to
monism put forward by early exegetes of the Upanis ads by arguing that such
claims failed to accommodate individual characteristics and idiosyncracies,
ignorance, wickedness, and virtue; and they stated that Upanis adic injunctions
to know one's self were for the purpose not of liberation but for the better
performance of Vedic rituals. Similarly, they
accepted as a given the realistic plurality of the world
around us in which the sacrifice was performed, and saw the sacrifice as the
means for the maintaining of that world. More specifically, it was the means
for maintaining Dharma – how things should be: this was the fundamental
rationale of the sacrificial ritual injunctions. The injunctions themselves,
being contained in texts representing eternal Truth, were seen as
selfvalidating, an intrinsic part of the Dharma-package, so to speak.
Kumārila said in his Ślokavārtika:
‘The injunction that one has a duty to understand the self does not have a goal
of liberation. Such selfknowledge is clearly intended to motivate performance
of ritual.’
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Plurality and Realism: Another Take on Categories
nature of its characteristics. This they did in a way
similar to the analyses and categorizing of the Vaiśe·ikas,
described in Chapter 5. The Mīmām sakas accepted five categories: substance,
quality, action, universality, and absence. To the nine kinds of substance
itemized by the Vaiśes ikas (earth, water, fire, air, ether, space, time, self,
and mind), they added darkness and sound. The relationship between substance
and qualities and other categories was subject to analysis which resulted in
what is called an ‘identity in difference’ position. Where categories coexist,
such as with the colour red and the form rose, they are different only insofar
as they each contribute to an identity. They cannot exist separately. Indeed,
nothing perceivable is wholly different or wholly identical: rather, things are
distinct in relation to each other or identical while being of different
categories. All cognition involves this ‘identity in difference’ of the various
aspects of the combination of categories involved.
The Mīmām sakas' epistemological theory
For Mimamsakas, cognition represented a
fundamentally valid and reliable means of knowledge, both of the world around
us and of individual ‘selves’ as knowers. The act of knowing ‘reveals’ the
external ‘transcendentally real’ existence of both known and knower: neither of
these, that is to say, is in any way dependent on the operating of the
cognitive process. Rather, cognition brings about a state of ‘being known’ in
the object of knowledge, and a confirmation of the existence of the autonomous
knower. The process of knowing therefore reveals ‘truth’, and in this case
confirms the worldview of the eternal Veda.
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The Mimamakas also held to a theory that all substance is
reducible to atomic particles. But in contrast to the Vaiśe·ikas'
microscopic atoms, which are not individually perceivable
reliability of perception, and held that atoms are no
smaller than what can be seen with the naked eye – such as a mote in a sunbeam.
They thus held to a strong common-sense view of reality, a feature which is
emphasized by their acceptance of cognition itself as a valid and intrinsically
reliable means of knowledge of a world that is external and independent of that
cognition. What is known exists, and cognitions should be understood as actions
which produce the quality of being known in their objects. Acts of knowing thus
reveal the reality of the plural world simply by virtue of their occurring.
The Veda is True
This epistemological theory requires not that cognition
needs validating – as was the approach of others, most notably the Buddhists –
but that it needs to be proved false by
validity of the Vedas and the ritual injunctions
they sought to defend. The status of the performers of the sacrifice was
similarly established in that the act of knowing was said to indicate the
existence of the eternal self as knower of the empirical world. That is to say,
it is not just that cognizing an implement of the sacrifice reveals the
independent existence of that implement, but also that such a cognition reveals
the existence of the cognizer: the cognition ‘I know X’ is the means by which
both X and the self are known to have autonomous existence.
These last two related points – the establishing of self
and world by means of cognition –
manifested in
language. They held to the orthodox view that the Veda had no author. -124-
Rather, it is self-existent truth, and cognizing it is an
act of revealing its validity because cognition is intrinsically absolutely
reliable. In common with the nature of the Veda as a body of injunctions to
act, so knowing is itself a revelatory activity – and the self, as knower, is
related to the external world, as known, by means of such cognitive actions. As
well as establishing the validity of the Veda, this position sought to
privilege the knower of the Veda as the agent of the perpetuating of reality –
a claim that had always been crucial to the orthodox tradition.
Śan˙kara's Non-dualism
Other orthodox thinkers, following the approach of
Bādarāyan˙ads in the Brahma Sūtra, saw
the injunctions of the Veda in the context of the need to acquire knowledge of
the essence of the cosmos, Brahman, rather than the performing of sacrificial
rituals. There is evidence of a long lineage of so-called ‘Vedāntin’ thinkers
(the Upanis ads are the vedānta, or ‘end of the Veda’). But it was the highly
influential Śan˙kara, who lived during the 8th century ce, who consolidated
Vedānta thought systematically enough to engage in serious polemical debate
with others. Śan˙kara's principal work was a commentary on Bādarāyan a's Brahma Sūtra, explicating what he saw as
a definitive exegesis of the message of the Upanis a-Sāhasrī, ‘The Thousand Teachings.’ Śan˙kara used the Brahma Sūtra, the Upanis ads themselves,
and the Bhagavad Gītā as his three
basic texts, and his exegetical work sought to present their teaching as a
unity – what is called the ‘triple foundation’ of revealed truth.
