Sāyaṇa-Mādhava closed his exposition of the Cārvāka philosophy in his Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha, Chap. 1 by quoting 11 and a half verses, the authorship of all of which was attributed to Bṛhaspati, the eponymous founder of materialism in India. One of these verses is presumably taken from the Viṣṇupurāṇa. However, it is not Bṛhaspati but some demons, deluded by a Jain and a Buddhist monk, who say this. Bṛhaspati does not appear at all in this Purāṇa. Variant versions of the same story (...) are found in other Purāṇas but Bṛhaspti is not invariably present in all of them. The origin of the story may be traced back to the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad. Although Bṛhaspati plays a leading part in that story, the background is quite different. By comparing all the versions found in the Purāṇas and the subject matter of the epigrams attributed to Bṛhaspati the paper proposes to show that the Viṣṇupurāṇa story has nothing to do with the materialists, whether the Pre-Cārvākas or the Cārvākas; the Jains and the Buddhists are the target of attack. Sāyaṇa-mādhava, by placing these satirical epigrams either in their original or in altered forms, and attributing them to Bṛhaspati, has mixed up the views of all sorts of nāstikas, particularly the Jains and the Buddhists, with the Cārvākas and thereby succeeded in deceiving several generations of readers and misleading even the best of scholars. (shrink)

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy (...) of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to analyze, classify and illustrate different scholarly approaches to the Sanskrit philosophical commentaries as reflected in some influential and especially thoughtful studies of Indian philosophy; at the same time it highlights some specific features involving commentary and annotation in general, drawing from results of studies on commentaries conducted in other disciplines and fields, such as Classical and Medieval Studies, Theology, and Early English Literature. In the field of South Asian Studies, philosophical commentaries may be assessed (...) from various overlapping and not always exclusive points of view, such as preservation of otherwise lost historical information, historical authenticity and reliability, interpretational innovation, spiritual or experiential insight, philosophical creativity, intellectual liveliness, doxographic intent, degree of incidentality, expository breadth and explanatory depth. The essay provides numerous examples taken from classical to early modern philosophical literature, especially of the Brahminical and Buddhist traditions, and also discusses their diverging perception by modern scholars and interpretators. (shrink)

The collection of Malayalam records entitled Vanjeri Grandhavari, taken from the archives of an important Namputiri Brahmin family and the temple under its leadership, provides some long-awaited information regarding a wide range of legal activities in late medieval Kerala. The organization of law and the jurisprudence represented by these records bear an unmistakable similarity to legal ideas found in dharmastra texts. A thorough comparison of the records and relevant dharma texts shows that landholding Namputiri Brahmins, who possessed enormous political and (...) economic power in the region, mediated the implementation of dharmastra into the legal system. From this comparison arise new understandings of law and legal categories such as custom and positive law. Moreover, such comparisons begin to elucidate the problems involved in Western assumptions that it is textual law, not its interpretation and application by humans, which controls behavior. The Vanjeri records demonstrate not only the importance of dharmastra as a historical document but also the manner and extent to which dharmastra provided the foundation for legal systems in Kerala as well as in other regions of India. (shrink)

2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in contemporary mystical studies: an overview of the basic ways to approach mystical experiences and mysticism. It discusses the problem of definitions of “mystical experiences” and “mysticism” and advances characterizations of “mystical experiences” in terms of certain altered states of consciousness and “mysticism” in terms of encompassing ways of life centered on such experiences and states. Types of mystical experiences, enlightened states, paths, and doctrines are (...) discussed, as is the relation of mystical experiences and mysticism to religions and cultures. The approaches of constructivism, contextualism, essentialism, and perennialism are presented. Themes in the history of the world’s major mystical traditions are set forth. Approaches to mystical phenomena in sociology, psychology, gender studies, and neuroscience are introduced. Basic philosophical issues related to whether mystical experiences are veridical and mystical claims valid, mystics’ problems of language, art, and morality are laid out. Older and newer comparative approaches in religious studies and in Christian theology are discussed, along with postmodernist objections. The intended audience is undergraduates and the general public interested in the general issues related to mysticism. (shrink)

