Indian Philosophy Book

The Multifarious Inbred Monster

Sankara's Advaita Vedanta 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 Vedantin practitioner Vivekananda at the World Council of Religions in Chicago in 1893 as 'Hinduism', and subsequently established in various centres, such as 'Ramakrishna 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.

This VSI gives a glimpse at the multifarious monster that Indian Philosophy really is. However, in the interest of making it comprehensible is such a short space, it tries to put an organic structure on indian philosophic 'growth' ' it focuses on the most accessible aspects of the Indian tradition to extrapolate for consideration in the context of Western thought, debating its structure, relative methodological merits and inter-linkages in the process. It emphasizes the 'context' of each school so as to demonstrate the factors that led to its 'branching out'. It also uses loaded terms from the western tradition such as 'idealism' and 'transcendental logic' to make the general thrust of the various schools intellectually available to the western reader.

As is often the complaint: In order to be taken seriously on the international stage of modern Western philosophy, Indian Philosophy has had to compete only on those terms that are of interest to modern Western philosophers. And, there has also been a tendency to separate philosophy in the sense of rational argument from any context that incorporated more religious issues.

Similarly, works on Indian philosophy adopts a western view on compartmentalization and wants to look at it as 'philosophy' ' something alien to these schools, since all (well, most) of them would not have made a distinction of religion vs philosophy. It was not a case that Indian philosophy was more 'mystical'; in fact, indian religious thought was more practical and incorporated the full range of speculations, not allowing theology to move away from philosophy. Whether that was a good thing is, of course, open to debate.

This VSI would not have been able to do an 'introduction' in 35,000 words without adopting the format and approach it eventually did. And as long as the reader is made aware that the whole book is an illusion of coherence, then it is fine by me. This is hinted at, but should have been made much clearer:

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.

All this is very fine and makes for interesting reading ' but the thing is that indian philosophy does not always follow the outgrowth-model that is used to introduce the students of western histories of philosophy, it is more often ingrowths that guide its paths.

The philosophic traditions were quite often self-contained and hermetically sealed from one another, and hence grew almost independent of each other (not all, and not always… this is a gross simplification ' a conceit by this reviewer, if you will). So minor differences are enhanced in this process just as small populations of the Galapagos finches develop such distinct beaks by inbreeding and mutual separation.

So to look at 'Indian Philosophy' as an organic whole and impose a structure of 'growth' and interrelation to the different schools is a retrospective western conceit ' useful only for comprehending/seeing the whole picture, but at the cost of reducing the individual philosophies to non-entities, losing their real identity as rich self-contained traditions (inside each of these schools the dominant ideas that give it its identity might have wrestled with contending views before one triumphed temporarily ' so to present another view as another 'school' makes no real sense when both schools are fighting the same battles...)

Such an introductory work which focuses on the distinct process of evolution available for study among the Indian traditions is what I would be really excited about. Such a work could go beyond presentation of ideas and attempt a glimpse at how they evolved in a medium that is not too distinct from the hyper-connected world of today (with collective enterprises taking precedence over individual investigations) where ideas bounce off each other, inbreed and mutate at the speed of thought, not waiting with patient discipline for neat out-branchings from previous ideas in any logical order. It is all a-tangle, and it is a lot of fun.