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 …
While reading Shabnum Tejani’s *Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (*2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform debate on secularism. This is a combination of the old claim that ‘secularism’ has acquired a different meaning in India and a general theoretical point: ‘secularism does not have any essence or universal meaning, …
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 …
Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which one can), these usages do not violate the primary distinction between a word from some natural language and its meaning.
Consider a classificatory scheme, say, cubes. Here, ‘cube’ is a word, it …
Let me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories.
Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’. All these sentences have the same meaning, namely that it is raining. Or it could also be said that they all express the same “proposition”. So, “meaning” and “proposition” are used as quasi-synonyms; and …
Many facts are interconnected within a culture. (The same applies to Nature too.) Some hypothesis or another notices some of these facts as facts, and it is able to provide an explanation (using the term ’explanation’ rather loosely) for them. This explanation helps us understand the phenomenon (means merely the appearance) in question because the theory or hypothesis under discussion is able to …
When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was, is and shall be. So, when I say that religion is such an entity, namely, it claims that it is the word of God and that it claims to be unconditionally true and that it is about the Cosmos, I am accepting the self description of religion. …
Are there accounts about the origin of religion? Yes, there are at least two kinds. One kind tries to localise the origin of religion in human beings and the other in God. 1.1. If religion is what it also says about itself, namely, it is the word of God, what are we trying to answer when we try to answer the issue of the origin of religion? Are we trying to give a scientific answer to the …
If we understand the word ’tradition’ to mean ‘a set of practices’, then the question is this: why continue a set of practices? When someone ‘justifies’ (I will soon explain why I use scare quotes for this) this by referring to the existence of a set of practices, what exactly is the person doing?
One way of looking at it is to say that the person ‘justifies’ his actions and understand …
Lets become clear about the nature of my claims about worldviews.
The word carries multiple meanings. It has partly to do with the multiple meanings of the component words: world’ and ‘view’. In daily language-use, ‘world’ is used to pick out (a) a spatial and temporal slice of the cosmos (b) and/or the entire Cosmos itself. The first, the slices, are many: from the ‘social world’ to the …
To begin with the question raised in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’: Do all cultures, peoples, and individuals need a world view to navigate themselves in the world? The answer is in the negative because religion is not a cultural universal and the only examples we have of world views are religions.
Are the atheists, free thinkers, and people ignorant of …
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 …
You do not want to call our natural sciences as ‘knowledge’. I do not even mind that. (For instance, you might want to define ‘knowledge’ as ’true and justified belief’. You might show me that our theories in natural sciences are only believed to be true and are not proved to be true. Therefore, you might want to say that our natural sciences are not ‘knowledge’ according to your definition. Fair …
Consider the following possibility: let us assume that in some of my writings, I reach the same conclusion as some or another ideologue from Hindutva. (Of course, neither Steve Farmer nor Michael Witzel shows that this is the case. But that is not the issue.) In other words, let us assume that, with respect to some or another issue, I arrive at the same conclusion as people from the Hinudtva …
You ask whether or not it was ‘factual’ that a ‘paraiah’ was not allowed on the same street as a Nair or a Brahmin. The evidence we have says that a Paraiah was not allowed to be on the same street as a Nair, but it is not clear whether it also applies to the presence of a Brahmin. First, here is some of the evidence. The Portuguese traveler Duarte Barbosa was among the first to talk about it in …
