German Indologists. Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies writing in German. Valentina Stache-Rosen. Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi 1981. x + 277pp.

Contributed articles on the life and works of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Indian philosopher and Indologist; includes some of his writings and letters.

Articles on the life and works of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Indian philosopher and Indologist.

The Parama¯rthasa¯ra, or 'Essence of Ultimate Reality', is a work of the Kashmirian polymath Abhinavagupta (tenth–eleventh centuries). It is a brief treatise in which the author outlines the doctrine of which he is a notable exponent, namely nondualistic S´aivism, which he designates in his works as the Trika, or 'Triad' of three principles: S´iva, S´akti and the embodied soul (nara). The main interest of the Parama¯rthasa¯ra is not only that it serves as an introduction to the established doctrine of a (...) tradition, but also advances the notion of jiv¯anmukti, 'liberation in this life', as its core theme. Further, it does not confine itself to an exposition of the doctrine as such but at times hints at a second sense lying beneath the evident sense, namely esoteric techniques and practices that are at the heart of the philosophical discourse. Its commentator, Yogara¯ja (eleventh century), excels in detecting and clarifying those various levels of meaning. An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy presents, along with a critically revised Sanskrit text, the first annotated English translation of both Abhinavagupta's Parama¯rthasa¯ra and Yogara¯ja's commentary. This book will be of interest to Indologists, as well as to specialists and students of Religion, Tantric studies and Philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims to synthesize two equally impressive systems of thought: Indian philosophy in the East and Presocratic philosophy in the West, which are separated not only by space and time but by our prejudices. It attempts to show the universality of philosophy by exploring the parallelisms and similarities, clarifying contrasts, and highlighting the common themes that are emphasized and de-emphasized in them. The study does not intend to give a complete account of the early Greek and Hindu thoughts. The (...) discussion of Hindu philosophy focuses on the Upanishads, the main source of Hinduism. We will use for our primary source the following texts which majority of Indologists consider as the most authoritative: Aiteriya, Kaushitaki, Taittiriya, Chandogya, Brihadharanyaka, Katha, Mandukya, Maitriyani, Svetasvatara, Isa, and Kena. On the side of Presocratic philosophy are included such major thinkers as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Empidocles. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive and systematic analytical study of the major philosophical concepts of classical yoga. The book consists of a series of detailed discussions of the key concepts used by Pata-jali in his Yoga-Sutra to describe and explain the enigma of human existence and to point a way beyond the perpetual motion of the wheel of becoming. Feuerstein's study differs from previous ones in that it seeks to free Pata-jali's aphoristic statements from the accretions of later interpretations; instead, (...) the author places the Sutra in its original context and sees it as the source of the whole edifice of classical yoga and not just as a summary of previous developments. This book will be of interest to comparative reliogionists, Indologists, and practitioners of yoga who wish to deepen their understanding of its philosophical basis._. (shrink)

This chapter studies the scattered career of Prince Frederick August of Augustenburg (1830–1881). Caught between the German-Danish conflict within the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, the Prince escaped from parental pressure as well as a lack of perspectives by delving into the riches of the Indian past. As an amateur-Indologist, he reshaped his self-perception and finally wrote the first Western biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The study draws on the Prince’s publications and his surviving handwritten documents and tries to highlight India’s (...) role in his process of gaining self-confidence and self-awareness. (shrink)

The publication is a commented translation and study of the work “Pakṣilasvāmin’s Introduc­tion to his Nyāyabhāṣyam” by a prominent Austrian indologist and intercultural philosopher G.R.F. Oberhammer. The author examines the background of Oberhammer’s research, gives a brief information about the school of Nyāya and focuses on how Oberhammer demonstrates the history of Nyāya and its becoming aware of itself as a philosophical system based on the short text of Pakṣilasvāmin (Vātsyāyana) introduction to his Nyāyabhāṣyam. In his article, Oberhammer answers the (...) question why such heterogeneous parts as elements of the theory of argumentation borrowed from the ancient tradition of Vāda (the theory of debate), logic and epistemology, cos­mology and the doctrine of the soul and its liberation from the bonds of saṁsāra (soteriology) were combined into the harmonious philosophical system of Nyāya and how this happened during the development of the school due to its becoming aware of itself as a method of searching for truth (and what this truth is from the point of view of Nyāya), how this was helped by creative bor­rowing from another philosophical school – Yoga. The publication is prefaced by a brief history of the Viennese oriental and indological school, to which Oberhammer belongs. (shrink)

According to the influential German Indologist Paul Hacker, Swami Vivekananda was a “Neo-Hindu” who mistakenly clothed what were essentially Western values in superficially Indian garb in order to promote Indian nationalism. I argue that Vivekananda’s philosophy of “practical Vedānta”—which upholds the ethical ideal of serving all human beings as manifestations of God—has its roots not in Western values but in the teachings of his beloved guru Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Ramakrishna often spoke of his own spiritual experience of “vijñāna,” which revealed (...) to him that everything in the universe was a manifestation of God. Sri Ramakrishna derived from this vijñāna-based worldview a spiritual ethics of service—“śivajñāne jīver sevā” —that directly shaped Vivekananda’s later formulation of practical Vedānta. I conclude the paper by arguing that we should reject the “Neo-Vedāntic” paradigm in favor of a more nuanced and dialectical “cosmopolitan” approach to modern Vedānta. (shrink)

Ashok Aklujkar, Indian Sanskritist and Indologist; contributed articles.