Both the itihāsa-s of the Mahābhārata and the Platonic philosophical ‘epode’ are often used to persuade in conditions where emotion threatens to incapacitate the person for argumentative discourse. Narrative reason has its own conditions of success and failure, opening up a discursive arena in which all kinds of utterances are welcome. Emphasizing the psychagogic function of the ‘once-upon-a-time’ reason, it is worth asking who the real protagonist of the story is and whether the story has a duty or a dharma (...) of its own to fulfill. Dharma and all the dilemmas it brings along with it constitute one of the fundamental problems that make up the whole Mahābhārata. In this essay I wonder about the dharma of the Mahābhārata itself—a literary work which gives itself the name ‘triumph’ (jaya)—and the cultural mission it fulfills in the lives of those who hear it, read it, study it, and share it with others. (shrink)

A long-lived and lively tradition of materialist philosophers flourished in classical India and in classical Greece. Due to the condition of their texts, however, they do not often receive close study. This essay compares the views of the classical Indian materialists, the Cārvākas, and the classical Greek materialists, the Epicureans. The first section introduces their philosophies. The second outlines their doctrines of empiricism and materialism. The third and fourth turn to two comparative topics in Cārvāka and Epicurean ethics: their views (...) on eliminating irrational fears caused by superstition and their understanding of pleasure as the goal of human action and life. (shrink)

This article shows in detail that the widely held view according to which the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha has a hierarchical structure is mistaken. It further argues that at least some parts of the texts were independent essays before being incorporated into the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha.

Recently, there has been a burgeoning of interest in the relationship between Schopenhauer's philosophy and Indian thought.1 One major reason for this trend is the growing conviction among scholars that a careful understanding of Schopenhauer's complex—and evolving—engagement with Indian thought can help illuminate crucial aspects of Schopenhauer's own philosophy.2 The late nineteenth-century German scholars Paul Deussen and Max Hecker are widely acknowledged to be the pioneers in the field of Schopenhauer's relation to Indian thought. Deussen, thoroughly trained in both indology (...) and Western philosophy, was the first to bring Schopenhauer's philosophy into dialogue with Indian thought... (shrink)

This article elucidates and interpretively develops Raimon Panikkar's hermeneutics of intertraditional dialogue by way of setting it into sympathetic and critical dialogue with the predominantly intratraditional hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It argues that Panikkar's thought enables us not only to appreciate, but also to question the limits of the fundamental roles played by language and tradition in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Panikkar's own hermeneutical reflections arise directly out of intertraditional as well as interlinguistic experience; and they ultimately direct us toward the profoundest (...) dimension of dialogue, a dimension in which the words we share arise out of and gesture back into the depths of an originary silence. (shrink)

This chapter explores how perspectives on science drawn from Indian experiences can contribute to the interface between history and philosophy of science (HPS) and science education (SE). HPS is encoded in science texts in the various presuppositions that underlie both the content and the way the content is presented. Thus, a deeper engagement with contemporary work in HPS will be of great significance to science teaching. By drawing on the notion of multicultural origins of science as well as redefining the (...) nature of science debate by invoking the Indian engagement with science, this chapter aims to make both HPS and SE more sensitive to other cultural understandings of science and scientific method. The last two sections describe ways of drawing on the Indian philosophical traditions that could be relevant for contemporary debates, such as constructivism and teaching critical thinking, in science education. (shrink)

Ken Wilber insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. In this article, I examine Wilber's claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices leading to mystical experience. Drawing on the works of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass and on close readings of primary texts, this article argues that mystical paradigms of replicable (...) experience are not in fact the essentials of these traditions--neither for the majority of practitioners nor even for their revered teachers or masters. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this point for constructive integral work. (shrink)