To grasp Śan˙kara's position of Advaita Vedānta, a
‘non-dual’ interpretation of the ontology principally expressed in the Upani·a
and drawing on his summary of the Upani·ads. ad which states:
In the beginning, this world was just Being [i.e. Brahman]
– one only,
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without a second…. And it thought to itself ‘Let me
become many; let me multiply myself.’
(Chāndogya Upani·ad 6.2.1–3)
coupled with:
By means of just one lump of clay, everything made of clay
can be known: any modifications are merely verbal distinctions, names; the
reality is just clay.
(Chāndogya Upani·ad 6.1.4)
These key passages establish for Śan˙kara two fundamental
points: a nondual, monistic universe, the substance of which is Brahman; and
the fact that all change is only apparent
– Brahman does not actually change. This kind of monism is
a form of ‘effect pre-existing
in
the cause’ (satkāryavāda ad, as the
material substance of the universe. It is knowledge of the
existent Brahman that is the ultimate experiential goal for man, not (merely)
knowledge of the unsubstantiality of the cognitively constructed empirical
realm, he said.
of the material cause, but is just an apparent
manifestation of plurality. This is called vivarta-vāda:
‘[manifestation] by way of appearance.’ sakas was to
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Śan˙kara's non-dualism
The advaita
of Śan˙kara's Advaita Vedānta denotes an interpretation of the Upani·ads
that gives a ‘non-dual’, or monistic, ontology. Everything is Brahman.
It follows from this that one's self, ātman, is
also Brahman: hence the famous expression ‘ātman is Brahman.’ For Śan˙kara,
Brahman is an unchanging absolute essence. All plurality is only apparent, not
actual. This does not mean, however, that it is correct to state that the
plurality of the empirical world is absolutely unreal or nonexistent. Rather,
it is of only ‘conventional’ reality. His most frequently cited analogy is of
seeing a snake where there is in fact a coiled rope. The false sighting is ‘real’
to us when it takes place, and has ‘real’ effects on us. But the coiled rope
has remained unchanged, and can be perceived for what it ‘more really’ is when
the false perception is seen through. Another related analogy more specifically
relating to the self as a part of unchanging Brahman is:
… The notion that the self undergoes rebirth and
change is similar to the [false] experience one has when moving along a river
in a boat that the trees on the banks are moving. Just as the trees seem to be
moving in the opposite direction to the person in the boat, so the self seems
to be being reborn.
(Upadeśa-Sāhasrī 5.2–3)
mistake conventional plurality for absolute reality. Furthermore, all of
these erroneous positions are in conflict with the true (i.e. Śan˙kara's)
interpretation of the Upani·ads; and whatever arguments,
logical or otherwise, others might put forward in support of their stance, they
all become invalid in the face of that Upani·adic interpretation.
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In support of Śan˙kara's non-dualism
The self (ātman), indeed, is this whole world.
(Chāndogya Upani· Brahman, indeed, is this
whole world, this widest extent.
(
7.25.2)
One should not on the strength of mere logic challenge
something that has to be ascertained from the Vedas.
(Śan˙kara's Brahma Sūtra Bhā·aka Upani·ya 2.1.11)
The experience of conventional reality for Śan˙kara is one
which arises because of ignorance as to the true nature of absolute reality. It
is not unchanging Brahman but ignorance that is the source and cause of
empirical plurality. And the overcoming of ignorance and the gaining of
knowledge of the identity of one's essential self (ātman) and the universal
essence (Brahman) effects liberation from the ignoranceinduced cycle of
rebirth. To the question ‘where does ignorance come from if everything is Brahman?’,
Śan˙kara replies that from the standpoint of knowledge, there is no ignorance
to ask the origin of: knowledge as it were ‘cancels’ all thinking in terms of
ignorance; and from the standpoint of ignorance, the question cannot be
answered as the notion of the beginning of ignorance is asked and meaningful
only from within ignorance itself.
The conventional world is of crucial importance to
Śan˙kara for two key reasons. First, it is at that level that the Veda reveals
eternal truth. And second, it is at that level that one can seek to gain
liberating insight. In a similar but more practically illustrative vein to
Śan˙kara's rope-andsnake and bank-of-river analogies (see
box on page 127), modern
Advaita Vedāntins explain as follows: You are dreaming
that you are
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-129-
being chased by a man-eating tiger and are extremely
afraid and run for your life. As well as experiencing what seems like very real
fear, your body will undergo all manner of physiological changes, including
increased heart-rate and sweating. Then in your dream one of your fellows who
is not being chased shoots and kills the tiger. The sound of
Māyā – ‘illusion’ – and Śan˙kara's ‘two levels of reality’
The term māyā
is sometimes used in the context of Advaita Vedānta in the sense that
conventional reality is ‘unreal’ or ‘illusory.’ While some other Advaita
Vedāntins did use this term, Śan˙kara did not. Rather, he postulated two
‘levels of reality’, one absolute and one conventional. Conventional reality is
the product of ignorance, avidyā.
This means that the world we inhabit while ignorant is ‘real’ at that level;
but when ignorance is replaced by knowledge, reality is seen to be different
from the conventional world.