Alexander Moiseevich Piatigorsky was, as we can read from numerous sources, an internationally renowned Russian and English philosopher, buddhologist, indologist, translator and writer.

Study of Gopi Nath Kaviraj, 1887-1976, Indologist and mystic.

About the Book: - Brahman and Person is a collection of essays by the late Richard De Smet (1916-1997) on the topic of person in Indian thought. Overturning the current interpretation, De Smet proposes that the nirguna Brahman can be regarded as properly personal, provided person is understood in the original and classical sense that emerged in the Christian effort to speak abut the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Rendering of saguna and nirguna Brahman as personal and (...) impersonal, instead originated with the Western translators of Sanskrit works, who were influenced by an individualistic idea of the person and the consequent restriction of its application to the human being. De Smet also dedicated attention to the question of the human person in Indian and Western thought over a number of essays, proposing that a properly holistic and organic notion of the human person can be found especially n the thought of sankara. This collection of essays by an eminent Indologist constitutes and important contribution not only to Indological studies but also to cross cultural and interreligious dialogue. About the Author:- Richard De Smet taught Indian Philosophy at Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune. Born in Belgium in 1916, he joined the Jesuits in 1934 and came to India in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. in 1953 from the Gregorian University, Rome, for his thesis on the theological method of Sankara, proposing both that sankara was srutivanadin, and that he used the method of analogy in his interpretation of the Upanisadic mahavakyas. De Smet was a life member of the Indian Philosophical Congress and the Indian Philosophical Association and Founder-President of the Association of Christian Philosophers of India and in these capacities carried out an ongoing dialogue with Indian philosophers and religious personalities. He died in 1997. Ivo Coelho is Reader in Gnoseology and Metaphysics at Divyadaan: Salesian Institute of Philosophy, Nashik, and editor of Dvyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education Born in 1958 at Mumbai, he studied under De Smet at Pune, and went on to specialize in the hermeneutical thought of the Canadian Philosopher theologian and economist Bernard Lonergan. He is interested in issues of cross-cultural and interreligious understanding, dialogue and collaboration. He is the author of Hermeneutics and Method: The Universal Viewpoint in Bernard Lonergan (Toronto, 2001). (shrink)

This article analyses the 1936 “Wotan” essay by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in light of one of its reigning motifs, Ergriffenheit. First, this term is examined within the works of Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto and Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who used it to describe what they claimed to be the original religious experience, a state of being deeply stirred or even seized by the “the holy” or by “the ultimate reality.” The article then examines antecedents in Jung's theory of (...) states of psychic seizure, in which two halves of the psyche come into conflict, the resolution of which leads to an increased capacity to create the arts of culture. The analysis then moves to the “Wotan” essay itself, where Jung brings together his own theory of psychic seizure with the theory of the original religious experience as proposed by the above-named scholars of religion in order to suggest that, under National Socialism, the Germans were in the midst of a collective confrontation with their own inner divinity, which should lead to a national spiritual rebirth. The article then investigates the works of several of the men Jung mentions in the essay, as well as his use of ancient Germanic mythology, to support his claim. Through his portrait of the Germanic archetype Wotan, Jung psychologizes and thereby essentializes the Romantic image of the Germans as “a people of poets and philosophers” as well as that of a Nietzschean “master-race.” In conclusion, the article argues that, at least in 1936, Jung's attitude towards Hitler and National Socialism was much more favorable than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

Contributed articles on semantics philosophy of vedic literature and poetics presented earlier at a seminar honoring Kapil Kapoor, Indian Indologist.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 159-169 [Access article in PDF] Using Three-Vehicle Theory to Improve Buddhist Inclusivism Kristin Beise Kiblinger Thiel College Inclusivism has significant appeal nowadays among religious people concerned with the question of how to respond to religious others. Many seek to justify inclusivistic attitudes using the resources of their respective traditions. Yet even though the body of theoretical work analyzing Christian inclusivism is by now quite extensive, (...) surprisingly the same is not true for Buddhist thought. As the late Paul Hacker, a respected German Indologist, wrote, "Die Inder selber haben, soweit ich sehe, keinen Terminus dafūr. Sie haben nicht darūber reflektiert... Ferner wird ein Beweis dafūr... meist nicht unternommen." That is, Indians [or, better, thinkers whose religious roots stem from India] seem to have no term for inclusivism, they have not reflected on it very much, and they tend not to justify their inclusivistic moves.1The questions arise of what strategies and resources Buddhists have used, and ought to use, in the service of inclusivism, and of whether inclusivism is doctrinally and philosophically justifiable according to Buddhist traditions. In the discussion that follows, there are two patterns of Buddhist inclusivistic moves that I want to identify and criticize before suggesting a resource for developing a new and improved form of inclusivism for Buddhist contexts.For my purposes, inclusivism is willingness to include the other (or something of the other's) while keeping one's home religious system primary. For example, one might accept as true or valuable a doctrine or practice (or many doctrines and practices) from a foreign religious system. Or, one might believe that a religious other could attain ultimate fulfillment or salvation as conceived by the home tradition despite—or even through—membership in an alien tradition. Nevertheless, the home tradition is somehow privileged. For instance, the home tradition might be thought to contain more or more important truths than alien traditions, or to teach them better. For another example, the home group may contend that practicing within the home tradition is an advantage for ultimate fulfillment, though not a necessity for it.An inclusivist is open to the presence of truth and value in other traditions and uses her own system as a filter for selective adoption of something from the outside, with concern to maintain a coherent self-identity and reject what is incompatible or [End Page 159] hindering with regard to it. This is a theoretical, conscious approach to others and thus differs from the sort of forced or unconscious influencing that occurs during historical diffusion of a tradition over the course of its evolution. Note that the term "inclusivism" in use here is quite broad; it covers many possible methods and justifications for inclusions and allows that the other tradition might be included as a whole or only in part. Thus, different kinds and degrees of inclusivism may be specified, but a view will qualify as inclusivistic here if it self-consciously recognizes a provisional, subordinate, or supplementary place within the home religious system for (some elements from) one or more alien traditions.I provide selected examples of inclusivism in Buddhist contexts from a range of time periods, schools, and regions, but in no way do I mean to suggest that Buddhists as a whole have been or mostly are inclusivists. There is, of course, no singular Buddhism, and the complexities and varieties of Buddhism, like those of Christianity, make it possible to support a range of positions toward religious others, all in the name of "Buddhism." Relatedly, I provide minimal historical contextualization and idealize types, but that is because I am concerned with the question of whether a certain stance in response to other religions is justifiable, not with historical questions and explanations of Buddhist behavior. I write having been heavily influenced by the work of certain Christian thinkers who, though referencing historical examples, focus their efforts on justifying philosophically and theologically a particular approach toward non-Christians. So, at bottom, my principal interests are not historical but rather critical. The provided instances of behaviors serve... (shrink)

