About This Series: This three-part series is based on a talk given by Sri Chittaranjan Naik at a Round Table Conference on Hinduism held in Hyderabad in the year 2014, which was organised by Dr. Aravind Raoji and sponsored by Sri Hari Kiran Vadlamaniji. The PowerPoint presentation prepared for delivering that talk was shared with Dr. Pingali Gopal recently and he felt that the ideas and points presented therein were as much valid today as they were back then in 2014; and he suggested that they be put down in an article and published for the benefit of a larger audience. Dr. Pingali Gopal took up the task of transcribing these points into the form of an article. What follows is the result of that endeavour.
Introduction
Indian philosophy is equated with only Vedanta, and that is a two-edged sword. No doubt, it represents the pinnacle of understanding the world and reality around us. However, using the so-called “illusory world” ideas in the understanding of the actual world presented to the individual or in defining the duties of the individual or the community—the Dharma and the karma—is fallacious. Indian Darshanas developed its three-tiered understanding of the world depending on the categories of mind it was addressing.
It was the Nyaya and Vaisheshika philosophies that were center stage at the practical level of dealing with the world and community around an individual. As a science of reasoning, Nyaya was used to interpret even the Dharma Shastras and Mimamsa, including Uttara Mimamsa or Vedanta. Nyaya therefore has a very important role to play in Vedic society. As an aside, Indian Darshanas are strictly not the philosophies associated with the Western traditions. However, to avoid confusion, we call them philosophies.
Along with Nyaya and Vaisesika, we have Samkhya and Yoga, which are the disciplines of knowledge relating to the discrimination between truth and untruth (viveka) and the control and cessation of mental modifications (chitta-vrittis). At the highest level of understanding of man, nature, God, and the final Reality, there was the philosophy of the Vedanta. The last was for the highest seekers, and using that alone to assess what Indian civilization accomplished or did not achieve amounts to a partial and distorted understanding of our culture and civilization.
Nyaya is held to be the queen of the Darshanas because it is the science which lays down the method of logic and reasoning required for establishing the rational foundations of all the vidyas. It deals with all aspects of reasoning including various ways of debating, the syllogistic rules of inferential reasoning, and the epistemological method of obtaining correct knowledge about the world based on the pramanas. Even though Vedanta represents the pinnacle of all knowledge, it does not replace Nyaya at the level of worldly transactions (vyavahara).
As an analogy, quantum mechanics or string theory may provide the final explanation of the matter around us, but in the gross world, it is Newtonian classical physics that forms the backbone of most technology, including sending satellites to the moon. Einstein may have given better explanations, but it subsumes Newton without rejecting it. Vedanta may be the highest explanation, but it does not prevent Nyaya and Vaisheshika from taking centre stage in explaining the world around us and laying the foundations of a huge knowledge output. Nyaya and Tarka form the foundational basis in all fields of science, technology, medicine, arts, literature, and the Dharmasastras, guiding a human being towards liberation.
Unfortunately, the teaching of Nyaya is largely ignored, and most Indians come out of schools and colleges absolutely unaware of the richness of Indian philosophical systems. Even worse, some of them take a disdainful view of these systems. The pushing of Indian philosophies into the realm of “religion” and then removing it from secular studies was initiated in the German universities of the 19th century to ward off the challenges to Western philosophy. The study of India became the exclusive domain of Indology, which was a racist enterprise. These aspects have been thoroughly documented in the book The Nay Science by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee.
There is an urgent need to revive the system of Nyaya and Tarka to present an alternative view of the world around us. The ontology (explanation of reality) and epistemology (acquisition of knowledge) have a far surer method in Indian Darshanas than Western philosophies, which appear stuck in both areas at some level with little hope of easy resolution in the near future.
The Civilization Heritage of India
India and Greece were the only two countries that developed logical formalism in philosophy. In Greece, logical formalism began with Aristotle. However, in Greek philosophy, logic, however, has no sound base in linguistics or language philosophy. Even ethics and justice have no sound foundation. In contrast, the tradition of Tarka (philosophy and reasoning) in India predates Aristotle by many hundreds of years. Linguistics and language have been the bedrock of Indian philosophy even as ethics and justice are based on the archetypes of the universe (Vedic Word).
India and Israel are the two lands with very ancient religions. Judaism, based on the written letter, the secondary form of language, is, however, of recent origin (around 3000 BCE) and follows a monotonic or single path to God. In India, Sanathana Dharma is based on Sabda, the primary form of language. It is ancient, beginningless, and based on knowledge where faith is only a pedagogic device. Multiple paths to liberation exist based on the adhikara, or the competence of the individual.