In Upani·adic terms – for it should
be remembered that Śan˙kara was primarily an exegete – conventional reality is
‘Brahman with qualities’ (sagun˙a Brahman).
These expressions are to be found in the Śvetāśvatara
Upani·ad.
According to this Upani· a Brahman) and absolute reality is
‘qualityless Brahman’ (nirgunad, among the aspects of ‘Brahman with qualities’,
as well as the conventional world, is a personal Lord. It is often overlooked
that Śan˙kara was a theistic monist. He was a devotee of a personal Lord while
also holding that ultimately all was one. The positing of the existence of a
personal Lord is no more problematic for a monist than are the pluralities
around us: ultimately it is all Brahman, personal Lord no less than people and
objects.
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the dreamed gunshot wakes you up, and at that point you
realize that the level of reality of the dream is not the same as the level of
reality of your waking state. But your experience both of the chase and of
liberation from it derive from the ‘less real’ level.
Śan˙kara's Advaita Vedānta is perhaps the best known of
Indian ‘philosophies.’ It was the first to be exported to and propounded in the
West, being presented by the Vedāntin practitioner Vivekānanda at the World
Council of Religions in Chicago in 1893 as ‘Hinduism’, and subsequently
established in various centres, such as ‘Rāmakrishna Missions’, in many Western
countries. It has since enjoyed such a high profile worldwide that not only do
outsiders often not realize it is only one among many of India's schools of
thought but it is also sometimes promoted as ‘the orthodox
religio-philosophical tradition of India’ within the subcontinent itself.
Rāmānuja: Theist and Philosopher
In fact, more representative of the daily beliefs of many
‘Hindus’ is the thought of the 11th-century ce Vedāntin, Rāmānuja. Rāmānuja was
a fervent member of a highly devotional sect known as the Śrī Vai·a. But Rāmānuja also wanted to establish
orthodox status for his sect, thereby giving it a superiority over other sects
and ‘authenticating’ his own religious beliefs and practices, and he sought to
do this by identifying the theology of the Bhāgavata
Purān a with the ontology and philosophical teachings of the ‘triple
foundation’ of orthodox texts used by Śan˙kara: the Brahma Sūtra of Bādarāyan˙avas, whose object of devotion was the
personal Lord as represented in a sectarian text called the Bhāgavata Purān˙
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central position it accorded to the ādvaita Vedānta –
Vedānta that is non-dual (advaita) but also qualified (viśi·ads, is
known as Viśi·a). Unlike
Śan˙kara's absolute monism, for Rāmānuja Brahman's oneness is qualified in that
there exists within the oneness a relationship between Brahman as Lord (the
monism is strongly theistic in Viśi· central position it
accorded to the Upani·ādvaita Vedānta literature)
and the individual self as devotee. Drawing on the rose and redness example
used by predecessors, Rāmānuja states that it is the nature of Brahman to exist
‘qualified’ in this way: as a rose is to its redness, so Brahman is to
individual selves. And just as a rose cannot exist without redness (or some
other colour), so Brahman cannot exist without selves. These are intrinsic to
one another as aspects of
Satkāryavāda – the ‘effect pre-exists in the cause’
Satkāryavāda
is the theory that nothing can come from nothing – ‘creation ex nihilo’ is impossible. Furthermore,
whatever there is must have pre-existed in its material cause, as material
causes cannot create something other than what is
unmanifest prakrti, but that a plurality of purusas
also existed separate from this. This is satkāryavāda in association with
ontological dualism. For Śan˙kara, however, who is an absolute monist, there is
nothing that is not unchanging Brahman, and all manifestation and plurality is
but an appearance rather than a change in substance. This is known as vivarta-vāda – a theory of manifestation
by way of ‘appearance.’ By contrast to these two, Rāmānuja's theory of
satkāryavāda, while also monistic like Śan˙kara's, states that Brahman actually
transforms itself into the world of plurality. This is known as parin˙āma-vāda – a theory of
manifestation by way of ‘transformation.’
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Brahman's nature. Furthermore, these aspects, while not
strictly speaking the same thing, are not different from one another either:
Rāmānuja does not categorially separate them as the Vaiśe·sakas
did. Rather, he states that they are intrinsically and eternally inseparable,
while also being distinct. This is the meaning of Viśi· ‘qualified
non-dualism.’
Again unlike Śan˙kara, according to Rāmānuja Brahman does
not have a qualityless aspect, but is wholly with qualities. This stance is no
doubt
According to Rāmānuja, Brahman has qualities:
Those who maintain [Rāmānuja is here alluding to
Śan˙kara] a doctrine of a substratum without any differentiation can offer no
valid proof of this, because the objects of all valid means of knowledge are
differentiated … therefore reality is differentiated and has qualities….
[Likewise] the view that all difference is unreal is completely erroneous. …
Expressions such as tat tvam asi [you
are all that] in the texts are not meant to convey the unity of
undifferentiated substance; on the contrary, the words ‘you’ and ‘that’
indicate Brahman characterised by difference.
