EDITED BY
JONARDON
GANERI
The Oxford Handbook of
INDIAN
PHILOSOPHY
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The Oxford Handbook of
INDIAN
PHILOSOPHY
Edited by
JONARDON GANERI
1
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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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Contents
Contributors
Timeline: Indian Philosophy in a Hundred hinkers
ix
xix
Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
Jonardon Ganeri
1
PA RT I M E T HOD S , L I T E R AT U R E S , H I S TOR I E S
1. Interpreting Indian Philosophy: hree Parables
Matthew T. Kapstein
15
2. History and Doxography of the Philosophical Schools
Ashok Aklujkar
32
3. Philosophy as a Distinct Cultural Practice:
he Transregional Context
Justin E. H. Smith
4. Comparison or Conluence in Philosophy?
Mark Siderits
56
75
PA RT I I L E G AC I E S OF SU T TA & SŪ T R A :
P H I L O S OP H Y B E F OR E DIG NĀG A
5. Nāgārjuna on Emptiness: A Comprehensive Critique of
Foundationalism
Jan Westerhoff
93
6. Philosophical Quietism in Nāgārjuna and Early Madhyamaka
Tom J. F. Tillemans
110
7. Habit and Karmic Result in the Yogaśāstra
Christopher G. Framarin
133
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vi
Contents
8. Vasubandhu on the Conditioning Factors and the Buddha’s
Use of Language
Jonathan C. Gold
9. Buddhaghosa on the Phenomenology of Love and Compassion
Maria Heim
152
171
10. he Philosophy of Mind of Kundakunda and Umāsvāti
Piotr Balcerowicz
190
11. Vātsyāyana: Cognition as a Guide to Action
Matthew R. Dasti
209
12. Bhartṛhari on Language, Perception, and Consciousness
Vincenzo Vergiani
231
PA RT I I I T H E AG E OF DIA L O G U E :
A S A N SK R I T C O SM OP OL I S
13. Coreference and Qualiication: Dignāga Debated by Kumārila
and Dharmakīrti
John Taber and Kei Kataoka
255
14. Relexive Awareness and No-Self: Dignāga Debated
by Uddyotakara and Dharmakīrti
Monima Chadha
272
15. he Metaphysics of Self in Praśastapāda’s Diferential
Naturalism
Shalini Sinha
289
16. Proving Idealism: Dharmakīrti
Birgit Kellner
307
17. Śāntideva’s Impartialist Ethics
Charles Goodman
327
18. A History of Materialism from Ajita to Udbhaṭa
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
344
19. Consciousness and Causal Emergence: Śāntarakṣita
Against Physicalism
Christian Coseru
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360
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Contents
20. Pushing Idealism Beyond its Limits: he Place
of Philosophy in Kamalaśīla’s Steps of Cultivation
Dan Arnold
vii
379
PA RT I V T H E AG E OF DI S Q U I E T
21. Jayarāśi Against the Philosophers
Piotr Balcerowicz
403
22. Two heories of Motivation and heir Assessment
by Jayanta
Rajam Raghunathan
420
23. Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta on the Freedom
of Consciousness
Isabelle Ratié
437
24. he Nature of Idealism in the Mokṣopāyaśāstra/Yogavāsiṣṭha
François Chenet
469
25. Logic in the Tradition of Prabhācandra
Marie-Hélène Gorisse
486
26. An Indian Philosophy of Law: Vijñāneśvara’s
Epitome of the Law
Donald R. Davis, Jr.
