The Indian Philosophy

Love of All Wisdom

Philosophy through multiple traditions.

This is a short note about ancient Indian philosophy for people who care more about the central questions of philosophy themselves — What exists? How should we live? How can we know? — than they do about the historical matter of ancient Indian thought. But current research in philosophy often refers to the ideas of ancient Indian philosophy, so it is worth knowing a bit about it.

Ancient India

           No ancient culture but Greece was more fertile in philosophy than India. While Parmenides, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were laying the foundations for Western philosophy in Greece, India’s geniuses produced treatises in linguistics, mathematics, logic, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine.

           Unfortunately, one cannot write a history of Indian philosophy the way one can write a history of Western philosophy. In Western philosophy, particular individuals are known to have advanced certain views, and the historian may arrange each philosopher chronologically and comment on how each thinker responded to their predecessors and how they influenced later philosophers. But ancient Indian philosophy is represented in a mass of texts for which the authors and dates of composition are mostly unknown.

           Chief among these texts are the Vedas, written from perhaps 1500-1000 B.C., the oldest religious texts in the world. They consist mainly of praise hymns to nature gods and instructions for ritual, and exemplify a primitive pre-theism. The latest works among the Vedas, the Upanishads, were written after 700 B.C. and are on occasion more philosophical. These Indian scriptures very loosely laid the foundation for most of India’s philosophical schools.

           So early Indian philosophy is much foggier to us than is early Western philosophy. What, then, shall be our strategy? We will examine each major school of ancient Indian philosophy, and we will not speculate much about who influenced whom or when certain developments occurred.

           Indians distinguish two classes of Indian philosophies: astika and nastika. The astika systems respect the Vedas to some degree. They are: Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Vaisheshika. The nastika systems reject Vedic thought. They are: Jainism, Buddhism, and Lokayata. Though forms of most of these schools still exist today, I will write of them in the past tense to refer to their ancient forms.

           In the West, philosophical schools tended to rise and fall, one after the other. But in India all these systems competed for adherents beside each other for centuries.

           Each system (or darshana, literally “view”) eventually developed sutras: aphoristic summaries of its positions, along with quick responses to common objections and brief attacks on the other systems. But the systems themselves predate their sutras, probably by many centuries.

Devotees worshipping at a stupa, the monument that symbolizes the Buddha's parinirvana, or final transcendence, detail of a Bharhut stupa railing, mid-2nd century BCE; in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.

Significance of Indian philosophies in the history of philosophy


In relation to Western philosophical thought, Indian philosophy offers both surprising points of affinity and illuminating differences. The differences highlight certain fundamentally new questions that the Indian philosophers asked. The similarities reveal that, even when philosophers in India and the West were grappling with the same problems and sometimes even suggesting similar theories, Indian thinkers were advancing novel formulations and argumentations. Problems that the Indian philosophers raised for consideration, but that their Western counterparts never did, include such matters as the origin (utpatti) and apprehension (jnapti) of truth (pramanya). Problems that the Indian philosophers for the most part ignored but that helped shape Western philosophy include the question of whether knowledge arises from experience or from reason and distinctions such as that between analytic and synthetic judgments or between contingent and necessary truths. Indian thought, therefore, provides the historian of Western philosophy with a point of view that may supplement that gained from Western thought. A study of Indian thought, then, reveals certain inadequacies of Western philosophical thought and makes clear that some concepts and distinctions may not be as inevitable as they may otherwise seem. In a similar manner, knowledge of Western thought gained by Indian philosophers has also been advantageous to them.

Vedic hymns, Hindu scriptures dating from the 2nd millennium BCE, are the oldest extant record from India of the process by which the human mind makes its gods and of the deep psychological processes of mythmaking leading to profound cosmological concepts. The Upanishads (speculative philosophical texts) contain one of the first conceptions of a universal, all-pervading, spiritual reality leading to a radical monism (absolute nondualism, or the essential unity of matter and spirit). The Upanishads also contain early speculations by Indian philosophers about nature, life, mind, and the human body, not to speak of ethics and social philosophy. The classical, or orthodox, systems (darshanas) debate, sometimes with penetrating insight and often with a degree of repetition that can become tiresome to some, such matters as the status of the finite individual; the distinction as well as the relation between the body, mind, and the self; the nature of knowledge and the types of valid knowledge; the nature and origin of truth; the types of entities that may be said to exist; the relation of realism to idealism; the problem of whether universals or relations are basic; and the very important problem of moksha, or liberation (literally “release”)—its nature and the paths leading up to it.

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!! Please check it out ! I will continue to do my blogging in cross-cultural philosophy here, but intend to cross-post any posts that are directly related to Indian thought.

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