Balagangadhara

1. Here is one way of looking at what stories are. They are symbols. What are they symbols of? Well, they could symbolize acts; they could also be symbolically interpreted as justifications of such acts. Under this construal, a story requires an interpretation: one has to interpret the story as a symbol of either an act or as its symbolic justification. (The same applies to looking at stories as …

A science of cultures is not Atmagyaana or Brahmagyaana. Let me also add that I find a quest for happiness a normal human striving. According to the Indian traditions, experience itself is a state of being: anubhava. In my story, so is happiness (or atmasaakshaatkaara). Need one be enlightened in order to speak about enlightenment? Should that be the case, one cannot strive for enlightenment at …

Why did Christianity become a ‘universal’ religion? How did Christians replace the ‘chosen’ people? What was the logic behind the transformation of the Jewish god into God of the humankind? In the literature on the subject that I have read, the first two questions get a historical (semi-psychological) answer. Traces of this answer can also be found between the lines in ‘The Heathen…’. There is a …

Let us begin with the idea that religion is some kind of a system (or structure or whatever you feel like using) that maintains itself. That is to say, it is able to reproduce itself, and sustain itself. I call this the ‘simple reproduction’ of religion. This dynamic enables not only the reproduction of the community of believers but also the experiential intelligibility that the Cosmos has for …

Assume that India (or any other society) does not have an ethics. What would happen? Surely, if ethics has something to do with coordinating human actions, we know of several ways to do the same without taking recourse to ethical thinking: laws, rules (like those in games), agreements, pacts, covenants, … are some of the candidates. Assume that India does not know of normative ethics. So, what is …

There are other normative statements besides ethical ones: even aesthetic statements are normative (when you judge something to be ugly or beautiful) or statements about the presence of other values (say, ’the meaning of life’ questions). I have never denied it. As you rightly point out, legal norms are normative but they are not co-extensive with the ethical ones. If there are standards to …

We need to tackle the following issues properly if we want to get a handle on normativity and its relation to a configuration of learning. 1.1. Normativity cannot be the product of ethical learning. If it were that, say, by being a biological inheritance, then normative thinking would be the form of all ethics and my claim is that it is not so. 1.2. Nevertheless, we need to explain the success of …

I still have some difficulty in figuring out the problem about normative ethics expressed on the Abhinavagupta forum. There is obviously something that bugs people, but I cannot make out what it is. First, about the counter evidence. If the Indian film censor board is a statutory body, then it derives its powers from the laws that have brought such an entity into being. Its tasks (viz. whether it …

X asks: I am unable to figure out what the special significance is of not having a ‘moral ought’ in the Indian traditions. If ‘should not’ and ‘must not’ have the same practical consequences as ‘ought not’, that is we are obligated to behave in a certain way, why does it make a difference how it is expressed in our language? Your question is probably the best way of showing the difficulty we have …

Whenever I discuss the absence of normative ethics in India, people, especially Indians, get agitated. They hear me say that India has no ethics. Consequently, they want to show that I could never be right in my claim. This has happened on the Abhinavagupta forum as well. Perhaps, I should say that the Indian understanding of ethics is different from the western understanding. While this might …

My proposal addresses itself to the following observation: the natural sciences, as we know them today, arise in the western culture. What ’natural sciences’ mean in the above statement is clarified by other sentences that say, for example, ’the rest of the world has accepted the western science and technology..’ or ‘we need to learn science and technology form the west..’ When we make these kinds …

Let us retain the translation of ‘Anu’ as ‘appropriate’ or ‘apt’. Let us emphasize the active dimension of the word ‘Bhava’ to translate it as ‘coming into existence’. (‘Existence’ and ‘being’ are also acceptable translations of the word ‘Bhava’.) Then ‘Anubhava’ would mean an apt way of coming-into-existence. The problem here is this: we can ask the question, coming into existence of what? Of …

The biggest issue is: what is experience? All the Indian traditions have been busy with answering this question. But both posing this question and answering it are themselves experiential, as far as the Indian traditions are concerned. For instance, according to the so-called Buddhist traditions, the structures-in-experience are not given in the experience itself: the impermanence and transience …

If we take our English language use as a reference point, it appears as though we can speak sensibly about experiencing our feelings (‘I experience sadness’), experiencing thoughts (‘I can even now experience my jumbled thoughts when …’), experiencing colour (‘I experience a redness’), experiencing actions (‘I still experience my shaking limbs when I…’) and so on. That is, we can experience the …

1.1. Let us begin with the word “Anubhava”, which we use to translate the English word “experience”. There are two sub-words here: Anu and Bhava. ‘Anu’ can be translated as ‘apt’, or ‘appropriate’, whereas ‘Bhava’ can be rendered as ’existence’ or ‘being’. (The word also has an active dimension of ‘becoming’ as one of its meanings.) So, ‘anubhava’ would mean having an appropriate existence or even …

According to your account, Vedanta claims that the world is an illusion and that only the Brahman is real. If the world is an illusion, Vedanta has to deny the reality of the world. To it, in the way you construe Vedanta, the world is the empty set. That is to say, all experiences are on par because they are all illusions. One cannot distinguish between experiences unless one introduces the notion …

(a) Which evidence (what kind of evidence) could prove the existence of Hinduism? (b) Idem. for the non-existence of Hinduism. I think these issues are far too important to allow for their dissipation as debating points. If we could arrive at something approximating a consensus, we will have made a substantial headway. At the least, we can critically read the material on Hinduism with our answers …

X says: Yoga practice of self attainment without the help of external deity worship so common in those days of Patanjali as today was restricted to very few as it required proper initiation from the guru and renunciation of normal humdrum lifestyle of a common man. I say man because fewer women go for that kind of ascetic lifestyle. What has self-attainment to do with worshipping the deity …

X says: “Wendy Doniger translates all the Sanskrit words into English and thereby ends up distorting their meaning. Dharma becomes religion, Varna becomes color, and apparently she ends up even translating the names of some tribes into English.” Assuming that this is the case (assumption is on my part because I have neither read her translation nor do I intend reading it), what is the problem? Out …

The issue is simply this: why use Indic categories to describe the world? What is interesting or important about this goal or venture? This, as I said, is the issue but we need to do some amount of thinking before we can identify the real question. That is so because there is a lot of deadwood floating around that makes navigation difficult. So, let me begin the process of clearing some of the …