Indian Philosophy

Indian philosophy is one of the oldest and longest-running traditions of systematic thought in the world. It grew out of the ritual hymns of the Vedas, composed in north-western India from around 1500 BCE, and took a decisively philosophical turn in the Upanishads and in the movements of wandering ascetics that produced the Buddha and Mahavira. Over the next two thousand years it developed into a family of rival schools, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, that argued with one another in Sanskrit about the self, the nature of reality, the sources of knowledge and the path to freedom from suffering. Its debates continued without a break into the modern period, when thinkers in British India reshaped them to address colonialism, caste and nationhood.

Two features set the tradition apart. Most of its schools saw philosophy as a means to liberation, called moksha by Hindus and nirvana by Buddhists, from the cycle of rebirth; and nearly all of them treated the question of how we know, through perception, inference or testimony, as the first question to settle. The result was a body of work on logic, language and mind as sophisticated as anything produced in ancient Greece or later in China, and largely independent of both.

The Vedas are four collections of hymns, chants and ritual formulas, the oldest being the Rigveda, composed orally by Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples in the Punjab between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE, centuries after the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation. Most of the hymns praise gods such as Indra and Agni, but a few already ask speculative questions. The Creation Hymn of the tenth book wonders what existed before being and non-being, and ends by suggesting that even the highest god may not know.

As Vedic culture spread east into the Ganges valley, priests composed prose commentaries, the Brahmanas, explaining the meaning of the sacrifices, and then, from around 700 BCE, the Upanishads. These are dialogues and teachings, often set at royal courts or forest retreats, in which sages and sometimes kings and women such as Gargi and Maitreyi discuss what lies behind the ritual. Their central claim is that the deepest self, atman, is identical with brahman, the single reality underlying the universe. Ignorance of this identity binds a person to samsara, the cycle of birth and death driven by karma, the consequences of action; knowledge of it brings release. The Chandogya Upanishad's teaching "that you are", given by a father to his son Shvetaketu, became the most quoted statement of the idea. The Upanishads are not a single system, and later schools read them in sharply different ways, but they set the agenda of Indian thought: the self, rebirth, karma and liberation.

In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE the eastern Ganges plain was changing fast. New cities and trade routes were growing, and kingdoms such as Magadha and Kosala were swallowing their neighbours. Alongside the Brahmin priests, a class of śramaṇas, wandering renouncers who rejected the authority of the Vedas and the sacrificial system, attracted followers with new answers to old questions. Buddhist texts describe a crowded marketplace of teachers.

The most successful was Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, whose dates are uncertain; many scholars now place his death around 400 BCE rather than the traditional 483. He taught that life as ordinarily lived is marked by dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness; that suffering arises from craving; that it can end; and that the way to end it is the Eightfold Path of ethical conduct, meditation and wisdom. Against the Upanishads he denied that there is any permanent self: a person is a changing stream of physical and mental events, and clinging to the idea of a fixed self is the root of suffering. His doctrine of dependent origination held that everything arises from causes and conditions and nothing exists independently. The movement he founded became Buddhism.

His older contemporary Vardhamana, called Mahavira, is regarded by Jains as the twenty-fourth and last tirthankara, or ford-maker, of the present age. Jainism teaches that every living being, down to plants and particles of earth, contains a soul, jiva, weighed down by karma imagined as a fine physical matter clinging to it. Liberation comes through strict non-violence, ahimsa, truthfulness and asceticism, which burn off the karmic matter. Jain philosophers later developed anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, holding that reality is complex and any statement about it is true only from a particular standpoint, a position they expressed in a sevenfold scheme of qualified assertions.

