Thirty-Five Oriental Philosophers

Diané Collinson, Dr Robert Wilkinson, Robert Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415025966
• eBook ISBN: 9781134973590
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

These are questions to which oriental thinkers have given a wide range of philosophical answers that are intellectually and imaginatively stimulating.

Thirty-Five Oriental Philosophers is a succinctly informative introduction to the thought of thirty-five important figures in the Chinese, Indian, Arab, Japanese and Tibetan philosophical traditions. Thinkers covered include founders such as Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha and Muhammed, as well as influential modern figures such as Gandhi, Mao Tse-Tung, Suzuki and Nishida.

The book is divided into sections, in which an introduction to the tradition it covers precedes the essays on its individual philosophers. Notes, further reading lists, and cross-references provide the student with a clear route to further study. There is a glossary of key terms at the end of the book.

INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTION

The tradition of recorded philosophical thought of the Indian sub-continent is as ancient, rich and subtle as any in the world. With roots in the insights of rishis, or seers, in the second millennium BCE, the tradition has developed continuously since that time, diversifying into the many schools of Hindu thought, together with Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. All the great philosophical questions are investigated by the thinkers in this tradition: in all the branches of philosophy, the great options have been explored with rigour and thoroughness, and this central philosophical business goes on to this day.

The first evidence of philosophical thought occurs in the great collections of hymns we know as the Vedas.¹ As Radhakrishnan puts it, in the Rig Veda one finds generally ‘the earliest phase of religious consciousness where we have not so much the commandments of priests as the outpourings of poetic minds who were struck by the immensity of the universe and the inexhaustible mystery of life’.² Most of the hymns are addressed to individual deities, but there are places in which a polytheistic account of reality is found wanting, and there is an intuition that there must be a single first principle behind all phenomena. Thus, in the important ‘Creation Hymn’ (S: Nasadiya) it is stated that ‘The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe’.³ Before the gods and this universe:

There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one [S: tad ekam] breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond.⁴

Prior to the universe there was tad ekam, something self-sufficient, to which no distinctions apply.

Hints such as these are taken up and developed philosophically in the Upanisads, constituting collectively one of the world’s greatest and most seminal philosophical works.⁵ The thought of the Upanisads stands to Indian thought as does that of Plato and Aristotle to the West or that of Lao Tzu and Confucius to China: their leading ideas set the philosophical agenda for their tradition, and they have remained a living source of inexhaustible significance ever since they were composed. Though the work of many hands and many INDIAN PHILOSOPHY: INTRODUCTION 40 years, the Upanisads set out a coherent philosophical outlook. The world of ordinary human experience, of individuals standing in mutual causal relations in space and time (in S, the samsara) is not reality. Reality is a oneness or absolute, changeless, perfect and eternal, Brahman. Again, human nature is not exhausted by its samsaric elements of body and individual consciousness or mind (S: jiva): there is further present in each one of us an immortal element, our true self, the atman. The atman has no form, and whatever is without form is without limit; whatever is without limit is omnipresent, and whatever is omnipresent and immortal is God. This is the basis for one of the most striking and central of Upanisadic doctrines, the assertion that Brahman and atman are in some sense the same:

Containing all works, containing all desires, containing all tastes, encompassing this whole world, without speech, without concern, this is the self [atman] of mine within the heart; this is Brahman. Into him, I shall enter, on departing hence.⁶

It is this doctrine which is summed up in the phrase ‘that art thou’ (S: tat tvam asi), ‘that’ referring to Brahman.