Within modern scholarship on Indian philosophy, religious studies, and Indology Purva-Mimamsa unfortunately features as a rather under-represented area. The present edition and translation of the Mimamsanyayasamgraha by James Benson is a most welcome exception in two respects: On the one hand it makes accessible the major premises and topics of Purva-Mimamsa to students and scholars in a rather simple and brief manner. On the other hand it represents the first translation of a work from the late 17th century, i.e. from (...) the "new school" of Purva-Mimamsa. So far no major texts from this period are available and little is known about the school's developments and changes in those times. Thus, besides providing a solid and understandable introduction to the system, this book will also be valuable to advanced students of Purva-Mimamsa interested in its newer branches. It will therefore be of use not only for Indologists, but also to students and scholars dealing with South Asian religions, ritual and intellectual history. (shrink)

The articles collected in this volume document the eighth conference organized by the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The conference in which Indologists, Theologians and Philosophers participated in, took place in september 2004 under the title "Certainty of Believe and Truth in Religious Tradition". Against the background of Gerhard Oberhammer's hermeneutics of religious traditions the contributors challenge from their professional viewpoint the traditional understanding of the relationship between certainty of (...) belief and truth and give reasons that certainty of belief found in a special religious tradition cannot claim absolute truth, even if its validity within a tradition is not to be denied. (shrink)

Does it make sense to employ modern logical tools for ancient philosophy? This well-known debate2 has been re-launched by the indologist Piotr Balcerowicz, questioning those who want to look at the Eastern school of Jainism with Western glasses. While plainly acknowledging the legitimacy of Balcerowicz's mistrust, the present paper wants to propose a formal reconstruction of one of the well-known parts of the Jaina philosophy, namely: the saptabhangi, i.e. the theory of sevenfold predication. Before arguing for this formalist approach to (...) philosophy, let us return to the reasons to be reluctant at it. (shrink)

English summary: The Spitzer Manuscript is one of the oldest Sanskrit manuscripts found on the Silk Road. The work preserved in it is unique; no further manuscripts of it have been discovered so far, nor is it transmitted in Tibetan or Chinese translations. The present volume contains an introduction which summarizes previous research and discusses grammatical, lexical and palaeographical aspects of the work, together with an outline of its content. It is followed by a complete facsimile edition of the fragments (...) accompanied by transliterations. These are supplemented by transcriptions of some fragments which are no longer available, recovered from the estate of the Indologist Dr. Moritz Spitzer. A concordance juxtaposes the earlier and present-day arrangements of the fragments, and an extensive character table documents the peculiarities of the Ku'a'a-Brahma script used in the manuscript. A complete word index and a study which aims at reconstructing the last part of the manuscript conclude the volume. As well as Buddhist scholastics the work also deals with a number of non-Buddhist topics, such as a theory of Vaise'ika qualities completely unknown from other sources it contains, inter alia, the oldest list of books of the Mahabharata and an enumeration of the sixty-four arts and sciences. The last part of the work is devoted to dialectics. German description: Das Spitzer-Manuskript ist eine der altesten Sanskrithandschriften, die an der Seidenstrasse gefunden wurde. Das in ihm erhaltene Werk ist ein Unikum; bis jetzt wurden keine weiteren Manuskripte dieses Werkes entdeckt und es ist auch nicht in tibetischer oder chinesischer Ubersetzung uberliefert. Der vorliegende Band enthalt eine Einleitung, die den Forschungsstand zusammenfasst, grammatische, lexikalische und palaographische Aspekte des Werks diskutiert und eine Inhaltsubersicht bietet. \nHierauf folgt eine vollstandige Faksimileausgabe der Fragmente zusammen mit ihren Transliterationen. Diese werden erganzt durch Transkriptionen einiger verloren gegangener Fragmente, die dem Nachlass des Indologen Dr. Moritz Spitzer entnommen wurden. Eine Konkordanz stellt die heutige und fruhere Anordnung der Fragmente gegenuber; eine ausfuhrliche Zeichentabelle dokumentiert die Besonderheiten der Ku'a'a-Brahma -Schrift des Manuskripts. Ein vollstandiger Wortindex und eine Studie, die die Rekonstruktion des letzten Teils des Manuskripts zum Ziel hat, beschliessen den Band. Neben Themen der buddhistischen Scholastik behandelt das Werk auch eine Zahl nicht-buddhistischer Themen, wie eine Vaise'ika-Theorie der Eigenschaften, die aus anderen Quellen nicht bekannt ist; ferner enthalt es u. a. die alteste Liste der Bucher des Mahabharata und eine Aufzahlung der vierundsechzig Kunste und Wissenschaften. Der letzte Teil des Werkes ist der Dialektik gewidmet. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years, a number of approaches to the recovery of the multiple pasts of Hinduism have held the field. These include that of the discipline of History of Religions as it is constituted in North America as well as those of the Hindu nationalists, the col and post-colonial historians, and the Subaltern Studies School. None of these approaches have proven satisfactory because, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have adequately addressed human agency or historical change in their (...) accounts of the pasts out of which modern-day Hinduism has emerged. The Hindu nationalist historians hark back to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remained unchanged until the corruptions spawned by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. Many Western indologists and historians of religion specializing in Hinduism never leave the unalterable ideal worlds of the scriptures they interpret to investigate the changing real-world contexts out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historians focus on the past two hundred years as the period in which all of the categories through which India continues to interpret itself—including Hinduism—were imposed upon it from without. Adducing examples of Hindu practitioners and thinkers from the colonial period, subaltern theorists and others argue that historical thought is itself alien to the authentic Indian mind. This article suggests a number of interpretive strategies for retrieving the multiple Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particular as that time out of which most modern-day practices of Hinduism emerged. These include an increased emphasis on non-scriptural sources and a focus on regional traditions. (shrink)