Two other movements survive only in their opponents' reports. The Ajivikas, led by Makkhali Gosala, a one-time companion of Mahavira, taught a strict fatalism: everything is fixed by niyati, destiny, and souls pass through a set number of lives before release, whatever they do. They enjoyed royal patronage under the Mauryas and lasted in southern India until perhaps the fourteenth century, but none of their texts survive. The Carvaka or Lokayata school was materialist. Its followers accepted only perception as a source of knowledge, dismissed inference about unseen things, denied rebirth and an afterlife, and regarded consciousness as a product of the body's elements, as intoxicating power arises from fermented grain. What is known of them comes almost entirely from refutations by other schools, which may distort them.

Magadha became the core of the Maurya Empire, founded around 321 BCE by Chandragupta Maurya, shortly after Alexander the Great had reached the Indus. Tradition credits his chief minister, Chanakya, also called Kautilya, with the Arthashastra, a vast treatise on artha, material prosperity and power. It covers taxation, law, espionage, war and diplomacy in cool, practical terms. Its theory of the mandala, a ring of states in which a neighbour is a natural enemy and a neighbour's neighbour a natural friend, has led modern readers to compare it with Machiavelli. Most scholars now think the text was compiled from older material between about the second century BCE and the third century CE, so its link to Chanakya is uncertain. Indian political thought also includes the dharmashastras, such as the Laws of Manu, which set out the duties of each social class and stage of life, and the Mahabharata, whose debates on just rule and just war fill whole books.

Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka took a different path. After his conquest of Kalinga around 260 BCE, he declared remorse in rock edicts carved across the subcontinent and promoted dhamma, an ethic of non-violence, tolerance and care for subjects, while sending Buddhist missions as far as Sri Lanka and the Hellenistic kingdoms of the west.

In the centuries after the Buddha, monks systematised his teaching in the Abhidharma, an analysis of experience into dharmas, the momentary, irreducible events of matter and mind out of which persons and objects are constructed. Different schools, such as the Sarvastivada in Kashmir and Gandhara under the Kushan Empire, argued over whether past and future dharmas exist. At the same time a new movement, the Mahayana or Great Vehicle, emerged with scriptures on the perfection of wisdom and an ideal of the bodhisattva, who seeks enlightenment for the sake of all beings.

Nagarjuna, who probably lived in the second or third century CE in southern India, possibly connected with the Satavahana court, gave the Mahayana its sharpest philosophy. In the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way he argued that the Abhidharma's dharmas were themselves empty, sunya, of svabhava, intrinsic nature or independent existence. If things arise in dependence on causes, he reasoned, they cannot have a fixed essence of their own; and anything with such an essence could never change or come into being. Using a relentless method of reduction to absurdity, he took apart theories of causation, motion, time and the self. Emptiness was not a hidden absolute but the absence of essence, and even emptiness was empty. He distinguished conventional truth, the world as it works in everyday life, from ultimate truth, and famously claimed that samsara and nirvana are not different. His school became Madhyamaka, the Middle Way.

In the fourth or fifth century the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, from Gandhara, founded Yogacara, the practice of yoga school, sometimes called Vijnanavada, the doctrine of consciousness. Drawing on meditative experience, Yogacara held that what we take to be an external world is the product of consciousness. Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses argued that dreams show how experiences of apparently solid objects can arise without objects, and Yogacara posited a storehouse consciousness carrying the seeds of past karma. Whether this amounts to idealism in the western sense is still debated. The logicians Dignaga, in the fifth or sixth century, and Dharmakirti, in the seventh, built a Buddhist theory of knowledge on this basis, accepting only perception and inference as valid sources and analysing language as a system of exclusions.

These ideas were taught at monastic universities such as Nalanda in Bihar, which flourished under the Gupta Empire and the Pala Empire and drew scholars from across Asia. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied Yogacara there in the 630s before carrying texts home to the Tang dynasty. Indian Buddhist philosophy passed along the Silk Road to China and East Asia and, from the eighth century, to Tibet, where Madhyamaka became the dominant school. In India itself Buddhism declined from the seventh century and almost vanished after Turkic raids destroyed the great monasteries around 1200.