If reality is Brahman, eternal, immutable, perfect, then an account must be given of the origin and status of the ordinary world of change, the samsara. The view given in the Upanisads to explain the existence of the samsara is that it is lila, or sport, an expression of Brahman’s constitutive delight (S: ananda). The samsara is not reality but maya (S: illusion), and to take the phenomenal world to be the ultimate reality is to be in the condition of avidya or spiritual blindness. By means of suitable disciplines, we can overcome the condition of avidya and pierce the veil of maya: if this is done, our true self is revealed, and this true self is Brahman. To achieve this rare state is moksa or release from the cycle of birth and death which is the samsara, and moksa is the goal of life in the Upanisadic philosophy. Only by attaining release can we be liberated from the law of karma, the otherwise inescapable visiting on us of the consequences of our actions which rules the cycle of repeated births and deaths in the samsara.

This set of ideas is the philosophical core of the Upanisads, and it involves many intractable philosophical problems. These are explored in some detail in many of the essays in this section, which deal with the ways in which some leading Indian thinkers have tried to articulate precise answers to questions such as that of the exact relation of Brahman to the samsara; the nature of atman and its relation to Brahman; the status of the material world and its framework of space and time; why the samsara should involve pain and evil, and the means and nature of release. The earliest attempt to systematize the Upanisadic doctrines is the Brahma Sutra of Badarayana, which then itself becomes one of the foundations of the future of the tradition.

Post-Upanisadic thought in the Indian tradition is conventionally divided into the two broad classes of orthodox (S: astika) and unorthodox (S: nastika). To be orthodox in this sense is to accept the Vedas as infallible, and the orthodox schools are six in number: Samkhya; Yoga; Mimamsa; Nyaya; Vaisesika; and Vedanta. Of these, we have chosen to include only thinkers from the Vedanta school,⁷, partly because of its central importance, and partly so as to be able to give an example of how a philosophical school can develop. Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva set out three classic sets of responses to the problems posed by Upanisadic ideas, and the modern thinkers included here – Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan and to some extent also Gandhi – show clearly that this tradition is still a living presence.⁸

The Indian tradition would be formidable enough were it coextensive with the orthodox Hindu schools alone. However, it includes others no less in importance, and of these we have included Buddhism, the religion and philosophy without which the history not only of India but also of Tibet, China and Japan would be incalculably different. The central concern of the Buddha himself was an ethical one: how to free humankind from all forms of suffering, and to this huge problem the Buddha proposes an answer. Suffering comes about through the non-satisfaction of desire, and the only way to be free of suffering is to be free of the desires which cause it. Desires are properties of the ego, and therefore the only way to be free of desires is to dissolve the ego. When the ego dissolves, what follows is enlightenment, and the condition of being free of self and desires is nirvana.⁹

The Buddha himself refused to speculate about the ultimate nature of reality, being concerned with the more urgent matter of the relief of suffering. Those of his followers who, broadly speaking, adopt this approach are members of the Theravada (S: Teaching of the Elders) school of Buddhism. Even if disinclined to speculation in certain areas, this tradition nevertheless involves a complex philosophy of its own, exemplified here in the work of Buddhaghosa. However, the urge to philosophize, to speculate, to construct a system to fill in the gaps deliberately left by the Buddha, proved irresistible, and over time there emerged a second major school of Buddhism, the Mahayana (S: Greater Vehicle), destined to have a major impact in Tibet, China and Japan.¹⁰ If enlightenment is direct awareness of reality, then it is difficult to resist the urge to say something about what this reality might be. Two leading points of view developed on this question, each associated with a great philosopher in the Indian Buddhist tradition. They are the Madhyamika tradition of Nagarjuna and the Yogacara tradition associated with Vasubandhu. For Nagarjuna, ultimate reality can be described only as a Void (S: sunyata, i.e. is not properly characterizable in conceptual terms), while for Vasubandhu it can be said to be mental in nature, and Vasubandhu gives a detailed account of different types of consciousness. The influence of each of these philosophies on the development of Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism has been immense, as will become clear in the later sections of this book.

Notes

1 There are four Vedas: Rig; Yajur; Sama; and Atharva. The composition of the 1,017 hymns of the Rig Veda probably began around 1200 BCE and went on for some time, perhaps centuries. The word ‘Veda’ comes from S: vid = knowledge: the Vedas are ‘sacred knowledge’.