We shall revisit a debate which has been going on at least since pioneering British Indologists like William Jones first encountered the ‘Brahmanic theology’ we now know as Vedānta, namely, the nature of the relationship—if any—between certain forms of ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ idealisms, and how these metaphysical systems have influenced Christian theology. Specifically, we look at the question of possible thematic and conceptual convergences between Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedānta, and argue that significant parallels can be found in their common (...) conception of the Absolute as Being. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of the two systems, we take the divine ‘I AM’ revealed to Moses in Exodus 3.14 as the locus classicus of Christian philosophical interpretations of God as Being itself, and explore how four seminal figures read this passage in light of Neoplatonic and Vedāntic influences. We shall see that similarities and divergences in the readings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Henri Le Saux can be understood in terms of how they negotiate the relation between the One and the many, or between ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. The more these figures allow themselves to be influenced by Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedānta, the more we see any clear ontological distinction between creature and Creator start to break down. This verse, therefore, proves to be an unusually fruitful test case for exploring the relation between the underlying Neoplatonic and Vedāntic metaphysics which structure varying Christian interpretations of it. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a close comparative reading of a creation myth from chapter 1 of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad, which opens with the startling statement “ātmaivedam agra āsīt”, “in the beginning there was the self (ātman)”. I read this classical text with Śaṅkara, its foremost commentator, in dialogue with an ensemble of Indologists (Wilhelm Halbfass, Greg Bailey and Frederick Smith) and theorists (Walter Benjamin, Ramchandra Gandhi and Hélène Cixous), and vis-à-vis, the creation myth narrated in chapter 1 of the (...) Book of Genesis. My aim is to decipher the intrinsic relation between identity, difference and diversity underlying the Upaniṣadic myth, and the ambivalent relationship (fear and desire) between self and other depicted here. The Upaniṣad presents a narrative of “the self first”, and implied is the aspiration to retrieve and rediscover this first self, the ātman, which precedes and encompasses everything else. I challenge this narrative drawing on Mukund Lath’s paper (J World Philos 4:6–23, 2003/2018). According to Lath, being is becoming, and change is a precondition of identity-formation. Identity, he argues, does not only accommodate but also invites change and plurality. Identity for Lath is a matter of creation, not restoration. It is pregnant with the future, not obsessed with premordiality. Lath’s unique case study for his counter-Upaniṣadic discussion of identity and self is classical Indian music, rāga music. (shrink)