In the spheres of the arts and aesthetics, there was no other civilisation that reached such heights of aesthetic efflorescence as India. The civilisation was not merely “otherworldly,” but it celebrated life in all its aspects; the sixty-four arts of the Gandharva Shastras stand as testimony to this. In no other civilisation were the arts and aesthetics based on the strong foundations of knowledge, i.e., a theory of aesthetics.
In the sciences and engineering too, it was the knowledge of India that was carried over to the rest of the world. There were great contributions in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, surgery, architecture, civil engineering, town planning, shipbuilding, and industrial technology. We had our own political principle too. Politics in Western civilisation was based on a notion of order with its focus on civic virtue and civic body. The Indian concept of politics was based on Rta, the natural ordering principle of the universe, with its focus on both (i) maintaining order and harmony in society and (ii) channelling the actions of the individual towards the highest human goal, i.e., liberation.
Indian polity was not lacking in the generation of wealth, too. The Indian civilisation was the wealthiest civilisation on earth. Until the 17th century, 25% to 30% of the entire world’s wealth was concentrated in India. Despite the high population, India maintained a fair level of per capita income.
The Indian civilisation was undoubtedly the greatest to have flourished in the world. It had prolific accomplishments in philosophy, linguistics, logic, religious goals, arts, poetry, aesthetics, sciences, engineering, state polity, and wealth generation. A massive body of literature amazingly survives intact across thousands of years. While other civilisations had one or two aspects that made a civilisation great, India excelled in every aspect of it. The Indian civilisation was without a parallel in which every aspect of life is based on knowledge, and the root of the civilisation is the Veda.
The Situation Today
The intellectual tradition of India has all but disappeared from the land. Even our own schools and universities do not teach our Vidyas, with the result that most people do not even know that we had a great intellectual tradition. We view our own culture and Dharma through Western ideas and notions, mocking our “superstitious past.” Our knowledge systems, our arts, and our culture are being sacked by the Western Academy, the Christian Missionaries, and the marketing cultures of the corporate world. Yet, we look up to the West to seek recognition for scholarship even in our own Vidyas. In terms of wealth and prosperity, poverty is widely prevalent.
How has this come about? From a historical perspective, the shift from the Old Order to the New Order occurred between 1600 and 1700 CE. This was when the Indian intellectual tradition lost its vigour and vibrancy. This was the time when the Great Indian Renaissance, which began in Nava Dwipa (Navya Nyaya reached its peak here), ended with the fall of the Vijayanagara Kingdom. This was also the same period when Western thought acquired a vigour with the advent of the European Renaissance, which brought with it new ideas in the fields of Western philosophy, Western science, and Western social theory. The declining vigour of the Indian intellectual tradition, combined with the resurgence of Western thought, resulted in our culture and Dharma being sacked by the West. This phenomenon continues today in the guise of Western academic scholarship and the upholding of Western ideals of humanism.
The Dominance of the West
Western scholarship has today acquired the status of Apta-Vakhya (the word of authority). We now live in a world that is shaped and defined by the West. This is mainly due to Western science and technology having brought tremendous material comforts to humankind. Powerful Western institutions cater to the welfare of human material comforts through the principles of humanism, human equality, and liberty. The West sees these phenomena as a continuation of its superior Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage. They have developed tremendous self-confidence, and the result is an enduring attitude of Western superiority.
The most dangerous outcome of Western scholarship’s dominance is that the stage of discourse on Hinduism has now shifted to the West. The debates on Hinduism are now taking place not on the soil of Bharata Varsha but in the academic halls of the West. Our own scholars seek to publish papers on Hinduism and get recognition for their work from Western academia, especially America.
For 300 years, the West has sacked our Dharma and culture. Today they stand poised to take control of the discourse on Hinduism. Meanwhile, our tradition remains cocooned within its own narrow circle, far removed from the needs of contemporary India. Our tradition is still engaged in clearing the doubts that people had in their minds hundreds of years ago instead of confronting and clearing the doubts that the modern world has put into their minds. If we fail to revive our intellectual tradition and challenge the West, we are solely responsible. We need to take control of the discourse on Hinduism.