Hindu tradition later grouped the schools that accepted the authority of the Vedas into six darśanas, or viewpoints, usually paired. Each had a founding text of short aphorisms, sutras, compiled in roughly the last centuries BCE and first centuries CE, and a long chain of commentaries. The grouping is a later classification; in practice the schools borrowed from and fought with one another and with Buddhists and Jains.

Nyaya, the school of reasoning, attributed to Gautama Akshapada, was above all a theory of knowledge and debate. It recognised four pramanas, or valid means of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison and reliable testimony. Its standard inference had five steps: the hill has fire; because it has smoke; wherever there is smoke there is fire, as in a kitchen; the hill has smoke; so the hill has fire. Nyaya defended the existence of a lasting self and of God as the maker of the world against Buddhist critics. Its partner, Vaisheshika, founded by Kanada, was a metaphysics. It sorted everything that exists into categories such as substance, quality, action, universal and inherence, and held that material things are composed of eternal, indivisible atoms of earth, water, fire and air. Over time the two schools merged.

Samkhya, perhaps the oldest of the six, is known mainly from Ishvarakrishna's Samkhyakarika of around the fourth or fifth century CE. It is a dualism of two eternal principles: purusha, pure consciousness, of which there are many, and prakriti, primal matter, made of three strands of goodness, passion and inertia. The world, including mind and ego, evolves from prakriti; suffering arises because consciousness mistakes itself for these products. Liberation is the realisation that purusha is a detached witness. Yoga, systematised in the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali, shares Samkhya's metaphysics but adds a God and, above all, a practical method: eight limbs of ethical restraint, posture, breath control and meditation designed to still the fluctuations of the mind.

Mimamsa, meaning inquiry, defended the Vedic ritual. Its founding text, Jaimini's sutras, and its great commentators Kumarila and Prabhakara, in the seventh century, held that the Vedas are eternal and authorless, so free of human error, and that dharma, duty, can be known only from their injunctions. To defend this, Mimamsa thinkers developed detailed theories of language, meaning and the interpretation of sentences that later influenced Indian law. Vedanta, the end of the Veda, took the Upanishads as its centre, reading them through Badarayana's Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue in the Mahabharata in which the god Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna to act without attachment to results.

Vedanta became the most influential of the six, and it divided over the relation between the self, the world and brahman. Adi Shankara, traditionally born in Kerala and probably active in the early eighth century, though some place him later, gave the classic statement of Advaita, or non-dualism. For Shankara, brahman alone is real: pure, undivided consciousness. The individual self is not a part of brahman but identical with it. The world of many separate things is maya, an appearance produced by ignorance, like a rope mistaken in the dusk for a snake. It is not simply nothing, since it works in ordinary life, but it is not ultimately real either. Liberation comes from knowledge, gained by study of the Upanishads under a teacher, reflection and contemplation, rather than from ritual or devotion. Hagiographies credit Shankara with founding monasteries in the four corners of India, and Advaita absorbed and answered many Buddhist arguments, which may have helped it displace Buddhism among intellectuals.

Ramanuja, a Tamil Brahmin traditionally dated 1017 to 1137, taught at Srirangam in the south under the Chola dynasty. He rejected Shankara's view that the world is illusory and that a personal God is a lower truth. His Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, held that brahman is the personal God Vishnu, and that souls and matter are real but form his body, depending on him as a body depends on its soul. Liberation comes through bhakti, loving devotion, and the grace of God, and the liberated soul remains distinct, enjoying God's presence. Ramanuja gave philosophical form to the devotional movement of the Tamil poet-saints.

Madhva, from the region of Udupi in Karnataka, active in the thirteenth century, went further and taught Dvaita, dualism. God, souls and matter are eternally distinct, and he listed five fundamental differences: between God and souls, God and matter, soul and soul, soul and matter, and one piece of matter and another. Souls depend wholly on God, but are never identical with him. Unusually for Indian thought, Madhva held that some souls are destined never to be liberated. The arguments between these three schools, and smaller ones such as that of Nimbarka and Vallabha, continued for centuries and still shape Hindu theology.