507
27. Śrīharṣa’s Dissident Epistemology of Knowledge
as Assurance
Jonardon Ganeri
522
PA RT V P H I L O S OP H Y F ROM
GA GEŚA
28. A Defeasibility heory of Knowledge in Ga geśa
Stephen H. Phillips
541
29. Jayatīrtha and the Problem of Perceptual Illusion
Michael Williams
559
30. Mādhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons as Exemplary
Mīmā sā Philosophy
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
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577
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viii
Contents
31. Hindu Disproofs of God: Refuting Vedāntic heism
in the Sāṃkhya-sūtra
Andrew J. Nicholson
598
PA RT V I E A R LY M ODE R N I T Y:
N E W P H I L O S OP H Y I N I N DIA
32. Raghunātha Śiro ani and the Examination of the
Truth about the Categories
Michael Williams
33. Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara’s Advaita Vedānta
Christopher Minkowski
34. Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī on Ontology: Debates over
the Nature of Being
Shankar Nair
623
643
657
PA RT V I I F R E E D OM & I DE N T I T Y ON
T H E E V E OF I N DE P E N DE N C E
35. Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Contexts
of Indian Secularism
Akeel Bilgrami
693
36. Freedom in hinking: he Immersive Cosmopolitanism of
Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya
Jonardon Ganeri
718
37. Bimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s Modern Moral Idealism:
A Metaphysics of Emancipation
Gopal Guru
737
38. Anukul Chandra Mukerji: he Modern Subject
Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield
750
Index
767
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I n t roduc tion
Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
Jonardon Ganeri
The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India
through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings
together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse igures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the
Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. he volume aims to be ecumenical, drawing from diferent locales, languages, and literary
cultures, inclusive of dissenters, heretics, and skeptics, of philosophical ideas in thinkers not themselves primarily philosophers, and relecting India’s northwestern borders with the Persianate and Arabic worlds, its northeastern boundaries with Tibet,
Nepal, Bhutan, and China, as well as the southern and eastern shores that aford maritime links with the lands of heravāda Buddhism. Indian philosophy has been written in many languages, including Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Urdu, Gujarati,
Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Kannada, Punjabi, Hindi, Tibetan, Arabic,
and Assamese. From the time of the British colonial occupation, it has also been written in English. It spans philosophy of law, logic, politics, environment, and society, but
is most strongly associated with wide-ranging discussions in the philosophy of mind
and language, epistemology and metaphysics (how we know and what is there to be
known), ethics, metaethics, and aesthetics, and metaphilosophy. he reach of Indian
ideas has been vast, both historically and geographically, and it has been and continues to be a major inluence in world philosophy. In the breadth as well as the depth of
its philosophical investigation, in the sheer bulk of surviving texts and in the difusion
of its ideas, the philosophical heritage of India easily stands comparison with that of
China, Greece, the Latin West, or the Islamic world.
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Jonardon Ganeri
A Focus on Figures
In compiling this book, my hope is to present a balanced and impartial picture of the
detail, diversity, and depth of philosophy in this region. What is the nature of a thinker’s philosophical project? What are the methods of philosophical inquiry used in pursuit of their goal? What deines the philosophical movement and intellectual lineage to
which an author belongs, and how does that ailiation bear on a thinker’s philosophical project? To fulill such an ambition requires that the contributions engage with the
very qualities that make the ield fascinating to a contemporary audience: the interplay
between charismatic individuals, the negotiated interaction of widely diferent intellectual outlooks, the intervention of critical voices of dissent and disavowal. It is essential to
emphasize regionality, vernaculars, subaltern communities, eccentrics, and to explore
scholarly networks, nodes of philosophical activity, transnational encounters, and contexts of philosophical invention. New research contained in this volume highlights previously unexplored thinkers and themes, drawing upon a vast array of scarcely studied
and sometimes not even edited work. While past scholarship has tended toward obsessive interest in a select few individuals, the timeline that precedes this introduction is a
record of a hundred outstandingly important thinkers, and this is but half of one percent of the total number known with certainty to have lived and whose writings have
been preserved. here is important philosophical thinking among mathematicians and
medics, in the poets and the pilgrims, while studies of philosophy in sūfī India, secular
India and stately India, of India’s impact on global philosophical movements, and their
efects on India all fall within the remit, not to mention the way Indian philosophical
ideas migrate and transform in diaspora, in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, hailand,
Indonesia, Cambodia, China, Japan, Central Asia and into the Persian and Arabic
worlds and on to the West.
he chapters in this Handbook provide a synopsis of the liveliest areas of contemporary research and set new agendas for nascent directions of exploration. he volume
comprises contributions each centered on philosophical ideas in a major igure, identiied either by name or only descriptively as the author/compiler/redactor of a given text.
he exact list has been determined by criteria that include the importance of the igure
to the philosophical tradition, the philosophical interest of their ideas, and the availability of a contemporary scholar able to write about them with the requisite level of
philosophical engagement. Although organized around igures and texts, the chapters
deal with a speciic philosophical question or issue that the given igure or text most centrally raises, the arguments presented in favor or against, rather than consisting in intellectual biography or a survey of a thinker’s oeuvre. Oten in conversations between two
thinkers, perhaps separated in time but also oten contemporaneous, scholarly ailiation (śāstra) is not the most salient indicator in understanding what is at stake, and what
two interlocutors share as common points of conceptual reference may be as important
as line and lineage (sampradāya); indeed, these exchanges, reciprocations, and reactions, actual or implied, constitute an important part of a thinker’s intellectual identity.