(Rāmānuja's Brahma-Sūtra
Bhā·ya 1.1.1)
The Supreme Brahman – who is a treasure store of
countless superlatively auspicious qualities, is flawless, possesses the
infinitely great realm manifesting his glory, and is an ocean of superlatively
gracious condescension, beauty, and forgiving love – is the principal entity,
and the self is the subordinate entity. (Rāmānuja's Vedārthasamgraha, quoted in John Carman Theology of
Rāmānuja p. 152) -133-
partly because sectarian imperatives demand the
emphasizing of qualities such as compassion, grace, and so on, as aspects of
Brahman. Mention is made of such qualities in some of the Upani·ads,
and Śan˙kara incorporated them into his ‘conventional’ level theism within an
ultimate absolute monism. But Rāmānuja saw these as real and active qualities
of the stuff of which the universe is made: the empirical world is a real
transformation of Brahman, manifesting qualities, pluralities, and so on that
are all ontologically of the same substance. Rāmānuja strongly criticizes
Śan˙kara's vivarta-vāda (manifestation by means of appearance) and states that
as Brahman is actually the material cause of the empirical world, what is
described in the Chāndoga Upani·ad passage
‘Being thought to itself, let me become many’, is
manifestation by means of transformation, parin
āma-vāda. Brahman actually changes, is active, and has a relationship with
individuals.
The Logic of the Exegetes
All the Vedic exegetes, whether concerned primarily with
the nature and supremacy of the ritual or with the teachings of the Upani·ads,
were faced with the problem of inconsistencies throughout the large corpus of
material with which they were working. Though the exegetes believed the texts
were records of eternal truth, the ritual manuals and Upani·adic
treatises were compiled over a vast period of time – possibly more than a
millennium. It would thus be extraordinary if they did not contain considerable
variations, and even a cursory study of them confirms that this certainly
appears to be the case. This allowed different exegetical approaches to be
accommodated, and quite different interpretations to have the power to convince
in different areas. The attribution to the material, by all of such exegetes,
of a status of epistemological certainty (by means of testimony) serves to
illustrate an important aspect of the way in which much Indian philosophical
thought is inseparable from what in the West would be called a religious
worldview. The criticisms of others were frequently presented in logical terms;
but they were also frequently founded on a logic internal to a
-134-
particular system of thought, with arguments
directed towards defending a worldview (darśana) which ultimately had
soteriological aims. While the different logical arguments can be extrapolated
and removed from the context of the tradition as a whole for intellectual
interest and for the purposes of comparison with Western forms of logic, the
classical Indian context was one in which there was no such formal separation. -135-
Postscript
From Classical Thought to the Modern Day
Just as the high days of pre-Christian Greek philosophy,
with its rich tradition of debate, waned over subsequent centuries, so too did
the ‘classical’ period of Indian thought come to a gradual end. If one includes
the earliest stages of the tradition, as I have done in this book, it
flourished for an astonishing 1500 years – with the first five centuries of the
Common Era seeing the greatest activity and variety. The texts and records that
have survived to this day attest to very many others that have been lost, or
are as yet undiscovered or unexamined, indicating an extraordinarily rich and
diverse heritage of original thought and argument. The loss of much of the
material is undoubtedly in part due to the fact that there is little or no
tradition in India of recording details of historical figures, facts, or
events, or of preserving information for a historical record as such. And a
great deal of what we do have has survived with almost no information as to its
author or origin save for a name, presenting scholars with the huge task, over
and above those of editing and translating, of attempting to contextualize it
accurately in its tradition. Although much scholarly work has been done to try
to piece together biographical facts and chronologies, it is still extremely
difficult to be certain about the geographical location in which schools of
thought were established, preserved, and taught, to work out how and where it
spread, to have anything other than a rough guide as to dates, or to know
exactly who wrote which works. Sometimes a name on a text is no more than that
– a name. So there is much that we simply
-136-
do not know about questions of continuity in the Indian
tradition, about what happened ‘between’ parts that we do know, or ‘before’ or
‘after’ certain key phases or events about which there is more certainty.
Much of the piecing together of the outline chronology
that I have followed in this book was undertaken by pioneer scholars in the
field of Indology. As a discipline, this began in the 19th century when a few
Western missionaries and travelling academics learned Sanskrit and began
editing and translating Indian texts. Many mistakes were made – in particular
of the ‘looking at Indian material through Western/ Christian eyes’ kind – but
the early work nevertheless made an enormous contribution to making Indian
thought accessible to the West. Work continues around the world, but it remains
a comparatively small discipline, and there is still a vast amount of material
to be studied properly.
In India itself, until outsiders learned Sanskrit, only a
tiny elite were familiar with religiophilosophical material: Sanskrit was the
language first of the brahmins, and then of educated ‘thinkers’, comparable
with Latin in medieval Europe. After the classical period waned, there were
some areas in which specific philosophical traditions were maintained, if on a
less broadly interactive basis. One such that we know about was a ‘new’ school
of Nyāya thought, where classical Nyāya was developed, criticized, and
reinterpreted, and on which many further texts were written. Brahmin
traditionalists also continued to study and preserve Pān˙ini's grammar. What
flourished more and were of more influence, however, were strongholds of
devotional traditions such as the one Rāmānuja was a member of. Some of these
(notably among the Śaiva groups) presented their theistic beliefs as highly
sophisticated metaphysical systems, but it was nonetheless the case that
cerebral concerns were of interest only to a very small minority. And while
Śan˙kara left a legacy of centres where people could put his philosophy into
practice, this was for religious exercise rather than as a debating or
exegetical forum. Buddhism survived only outside India, in countries
-137-
such as China, Tibet, Japan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), and
Thailand. Scholarly Buddhists, particularly in Tibet, continued to engage in
the more philosophical issues within their own schools of Buddhism, but the
tradition endured largely as a religion.