The West’s Shield of Protection and Its Weapon of Destruction
Contemporary Western philosophy has all rejected any higher goals or a grand narrative for philosophy. For the West, the shield of protection has been the professionalisation of philosophy. The Academy recognises “philosophy” only when articulated or written by its professional philosophers and peer-reviewed by its own coterie. The Academy rejects any philosophical traditions other than its own, rejecting them as not constituting ‘philosophy.’
Psychoanalysis of the “other” is its destructive weapon. The rejection of the Grand Narrative has brought about a shift in focus from philosophy to the philosopher. Since the Grand Narrative is thought to be a delusion, the next step is to use psychoanalytical methods like deconstruction, Jungian, and Freudian techniques to look at the philosopher’s mental state and figure out what led him or her to believe in such a philosophy.
Scholars of Indology and Hinduism, like Wendy Doniger, wield the destructive weapon, crafted by the Western philosophy tradition, to wreak havoc in the soil of our culture and Dharma. But individuals are foot soldiers; the real enemy sits in the philosophy departments behind the shield of protection. In focusing our attention solely on fighting individuals, we are dissipating our energies in fighting decoys while the real enemy is left unhindered to shape the worldviews of the future detrimental to our Dharma. The real enemy, protected by the shield of professionalism, feels that Indian philosophy is dead and has been consigned to the departments of archaeology.
In this scenario, we have the ideal opportunity to revive the Indian Tarka tradition by challenging the fundamental underpinnings of the Western shield of protection, as well as the fundamental principles of what modern Western philosophy refers to as “the quintessential feature of modernity”—the rejection of the larger goals of philosophy. In attacking the real enemy and refuting the key principles that have gone into building the modern worldview, we will be reviving our tradition of Tarka as a living force in the world.
The Sack of Our Culture Without Debate
The sustained efforts of the Nyayayikas and Mimamsikas to engage the Bauddhas in rational debate led to the overthrow of Buddhism in India. The fate of Buddhism in India was finally sealed by the logical arguments of Kumarila Bhatta and Udayana. The West, on the other hand, has never tried to refute our siddhantas through even a semblance of rational debate; it has simply foisted and superimposed its own half-baked ideas on our philosophies through unfair means and methods. As a result, all our philosophies and vidyas have been presented to the world through the muddy and fractured lensof half-baked Western scholarship.
There has never been a clash between civilisations; the West has simply avoided it by adopting deceitful and backdoor methods to subvert our culture. It is time for a real clash between civilisations. We cannot undo the events of history. But we have the option to shape the future of our country. We need to scrutinise the ideas, philosophies, and sciences of the West through the indigenous, perhaps superior, platform of Pramaana Shastra.
We have to throw the challenge back to the West instead of passively accepting their ideas and ideals. No one has ever undertaken such an enterprise before. Reviving the Indian intellectual tradition as a living force will lay the seeds of a future renaissance in our country. Importantly, it will preserve the kernel and not merely the outer shell of our Dharma.
A Survey of Western Traditions: Loss of a Higher Purpose
From Descartes to the rise of Analytic and Continental philosophy, a 300-year arc of history destroyed the entire framework of Scholastic philosophy. Empiricism replaced the “categories” as the foundation of logic. The ontological status of the perceived world became, and continues to remain, a point of debate. The foundation of inductive reasoning suffered a setback. The absence of categories calls into question even the foundation of analytic truths.
Only truth preservation from the premises to the conclusion, not truth determination, became the scope of logic. Logic clearly distinguishes itself from epistemology. The latter has lost its ground and is trending towards fallibilism, the belief that no belief can be proven or justified with absolute certainty. A posteriori reasoning has replaced a priori reasoning in science, leading to the acceptance of bizarre theories as sublime truths. A priori knowledge is knowledge that comes from the power of reasoning based on self-evident truths; it usually describes lines of reasoning or arguments that proceed from the general to the particular, or from causes to effects. A posteriori means “from what is later.” It describes knowledge based solely on experience or personal observation.
Western civilisation has rejected the concept of any “grand truth,” and it wants to impose its loss of faith on other civilisations. Contemporary Western philosophy consists of two streams—the Analytic and the Continental—and both of them reject the higher goals of philosophy, though for different reasons. The French philosopher Lyotard succinctly captured this theme when he stated, “The end of the Grand-Narrative is the quintessential feature of modernity.”