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Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
3
Too great an emphasis on “systems,” apart from repressing chronology and innovation,
marginalizes the role of dissidents, doubters, and free-thinkers in providing interstitial critique. Talk of “schools” meanwhile implies a form of institutional organization
and social arrangement alien to Indian contexts of scholarship. A danger in organizing
material solely by discipline (for example, aggregating all and only Buddhist philosophy
in one volume, journal, institute, or workshop, Hindu philosophy in a second, Islamic
philosophy in a third) is that it makes it seem that the only exchanges that matter are
internal, and this is a mistake because criss-crossing and boundary-hopping encounters
are oten highly signiicant, philosophically and prosopographically. here are plenty
of examples of individuals—Vācaspati Miśra is one, Vijñānabhikṣu another, Appayya
Dīkṣita a third—who found being bound by just one disciplinary code an unbearable
limitation on philosophical freedom; we cannot hope to understand what they were
about as philosophers (creative engagement, concordance, criticism, etc.) unless this
is acknowledged.1 Still others—most notably Jayarāśi and Śrīharṣa—dismiss systemconstruction as a good way to do philosophy. In this volume, therefore, I have kept the
focus irmly on individual philosophers, and have allowed them to tell us which interlocutors and questions they have found most engaging, whether this be from within
the same discipline or lineage, or not. Surveys of general doctrine in Indian “schools”
and “systems” are in any case already readily available and need not be replicated here.2
What this volume does is to let the story of philosophy in India play out in the form of a
sequence of individual acts of uncanny philosophical genius.
“Indian philosophy” is thus a designation for a vast and still vastly under-researched
body of inquiry into the most fundamental topics ever to engage the relective human
mind. As the discipline of academic philosophy begins to address its history of elitism
and exclusion, and to evolve into a genuinely diverse and pluralistic ield, India’s past
represents an unquantiiably precious part of the human intellectual biosphere. For
those who are interested in the ways in which culture inluences structures of thought,
for those who want to study alternative histories of ideas, and for those who are merely
curious to know what some of the world’s greatest thinkers have thought about some
of the most intractable and central philosophical puzzles about human existence and
experience, Indian philosophy is a domain of unparalleled richness and importance.
Meanwhile, for those who draw upon India’s intellectual past to give sustenance to contemporary programs of social and political reform, it is essential that the whole of this
past, the fullness of its vast diversity and richness, is available and acknowledged.
A Brief History of Philosophy in India
It has become something of a commonplace to speak of “classical Indian philosophy” or
“philosophy in classical India.” he term “classical,” though, is problematic with respect
to Indian philosophical historiography, as indeed is the term “medieval.” his is because
of the exceptional longevity and continuity of the tradition when contrasted with other
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4
Jonardon Ganeri
civilizations. We need to use a diferent stratiication of India’s intellectual past, not one
borrowed from a history of European ideas. Historical narratives of Indian philosophy
need also to be responsive to the diferent rythms and trajectories of diferent locales
in that vast region. Let us start afresh, with a new periodization. I’ll distinguish irst a
period when philosophy was seen as essentially tied to the way one lives one’s life, and
it was also thought of as a vehicle through which one could achieve liberation or release
from the suferings implicated in any human life. I’ll call the philosophies of this irst
period, which is from around the eighth century bce until around the second century
ce, “philosophies of path and purpose.” Included in this broad designation will be the
ancient wisdom of the Vedas, a body of ritual prescriptions seemingly brought to India
by Aryan settlers and written in a sort of proto-Sanskrit called Vedic. Included too
will be the Upaniṣads, beautiful and majestic texts articulating a vision of the unity of
humanity, ritual, and cosmos. And it will include the original teachings of the Buddha,
who seems to have lived ater the composition of the earliest of the Upaniṣads but before
the remainder, as well as other “striver” (śramaṇa) intellectuals including Mahāvīra the
Jina. he Buddha certainly taught a philosophy of path, since the fourth of his four Noble
Truths is called the Truth of the Path, a path leading from sufering to nirvāṇa, the state
of health in which one is free from spiritual as well as physical pain. Another text I would
include in this period is the complex Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, an order of magnitude grander than the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, which contains as a sort of inserted
interlude that famous moral discourse between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna known as the “Song
of the Lord,” the Bhagavad-Gītā. Yet while the Gītā has justly been the subject of intense
scholarship there is much interesting philosophy in the body of the epic itself, an ethics
of ambiguity and disorientation that also reveals the important relationship between a
work’s literary form and its philosophical ambitions.