In many respects, it was the interest of outsiders that
triggered a selfconscious revival among many less ‘popular’ Indian traditions.
Seeing that others were learning Sanskrit, seeking out and editing texts, and
wanting to know about the history of the ideas of India, prompted Indians to
resume a more active interest in their own classical traditions. Some did this
with the aim of promoting their own particular tradition much as had been done
in the past. This was the case particularly with Śan˙kara's Advaita Vedānta,
which very successfully presented itself in a simplified form for Western
consumption. This form is mainly of interest to Westerners whose concern is its
soteriology. In India too, the focus of the Śan˙kara centres remains largely
practical.
It has been educational establishments in India (many of
which were established by the British in the 19th century) that have provided
the milieu in which Indian philosophy flourished again during the 20th century.
Professional Indian scholars joined Western scholars in studying the classical
texts and, in university departments in India and the West alike, debate has
resumed on the relative merits of different systems of thought, their internal
coherence, the validity of their arguments, the strengths or weaknesses of
their methodologies. In broad terms, this has been undertaken in a variety of
disciplines, as scholars approach the material from different angles.
Philologists, historians, students of religion, and philosophers have each
raised different kinds of questions and contributed to modern debate in
different ways.
Because of the influence of Western ways of doing things,
however, there has also been a tendency to separate philosophy in the sense of
rational argument from any context that incorporated more religious
-138-
issues. So in India as in the West, Indian philosophy in a
more specific sense has become an academic discipline concerned primarily with
logic and linguistic analysis. In order to be taken seriously on the
international stage of modern Western philosophy, it has had to compete only on
those terms that are of interest to modern Western philosophers. Drawing mainly
on the work of Naiyāyikas and Buddhists, some have devoted their professional
careers to promoting Indian philosophy strictly in the sense of logical
argument – in order to overcome Western preconceptions that Indian thought is
‘mystical’, ‘magical’, and anything but rational. Rationality, many thought
(and many still think), was the province only of the West. While one must
applaud any successful overcoming of such misconceptions, it is also to be
hoped that before too long professional philosophers will be less reluctant to
pay due attention to the wider context in which Indian logic was developed, and
the reasons why it was developed: its total abstraction from context is a
wholly Western cultural phenomenon. With its fundamental focus on the nature of
reality itself, much more profound than this was the worldview of classical
India. -139-
Recommended further reading
Chapter 1
Simon Blackburn, Think,
Oxford: OUP, 1999. Sarandranath Dasgupta, A
History of Indian Philosophy, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975.
Paul Dundas, The
Jains, London: Routledge, 1992.
Eric Frauwallner, History
of Indian Philosophy, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993.
John Hospers, Introduction
to Philosophical Analysis (3rd edn), London: Routledge, 1990.
The chapter on Śaivism in S. Sutherland et al. (eds) The World's Religions, London:
Routledge, 1988.
Chapter 2
J. L. Brockington, The
Sacred Thread, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.
Thomas J. Hopkins, The
Hindu Religious Tradition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971.
R. E. Hume, Introductory essay in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (2nd edn), Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1931.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, (ed. and trans.) The Rig Veda: An Anthology,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Patrick Olivelle, (trans.) Upani·ads,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
-141-
B. K. Smith, Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varn˙a System and the
Origins of Caste, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Chapter 3
Rupert Gethin, The Foundations
of Buddhism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Richard Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from
Benares to Colombo, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988.
Sue Hamilton, Early Buddhism – A New Approach: The I of the Beholder, Richmond:
Curzon Press, 2000.
Damien Keown, Buddhism:
A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Walpola Rahula, What
the Buddha Taught (2nd edn), London: Gordon Fraser, 1967.
Andrew Skilton, A
Concise History of Buddhism, Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 1994.
Complete translations of the texts of early Buddhism are
published by the Pali Text Society. Alternatives for some sections are
Bhikkhu Ñān˙amoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, (translation of the Majjhima Nikāya) The Middle
Length Discourses of
the Buddha, Boston: Wisdom Publications in association with the Barre
Centre for Buddhist Studies, 1995.
Maurice Walshe, (translation of the Dīgha Nikāya) Thus Have I
Heard, London: Wisdom Publications, 1987.
Chapter 4
There is almost no non-specialist reading material on this
period. Some general references are made in:
Harold G. Coward and K. Kunjunni Raja, Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies,
Vol. V: The Philosophy of the
Grammarians, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990.
-142-
W. Halbfass, India
and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1988.
Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
J. N. Mohanty, Classical
Indian Philosophy, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
More specialized:
George Cardona, ‘Indian Linguistics’, in Giulio Lepschy
(ed.) History of Linguistics, Vol. I:
The
Eastern Traditions of Linguistics, London: Longman, 1994.