The Linguistic Account of Thought holds that thought is the meaning of declarative sentences. According to Linguistic Internalism, two languages can share sentential meanings and hence express the same thought. According to Linguistic Particularism, thought content is relative to languages and is not shared. We can contrast these two accounts of thought with a third: the intension of a thought is a common disciplinary use of differing meaningful claims, and the extension of a thought is the collection of sentences or (...) symbols that share a disciplinary use---a view inspired by Patanjali's Yoga, Linguistic Externalism. Having noted that the Linguistic Account of Thought is the defining feature of the Western tradition, underwriting the European philosophical tradition and work in Indology, I consider whether the competing accounts of thought can be tested. I note that the Moral Twin Earth thought experiment by Horgan and Timmons, assumes Linguistic Internalism and attempts to test competing accounts of moral semantics for their capacity to facilitate cross cultural communication on morals across different languages. I propose testing competing accounts of thought to the same end on Planet Ethics: here the moral semantics of a language simply is its national moral theory. So the literal meaning of “good” for Nation Kant would be “a will determined by the categorical imperative,” but for Nation Expressivism Kant it would an internalist semantics that allows speakers to express their minds. Nation Plato is ruled by a philosopher king, and "good" there means "the form of the forms," and for Nation Positive Utilitarians it means "maximal happiness" while for the Negative Utilitarians it means "minimal suffering." The scenario also contains with in it the Thems: they have their own Them language tied to their own moral tradition, but they also participate in the linguistic culture of their adopted homes. Can the citizens of Planet Ethics have a conversation about morals, and can they avoid Anti Thematism? I note that the two Linguistic Accounts of Thought cannot explain how moral conversations occur across languages on Planet Ethics. Each culture will try to use its own language as a frame to understand others, who will be incomprehensible in so far as they depart from the assumed linguistic frame: each culture will view itself as having the moral frame work. Worse, the linguistic accounts of thought render right answers to moral questions analytically true, and criticisms of the dominant moral theory a contradiction in terms. A community who cannot get along with each other can separate and make separate moral communities, each with its own national ethos and corresponding moral semantics, but then they will not be able to conceptualize their prior disagreement especially if both new languages are departures from the earlier shared moral semantics. Also, the Thems will be viewed with suspicion for not wholly and univocally supporting the national ethos of their adopted homes. Linguistic externalism has no problem accounting for moral discourse here or in allowing for intra cultural moral criticism: the common philosophical use of the diverse philosophical sentences is the common proposition on which speakers of the various languages can agree or disagree to. On Planet Ethics it becomes clear there is "right" moral semantics: all will do as well as each other. Whereas the Linguistic Account of Thought leads to an inflationary approach to linguistic meaning, the linguistic externalist option is deflationary with respect to linguistic meaning. Finally I note that the linguistic approach to thought underwrites Indological investigations into Indian ethics and I consider two Davidson inspired tweaks to save the linguistic approach. The upshot is that Orthodox Indologists, in practice, adopt the procedure that Davidson recommends for understanding malopropers, such as Archie Bunker. In short, Orthodox Indologists, in being wedded to the linguistic approach to thought, treat Indian philosophers like malapropers who can't speak Sanskrit, like Bunker cannot speak English without erring. All can be avoided by Linguistic Externalism. This means that the conceptual content of moral vocabulary is not their linguistic meaning, but their philosophical purpose. (shrink)

Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition , which we are taking as our (...) text, Eliade notes that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight. (shrink)

The book called "Philosophy of the Gita," by Prof. Ramesh N. Patel, is a striking philosophical study of the celebrated Sanskrit text called the Bhagavad-gita which is known simply as the Gita. Patel's book proposes and develops a new hermeneutic called archaic coherentism and applies it to the Gita to distill and decode a comprehensive metaphysic and philosophy of action embedded in the text. A new conceptual translation of the Sanskrit text brings out this philosophy in clear detail. Philosophical essays (...) preceding the translation include analysis of the often-neglected background of war and morality, discussion of action, freedom and self-identity, delineation of a new synoptic philosophy of Hinduism, and unearthing of a strikingly original and innovative metaphysics of existence, energy and triple individuation. The translation of the Gita is followed by two critical essays called "Emerging Philosophy" and "Coherence and Exegesis." Patel's translation focuses on the conceptual rendering of every term, with no Sanskrit word left untranslated, even including the tough ones like guna and Brahman. The essay called "Emerging Philosophy" does away with all Sanskrit terms, to facilitate the understanding of the newly decoded Gita's philosophy as a whole. The essay called "Coherence and Exegesis" critically examines several scholarly standpoints on the Gita with Patel's sound philosophical reasoning. The innovative philosophy of the Gita that emerges through the book's analysis includes an original theory of individuation revealing a Platonic-type Form of individuation evolving at three levels: essential, actional and physical. The book is written for professional philosophers and Sanskritist Indologists. It generally assumes familiarity with logical problems of philosophy and with Sanskrit terms in Indian philosophy. The author has a rare dual training in Sanskrit and philosophy. He skillfully exploits both in this book to achieve an unusual outcome that should be of great interest and challenge to both professional philosophers as well as scholars of Indology. (shrink)

Festschrift honoring Prof. Gustav Roth, b. 1916, Indologist, on his 76th birthday; comprises research papers on Hindu philosophy and Buddhist philosophy.

A collection of classic essays by two highly regarded scholars on the development of yoga and its rapport with other religious traditions. Georg Feuerstein, one of the world's foremost scholars of yoga, and Jeanine Miller, long recognized for her insightful commentaries on the RgVeda, here pool their considerable talents in a look at the development of yogic thought across the ages and its similarities with the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Two of their essays included here, one concerning the essence (...) of yoga and the other looking at the meaning of suffering in yoga, have long been singled out by indologists for correcting prevalent misconceptions and providing a conceptual framework for many of the subsequent studies in that field. The reprinting of these important essays in The Essence of Yoga gives new readers a chance to share some of the authors' earliest insights into yoga and their deep conviction that these discoveries are of the highest significance for a proper understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

I have gathered and studied these Sanskrit and Telugu writings by South Indian poets, and I’ve thought about them, and researched them for a few years. My highest priority in this piece is not to make the most simple literal word-for-word translation. I am trying not only to be faithful to the original texts, but to find a way in English to tell the detailed century-old stories more naturally, conveying them in a way that gives them a flow and literary (...) charm. I want to make a new attempt to convey these century-old stories which suggest the rich feelings of human life, in refreshing ways. I hope people who are not professional Indologists, but who are humanists, can enjoy the nuances of the topic. So this article based on translations is literary and frankly experimental; it is about natural experiences told in natural language. Often, translations from centuries ago seem stilted, dry and archaic, literally correct and academically adequate, but lacking such touchstones of basic humanity’s life as inner feelings and visceral intuitive sensations. I am exercising a hope of offering a fresh telling, and a chance to provide some imaginative reflections on this topic I have chosen. The theme is sweat—and other natural human responses. Why explore sweat? This is a pertinent question. For one thing, I’ve been struck by how the experience of sweat meant something different centuries ago in India, in comparison with what it means to many people today. As reflected in Sanskrit literature, it had associations with desirable feelings—thrills, soulful exertions, arousal, passionate intensity. It is distinctive, and I seek to know what it might tell us about life, both to Hindus and non-Hindus. It offers a chance to contemplatively play around with beauty, too. It is an aesthetic exploration, an artistic challenge, an alluring human mood, of loving joy. The longer texts I am working with are Tirumalamba’s Sanskrit text Varadambika Parinaya Campu and Pingali Surana’s Telugu text Kalapurnodayam. Shorter texts I refer to include a verse from the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, and Jayadeva’s Sanskrit Gita Govinda, and a Telugu song by Annamacharya. (shrink)