The grand narrative has indeed become an anathema. Analytic philosophy rejects the pursuit of the higher goals of philosophy as a futile and irresponsible exercise because philosophers had not come to an agreement even after 2000 years of philosophy. Analytical philosophy defines itself as a style of philosophy characterised by precision and thoroughness about narrow topics, as well as resistance to imprecise and cavalier discussions of broad topics.Continental philosophy (now post-structuralism) rejects the higher goals of philosophy because it believes that reality is shaped by language and that language itself has no fixed centre; it is nothing more than a set of floating symbols determined by social and historical factors.
Post-structuralism promotes the idea of anti-essentialism which means that there are no intrinsic essential properties to objects or entities. Poststructuralism is characterised by the belief that there is no truth with a grand “T” and that anyone speaking of a higher truth needs therapy. Post-structuralism views itself as a therapeutic philosophy. So, modern Western philosophy has created and pushed a view of the world in which any philosophy that talks about a Grand Truth or a Grand Narrative (or Meta Narrative) is seen as trying to return to a totalitarian past or as part of a regime of dominance.This fundamentally clashes with the view of Indian philosophy, whose grand purpose is to liberate an individual from bondage to freedom and transform the state from ignorance to knowledge.
The Loss of the Ideal of Dharma
The misrepresentation of our Dharma happened because our society has lost sight of the Vedic Ideal. The idea of separating religion/Dharma from secular life is the root cause of the corruption of our cultural soil. This idea of secularism, or separating the sacred from the secular, is directly antagonistic to the Eternal Dharma (Sanathana Dharma) that Lord Krishna came to reiterate on earth. In our Dharma, there is no such thing as separation of religion from secular life. Dharma determines every human action and every aspect of human life. Dharma is the regulating principle that tempers all our actions and leads us towards the highest goal of human life.
It is the key factor that has prepared the soil for the missionaries to convert our people. Where did the concept of separating religion from secular life originate? It originated in the West, in an epoch of human history that began approximately 1700 years ago, known as the Ecumenical period. It was born out of the corruption of the Christian religion by the Christian Church itself. It is the false principle propagated by the Church that says that “grace supersedes law.” It created a vacuum in the Western world with respect to the regulatory principles governing human action.
This vacuum was filled up by the ideal of humanism fostered by the Western Renaissance and Western Enlightenment and by man-made laws based on the principles of human equality and liberty designed to serve the welfare of the body in complete disregard for the welfare of the soul. As a result, Religion/Dharma was completely cut off from Secular Life. This created a religion without any rules for how people should act, as well as a set of rules made by people to guide how people should act in secular life.
Proselytisation thrives when the ideal of Dharma is lost. Formerly, people in our country fell into Adharma not because they did not know Dharma, but because desire and temptation were too strong. Today, we have lost even the ideal of Dharma. Therefore, not only have we lost the restraint on the pull of desire and temptation, but we have also lost the normative principles that guide our actions. How can we stop the growth of Adharma when people are unaware of the distinction between righteous and wrongful action? How can we contain the missionaries’ work?
Knowing Dharma and Fighting Adharma
The fight has to be strong in the effort to restore Dharma. If our fight is only to prevent street-level conversions, what do we gain by it? When the very ideal of Dharma is lost, what is the use of ensuring that we have large ‘numbers’ wearing the label of ‘Hindus’? When we lose the inner core, what is the purpose of preserving its outer shell? We need the numbers, of course, because we live in a democracy and the numbers help to shape national policy, but the more important goal is to preserve the kernel of our Dharma as a living tradition rather than achieve victory in terms of mere numbers. Fighting Adharma is not an end in itself but is a part of the enterprise to restore Dharma.
Our primary focus has to be on restoring Dharma. The truth about what Dharma is and what Adharma is can be known only by knowing what Dharma is in the first place. Knowing what a lotus is the only way to know what it is not—a rose, cow, mountain, etc. But one cannot know the identity of a thing merely by knowing its difference from other things. Knowledge of difference from other things is rooted in knowledge of its identity. If one does not know what Dharma is, one cannot fight effectively against Adharma because one is then liable to mistake one for the other.
Our fight against Adharma, therefore, cannot be an independent project. Our endeavour to restore Dharma in our society must include this fight. Otherwise, the result will be the perpetuation of more confusion. This confusion is exemplified in many areas where even well-meaning scholars get involved, like (1) the efforts to date the Vedas, (2) the denial of Varnashrama Dharma in keeping with ideals of equality and liberty, (3) anti-essentialism, and (4) ethics based on the human being as tabula rasa at birth, denying the ideas of karma and rebirth. Our primary focus has to be on restoring Dharma. This naturally leads to the fight against Adharma.
…Continued in Part 2
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