B. K. Matilal, Logic,
Language and Reality, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985.
Chapter 5
E. Frauwallner, History
of Indian Philosophy, Vol. II, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973.
M. Hiriyanna, The
Essentials of Indian Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
J. N. Mohanty, Classical
Indian Philosophy, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
More specialized:
Wilhelm Halbfass, On
Being and What There Is: Classical Vaiśe·ika and the History of Indian Ontology, Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1992.
B. K. Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Chapter 6
Stefan Anacker, Seven Works of Vasubandhu: The Buddhist Psychological Doctor,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984.
-143-
Ian Harris, The Continuity of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1991.
C. W. Huntingdon, The
Emptiness of Emptiness. An Introduction to Early Indian Mādhyamika,
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.
Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Thomas A. Kochumuttom, A
Buddhist Doctrine of Experience, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982.
F. Th. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist
Logic, New York: Dover Publications, 1962.
Frederick Streng, Emptiness.
A Study in Religious Meaning, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1967.
Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, London: Routledge,
1989.
More specialized:
Shoryu Katsura, (ed.), Dharmakīrti's
Thought and its Impact on Indian and Tibetan Philosophy. Proceedings of the
Third International Dharmakīrti Conference, Hiroshima, November 4–6, 1997.
Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999.
Chapter 7
Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga-Sūtra of Patañjali: A New
Translation and Commentary, Folkestone: Dawson, 1979.
Georg Feuerstein, The
Philosophy of Classical Yoga, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1980.
Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Gerald
Larson, (2nd edn), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
Ian Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darśana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
J. H. Woods, The
Yoga System of Patañjali, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
-144-
Chapter 8
A. J. Alston, (trans.) The
Thousand Teachings of Śan˙kara, London: Shanti Sadan, 1990.
Encyclopedia
of Indian
Philosophies,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.
John Carman, Theology
of Rāmānuja, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
Eliot Deutsch, Advaita
Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction, Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1968.
M. Hiriyanna, Essentials
of Indian Philosophy, London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
J. N. Mohanty, Classical
Indian Philosophy, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
George Thibaut, (trans.) The Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary of Śan˙karācārya, ed. Max
Müller, Sacred Books of the East Series,
Vols. XXXIV and XXXVIII, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890 and 1896.
George Thibaut, (trans.) The Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary of Rāmānuja, ed. Max Müller,
Sacred Books of the East Series, Vol. XLVIII, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904.
Other recommended books
A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India: A Survey of the Indian Subcontinent before
the Coming of the Muslims, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1954.
Franklin Edgerton, Allen and Unwin, 1965.
Jonardon Ganeri, (ed.) Indian
Logic: A Reader, Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000
-145-
J. N. Mohanty, Reason
and Tradition in Indian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought, Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1991.
Karl Potter, Presuppositions
of India's Philosophies, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.
Karl Potter, (ed.) Encyclopedia
of Indian Philosophies, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970–93.
S. Radhakrishnan and C. A. Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1957.
Ninian Smart, Doctrine
and Argument in Indian Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964.
-146-
Index