This thesis is primarily an attempt at solving some issues in Schopenhauer’s theory of salvation. My aim is to provide ways in which Schopenhauer’s soteriology could work. It is a partially reconstructive project in that I will be bringing to the forefront some of Schopenhauer’s assertions at the expense of others. My aim is to show that we are able to provide a much more cohesive and satisfying reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophical project if we let go of some of the (...) more orthodox assumptions in the Schopenhauer scholarship – chief amoung these being that Schopenhauer is committed to the view that the will constitutes ultimate reality. While this reading is a departure from the vast majority of the traditional readings of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, I believe it has the twin advantages of both aligning Schopenhauer’s thought much closer with the eastern traditions he believes his work is in sympathy with, and ultimately, providing a new platform from which to assess the ‘traditional’ reading of Schopenhauer’s thought as ‘hopelessly pessimistic’. It is my contention that while it remains true that Schopenhauer is very much a pessimist about the world as manifested will, it is the perceived difficulties of his philosophy of salvation that have provided the most significant road block preventing critics from seeing that there are dimensions to Schopenhauer’s thought that cannot so easily be labelled as either pessimistic or optimistic. This thesis is an attempt to shed light on possible new readings of Schopenhauer’s project in light of attempts to resolve issues in his soteriology. I begin with the question – why do we need saving? I attempt to answer this through an analysis of the terms ‘will’, ‘will-to-life’ and ‘affirmation and negation of the will-to-life’. Next, I attempt to argue that the will should not be seen as ultimate reality in Schopenhauer’s system and that this is both closer to the account which Schopenhauer himself was inclining towards later in his writings as well asa necessary sacrifice in order to save Schopenhauer from more problematic inconsistencies. I next attempt to solve inconsistencies in Schopenhauer’s account of personal identity. I argue that there can only be a denial of the will-to-life if there is more to our identity than willing. I will also examine the possibility of a denial of the will-to-life at all. I will be engaging with recent scholarship from Christopher 3 Janaway on the possibility of negating the will-to-life and the implications of this for Schopenhauer’s account of willing. I will then attempt to resolve the on-going debate in the secondary literature concerning Schopenhauer’s ethical pronouncements and his theory of the negation of the will-to-life. I will argue, contrary to Sandra Shapshay and Tristan Ferrell, that it is possible to be one in whom the will has denied itself while remaining one who wills ethically and that this can be the case if we focus our attention on what Schopenhauer may truly mean by a compassionate will to help others. Next, I will be asking why exactly it is good to be one in whom the will has denied itselfand what this means for our understanding of value for the will-less subject. Finally, I will be focusing on Schopenhauer’s pessimism and how a new reading of Schopenhauer’s soteriology means that we can introduce new ways of assessing both the world as well as the place of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system within it. Ultimately, I will conclude that any interpretation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy presents the scholar with a choice and that we are subsequently only able to make new evaluative assessments on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as well push back against the charge that it is wholly pessimistic, if we choose to accept major revisions to his metaphysics of the will. However, because Schopenhauer himself seemed to be moving towards such revisions, we should not be afraid of doing so either. (shrink)

This paper provides one of the many ways of doing historiography, specifically concerning Indian philosophy. After making some general observations on the limitations of a historian and a historiographer in general—it would provide a brief analysis of the historiography of Indian philosophy by looking at the recent attempts at periodization. The development of 'Indian philosophy' as a label to a concept, issues concerning the use of darśana for its representation, and reeking it as a space of strange intellectual landscape by (...) contemporary scholars are discussed subsequently. While using historiography implicitly as a methodological tool, an attempt is made to probe into the contemporary conception of Indian philosophy. Though it doesn’t claim to provide any determinate conclusions regarding either periodization or conceptualization of Indian philosophy, the paper emphasizes the need to probe these concerns further and the need to use a historiographical approach to such a study. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to clarify Nāgārjuna’s use of the term pratijñā in verse 29 of the Vigrahavyāvartanī as situated in its contemporaneous thriving debate culture. In contrast to the standard formulation, which interprets the term pratijñā as a reference to the thesis of śūnyatā proffered by Nāgārjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, an examination of the debate culture in, and leading up to, second-century CE India shows that the term pratijñā refers to the first of five steps within the (...) Nyaya five-membered syllogism as it functions within a vitaṇḍā form of debate. Through an examination of the context in which this verse was written, the association made between Nāgārjuna’s use of pratijñā in the VV and śūnyatā within other texts becomes dislodged, thereby demonstrating the inadequacy of the standard formulation and the need for a revised understanding of the intent of the VV. (shrink)