Festschrift in honor of V.N. Jha, b. 1946, Indologist; comprises contributed papers on various aspects of Vedic literature and philosophy.

Our time as the age of fragmented cultural ontologies, acceleration, and ongoing socio-cultural transformations is the age of the quest of belonging par excellence. My paper deals with this quest out of a singular culturally situated perspective – the work of the Indologist and comparative philosopher Daryush Shayegan (1935–2018) – which despite its singularity hints at a general hypothesis: the recognition of a tamed cultural schizophrenia can be an inspiring model of belonging for our time.

India has been the seat of deep philosophical engagements since the Vedic period. However, Indian philosophical wisdom, albeit different from Western philosophy in many respects, was not widely known to the rest of the world before colonial thinkers started their dialogue with Indian philosophy through their translations and academic exegeses. Western scholars, primarily the Indologists, analyzed Indian thought through the lens of Western thought in spite of the traditional insular approach of Indian pandits. Amidst this tension between traditional Indian (...) scholars and Western scholars who encountered Indian philosophy, was born a unique breed of Indian scholars, thanks to the colonial milieu of education and... (shrink)

The leading arguments of Anquetil-Duperron's Legislation Orientale (1778) are analysed as a sustained attempt by this early Indologist to refute Montesquieu's influential theory of oriental despotism with respect to the Muslim regimes of Turkey, Persia and India (the Mogul empire). Anquetil adduces literary evidence and his own observations to refute the claim that Asian governments are invariably arbitrary, lawless and without property rights. Rather, similarities in these basic respects between European and Asian societies underline the common humanity of their inhabitants, (...) in keeping with the convictions of Enlightenment humanism and contrary to some eighteenth-century justifications for European empires. (shrink)

As has been obvious to anyone who has looked at them, there is a special relationship between the two earliest extant works on Sanskrit poetics: Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra (Ornamenting Poetry) and Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (The Mirror of Poetry). The two not only share an analytical framework and many aspects of their organization but also often employ the selfsame language and imagery when they are defining and exemplifying what is by and large a shared repertoire of literary devices. In addition, they also betray (...) highly specific disagreements regarding the nature and aesthetic value of a set of literary phenomena. It has thus long been clear to Indologists that the two are in conversation with one another, but the nature of the conversation and its directionality have never been determined: Was Bhāmaha responding to Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa ? Was Daṇḍin making a rejoinder to Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra ? Were the two authors contemporaries who directly interacted with one another? Or was their interaction indirect and mediated through other texts that are no longer extant? Determining the nature of the interrelations between the two authors and their texts may teach us a great deal about the origins of Sanskrit poetics, the direction in which it developed during its formative period, and the way in which some of the disagreements between Daṇḍin and Bhāmaha metamorphosed in later time. By reviewing existing scholarship, considering new evidence, and taking a fresh look at some of the passages that have long stood at the center of this debate, this article sets out to answer the question of the texts’ relationship and relative chronology. (shrink)

Although the author attempts to define all his terms, his book is too full of unfamiliar categories to be of much help to the lay reader. For the Indologist, it may provide a useful catalogue of bases to be touched in a survey of Hindu theism. However, it fails to take sufficient account of Saiva Siddhanta and ignores Tantrism. In short, it is a sample of partisan Vaisnava scholarship.--C. P. S.

A short and well balanced study of the early history and position of the lower castes of India, as seen in the code of Manu. Tiwari is to be commended not only on her clarity of expression and excellent diction—"avis rara" in Indian scholarship—but also on her broadness of vision concerning such a touchy question. The author's view is that "class-war" originated and maintained the Hindu class system; she discards race and ritual impurity as the prime causes of the caste (...) structures, but fails to present or refute all the evidence to the contrary. This book has little of interest for the student of philosophy, but, should be of interest to Indologists.—L. O. G. (shrink)

