Indian Traditions

If we want to grasp the nature of the discussions in the Indian traditions, there is much we need to do beforehand: (a) identify the entity they were talking about; (b) identify the specific questions they were answering; (c) identify the generic questions that defined both the outlines of the acceptable answers and the formulation of the specific questions; etc. (The ‘cetera’ indicates that I do …

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 few points about ‘self’ and about what I have said and have not. Comment: “Say, Mr. X made 1 run, 2 runs, 3, 4, n, and a total of 50 runs. Now to say “I made 50 runs” is to assume that, Mr. X who made 1 run, 2 run, etc. is linked to each other, and this organism , in this sense, has a unity. This unity is what Balu calls rubbish”. First, I do not call this ‘unity’ rubbish. Second, this is a …

Is bhakti what the bhaktas do, or are people bhaktas because they ‘follow’ (bad choice of words, but there is no other way to put it) the ‘bhakti marga’, or is bhakti neither of the two? I mean: is the bhakta moved because, for example, the child who stole the butter happens to be the Kannan, or because the child, who also happens to be the Lord, stole the butter? If it is the first, it is …

The first thing is that my book is about the western culture and a specific religion, which brought the former forth. It is only indirectly about India because I interrogate the way India was looked at by the western culture. I proffer some hypotheses about India there by consciously remaining within the western framework. You are right in saying that I deny that ‘religions’ called ‘Hinduism’, …

(1) What is called ‘mysticism’ in the western culture is not the same kind of experience that the different Indian traditions talk about. (2) I do think, as a corollary, that to describe the Indian ’enlightenment’ (let me use this word temporarily, the scare quotes indicate my reservations) as ‘mysticism’ is not to understand either. (3) There are different levels in and different ways to achieve …

While reading this contribution and all the others ([1] , [3] ) I hope to write, we need to keep the context in mind. The context is this: many intellectuals, both in India and among the NRIs elsewhere, appear bent on transforming our multiple traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. The problem does not lie in the transformation of variety and diversity into a unity. Rather, it lies …

The problem about translating ‘sruti’ is not as easy as it has been made out to be. Is it possible to translate it as ‘revelation’ or even as ‘divine revelation’? Because it has so far been translated in this manner, we can only conclude that it is indeed possible to do so. Next issue: how accurate is this translation? The answer to this question depends upon what ‘revelation’ or ‘divine …

What Aristotle is doing in my piece on the Indian traditions? He is doing many things actually. His presence is a continuation of my argument that the Antiquity (Greeks and the Romans) is not the cradle of western culture and civilization. Aristotelian ‘Eudemonia’ is my way of explaining his thought to the western public, which thinks that it understands Aristotle. There is a greater similarity …

Here is what I say in my article on ‘how to speak for the Indian traditions’: “Our middle-aged man is, thus, raising the question of Aristotle.“I have pursued many things in life. I have acquired wealth and status, and aimed with varying degrees of success to become powerful and famous. I have been successful in some of my endeavors, while failing in yet others. I thought these things would make …

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 …

The absence of supernatural entities in the Indian traditions may seem counterintuitive to many. We can let someone else do the talking for us, namely Dale B. Martin in his interesting book Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians (Harvard University Press, 2004): “One of the basic arguments of this book is that, contrary to many modern assumptions, the category of “the …

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 …

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 …

Is enlightenment learnable? (In a less loaded formulation: Can all people be happy?) My answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. Before we go further, we need to be clear what exactly this sentence says: enlightenment is not, say, the result of some genes (that explains why we get molars and not tusks, for instance), nor is it a law of nature (that explains why, say, water boils when heated and does not …

When we speak about ignorance, we can do so in two ways. One is by talking about ‘how the world is’; the other is by talking about ‘how we think the world is’. Even though we could use both ways to characterize ‘ignorance’, they are not coextensive (or synonyms) because (a) they are about different things – in the first case it is about the world; in the second case it is about what we take to …

Experiences are structured differently in different cultures. We believe that it is possible to give a true description of this difference, at some level or the other, asa difference regarding the experience of time itself. Consider the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. One of the central notions in these traditions is that of temporality. That is, they believe that all events, …

Consider the everyday phenomenon of sunrise and sunset. We see the movement of the sun on the horizon and, for a very long period of time, people thought that they observed this because that is the way the reality is: the sun moves around the earth. With Galileo Galilei, two things happened. (a) He argued that the earth moves round the sun. (b) On the basis of this theory, he claimed that we are …