INDIAN PHILOSOPHY - 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 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.

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 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 clear-cut separation of what is religious and what is philosophical, the Western philosophical tradition began in pre-Christian 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.

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.

After the Greeks, Western philosophy in the Christian era was for many centuries dominated by people who were also profoundly religious, and 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 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, 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 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 ṛṣis (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 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 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 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.

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 religio-philosophical 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 based on exegesis of texts called the Upaniṣads, 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 recorded in the early Upaniṣads. 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-Upaniṣadic 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 they engaged in argument and debate, and produced teachings and viewpoints that sometimes differed wildly, accepted Brahmanical authority and so remained within that fold.

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 map-referenced 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.

The six classical darśanas, each of which is discussed in this book, are called Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Yoga, Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta. Traditionally, the six are treated as three pairs, with each pair having compatible or similar key features: Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika share an ontology (see the box on page 16) supplied by the latter with which the method of the former is compatible; Yoga and Sāṃkhya to a large extent share an ontology, again with which the method of the former is compatible; and Mīmāṃsā 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.

By Sue Hamilton in "Indian Philosophy - A Very Short Introduction", Oxford University Press, UK, 2000, excerpts chapter I. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.