The Fang Bian Xin Lun is a text on Buddhist logic which is thought to be the earliest one still to be extant. It appears in Chinese only (T1632). The great Italian indologist Giuseppe Tucci, believing that the text was originally a Sanskrit text, translated it into Sanskrit and gave it the title Upāyahṛdaya. The paper provides the historical background of the development of logic in Classical India up to the time of this text, summarizes its content and translates its (...) first section. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review of Stephen Phillips' Jewel of Reflection on the Truth about Epistemology:A Complete and Annotated Translation of the Tattva-cintā-maṇiMichael Williams (bio)Stephen Phillips presents a translation and commentary on Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya's Tattvacintāmaṇi, which is widely regarded as the foundational text of the Navya-Nyāya tradition. The importance of Gaṅgeśa's work to subsequent philosophy in India can hardly be overstated. In the centuries after his death, countless commentaries and dissertations were written (...) on the Tattvacintāmaṇi by Nyāya scholars in Mithila and Bengal. Recent [End Page 510] scholarship (David and Duquette 2021) has highlighted how the work of the Navya-Naiyāyikas came to influence intellectuals from all over the Indian subcontinent. The theories of Gaṅgeśa and his followers shaped discussions in diverse scientific fields, including Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā, grammatical science, and literary theory.Despite its pervasive impact on Indian thought, Navya-Nyāya has frequently been portrayed in a negative light by scholars. The Indologist Arthur Berriedale Keith (1921, p. 35) described the commentaries on Gaṅgeśa's work as "a vast mass of perverted ingenuity worthy of the most flourishing days of mediaeval scholasticism." Meanwhile, Swami Vivekananda bemoaned the "never ending Avacchinnas and Avacchedakas" of Navya-Nyāya prose.1Jonardon Ganeri (2011) has discussed how these negative stereotypes reach back to the political agenda of the British colonial government in India during the nineteenth century, and his work highlights the vitality and diversity of the discussion of metaphysics in the Bengali tradition of Navya-Nyāya. Nevertheless, there is no denying that much Navya-Nyāya work is extremely difficult to discuss and translate comprehensibly. Many scholars still think of Navya-Nyāya works as untranslatable, at least in the sense that their meaning could not be effectively communicated to a modern audience who are not already deeply familiar with the tradition. This would be tragic, given the potential of Navya-Nyāya philosophy to contribute to the growing cross-cultural conversation in philosophy.Phillips is the first scholar to translate the entire Tattvacintāmaṇi into another language. His work attempts to communicate the foundational text of the Navya-Nyāya tradition to a broad audience. In his introduction, Phillips says that his work aims to speak to analytic philosophers, Sanskritists, and "specialists whose interests span issues in contemporary philosophy and Gaṅgeśa's achievements" (2020, vol. 1, p. 1). Phillips worked with the late Ramanuja Tatacharya to read the Tattvacintāmaṇi's chapters on perception and inference. Tatacharya was recognized as one of the leading experts on Navya-Nyāya philosophy in the world during his lifetime, and Phillips' translation distils many of his insights into the text.Phillips' goal is to translate the Tattvacintāmaṇi into lucid English. He eschews what he terms the "error of literalism" (2020, 1:xvi), instead using idiomatic translations that draw on concepts from contemporary analytic philosophy. Unlike Daniel Ingalls (1951) and Cornelius Goekoop (1967), Phillips uses formalization in Property Predicate Logic comparatively rarely, deploying it selectively in contexts such as the discussion of the nature of pervasion (the Vyāptivāda) and the discussion of the "inferential undercutter" (the Upādhivāda), for instance. The introduction to the work is extremely clear and explains the translation using terms of modern analytic philosophy. Phillips presents a perspicuous introduction to the theory of inference, [End Page 511] which is necessary to understanding Gaṅgeśa's work, which constantly employs inferential arguments.Phillips' introductions to the individual chapters of the text are also very illuminating, and often contain original insights into the philosophy of the Tattvacintāmaṇi. For instance, his introduction to the Īśvaravāda argues, contra John Vattanky ([1989] 2011), that Gaṅgeśa himself was not entirely persuaded of the strength of the proofs for the existence of god (īśvara) that he puts forward in that chapter. Phillips argues that Gaṅgeśa may actually have sympathized to some extent with the Mīmāṃsā views he ultimately critiques there, detecting on Gaṅgeśa's part a "sympathy for certain atheistic... (shrink)