Dating authors and texts in the history of Indian philosophy with any precision is,
I should caution, an extremely fraught exercise. At best, usually, one can work out the
relative chronology, if for example one text directly cites another. More oten even that
is problematic. Issues of authorship are as complex as those of chronology. Attaching
an author’s name to a text is oten vexed, for the texts of Indian philosophy are sometimes compilations, the composite work of a variety of hands and mouths that have been
edited and reedited over a long period of time and in diferent recensions. he names
that are traditionally put forward as the authors of these texts are sometimes no more
than literary ictions; sometimes too a text is attributed to a famous philosopher as a
way to give it extra clout. Even the date of the Buddha is controversial. Tradition teaches
that he died in 486 bce at the age of 80. Modern scholarship is tending to push his date
forward, perhaps to somewhere around 400 bce or even sooner. On the other hand a
recent excavation of the Mahā Devī temple at his historical birthplace, Lumbini, has
unearthed evidence that perhaps the tradition is correct ater all. Only time will tell; or
maybe it won’t. Whenever it was that the Buddha lived, it was an interesting time from
a philosophical point of view, and the records of his life contain colorful reports of a
whole host of unusual and unconventional thinkers. he founder of Jainism, Mahāvīra,
lived perhaps a little earlier, but Jainism and Buddhism share a spirit of deiance against
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Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
5
the social and intellectual status quo. he Jainas’ commitment to principles of tolerance,
harmony, and rapprochement led them to a philosophy of pluralism in metaphysics and
ethics, and to perspectivalism in epistemology and semantics.
he second period I will distinguish is what I will call “he Age of the Sūtra, ” a period
when considerable efort was indeed spent in the philosophical construction of conceptual arrays (śāstra; tantra). he term sūtra means “thread,” and a sūtra is both a single
numbered philosophical aphorism and a text comprising an entire collection of such
aphorisms. More important than even the sūtras themselves were the initial commentaries written on them. hese irst commentaries—the technical designation of which
is bhāṣya—had as their explicit aim the construction of an organized body of concepts,
a weaving of the threads into a single uniied cloth of philosophy; and it is not unheard
of for commentary and core to be co-produced in a single act of textual production.
he authors of those irst commentaries (Śabara, Patañjali, and Vātsyāyana, to name but
three) were the true structure-creators in India. It is something of a common-place to
talk about the “six systems of Indian philosophy,” but I will reject this rather supericial
doxography, orientated as it came to be around orthodox Hinduism’s commitment to
the veracity of the Vedas, ignoring less orthodox Hindu movements as well as all the
dissenters, most especially the Buddhists and the Jainas, not to mention more naturalistic or materialist thinkers and other interstitial and dissident groups, and, as with all
doxographies, enforcing an artiicial order. It is worth remembering that to an eighthcentury doxographer like Haribhadra the only philosophical systems were those of
Buddhism, Jainism, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sā khya, Mīmā sā, and, grudgingly, Lokāyata.
What is more important is that in the period from let us say 100 bce until 450 ce a
large part of the philosophical activity in India was focused on a crystalization of philosophical wisdom into more organized philosophical treatises. hey retain the idea that
learning philosophy is a way to the highest good, and thus a path with a purpose, but
now see their primary work as consisting in detailed descriptions of the structure of the
human being, of the world which human beings inhabit, and of the capacities human
beings have to learn about this world. So the topic of the existence, make-up, and aspirations of the self retains center-stage, but supplemented now with an interest in, to use
the Indian parlance, the pramāṇas, or principles for knowing reality, and the prameyas,
reality as it is so known. Analogous ambitions in Buddhism and Jainism from the period
are relected in works such as Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya and Umāsvāti’s
Tattvārthādhigama-bhāṣya. Early Jainas and Buddhists use the term sutta to refer to
the reported words of Mahāvīra and the Buddha: in the Age of the Sutta, philosophical
efort takes the form of seeking to identify and order the categorical philosophy those
words contain.
Indeed until the second century ce, Buddhist and Jaina philosophy in India was written mostly in the languages of Pali and Prakrit, languages that, while not dissimilar to
Sanskrit, were not destined to become the main vehicle for intellectual discussion on the
subcontinent. Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, “he Path of Puriication,” is an organizational masterpiece, a structured representation of philosophy in the sutta as mediated
by the then-extant Sinhala commentaries on canonical Abhidharmic classiications.
