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Part II INDIAN PHILOSOPHYAN PHILOSOPHY INTRODUCTION India has long been the recipient of religious and philosophical ideas from migrating or invading peoples from the North and the West. It is not, therefore, surprising that India is the birthplace of one of the most sophisticated and diverse philosophical traditions in Asia. What is perhaps the most striking feature of this tradition is its originality and rigorous development of themes ranging from social and political philosophy to abstract metaphysics and philosophical logic. Ideas and traditions were absorbed from outside, but Indian philosophers built upon them and adapted them into a structured and lively debate which lasted more than two thousand years. Influences from outside India have been quite diverse. During the period 2000–1000 BC the indigenous population saw a continual influx of Aryan people, people coming out of the culture of central Asia. This was probably the most significant stage in the foundational development of the religious tradition of Brahmanism or early Hinduism, for it was during this time (and the five hundred years that followed) that the four Vedas were composed. A further influx of people was to follow in 600–500 BC, this time the Zoroastrian (or Parsi) people, who found a congenial refuge in India’s tolerant society. Alexander’s invading forces brought Greek culture into India, especially in the North, for the period 300–100 BC. The extent to which Alexander’s invading forces brought with them Greek philosophy is still much debated. From AD 800 to AD 1800 the most important migrating and invading people were from Islamic cultures. From AD 1800 to India’s independence in 1946 British culture left its mark on many aspects of social life which are vitally relevant to philosophical enquiry: education and its curriculum, the political and legal systems, and the preferred language of the scholars and political leaders. It says much for the vitality of India’s own indigenous social and religious traditions that they have been able to absorb and assimilate many features of such diverse influences. Towards the end of the composition of the Vedas—at around 800–500 BC—came the composition of the Upani ads as both a reflection on the Vedic tradition and the introduction of some strikingly new ideas concerning the nature of the individual soul (ātman) and its connection with the ultimately real (Brahman). The Upanisads introduced also the doctrine of the cycle of birth-death-rebirth (sa sāra) and the hope of an escape from this cycle into mok a or mukti. The Bhagavadgītā attempted a synthesis of previous Vedic and Upani adic ideas, whereas many rival systems of thought flourished at the same time. Of these latter, the two most durable have proved to be Buddhism and Jainism. From that time to about AD 1800 the philosophical community took the form of schools, both orthodox (following or at least in theory consistent with the teachings of the Vedas) and non-orthodox (where Buddhism manifested the most extreme variations on possible implications of the teachings of the Buddha). After the formulation of the original sūtras of the six orthodox schools, there soon emerged a pairing of these schools as Sā khya-Yoga, Nyāya-Vaiśe ika and Mīmā sā-Vedānta, and a large corpus of Introduction 87 works followed which were commentaries and sub-commentaries on the sūtras. These texts developed and defended their school’s major tenets against the developing texts of rival schools. From the latter part of the nineteenth century, Indian philosophers have attempted an accommodation with western thought. This has taken two forms, represented in the cases of Radhakrishnan and some contemporary scholars. Radhakrishnan found inspiration in Vedānta philosophy and in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sought to combine these traditions with his own thinking. Contemporary philosophers in India take a different approach. Working in university departments where the emphasis has been very heavily on the analytic tradition of the west, some leading scholars are attempting a recovery of the indigenous philosophical tradition, yet with an analytical approach. Though Indian philosophy has its mystical side, and though the general setting of the philosophical schools is within the soteriological context of seeking mok a by way of jñāna or intellectual knowledge, there is much in the Indian tradition which may fairly be called analytic philosophy. B.C. and I.M. 5 THE ORIGINS OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY John Brockington The Vedas have generally been regarded as the ultimate authority in Hinduism, both by those who belong to that religion and by others from the outside. The same is broadly true for Hindu systems of philosophy. So much is this the case that non-orthodox systems of thought are in large measure defined as those that reject the authority of the Vedas. It is therefore appropriate to begin an examination of the origins of Indian philosophy with the Vedas, while not overlooking the fact that there were other, though less immediately obvious, sources for Indian thought. The religion that is recorded in the Vedic hymns is an élite form of that brought into India by the Āryans who began to settle in north India soon after the middle of the second millennium BC, and has recognizable affinities with the early religion of other Indo- European-speaking peoples; indeed, in some respects it shows greater similarity to such religions than to developed Hinduism. These hymns, the sa hitās, form the first of the four categories which evolved within the Vedic literature (the whole of which is for Hindus ‘the Vedas’, although western writers tend to use the term to denote these hymns alone). They were grouped into four collections, of which the oldest in terms of compilation is the g Veda, which can be assigned to around 1200 BC on the basis of its language and also of its clear links with the Iranian religion, especially in the form which precedes Zarathushtra’s reforms, so far as we can discern it from the Avesta. Probably the next is the Sāma Veda, although the Yajur Veda cannot be much later, and finally comes the Atharva Veda.1 It must be emphasized that this order is based on the date of compilation and that individual hymns may be much older than that. The Vedic literature was then further developed, also over an extended period, by the group of texts known as the Brāhma as, which differ from the hymns by their prose form, their later language and their more elaborate ritual; they form the second category. Within the Brāhma as is contained the third category, the Āra yakas, of which the Upani ads were in their origin a further development, although they became increasingly independent later. The hymns of the g Veda are thus our earliest textual evidence for the religious beliefs of the Āryans. They were transmitted orally for many centuries, initially because this was the way that they were composed but subsequently because they were regarded as too sacred to be reduced to writing, but the hymns have nevertheless been preserved with remarkable accuracy as a result of elaborate methods of recitation introduced to safeguard their exact wording. The picture that they give us of the religious thought and practices of their time is hardly complete, however, for they reflect the interests of the priestly group concerned with the ritual worship of the major gods, while the total length of the collection (just over a thousand hymns, containing in all a little over ten thousand verses) means that there is not in any case the space for a comprehensive picture, given the nature of the hymns as primarily poems of praise and petition to the various deities.2 The origins of Indian philosophy 89 The collection is divided into ten books, each of which is a separate grouping. The earliest block seems to consist of books 2–7, each containing the hymns composed by one family of seers and all following the same arrangement of their hymns by deity addressed and by length of hymn. These were then bracketed (probably in a two-stage process) by the first and eighth books. The ninth book consists exclusively of hymns to Soma, collected together here because of the importance of Soma in the ritual, as we shall see shortly. The hymns of the tenth book were then the last to be added and, while a few of them are as early as any in the other books, they are in general distinctly later, as their language and metre reveal quite as obviously as their content. Indra was clearly the most popular deity in the pantheon for the poets of the g Veda, for nearly a quarter of all its hymns are addressed to him. He is also described in more anthropomorphic terms than the other deities, with his bodily strength, his great size and his weapons being often alluded to, for he is clearly the apotheosis of the Aryan warrior. His conflict and victory over the serpent V tra is frequently mentioned in the hymns and this is now usually regarded as a creation myth (one of several that we find in the hymns), but the style of the allusions to it tends to stress Indra’s martial character. More generally, he appears as the king of the gods (paralleling the way that the Aryan chief was both leader in battle and head of his clan). Nevertheless, although the order of the hymns in the ‘family’ books 2–7 generally reflects the relative ranking of the deities (as shown by the number of hymns addressed to them), the hymns to Indra follow those to Agni, reflecting one of the major constraints on the nature of the collection as it has come down to us: its use in the ritual.

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