A
Abhidharma tradition 88 –93 absence, category of 72 , 75 , 76 action, category of 72 , 75 –6 action organs 115 action section of the Veda 33
Advaita Vedānta 125 –31, 138
115 –17 air 73 –4
anattā (not-self) 50 –1, 54 , 86 , 89 , 90 , 93 –4 annihilationists 39 , 40
Anselm 6 ānvīki
69
appetitive response 52 Aquinas 6
Āran˙yakas
27
Aristotle 82 Artha-Śāstras 59
Aryans 18 –19, 35 Asan˙ga 101 asceticism 34 Aśoka, king 91
A·ādhyāyī (Pān˙ini) 60 astronomy 59
Ātman (essential self) 28 , 30 proof of the 81 –3 atoms 73 –4, 91 , 94 124
Augustine 6
B
Bādarāyana 58 , 66 –7, 68 being 95 –6
Bhāgavata
Purān˙a 131
Bādarāyan˙hari 118 –21
Brahma
Sūtra 66 –7
Brahman 29 –32, 40 and Buddhism 54 Rāmānuja 131 –5 reinforcement of social structure 59 Śan˙kara 125 –8 two coexisting branches of 32 –3, 58 Brāhman˙as
(Vedic texts) 27
brahmins 15 , 32 –3, 86 and the Buddha 55 origins of 18 –19 and renouncers 34
threat to the 57 –9
Buddha, the 35 , 58 early life 42 Enlightenment of 41 , 45 , 100 and Lokottaravādins
86 –7 and Nārgārjuna 94 –100 undermining the brahmins 55 buddhi 115 –16
Buddhism 15 Abhidharma tradition 88 121 and challenge to
Brahmanical teaching 32 decline in India 91 dependent origination 48 , 49 –52, 53 , 54 , 94 –6
developments in 105
-147-
different schools of 84 –8 Four Noble Truths 47 –9, 52 , 98 karma 11 , 12 mind-only school of thought 101 –4 monastic
life 50 , 84 and
Śan˙kara's teachings 126
on selfhood 38
, 39 –40
survival outside India 137
–8 teachings 92
–3 texts of 87
Unanswered Questions of 51
Buddhist logic 106 Burma 138
C
Cārvāka tradition 13 caste system 23
categories enumeration of 115 of existent entities 72 123 –4
ceremonial rules 59 –60
Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka) 88 , 91 , 138
China 91 , 138
Christianity 6
Classical Yoga 109 –12, 116 , 117
cognition 51 –3, 90 , 104 , 106 perception 9 –10 consciousness 115 –16 transformations of 101 consciousness
storehouse 103 constructed
aspect of experience 102
continuity 89
–90, 101 –2
conventional reality 126
–8 cosmic order 19 –20, see
also dharma
cosmic speculation 25 –8
D
darśanas (Indian philosophies) 9 –10 six classical 15 , 16 debate 77
dependent aspect of experience 102 –3
dependent origination 48 , 49 –52, 53 , 54 , 94 –6 Descartes, René 6
destiny 1 , 2 , 77 devas
19 –20, 25 dharma 20 , 64 –5 and Abhidharma tradition 88 –94, 101 and Kan˙āda
70 , 77 and
Nāgārjuna 94 –5
Dharma-Śāstras 59 discrimination
116 dualism 112 –17, 126 , 132
dukkha
47 , 52
E
earth 73
–4 ego 110 ,
115 –17
empirical reality 31
emptiness, logic of 94 –100, 101 energy or passion 115 , 117
Enlightenment (of the Buddha) 41 , 45 , 100
-148-
enquiry 78 –9, 80 –1 essential self 81 –3 enumeration 112 –17
epistemology 4 , 5 , 52 inferential reasoning 79 123 –4 and testimony 4 ,
68 –9,
76 eternalists
39 ether 73 –4
etymological analysis 59
exegesis 14 sūtra writing style 67 , 68 testimony 4 , 67 –8, 76 Vedic texts 62 –7,
121
–35
existence Buddha's three insights 42 , 45 , 47 categories of 72 –7 and Four Noble
Truths 47 –9, 52 , 98 and non-existence 96 , 97 , 99 experience nature of 52 –5 three aspects of 102 –3
F
faith, and reason 6 fire 73 –4
formal method of reasoning 77 , 79 –81 Four Noble Truths 47 –9, 52 , 98
G
goodness 115 , 117
Gotama 71 , 77 , 79 , 80 –1, 89 and proof of the self 81 –3
Gotama, Siddhartha, see
Buddha, the grammar 59 ,
63 , 64 , 66 118 –21
Greek philosophy 5 ,
138
gross elements 115 , 117
H
Hegel 6 Hinduism 8 , 9
householders 34 –8, 50 , 58
human existence, see
existence
I
idealism 104
identity in difference 123 –4
ignorance 41 ,
52 , 128 immaterial
substance atoms 73 –4
impermanence 90
India decline of Buddhism in 91 revival in Indian philosophy 138
Indian philosophy decline of 136 first shift to more personcentred
issues 28 ‘mystical’
perception of 7 –8,
10 , 139 six
classical darśanas 15 ,
16
Indus Valley 35 –6 inertia 115 , 117 inference 113 –14
inferential reasoning 79 –81, 83 insight of the Truth 9 –10
-149-
intuitive perception 77
Íśvara 111
J
Jaimini 58 , 68 defence of the Veda 62 –6
Jainism 13 , 15 karma 11 –12 Japan 138
K
Kan˙āda 70 , 77
Kant, Immanuel 1 , 3 , 6 Kapilavatthu 41 karma 10 –12, 23 , 28 , 101 Kātyāyana 58 , 61 –2 khandhas
51 –2
knowledge and Classical Sāmkhya 112 –14 and complete sentences 120 and destiny
77 –9 limits
of 4 manifest/unmanifest
113 123 –4
Veda 33 Kumārila 122
L
language 60 –2 and reality 118 , 119 logic 106