2 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanisads, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 30.

3 Rig Veda, X, 129, vs 6; trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p. 25.

4 op. cit., vs 2; Doniger O’Flaherty, p. 25.

5 Canonically, there are said to be 108 Upanisads, but some scholars include over 200 works in the list. The earliest of them were probably composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE; the last ones are generally regarded as post-buddhistic. Between ten and twenty are regarded as philosophically of the first importance. The etymology of the word ‘Upanisad’ is disputed. Radhakrishnan derives it from Sanskrit terms meaning ‘sit down next to’, a reference to the gatherings of aspirants seated at the feet of rishis to hear their insights. cf. Radhakrishnan, op.cit., pp. 19–20, for a survey of other etymologies.

6 Chandogya Upanisad, III.14.4. Radhakrishnan, op.cit., p. 392.

7 Vedanta (S: end or completion of the Vedas) is a term used in two senses in Indian thought, and only the context makes it clear which is being employed. These senses are:

1. the name of the orthodox Hindu school whose principal members are the subject of essays in this section;
2. the name for the fourth and final section of a Veda. Each Veda has four sections: (i) samhitas: hymns to the various deities; (ii) Brahmanas: specifications of sacrifices and their value; (iii) aranyakas: ‘forest treatises’ which specify methods of meditation on symbols; and (iv) Upanisads: which deal with the path to release via knowledge (S: jnana ). Thus in sense (b) of ‘Vedanta’, the Upanisads are Vedanta. In this book, the term is always used in sense (a).

8 We have not space to discuss in this book the ideas and influence of one of the greatest of Hindu classics, the Bhagavad Gita (S: Song of the Lord), a section of the great epic Mahabharata which has the status of a separate work, and is the most popular spiritual classic in its tradition. Composed (probably) in the fifth century BCE, the Gita applies the ideas of the Upanisads (with which it has some verses in common) to the situation current at the time when it was written. It draws out from the austere philosophy of the Upanisads a path of religious devotion which gives solace to all and which all can follow. Though Brahman is still regarded as ultimate reality, the emphasis in the Gita is on Brahman’s manifestation as Isvara, a personal Lord of creation, much more readily a source of devotion and consolation than an absolute. Without the Gita, the history of Hinduism would be unimaginably different.

9 The concepts of moksa and nirvana are very similar, and there continues to be much debate on the extent to which the Buddha was influenced by Upanisadic ideas (in which he would have been educated). This very large issue in the history of Indian thought we have not had space to deal with directly. However, the similarities and differences between the ideas of the two philosophies will speak for themselves.

10 Mahayana Buddhism is conventionally said to have emerged as a distinct movement at the Second Buddhist Council, c. 383 BCE.

SIDHARTHA GAUTAMA: THE BUDDHA c. 563–483 BCE

A person now known as the Buddha, ‘the Enlightened One’, is believed to have lived in India in the latter part of the sixth and the early part of the fifth centuries BCE. The example of his life and teaching generated Buddhism, a tradition of beliefs and practices which, during two and a half thousand years, has spread peaceably through many parts of Asia. Buddhism has developed or been interpreted from the central tenets of the Buddha’s teaching in a variety of ways. Although it has no god it is widely regarded as a religion. Any person may endeavour to achieve the buddhic condition of enlightenment: by eschewing extremes and following the Middle Way; by transcending the self of everyday life.

Buddhism is essentially a practical doctrine, dedicated primarily to the negation of suffering and only secondarily to the elucidation of philosophical issues. But of course, the two realms, the practical and the philosophical, are not unconnected and the Buddha’s metaphysical conception of the impermanence and interdependence of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• INTRODUCTION
• ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
• INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
• TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY
• CHINESE PHILOSOPHY
• JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY
• GLOSSARY
• GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY