When we think of the beginnings of philosophy, it is generally believed that it is to the Greeks that we should turn. European scholars who survey the development of philosophy across the world are convinced that the roots of rational thinking first evolved in the Greek cities of Asia Minor and on the Greek islands. Though the fifth and fourth centuries BCE are considered the finest hour of Greek philosophy – when Socrates argued with his Athenian friends and his star student Plato wrote down all that he had heard the master speak, adding his own speculations through the voice of Socrates in his dialogues – it is recognized that the earliest Greek philosophers began their quest for truth two centuries earlier. Thales, who belonged to the Greek colonial city of Miletus and is supposed to have lived around 570 BCE, and who had identified water as the main source of life and creation, is regarded as the father of Western philosophy, and sometimes, due to an unconscious cultural arrogance, as the father of philosophy. The other philosophers who preceded Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and who are known as Presocratic philosophers had lived in the time between that of Thales and Socrates.
The story of world philosophy would, however, be incomplete and inaccurate if we do not look at its beginnings in India. The upanishads are the earliest philosophical texts; even according to the skewed chronology of the ancient period as marked out by Western Indologists of the nineteenth century like Max Müller, the earliest upanishads date back to 800 BCE, the time when the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is supposed to have been composed, and a century before Homer is supposed to have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. And the upanishadic period ends sometime in the sixth century BCE, when Thales begins his preliminary speculations about what constitutes the world. Mahavira, the last of the great Jain masters, and the Buddha, contemporaries of Thales, were preaching in Bihar and the eastern parts of what is now Uttar Pradesh, and the two were using many of the ideas found in the upanishads, and adding their own insights to them.
Western historians of philosophy have consistently refused to accept the upanishads as philosophical texts. They are seen as religious texts that hinted at philosophical ideas sometimes in the poetic language of myth and metaphor. The upanishadic thinkers, it is argued, had never pursued the path of rational enquiry in the way that Greek thinkers from Thales onwards had tried to do. This is, of course, the view of scholars who carry the burden of cultural bias to the extent that they do not recognize a philosophical argument when they see one in a non-Greek text. It is difficult to find another reason for historians of philosophy failing to accept the fact that philosophy was born too in India, and its birth and early growth are to be clearly seen in the upanishads, and which clearly predate the efflorescence of philosophy in ancient Greece.
What seems to disqualify the upanishads from being philosophical texts like the fragments of Presocratic philosophers Heraclitus or Parmenides and the dialogues of Plato is the fact that the upanishads form part of the vedas, the earliest religious texts of India. The Europeans argue that philosophy is truly born when rational enquiry is free of all religious traces. The upanishads are pure religious texts, and if they contain philosophical ideas then it could only be a matter of curiosity. But they can never be part of the history of philosophy, and though the upanishadic thinkers had grappled with philosophical ideas long before Thales and Plato, they cannot be given their place of honour in the hall of thinkers.
Religion is indeed the bugbear of modern Western thought. There is this romantic notion that Greece was free of religion and it was for this reason that philosophy flourished there without hindrance. The European historical perspective is distorted by the sixteenth-century Renaissance view that Christianity was anti-philosophy, and that for a thousand years after the fall of the classical Graeco-Roman world, which ended with the sacking of Rome in the sixth century by the Goths, the northern European tribal hordes, philosophy was outlawed. This was, of course, untrue. Though Christianity preached by the early disciples of Jesus and St. Paul was firmly anti-intellectual, the early Church Fathers of the third and fourth centuries, such as Origen, Clement and Justin the Martyr, were immersed in Greek philosophy and were interpreting Christianity in philosophical terms, which they freely and creatively borrowed from Plato. Of the two great Christian thinkers, St. Augustine of the fourth century was a Platonist, and St. Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century was an eminent Aristotelian. Western Christianity was never cut off from philosophy as modern European scholars would like to believe.
Martin Luther, who rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, was an ostensible anti-intellectual, and the early Protestants, like the early Christians, frowned upon philosophy. But most modern European philosophers, from Rene Descartes (a believing Roman Catholic) onwards, carried out their philosophical investigations within the Hellenic–Christian framework. There are strong traces of Christianity in avowedly atheistic thinkers like the seventeenth century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who never banished religion from his commonwealth. The influence of Christianity is conspicuous in the arguments of the two great Germans, eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, and nineteenth-century arch-Romantic philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
It is also necessary to consider the facts about philosophy’s unhindered flight in ancient Greece. All of the Presocratic thinkers show mystical leanings, though it is only Pythagoras, the sixth-century BCE Greek thinker from Sicily, who is explicitly known for his belief in the transmigration of the soul and dietary restrictions derived from religious tenets. We will discover that the sayings of Heraclitus, the sixth-century BCE philosopher with his enigmatic epigrams about the flux that marks the world is quite mystical, and Parmenides, the fifth-century BCE thinker, who has been taught by a goddess about the reality of the Changeless Being, is still not a rational thinker in the modern sense. Socrates and Plato may have made fun of Homer and his portrayal of gods, but at the time of his death Socrates remembered that he had to sacrifice a cock to the god Asclepius.