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Jonardon Ganeri
At a time when Sanskrit began to emerge as a shared discursive medium, the switch
to Sanskrit by these thinkers was to prove monumental, and their impact on philosophy in India from then until the end of the irst millennium immeasurable. heir rivals
found themselves having to defend the foundations of their philosophical matrices as
they had never had to before, and they skillfully adapted and reimagined the resources
those structures made available in attempts to give answers to the challenges presented
by Buddhist and Jaina thinkers, all the while co-opting and reusing Buddhist and Jaina
ideas as they went. Among the most notable Buddhist philosophers in this period are
Nāgārjuna, whose anti-foundationalist quietism led to the formation of the branch of
Buddhist philosophy known as Madhyamaka, the Middle Way, and Vasubandhu, who
standardized Sarvāstivāda and Abhidharmic schematization in Sanskrit.
Dignāga, sixth-century developer of the branch of Buddhist philosophy known as
Yogācāra, inaugurates a new epoch. Dignāga lived and taught at the Buddhist university of Nālandā, founded in the same century and destined to become one of the world’s
greatest centers of learning. Dignāga owed much to internal dialogue with a contemporary of his, the grammarian-cum-philosopher Bhartṛhari. His disciple Dharmakīrti
would go on to reinvent Dignāga’s innovation and adapt it to the needs of new Buddhist
communities in ways Dignāga himself may not have imagined, most notably by giving it an idealist inlection. Dignāga’s breakthrough work was decisive in shaping the
next period of Indian philosophy, a cosmopolitan Age of Dialogue in Sanskrit that runs
at least until the relocation of Buddhists like Kamalaśīla to Tibet. An emerging scholarly consensus agrees in identifying Dignāga as marking the beginning of a new era in
Indian philosophical thought, some scholars emphasizing his theoretical innovations3
and others his transformation of discursive practice.4 Dignāga’s new citational and critical practices were switly adopted by his opponents, a change already evident in the technical styles of respondents including Uddyotakara and Kumārila. As important as these
shits in doctrinal formulation and discursive practice was the transformation Dignāga
achieved in ways of reasoning, with a movement away from an epistemic localism to
a rule-based universalism. he Age of the Sūtra, distinguished by its use of a style of
inquiry grounded in adaptation and projection from locally normative paradigms, was
over. Now too the precise formulation of deinitions of key philosophical concepts takes
center-stage as constitutive of philosophical practice, rival deinitions of what purports
to be a single concept locking horns in contexts of philosophical debate. Rapidly this
became the hallmark of philosophical activity in a broad Sanskrit cosmopolis that was
to endure for centuries and whose geographical borders spread well beyond the subcontinent. During this period of dialogue between Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu astonishing theoretical advances were made in understanding the working of the human mind’s
properties, processes, and powers—in analyses of selhood, consciousness, moral psychology, and agency by philosophers from Praśastapāda to Prabhākara, from Kumārila
to Śa kara, from Śāntideva to Śāntarakṣita.
With the decline of Buddhist societal inluence in subcontinental India—and of
course this did not afect its continuing importance in the neighboring territories
of Sri Lanka, Burma, hailand, Nepal, Tibet, China, the Maldives, Cambodia, and
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Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
7
Indonesia—a new era of philosophy commences in India, now hallmarked by a spirit
of uncertainty and questioning. his was a time of intellectual turbulence, as philosophers increasingly doubted the foundations of the structures they had done so much to
construct and defend. With the Buddhists less available to provide a foil, philosophers of
various persuasions, persuasions that would only later be aggregated under a unifying
label “Hindu,” began to question themselves and to interrogate each other, while Jaina
philosophers assumed if anything even greater signiicance. I’m inclined, therefore, to
describe the period from the ninth or tenth to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, as
an Age of Disquiet. Some of its great igures come from Kashmir, including Śaiva thinkers like Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, the Nyāya genius Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, and possibly
also the transformative Cārvāka Udbhaṭa. If Jayarāśi had announced himself to be a
lion come to upturn every philosophical cart, and Vasiṣṭha had declared the world to be
nothing but imaginary emergence, matters came to a head with a revolutionary critique
of the fundamentals of epistemology provided by Śrīharṣa. His twelth-century philosophical classic, Amassed Morsels of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), is a brilliant
take-down of the deinition-mongering philosophical activities of past generations of
thinkers. Śrīharṣa attempts to demonstrate that a philosophical method based on the
search for deinitions is misguided, indeed incoherent. He develops a rival method,
a method of refutation, to expose the vacuity of a way of doing philosophy that had
become de rigueur with Dignāga. His new method required him to reconstruct the best
possible version of any deinition, not merely the best one actually formulated, and his
ability to articulate philosophical positions with greater insight, accuracy, and acuity
than their own proponents is astonishing. his though was perhaps also his Achilles
heel insofar as his reconstructions aforded great assistance to those he sought to refute.