We shall examine some conceptual tensions in Hick’s ‘pluralism’ in the light of S. Radhakrishnan’s reformulation of classical Advaita. Hick himself often quoted Radhakrishnan’s translations from the Hindu scriptures in support of his own claims about divine ineffability, transformative experience and religious pluralism. However, while Hick developed these themes partly through an adaptation of Kantian epistemology, Radhakrishnan derived them ultimately from Śaṁkara, and these two distinctive points of origin lead to somewhat different types of reconstruction of the diversity of world (...) religions. Our argument will highlight the point that Radhakrishnan is not a ‘pluralist’ in terms of Hick’s understanding of the Real. The Advaitin ultimate, while it too like Hick’s Real cannot be encapsulated by human categories, is, however, not strongly ineffable, because some substantive descriptions, according to the Advaitic tradition, are more accurate than others. Our comparative analysis will reveal that they differ because they are located in two somewhat divergent metaphysical schemes. In turn, we will be able to revisit, through this dialogue between Hick and Radhakrishnan, the intensely vexed question of whether Hick’s version of pluralism is in fact a form of covert exclusivism. (shrink)

In its classical formulation as found in Svātmārāma’s Haṭhapradīpikā, haṭhayoga is a Śaiva appropriation of an older extra-Vedic soteriological method. But this appropriation was not accompanied by an imposition of Śaiva philosophy. In general, the texts of haṭhayoga reveal, if not a disdain for, at least an insouciance towards metaphysics. Yoga is a soteriology that works regardless of the yogin’s philosophy. But the various texts that were used to compile the Haṭhapradīpikā (a table identifying these borrowings is given at the (...) end of the article) were not composed in metaphysical vacua. Analysis of their allusions to doctrine shows that the texts from which Svātmārāma borrowed most were products of a Vedantic milieu—bearing testament to Vedānta’s newfound interest in yoga as a complement to jñāna—but that many others were Śaiva non-dual works. Because of the lack of importance given to the niceties of philosophy in haṭhayogic works, these two non-dualities were able to combine happily and thus the Śaiva tenets incorporated within haṭhayoga survived the demise of Śaivism as part of what was to become in the medieval period the dominant soteriological method in scholarly religious discourse in India. (shrink)

From early on, comparative philosophy has had on offer a high variety of goals, approaches and methodologies. Such high variety is still today a trademark of the discipline, and it is not uncommon of representatives of one camp in comparative philosophy to think of those in other camps as not really being about ‘comparative philosophy’. Much of the disagreement arguably has to do with methodological problems related to the concept of comparison and with the widely prevailing but unwarranted assumption that (...) comparative philosophy should be about comparing ‘culturally different philosophies’. This paper seeks to problematize this assumption by clarifying conceptually the notions of ‘comparative philosophy’ and of ‘comparison’, by showing the prevalence of the assumption in recent second-order discussions of methodology in comparative philosophy and its restraining implications in a randomly selected contribution of ‘Chinese philosophy’. At the end, a rallying call for a (self-)critical comparative philosophy is issued. (shrink)