In both Greece and Rome, religion remained at an elementary level of propitiating gods. It failed to evolve into a higher ethical stage. It is a matter of debate whether Greek philosophy was made possible because Greek religion was stuck at a particular stage. Greek religion as seen in Orphic mysteries or the Dionysian frenzies embodied irrationality. It would, however, be unfair to overlook the fact that Greek tragic drama was performed as part of a religious ritual, and that the great dramatists, Aeschylus and Sophocles, expressed their dark philosophical view of life on the basis of Greek religion.
We also witness in Greece the dangerous divide created by philosophy. Plato had banned poetry from his ideal republic, and this left no room for the aesthetic and emotional needs of the people. There is also no room for any religion in his philosophical world. It is because of this emotional vacuum that Christianity appealed so immensely to the people of the Greek and Roman worlds. Greek philosophy failed to create a worldview that would sustain life. This dichotomy between philosophy and life dogs Western philosophy to this day.
In contrast, the upanishads, which sprung from the religious chalice of the vedas, continued to shape the evolution of the vedic religion, and, indirectly, of Jainism and Buddhism. The upanishadic influence continued in classical Hinduism as it emerged in the post-Buddhist period, and through the medieval synthesis of Hinduism and Islam, and down to the modern reformers of Hinduism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The vedic religion, which gave rise to the upanishads, had receded into the background by the time Jainism and Buddhism emerged in the sixth century BCE, but the upanishads themselves have continued to shape the history of ideas that followed in the next two thousand years. The great British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead had said that the whole of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. There was some truth and exaggeration in that pithy observation. It can be said with greater justification that the whole of Indian philosophy is a footnote to the upanishads.
If the upanishads had remained philosophical texts divorced from the beliefs of the people, then they would have fallen into the same trap that Greek philosophy had – the cul de sac of mere intellection. What Western scholars perceive to be the religious stigma of the upanishads is the very reason that these texts remain intellectually alive three thousand years after they had been expounded.
In the West, we can safely assume that only a well-educated person would have heard of Plato even though he might not have read Plato’s dialogues. But an illiterate person in India is aware of the upanishadic idea that the creation of the universe is the handiwork of a single intelligence, and that this intelligence is both immanent and transcendent. That is, God is both the world and beyond the world. He may not be able to cite chapter and verse any upanishad. He may not have even heard of anything called upanishads. But the upanishadic idea is ingrained in his consciousness.
***
The upanishads did not remain static, something set in stone and unchangeable. They served as the crucible for philosophical developments in the centuries that followed. What came of the subsequent developments was far removed from the early insights provided by the upanishads. There were sometimes curious turns – like in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras – and sometimes bizarre – like in the tantric practices where alcohol, fish, meat, parched grain and sexual intercourse form part of worship, where the upanishadic ideas are expressed in entirely new ways and words. The tantrics also evolved the path of kundalini yoga, the energy rising from the Muladhara or the root chakra at the base of the spinal cord and passing through the Svadhishthana (sacral chakra), Anahata (heart chakra), Vishuddha (throat chakra), Ajna (third-eye chakra) and culminates in the Sahasrara (crown chakra) situated in the brain.
This does not imply that there is nothing more to Indian philosophy than the upanishads. If that were so, then Indian philosophy would have nothing much to offer, in the same way that Western philosophy would be quite unattractive if it were only a variation on Plato. Indian philosophers took flight in different directions from the upanishadic summit. The beginnings were important, but they were not all.
The great difficulty posed by the upanishads is that the beginnings were so brilliant, that it became a tough act for philosophers who came after to follow up on the achievement. But the post-upanishadic philosophers in India were not really daunted by the upanishadic achievement. They forged ahead with their own bold arguments about the world. That is why it is quite rewarding to understand the ideas of Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, or that of classical Hindu thinkers like Shankara and Ramanuja.
In the modern period, most of the philosophical attempts have been to recapture the magic of the upanishads, and to reaffirm the upanishadic insights in the language of modern science. It has been a hazardous enterprise, and, as we shall see, the attempts have not been quite successful.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the upanishads are both very far and very near. There are distinct echoes of the upanishads down the centuries, but the echoes are not the same as the original sound itself. What is exciting about the upanishads is that we discover once again the ways of asking questions about the world. The upanishads are all about intellectual curiosity, the main spring that keep philosophy alive.
Surreal yet gritty, violent yet poetic – such is the world of Chandan Pandey’s fiction.…
From books on financial frauds to a graphic novel based in Gaza, Mitali Mukherjee reading…
Mitali Mukherjee's chilling and unputdownable new book Crypto Crimes traces the murky underbelly of the…
Hey there readers! For today’s blog we have brought you a collection of finance and…
Hi readers! In this week’s blog we have some Young Adult recommendations perfect for teens.…
is proud to announce the release of THE BLACK ORPHAN Inspired by true events,…