When Ga geśa intervenes in the fourteenth century, he is therefore responding to a
variety of pressures internal to the Sanskrit world, critiques that had already been gathering force for some time. One came from the direction of the rival Mīmā saka philosophical theory about the nature of inquiry, developed within a context of defense of the
legitimacy and authority of Vedic knowledge. If the Vedas are authoritative then there
is no question about the truth of the beliefs we form from them and no further project
of veriication. Such an attitude toward inquiry is profoundly at odds with one which
sees the truth as a matter of discovery and conirmation. he other came from a challenge to the pluralist metaphysics of common sense, and found its most severe articulation in Advaitic thinkers who sought to undermine the principle that appearance is
trustworthy, and in particular that there is a world populated by middle-sized objects
and known to a plurality of distinct cognizers. Ga geśa’s brilliant response, in a book
that claims itself to be the “jewel which fullills the wish for truth” (Tattvacintāmaṇi),
was to re-equip the philosopher’s analytical arsenal, and his new conceptual methodologies rapidly gained currency throughout Sanskritic intellectual space, spreading to
disciplines other than philosophy and to other regions, including the South where they
secured much admiration but also admonishment from the Mādhva thinkers Jayatīrtha
and Vyāsatīrtha. Disquiet continued too in the form of new Hindu arguments against a
Hindu God.
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Jonardon Ganeri
A distinctive form of Early Modernity began to emerge in the sixteenth century.
Occasioned in part by new overlappings with the Persian cosmopolis, with exposure to
new paradigms of thinking, Sanskrit philosophers self-consciously set out to innovate,
to think with the old structures but not defer to them. An astonishingly vast number
of works in Sanskrit exists from this enormously rich period, today lying unedited and
sometimes in a single copy in manuscript libraries around the world. In the writings
of those philosophers who followed Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, from about the middle of
the sixteenth century until the middle of the eighteenth, there is a metamorphosis in
epistemology, metaphysics, semantics, and philosophical logic. he works of these philosophers, many of whom lived in Raghunātha’s hometown of Navadvīpa in Bengal, are
full of phrases that are indicative of a newly open and exploratory attitude, phrases like
“this should be considered further,” “this needs to be relected on.” Openness to inquiry
into the problems themselves is what drives the new work, not merely a new exegesis of
the ancient texts, along with a sense that they are engaged in an ongoing project. A second group of philosophers, this time based in Vārāṇasī (Benares), and again profoundly
inluenced by Raghunātha, sought to use his work in reinterpretations of ancient metaphysics, sometimes with the encouragement of Mughal patronage and support. At the
same time, and in opposition to Raghunātha’s band of new reasoners, while also coopting his methods, the works of thinkers like Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, Appayya Dīkṣita
and Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara brought a distinctive renewal to Vedānta, in their own
complex negotiations with Mughal patronage and power and with their own pasts. In
tandem with these developments in the realms of Sanskrit, Islamic philosophers were
producing important and innovative philosophy in parallel centers of Islamic learning.
hree important Islamic trends in India emerge during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries: irst, the Perso-Indica project of Dārā Shikuh and others involving a wideranging translation of philosophy from Sanskrit into Persian; second, the sūfī philosophy of Muḥibballāh Ilāhābādī, a proliic author in Persian and Arabic and defender of
the Andalusian Ibn ʿArabī; and third, the debate between Avicennans—notably including the inluential philosopher Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī—and Illuminationists. Meanwhile,
Muḥibballāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm is a milestone seventeenth-century Indian textbook in Arabo-Islamic logic. We still have only the most rudimentary understanding of
the nature of intersections between nodes of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic philosophical
scholarship during this profoundly innovative era of early modernity in India. Nor at
present do we have much insight into the dynamics of philosophical activity in Indian
vernacular languages in the period.
hen came British colonial occupation, and with it new philosophical priorities, perhaps most especially the need to respond to the incompatibility between the pretensions
of European claims on the values of liberty, tolerance, equality, and secularism and the
multiple and manifest illiberalities, intolerances, and inequalities of colonial rule, which
began irst during a period of exploitative governance by the East India Company from
the Battle of Plassey in 1757 until the failed Independence War in 1857 and then under
direct colonial rule by the British Crown until independence was inally won in 1947. In
the end-game, a period we might describe as the Eve of Independence, Indian thinkers
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Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
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including Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and Tagore, oten writing in English, bring political and social philosophy to the center-stage where in earlier times it had been epistemology and metaphysics, while philosophers like Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya and
Anukulchandra Mukerji relect deeply on the nature of the subject, its freedom, agency,
and identity, in a concerted efort to formulate the philosophical grounds of an intellectual decolonization. In the struggle for freedom from political and intellectual servitude the whole of India’s philosophical past became an immense resource that could be
drawn on, and in particular its perceived spirit of negotiated pluralism and non-coercive
cosmopolitanism were made central in the design of a post-independence nation.