From around 1300 the old Nyaya school was transformed in Mithila, in northern Bihar. Gangesha's Tattvacintamani, the Jewel of Reflection on Reality, reorganised the theory of knowledge around precise definitions and created a technical language for describing relations, absences and the conditions under which an inference is valid. This new logic, Navya-Nyaya, has been compared with modern formal logic in its precision, though it works through a regimented Sanskrit rather than symbols. In the sixteenth century Raghunatha Shiromani made Navadvipa in Bengal its centre, and its vocabulary was adopted by grammarians, legal theorists and even Vedantins. Sanskrit philosophy remained productive into the eighteenth century under rulers of the Vijayanagara Empire and the Mughal Empire, where it met Persian and Arabic learning. The emperor Akbar sponsored debates between Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars, and his great-grandson Dara Shikoh translated the Upanishads into Persian, a version that reached Europe and, in Latin, inspired Arthur Schopenhauer. The mystical thought of Sufism and of devotional poets such as Kabir and Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, crossed the boundaries between religions.

Under British rule, Indian thinkers confronted western science, Christian missionaries and colonial claims that India was backward. In Kolkata, Ram Mohan Roy, who died in 1833, founded the Brahmo Samaj to promote a reformed, monotheistic Hinduism based on the Upanishads and to campaign against practices such as widow burning. Swami Vivekananda, a disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna, presented Advaita Vedanta as a universal religion at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and argued that spiritual realisation should go together with social service. His version of Vedanta, and of yoga, shaped how the west saw Indian thought for a century.

Sri Aurobindo, educated at Cambridge and once a revolutionary nationalist, withdrew to Pondicherry in 1910 and developed an evolutionary philosophy in which consciousness, having descended into matter, ascends through life and mind towards a supramental level. Rabindranath Tagore, poet and Nobel laureate, wrote on the unity of humanity and criticised aggressive nationalism. Mahatma Gandhi drew on the Bhagavad Gita, Jain ahimsa, the Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin to develop satyagraha, truth-force, a method of non-violent resistance first tried in South Africa and then used against British rule. In Hind Swaraj he argued that true self-rule meant freedom from the industrial civilisation the British had brought, not simply replacing British rulers with Indian ones. His ideas later influenced Martin Luther King Jr.

B. R. Ambedkar, born into an untouchable caste in 1891 and educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, became Gandhi's most powerful critic. He argued that caste was rooted in Hindu scriptures and could not be reformed from within, and in Annihilation of Caste called for its abolition. As chief architect of the constitution of independent India, adopted in 1950 after the Partition of India, he wrote guarantees of equality and a ban on untouchability into law. In 1956, weeks before his death, he converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers, reinterpreting the Buddha's teaching as a social philosophy of liberty, equality and fraternity. His successors among Dalit thinkers, and Jawaharlal Nehru's secular modernism, remain at the centre of Indian political debate.

In the twentieth century academic philosophers such as K. C. Bhattacharya, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who became India's president, and later Bimal Krishna Matilal and J. N. Mohanty brought the classical schools into conversation with Kant, phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Indian philosophy today is studied worldwide, and its Buddhist and Nyaya theories of mind and knowledge are increasingly read alongside western work on the same problems.

Indian philosophy did not end or give way to a successor era; it was continuous from the Upanishads to the present, and its terms, karma, dharma, yoga and nirvana, have entered languages across the world. Its Buddhist branch became the foundation of Chinese and East Asian philosophy as much as of Indian thought, and its contact with the Greek world, through Alexander's campaigns and the Indo-Greek kingdoms, and with the Islamic world, through scholars such as al-Biruni, made it one of the threads connecting the philosophies of Eurasia.