This is one of the best studies to date on the philosophy of emptiness, established by the Buddhist scholar Nägärjuna. It not only presents an exposition of emptiness, the lack of self-existent entities, but also gives the background in India at the time of the formulation of the Mädhyamika and analyzes the structures of religious apprehension in Indian thought. Streng finds three types of religious realization: mythic, intuitive, and dialectical. He clearly sees and demonstrates that the doctrine of emptiness is (...) not a teaching of an unqualified base of phenomena, and thus classifies this system as a dialectical structure. The second part is devoted to a study of the system itself; the third, to placing that system in the context of Indian religious thought; the fourth, to relating the doctrine of emptiness to the general problem of religious knowledge as a means for ultimate transformation. Thus, the book is by no means limited to Buddhologists or Indologists. The almost constant translation of Buddhist Sanskrit terms into English makes this work available to all interested in philosophy and religious thought. The appendix contains translations of the whole of the Mülamadhyamakakärikäs and of the Vigrahavyävartanï both by Nägärjuna. Because the texts are root or fundamental texts, and thus brief, the translations are not easily comprehensible; however, those parts can be skipped over as the principle being exemplified is the same in every instance. Because this book places the concept of emptiness in its proper perspective, distinguishing emptiness from an all-pervasive base out of which phenomena are produced, and yet appreciates the spiritual value of the doctrine, it is a must for all who wish to know more of the more profound aspects of Buddhist philosophy.--P. J. H. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the BuddhaA. J. NicholsonRoger-Pol Droit. The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 263.Roger-Pol Droit's recently translated study, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, is not a book about Buddhism per se. Rather, it is a rich and theoretically (...) sophisticated overview of the reception of Buddhism in Europe that deserves shelf space alongside Wilhelm Halbfass' India and Europe and Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance. But while some of the figures Droit covers may be familiar from these other studies in the history of orientalism, Droit's book has its own unique narrative thread. Specifically, Droit wishes to examine the once widespread notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion, a religion that worships nothingness. His central thesis is that this conception of a nihilistic religion really wasn't about Buddhism at all, but "that Europe... was speaking only of herself." Droit sees in the cult of nothingness the subconscious expression of a crisis of foundations among nineteenth-century European intellectuals, as well as a "hidden laboratory for the theoretical development of European nihilism."Along the way to illustrating this thesis, Droit leads a masterful and extremely entertaining tour of the opinions of early Buddhologists and Eastward-looking philosophers, some of whom have seldom been documented elsewhere. He also provides an enormous bibliography of European writings on Buddhism from 1638 to 1890. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Buddha was often identified as one of many gods belonging to an inchoate and primitive world of mythical concordances. Thus, George Stanley Farber wrote in 1816 that "the primeval Buddha... is the same as Vishnu, or Shiva, or Osiris." Writers in this genre were especially fond of identifying the Buddha with the god Mercury. The sole reason, it seems, was simple linguistic confusion-the word for the planet Mercury in Sanskrit is budha, one letter short of buddha. Furthermore, the preeminent Indologist Sir William Jones posited the identity of the Norse god Woden and Buddha; this was later taken up by A. W. Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, and eventually influenced the publication of such unforgettable titles as Holmboe's Traces du Buddhisme en Norvège avant l'introduction du Christianisme. Jones elsewhere hinted that the Buddha might have been of Ethiopian, rather than Indian origin, and this set off another wave of speculation. To reconcile theories of a primordial god named Buddha with new evidence that the Buddha had been a man who had lived at a relatively recent date, for a short time a theory of two Buddhas emerged, first suggested by Antione Augustin Giorgi, and later taken up by Jones himself.Droit sees Hegel as the single figure most responsible for establishing the link between Buddhism and nothingness that endured in the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination. Droit painstakingly charts Hegel's changing attitudes toward Buddhism over the course of his lectures from 1822 to 1831. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Hegel's familiarity with all of the most recent secondary works on Buddhism, he had great difficulty in integrating Buddhism into his philosophical grand [End Page 577] narrative. But his most enduring interpretation of Buddhism came in 1827, when he asserted that for Buddhism, "Saintliness consists in man uniting himself with God, with nothingness, with the absolute in this destruction, in this silence.... Man must make himself nothing." Hegel did not get this idea from his contemporaries, but from an earlier stratum of writing on Buddhism, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. After this portrayal of Buddhism became prevalent in European philosophical circles, an extraordinary debate developed. The notion of a religion that worships nothingness was so contrary to common sense that it threatened the Enlightenment conviction that there existed a single, universal human nature. Jules Barthélmy Saint-Hilaire summed it up quite clearly: "In the presence of a phenomenon so curious and so deplorable... one might ask... if, in those climates where life is so horrific and nothingness is worshiped instead of God, human nature is... (shrink)

English summary: The Max Weber-Studienausgabe (MWS) renders Max Weber's works and speeches accessible to a large audience, using the complete and reliable Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (MWG) as its basis while deliberately dispensing with its editional apparatus. It has however been laid out in such a manner that the reader can easily fall back on the MWG.This is a critical edition of Max Weber's Hinduism and Buddhism, the second of Max Weber's studies on the Economic Ethics of World Religions which followed his (...) famous studies on the relationship between the Protestant ethic and sectarian Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism. This edition offers not only the original text but also an introduction, an editorial report and editorial comments and is thus indispensable for Indologists, for cultural anthropologists and for all those studying the history of various religions. German description: Die Max Weber-Studienausgabe (MWS) will die Schriften und Reden Max Webers auf der gesicherten Textgrundlage der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (MWG) allgemein zuganglich machen, unter Verzicht auf den editorischen Apparat. Doch ist sie so angelegt, dass dem Benutzer der Ruckgriff auf die MWG jederzeit moglich ist. Deshalb folgt die Studienausgabe in Textkonstitution und Anordnung der Texte durchgangig der MWG. Um dem Leser daruber hinaus das Aufsuchen von Fundstellen zu erleichtern, sind am Fuss jeder Seite die entsprechenden Seitenzahlen der MWG angegeben. Ausserdem wird auf die gangigen Ausgaben verwiesen, die bisher in der Sekundarliteratur gebrauchlich sind.Der vorliegende Band ist eine textkritische Edition des von Max Weber fur den zweiten Band der Gesammelten Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie uberarbeiteten zweiten Teils der unter dem Titel Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Vergleichende religionssoziologische Versuche vorgelegten bahnbrechenden kulturvergleichenden Studien. Hinduismus und Buddhismus erscheint hier erstmals in historisch-kritischer Edition. Dieses in der ganzen Welt, nicht zuletzt in Indien selbst, vielbeachtete Werk ist nicht nur wissenschafts- und methodologiegeschichtlich von grosser Bedeutung, sondern ist als beispielhafte Kulturanalyse Indiens nach wie vor ein Standardwerk zur indischen Religiositat, insbesondere zum Hinduismus und zum Buddhismus. Der Anhang bietet ausfuhrliche Informationen uber die Textgrundlage dieser Ausgabe und uber die Entstehung der Schriften. In einem Abschnitt Zur Textkonstitution werden die editorischen Grundsatze der MWG dargelegt und die fur die Studienausgabe notwendigen Erganzungen. Insbesondere wird mitgeteilt, wann und in welcher Weise Emendationen am Text vorgenommen wurden. Unter der Uberschrift Zur Entstehung und Uberlieferung der Texte berichten die Herausgeber uber die Entstehungsgeschichte der Texte und den zeit- und werkgeschichtlichen Kontext. Am Ende des Bandes folgen Verzeichnisse und Register. (shrink)