The Concept Philosophy
and Its Congenetics
Let me conclude this introduction by saying something about the application of the concept philosophy in reference to India. Fortunately long gone are the days when Hegelian
historians could seriously claim that there was no such thing as philosophy in India
because the word “philosophia” is a Greek word. he proprietary argument is in any case
spurious given that Alexander arrived to India with the Greek language in his retinue,
and the word later thrived in India in its Arabic and Persian form falsāfa; yet names in
Indian languages are available for coincident species of that genus of intellectual skill to
which philosophy also belongs. A Sanskrit term ānvīkṣikī, for example, meaning something like “critical investigation,” is used in a work on statecrat dating perhaps from the
fourth century bce, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra; its author, a royal minister in the Magadha
empire, is said to have written it in order to educate princes in the necessary skills
required for a successful and prosperous rule. here are, he ventures, four branches of
learning in which young princes should be trained: ānvīkṣikī, the methods of critical
investigation; trayī, the religious canon made up of the three Vedas; vārttā, the sciences
of material acquisition such as trade and agriculture; and daṇḍanīti, political administration and government. Kauṭilya explains the meaning of ānvīkṣikī: “Distinguishing
with proper reasons, between good and evil in the Vedic religion, between proit and
loss in the domain of wealth-generation, and between right policy and wrong policy in
political administration, and determining the comparative validity and invalidity of all
these disciplines in special circumstances, ānvīkṣikī renders help to people, keeps their
minds steady in woe and weal, and produces adroitness of understanding, speech and
action.” To emphasize the point that ānvīkṣikī is not a body of knowledge but a method
of studying the proper aims and methods of knowledge as such, he adds that it “has
always been considered as lamp for all branches of study, the means for all activities,
the support for all religious and social duties.” Kauṭilya gives a list of the diferent types
known to him—sāṃkhya, yoga, and lokāyata—which refer to diferent methods for
approaching a critical investigation: a method of listing and enumeration, a method
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Jonardon Ganeri
of dividing and reconnecting, and a method of empirical experimentation. Two other
methods don’t get a mention here, yet their names—nyāya and mīmāṃsā—also in the
irst instance refer to techniques of reasoning: a method of observation-with-deduction
and a method of textual hermeneutics. he subequently-to-emerge intellectual structures were thus originally not so much given bodies of doctrine as the codiication of
particular ways of thinking and methods of inquiring, distinctive approaches to what it
is to experience the curiosity that makes us human.
Apart from the various methods of critical investigation there is a kind of thinking
that consists in perspicuous ordering, staying on the surface, rendering evident. he distinction is between, on the one hand, the sequential reasoning of a critical investigation,
and, on the other, using insightful ordering and sparseness to put a phenomenon on
display. here is a parallel in the Indian mathematicians’ discussion of a kind of mathematical proof that they say aims at rendering a mathematical result transparent rather
than reaching it as the conclusion in a series of deductive steps. So Bhāskara II’s diagrammatic proof of a theorem he knew from the Śulba-sūtra is meant not to deduce
the theorem but to display it. A diagram as such is simply a diagram: it does not itself do
anything. What does the proving is the viewer’s moving triangles around in imagination
to form two squares: the proof is enacted by the viewer. hinking likewise occurs at the
interface between text and reader, in the reader’s acquisition of a clear perspective in
the topology of concepts through their imaginative engagement with a text. One inds
this method at work in those who compose compact texts that aim more at conceptual
cartography than at structural construction. In this style of enquiry the idea of omission
plays an important role, for thinkers who use principles of reason in this way are careful
to omit anything that can cloud the reader’s capacity to form a picture—a large part of
philosophical skill is knowing what to ignore. Seeing interrelatedness is thus as creative
a philosophical act as drawing consequences: one is a matter of evidence, the other of
what is evident. Derived from a verb meaning “to see,” the Sanskrit term darśana can
mean “seeing the point” in something like that sense; it can also mean a “manner of seeing” or doctrinal outlook, and so was it used in the Buddhist doxography of Cāttaṉār in
Tamil, in the Jaina doxography of Haribhadra, and still later in the Hindu doxography of
Ceṇṇibhaṭṭa. A clear map of the conceptual terrain is a powerful tool, enabling both creative thought and aesthetic empathy, and philosophy based on this mode of reasoning
has not lost sight of its ties to deepened ways of living. As Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya
most eloquently put it, “a true philosophical system is not to be looked upon as a soulless
jointing of hypotheses; it is a living fabric … It is not to be regarded as the special property of academic philosophy-mongers, to be hacked up by them into technical views,
but is to be regarded as a form of life and is to be treated as theme of literature of ininite
interest to humanity.”5 his is a more immersive, experiential, aesthetic conception of
the rational life, and one with which several of the philosophers whose work is reviewed
in this volume, though of course not all, would have agreed.
