Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in India

Philosophy in India

Indian thinkers named their work by its schools, doctrines and treatises: tantra, a school; mata, a view; vāda, a doctrine; siddhānta, an established tenet; śāstra, an authoritative treatise. Śaṅkara writes of vedāntavāda, the Vedānta doctrine, sāṃkhyatantra, the Sāṃkhya school, and sugatasamaya, the Buddha’s teaching. The Nyāyasūtra defines the established tenet and sorts it: there are tenets “of all the schools … not opposed by any school”, and tenets “peculiar to some school”, “accepted by similar schools but rejected by opposite schools” (1.1.28–29, tr. Vidyabhusana).

Several root texts open on the desire to know, jijñāsā. The Mīmāṃsāsūtra begins “athāto dharmajijñāsā”, “then therefore the enquiry into duty”, and the Brahmasūtra “athāto brahmajijñāsā”, “then therefore the enquiry into Brahman” (tr. Thibaut; jijñāsā is literally “the desire to know”). Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra counts investigation (ānvīkṣikī) among the sciences (vidyā) and calls it “a source of light for all sciences” (pradīpaḥ sarvavidyānām, 1.2.12, tr. Halbfass).

An inquiry is begun for a purpose. The Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti opens his Nyāyabindu: “All successful human action is preceded by right knowledge. Therefore this (knowledge will be here) investigated” (tr. Stcherbatsky). His commentator Dharmottara adds that no reasonable man would “undertake an enquiry about the teeth of the crow, because this would serve no purpose”. For most schools the highest purpose is liberation; the materialists, as their opponents report them, denied liberation.

The work was done in layers. A root text (sūtra), often terse, drew a commentary (bhāṣya), the commentary drew subcommentaries, and independent treatises answered all of them, over centuries. A school set out its own teaching as the answer (uttarapakṣa) to the views of its rivals (pūrvapakṣa). The Naiyāyika Jayanta, in the ninth century, says he cannot “expound new ideas or doctrines of his own”, and asks to be judged on “the variety and novelty of his manner of presentation” (as quoted by Halbfass). By the seventeenth century, scholars in several fields were calling themselves or their opponents navya, “new”.

The schools were also sorted. Pāṇini’s grammar forms āstika and nāstika for a person whose opinion is “there is” or “there is not”, and its commentary, the Kāśikā, says of what: “the other world”. For Manu the nāstika is one who, “relying on the Institutes of dialectics”, is “a scorner of the Veda” (2.11, tr. Bühler). The Jaina Haribhadra, in the eighth century, counts the Buddhists and Jainas among the āstika doctrines and only the materialists as nāstika. The later Vedāntic surveys sort three schools that accept the Veda against three that do not, and the familiar list of six, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, has become standard only in the last few centuries.

English quoted without a named translator is rendered from the original.

The lines

The Upaniṣads — the higher and the lower knowledge, the Self that “overcomes grief”, the seeker who approaches a teacher.
The Buddhists — the questions the Buddha left undeclared, the poisoned arrow, Nāgārjuna’s relinquishing of views, Dharmakīrti on right knowledge.
The Jainas — right view, knowledge and conduct as the path, the standpoints (naya), Haribhadra’s survey of the schools.
Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika — investigation by the means of knowing, release through true knowledge, the forms of debate, and the new logic of Gaṅgeśa.
The investigative science — Kauṭilya’s ānvīkṣikī: Sāṃkhya’s inquiry into the end of pain, Yoga, and the materialists, who allowed perception alone and no end beyond this life.
Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta — the inquiry into dharma and the inquiry into Brahman, Śaṅkara on their different fruit, reasoning in the service of scripture, Mādhava’s ascent through the schools.
Modern India — the answers to Europe from around 1800: darśana taken for “philosophy”, Rammohun Roy and Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan’s “essentially spiritual” and Matilal’s corrective, K. C. Bhattacharyya’s “Svaraj in Ideas”, Daya Krishna’s dialogue between pandits and philosophers.