According to the orthodox account of meaning and translation in the literature, meaning is a property of expressions of a language, and translation is a matching of synonymous expressions across languages. This linguistic account of translation gives rise to well-known skeptical conclusions about translation, objectivity, meaning and truth, but it does not conform to our best translational practices. In contrast, I argue for a textual account of meaning based on the concept of a TEXT-TYPE that does conform to our best (...) translational practices. With their semantic function in view, text-types are Archimedean points for their respective disciplines. The text-type of philosophy is no exception. Culture-transcendent conceptual analysis can proceed on firm footing without having to deny the reality of radical cultural and linguistic difference by treating components of text-types as the concepts to be analyzed. Analyses of central philosophical concepts are provided as a means of adjudicating philosophical controversy. (shrink)

The technical term “ tarka ” in the Nyāya tradition is the object of the present investigation. Diverse texts including Buddhist ones exhibit a negative estimation of activities using tarka . In contrast, more often than not, later treatises dealing with logico-epistemic problems, especially certain Naiyāyika works, identify the methodological peculiarity of Nyāya with tarka . Such an ambivalent attitude toward tarka can be understood in a coherent way if the essential features of tarka that gave rise to it can (...) be grasped. Starting from the Nyāyasūtra 1.1.40 and the explanation given in the Nyāyabhāṣya on it, the present researcher sorted out three characteristic features of tarka in the early Nyāya tradition. These three features focus on the main feature of tarka : namely, reflective analysis without requiring further factual information on the object of investigation. Based on this, the present researcher critically reviewed what promoted an understanding of tarka as a reductio ad absurdum argument or an a priori reasoning. Furthermore, certain passages from the Nyāyamañjarī , Nyāyakalikā , and Tarkasaṅgraha were examined to demonstrate that the present researcher’s interpretative understanding of tarka was adequate for explaining the usage of this term in a broad sense, with positive connotations. (shrink)

We (relatively few) Western analytic philosophers who also work on classical Indian philosophy commonly encounter puzzlement or suspicion from our colleagues in Western philosophy because of our Indian interests. The ubiquity of these attitudes is itself revealing of Western conceptions of Indian philosophy, though their origins lie in cultural history often unknown to those who hold them. In the first part of this paper I relate a small but significant slice of that history before going on to distinguish and illustrate (...) three different Western conceptions of Indian philosophy associated with three different approaches to India: the magisterial, the exoticist and the curatorial. I argue that none of these three approaches gives us an adequate conception of Indian philosophy: the magisterial approach is overly dismissive, the exoticist approach misrepresents the analytical achievements of Indian philosophy, and the curatorial approach fails to take seriously Indian philosophy's concern with truth. I advocate instead a different Western approach to Indian philosophy, an approach suggested by the Indian philosophers' own discussions of the problem of truth. (shrink)

Studies of Indian philosophy have generally overemphasized the con-sistency of philosophical systems over time, and consequently slighted later works as derivative. This paper seeks to reassess the “system” as a basic category for analyzing Sanskrit philosophy, in particular by examining the changes that took place in hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it became commonplace for Mīmāṃsā authors to criticize long established Mīmāṃsā positions. At first this criticism is selective and largely directed at more recent authors, (...) but the margins of acceptable criticism are gradually broadened to the point when even the foundational works of the tradition are routinely attacked, and works are produced whose sole purpose appears to be to attack established Mīmāṃsā tenets, sometimes without even attempting to replace them with a more workable set of views. It becomes increasingly difficult to see what if anything one must believe to be considered a Mīmāṃsaka. (shrink)

This article examines the critique of philosophical Eurocentrism developed over the past two-and-a-half decades by Robert Bernasconi. The restriction of the moniker “philosophy” to the Western tradition, and the exclusion of non-Western traditions from the field, became the standard view only after the late eighteenth century. Bernasconi critically analyzes this restriction and exclusion and makes a compelling case for its philosophical illegitimacy. After showing how Bernasconi convincingly repudiates the identification of philosophy with Europe – asserted most explicitly by Continental philosophers (...) such as Hegel, Husserl, Levinas, and most recently Rodolphe Gasché – the present article critically reflects on both the significance and the limits of Bernasconi’s own predominantly “immanent critique” of philosophical Eurocentrism, and ends by calling on philosophers to engage more thoroughly in studies of and dialogues with non-Western traditions of philosophy. (shrink)