Let me then venture to provide a suitably encompassing deinition of the kind we are
interested in, the genus of intellectual practice and skill whose species include darśana,
philosophy (in its various calques), and ānvīkṣikī (in all its varieties). An intellectual
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Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?
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practice belongs to this kind just in case it is the use of distinctively human capacities
to ind orientation in the space of reasons, which is to say, to move from saṃśaya or
perplexity to nirṇaya or clarity, where that orientation can come either in the form of
a reasons compass, which enables the activity of sequentially engaging one’s powers of
deductive maneuvering and capacities for projective extrapolation, or else in the form of
a concept map, which engages the imagination and enables one to make a survey of the
terrain, locating oneself within it. his is a methodological pluralism in which there are
many diferent procedures for interrogating reality or epistemic stances, and no prospect of reducing them all down to one.
Each one of the chapters in this volume provides compelling evidence that in the
global exercise of these human intellectual skills, India, throughout its history, has been
a hugely sophisticated and important presence, host to an astonishing range of exceptionally creative minds engaged in an extraordinary diversity of the most astute philosophical exploration conceivable.
Notes
1. “By bringing us to see strengths and weakness of several positions and points of view,
Vācaspati enriches his reader’s sense of where the truth lies. We are able not only to see
from the other’s perspective but to incorporate it, or part of it, into our own view,” Stephen
Phillips, “Seeing From the Other’s Point of View: Countering the Schismatic Interpretation
of Vācaspati Miśra,” APA Newsletter 14.2 (2015): 4–8; “Vijñānabhikṣu claimed that, properly understood, Sā khya, Yoga, Vedānta and Nyāya were in essence diferent aspects of
a single, well-coordinated philosophical outlook and their well-documented disagreements were just a misunderstanding,” Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy
and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 4;
“Appayya …, a virtuoso textualist, the master of all disciplines, slave of none,” Christopher
Minkowski, “Appayya’s Vedānta and Nīlakaṇṭha’s Vedāntakataka,” Journal of Indian
Philosophy 44 (2014) 95–114, 113.
2. he doxographic Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy contains several valuable surveys of
systematic general doctrine.
3. “Dignāga, whose profound inluence had permeated Indian thought a century before
Hsüan-tsang’s visit, radically reoriented Buddhist thinking. For instance, he shited the
notion of pramāṇa (criteria for valid knowledge) from scripture and reason—which are
accepted in Vasubandhu’s writings as well as Ch’eng wei-shih lun—to perception and inference (i.e., rejecting ‘scripture’ as an independent valid pramāṇa).” Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist
Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch’eng wei-shih
lun (London: Routledge, 2002), 363.
4. Dignāga “initiated a sudden, widespread and radical transformation in the reading, citational, and discursive practices of Sanskrit philosophers, a transformation perhaps even
more dramatic in its efects than Dignāga’s speciically philosophical contributions …
[He] makes the systematic investigation of and response to the texts of rival philosophical traditions a basic organizing principle of his own work.” Lawrence McCrea, “he
Transformations of Mīmā sā in the Larger Context of Indian Philosophical Discourse,”
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Jonardon Ganeri
in Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, ed. Eli Franco (Vienna: De Nobili
Research Library, 2013), 129–130. Franco, in his introduction to the volume, periodizes
Indian philosophical history in a manner compatible with the one provided here: the period
up to Dignāga; the period from Dignāga upto and including Udayana; and the period from
Ga geśa.
5. Bhattacharyya, Krishna Chandra. Introduction to Studies in Vedāntism (1907), reprinted
in his Studies in Philosophy, ed. Gopinath Bhattacharyya (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers,
1958), pp. 1–6, p. 6.
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