Lokottaravādins 86 –7
M
Madhyamaka school of thought 94 , 100 Mahāyāna Buddhism 93 manifest/unmanifest 113 –17
manifestation by way of appearance 126 , 134 by way of
transformation 132 ,
134 material
substance atoms 73 –4
materialists 39 ,
40 meaning
and grammar 63
meditation 42 , 102 116 Yoga 107 , 109 –12 mental
processes analysis 101 metaphors
62 , 63 , 66 , 103 metaphysics
5 metrics 59
middle way Buddha's 49 –52 Nārgārjuna's 94 –6
17 , 32 , 62 , 64 , 67 philosophy of the ritual 121 –5 mind 73 –4 as a category 115 and
Classical Yoga 109 –12
mind-only school of thought 101 –4 mok·a (liberation) 28 , 40 , 42 , 47 , 66 , 77 –8, 79 monism 29 , 126 , 132 monotheism 29 Muslims 91
N
Nāgārjuna 94 –100, 104 , 105 Naiyāyikas 76 , 77 , 80 , 81 , 86 , 139
-150-
nature of reality 3 –5, 7 , 12 , 31 , 52 , 96 nihilism 97 , 101 nirvana 48 non-dualism 125 –31 not-self doctrine 50 –1, 54 , 86 , 89 , 90 , 93 –4
Nyāya 17 , 70 –83, 91 –2
Nyāya Sūtra 71 –2, 77 –9, 80 , 82 , 137
O
observational data 79 oneness 29 –33, 132
ontology 16 , 52 , 109 dualism 112 –17, 132 Sāmkhya
Kārikā 113 Vaiśe·ika
system
72
–7
‘own being’ 95 –6
own-dharma 65
P
Pāli 88 , 89
Pān˙ini 58 , 60 –1, 137 parin˙āma-vada
132 , 134 particularities
71 , 72
Patañjali 58 , 61 –2, 107 , 109 perception 114 , 116 , 124 perfected aspect of experience 103
Perfection of Wisdom, treatises on 93 –4, 101 philosophy, and religion 1 –6, 12 phonetics 59 , 60
pluralism manifestation of 126 Nāgārjuna's critique of 94 –6 and
realism 31 ,
70 –7, 82 , 104 , 123 –4 111 , 113 –17 pramān˙a
68 puru·as
(true self) 110 –16
pūrva-pak·in 69
Q
qualities 123 , 133 –4
quality, category of 72 , 74 , 81
R
Rāmakrishna Missions 131
Rāmānuja 131 –4, 137
rationality 139
realism conventional 126 –8 and language 118 , 119 , 120 –1 nature of 3 –5, 7 , 12
, 31 , 52 , 96 pluralistic 31 , 70 –7, 82 , 104 , 123 –4 reason, and faith 6
rebirth 11 –12, 28 Buddha's insight into 42 and enquiry 79 and ignorance 41 liberation from 111 , 116
religion and duties 11 and philosophy 1 –6, 12 renouncers 34 –8, 50 , 58
-151-
S
Śabda-pramān˙a
68 sacrificial
rituals 11 ,
19 –25, 30 , 40 and goal of
monastic sound 121 121 –5
vedān˙gas 59 –60 salvation 2 –3, 7 , 28 , 77 –8 Śaivism 13
112 –17, 126
Sammatīyas 87 , 88
Śan˙kara 125 –31, 138
Sanskrit 23 , 58 , 137 118 –21 Kātyāyana and Patañjali 58 , 61 –2 Pān˙ini
and 61
Sarvāstivādins 87 , 90 , 94 –5 satkāryavāda
113 , 132 Sautrāntikas
87 , 88 –9
selfhood 73 –4 Buddhism 38 , 39 –40, 50 –1, 112 and cosmos 28 , 29 –30 differing views of 40 –1 essential 28 , 30 , 81 –3, 107 knowledge of 69 true 110 –12 sense organs 115
sense perceptions 53 , 76 , 77 , 106 sentences 120 skandhas
90 sleep 110
soteriologies 2 –3, 7 Classical Yoga 109 Sāmkhya
Kārikā (SK) 113 space
73 –4 Śrī
Vai·navas 131
substance, category of 72 –5, 81 , 123 subtle elements 115 sūtra writing form 67 , 68 syllogism 82
T
testimony 4 , 68 –9, 76 , 82 , 114 Thailand 138
Theravāda Buddhism 85 , 88 , 90 –1 Three Characteristics of Existence 54
Three Marks of Existence formula 48 , 88 –9
Tibet 91 , 138 time 73 –4
transcendental realism 31
transformations of consciousness 101
Treatises on the Perfection of Wisdom 93 –4, 101 triple
foundation 125
truth Four Noble Truths 47 –9, 52 , 98 insight of the 9 –10 self-existent 125 two
truths 96 –100
U
universality 75
Upani·ads 14 , 15 , 27 –8, 58 , 134
Bādarāyana and 66 –7 Jaimini and 66 and nature of the world 38 , 40
-152-
oneness 29 –32 Śan˙kara 125 –8 on selfhood 50 , 122 Yoga 107
V
Vaiśe·ika 17 , 70 –83, 91 –2
Vaiśesika Sūtra 70 –7, 89 Nyāya
contribution to 77 –8
Vasubandhu 101 , 104
Vātsyāyana 80
Veda Jaimini's defence of 58 , 62 –6 maintaining universe 121 121 –5, 124 –5 testimony and 67 –8, 76 two bodies
of material 32 –3
vedān˙gas 59 –60 gas 59 –60
Vedānta 17 , 32 , 67
Vedānta
Sūtra 66 –7
Vedāntin thinkers 125 –35
Vedic Dharma 89
Vedic sacrificial religion 14 , 19 – 25, 30 , 40 threat to 57 –9 verbal differentiation 97 , 99
verbal testimony 4 vivarta-vāda
126 , 134
Vivekānanda 131
W
water 73 –4
Western philosophy ancient Greek philosophy 5 , 138
modern 6 –7 and religion 5 –6 and study of Indian philosophy 138 –9 wisdom 5 Perfection of
93 –4, 101
World Council of Religions, Chicago (1893) 131
worldview 135 differences in 10 –12, 40 Nyāya-Vaiśe·ika 82 –3 writing style 67
Y
Yoga 17 , 107 –12
Yogācāra Buddhism 54 , 101 –4 yogic perception 10 , 77
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