The seventeenth century author Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara wrote several works criticising the Vedāntic theology of the sixteenth century author, Appayya Dīkṣita. In one of these works, the Vedāntakataka, Nīlakaṇṭha picks out two doctrines for criticism: that the liberated soul becomes the Lord, and that souls thus liberated remain the Lord until all other souls are liberated. These doctrines appear both in Appayya’s Advaitin and in his Śivādvaitin writings. They appear to be ones to which Appayya was committed. They raise theological and (...) conceptual problems, however, both in themselves as doctrines, and as part of nondual Vedāntic teaching. A study of the Vedāntakataka reveals those features of Appayya’s Vedānta that Advaitins in Banaras in the century after his life considered to be anomalous, and illuminates aspects of the context in which his ideas developed and circulated. (shrink)

The study of philosophical terms and doctrines in the Mahābhārata touches not only on important aspects of the contents, composition and the historical contexts of the epic, but also on the historiography of Indian philosophy. General ideas about the textual history of the epic and the distinction between “didactic” and “narrative” parts have influenced the study of epic philosophy no less than academic discussions about what is philosophy in India and how it developed. This results in different evaluations of the (...) place of philosophical texts in the epic and their relationship to the history of Indian philosophy. While some scholars have suggested that there is a “philosophy of the epic” its composers wished to propagate, others have argued that “philosophy” is included in the epic either in a “proto” form or in a variety of doctrines they deemed relevant. The article discusses these views and some of the heuristic assumptions on which they are based. It proposes to widen the scope of analysis by paying more attention to the interplay of narrative and didactic passages, the various ways in which philosophy is presented in the epic, and its connection to a larger spectrum of the reception of philosophy in textual genres and by audiences outside the expert circles of the philosophical schools. (shrink)

In classical India, debates over rational theology naturally become the occasion for fundamental questions about the scope and power of inference itself. This is well evinced in the classical proofs for God by the Hindu Nyāya tradition and the opposing arguments of classical Buddhists and Mīmāsā philosophers. This paper calls attention to, and provides analysis of, a number of key nodes in these debates, particularly questions of inferential boundaries and whether inductive reasoning has the power to support inferences to wholly (...) unique entities (like God). (shrink)

This paper evaluates several recent efforts to interpret the work of Nāgārjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic. An attempt is made to uncover the premises that justify the use of symbolic logic for this purpose. This is accomplished through a discussion of (1) the historical origins of those premises in the Indian and Tibetan traditions, and (2) how such assumptions prejudice our understanding of Nāgā rjuna’s insistence that he has no “proposition” (pratijñā). Finally, the paper sets forth an (...) alternative interpretation that takes into account the literary dimensions of Nāgārjuna’s writing. (shrink)

. Avataric evolutionism is the idea that ancient Hindu myths of Vishnu's ten incarnations foreshadowed Darwinian evolution. In a previous essay I examined the late nineteenth‐century origins of the theory in the works of Keshub Chunder Sen and Madame Blavatsky. Here I consider two major figures in the history of avataric evolutionism in the early twentieth century, N. B. Pavgee, a Marathi Brahmin deeply involved in the question of Aryan origins, and Aurobindo Ghose, political activist turned mystic. Pavgee, unlike Keshub, (...) used avataric evolutionism in expounding his nationalistic goals for an independent India. His rationale was bolstered by the idea that India was the fountainhead of all science and civilization. Aurobindo saw in avataric evolutionism a possible key to understanding the involution and evolution of the supreme spirit in the realm of matter as taught in traditional Vedanta. This material‐spiritual evolution represented for Aurobindo the necessary knowledge for the true liberation of India, transcending purely political independence. Such knowledge he also saw as the means for the spiritual liberation of the whole of humankind. The processes of involution and evolution he claimed were not in conflict with modern science, and Western evolutionary thinking seems to have inspired many of his own evolutionary reflections, even though in the end he rejected the Darwinian transmutation of species. I conclude with an overview and assessment of recent, post‐colonial Hindu assimilations of avataric evolutionism. (shrink)

Christopher Framarin has spent many years analyzing the problem of niṣkama karma or desireless action in Indian philosophy as evidenced by his many papers on the topic. The results of these papers are gathered into his book, Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy, which presents a sustained defense of the doctrine from multiple perspectives. Its philosophical depth and sophisticated argument notwithstanding, Framarin's work is lucid, persuasive, and well-executed. Framarin sets up the basic problem in the introduction and then proceeds to (...) test various interpretive responses. As he develops the book, he shows why each of these responses fails before presenting his own solution. The inquiry into non-viable .. (shrink)

By drawing on the insights of a number of continental as well as Asian thinkers, this article reflects on the "significance" of comparative philosophy—both in the sense of discussing the "meaning" and in the sense of arguing for the "importance" of this endeavor. Encountering another culture allows one to deepen one's self-understanding by learning to "see oneself from the outside"; this deeper self-understanding in turn allows one to listen to what the other culture has to say. These two moments, or (...) movements, are interdependent and mutually supportive. Without the step back to self-understanding, we unknowingly reduce the other to the unrecognized categories of our own thinking; but without encountering another culture, our understanding of our own culture remains shallow. This article argues that an engagement with non-Western philosophy, particularly with a set of traditions as rich and radically different as those of Asian thought, can and should take place as a hermeneutic circling between self-understanding and openness to encounter: the dialogical step back and step forward are mutually supportive endeavors. For only by way of such dialogue do we attain the concrete freedom and possibility for transformation and change, that is, the ability to critically and creatively develop old customs or modes of thought and to critically and creatively adopt new ones. Moreover, only through such dialogue can we learn to not only let others be, but to share insights with them, and to build together a global community which neither reifies nor abolishes cultural differences. (shrink)

The notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which now seems to have become a fashionable cliché, should be discussed in the context of a broader set of questions: the problematic of intercivilizational encounters. This is an important but very underdeveloped part of the research programme now known as civilizational analysis. The article begins with a brief survey of the Indian experience. Indian history includes a long succession of intercivilizational encounters, both those initiated from the West (by Greeks, Muslims and Europeans) (...) and those that brought Indian influence to bear on other regions (as did the spread of Buddhism to East Asia and the ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia). These examples serve to sketch a phenomenology of encounters. For a more theoretical approach, the article turns to the work of Benjamin Nelson, who first introduced the concept of intercivilizational encounters. His analyses focus on the encounters that involve contacts or conflicts between the basic ‘structures of consciousness’ that define different civilizations. Such interactions can lead to fusion or to prolonged internal conflicts, but they may also be instructive because of the very absence of significant effects: in the latter case, fundamental blockages to intercivilizational borrowing or engagement are built into the structures of consciousness. For Nelson, the early modern encounter between China and the West was a prime example of that kind. The last part of the article takes the question beyond Nelson’s historical cases and relates it to the advanced phase of modernity, where the dominant type of encounters is three-cornered: it involves Western and non-Western civilizations as well as the new (modern) civilizational patterns adumbrated in the West but open to redefinitions in other contexts. (shrink)

The writing of literary histories of Tamil literature coincided with the practice of history itself as a discipline starting in the late nineteenth century. The historiographical practices conflated Tamil literary history, religious history, as well as notions of the Tamil nation, which led to such works becoming vitally important legitimising narratives that established the claim of self-defining groups within a new Tamil modernity. The absence of such a narrative also meant the erasure of a particular group, identifying itself as a (...) caste or religious unit, or both, from Tamil history. It is in the light of these cultural and political stakes that we must view the textual and hermeneutical strategies of an old, Tamil, religious group, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, to position themselves anew in the mid-twentieth century, in what they saw with anxiety as a Tamil, Ṡaiva Age. (shrink)

Through an examination of Bhāgavata Purāṇa X.43.17 and its interpretation by early commentators like Vopadeva, Hemādri, Śrīdhara, Sanātana, Rūpa, and Jīva, I argue that they created forms of hierarchical inclusivism by the application of rasa in the interpretation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. In doing so, I examine bhakti as a rasa, showing how rasa theory provided a vocabulary to include the characters of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and their diverse experiences of the God Kṛṣṇa within hierarchical systems of bhakti. By hierarchical (...) inclusivism, I mean a theory, e.g., in the case of rasa, “the superiority of passionate love over fear,” and that this theory provided criteria to order items, e.g., in the case of rasa again, “the character of the cowherd women is superior to the character of the king.” In this case, hierarchical inclusivism is a theory for organizing and evaluating the mystical and aesthetic experiences of the ten characters mentioned in Bhāgavata Purāṇa X.43.17. I look at how commentators also used rasa for the basis for doctrines about God’s being and nature. (shrink)

This essay considers the relationship between the Bhagavad Gita as a transnational text and its changing role in Indian political thought. Indian liberals used it to mark out the boundaries between the public sphere they desired and a reformed Hinduism. Indian intellectuals also used the image of Krishna to construct an all-wise founder figure for the new India. Meanwhile, in the transnational sphere of debate, the Gita came to represent India itself in the works of theosophists, spiritual relativists and a (...) variety of intellectual radicals, who approved of the text's ambivalent view of the relationship between political action and the World Spirit. After the First World War, Indian liberals, notably Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later India's second president, used Krishna's words to urge a new and humane international politics infused with the ideal of “detached action”. (shrink)

Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through (...) the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of post-colonial theory in the humanities and social sciences, why is it that the two main secular formations in the study of religion(s), as philosophy of religion and history of religions, continue to deploy very similar mechanisms that reconstitute past imperialisms such as the hegemony of theory as specifically Western and/or the division of labor between universal and particular knowledge formations? To answer this question this paper stages an oblique engagement between the seemingly divergent discourses: (i) philosophy (...) of religion, (ii) history of religion—more specifically the area specialism called South Asian religions, and (iii) post-colonial theory especially where these discourses intersect with the discipline of Indology and the representation of Indic phenomena. A different version of this engagement occurs in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR). A post-colonial reading of the LPR reveals closer and often unacknowledged connections between the birth of these two disciplines. More importantly the LPR anticipates the auto-immunizing mechanism that underpins the continued lack of engagement between the various disciplines of contemporary religions. Ironically, this mechanism, it will be argued, is located in the very heart of the comparative enterprise itself. (shrink)

The commentary engages Hegel’s anxieties as discussed in Robert Pippin’s lead paper on the question of Western ‘modernity’ in early 19th century: how did we get there, to the ‘dissatisfactions of European high culture’, after all the promises of the teleology of world-spirit (ecclesia spiritualis) and hermeneutik that Hegel mapped in the inexorable march of history. More importantly, we ask how does the rest of the world – the non-European, non-modern regions – fare or compare? Where do they belong in (...) the larger scheme of the world historical picture (Weltbild)? Hegel was not blinded by the lure of a modernising West that he had created; rather, he valued the contributions of other civilizations to the growth of the West. At least references to India, China, or Asia at large, from Herder onwards, did not escape him. But this part of the story is left out from modern accounts. While he suggested turning the gaze toward the East could be instructive for the triumphalism of the West, he was not sanguine about the prospect of the East ever catching up with the West; imperializing the aliens might work. But his anxiety about the incomplete determinate subjectivity of the modern West was not assuaged. That Hegel flirted with the Orient in moments of disappear tells us something about how he both drew West’s attention to the hidden philosophies of the East—especially to Indian dialectical logic—and paved the way for the ‘Europeanisation of the Earth’ (in Heidegger’s cautionary adage on Husserl’s dictum). (shrink)