Journey · 9 stops
Paths of Indian Thought
Self, suffering, logic and liberation: the schools of India in dispute with one another.
Stops
Stop 1 of 9: Yajnavalkya
The oldest Upanishads, composed around the 8th to 6th century BCE, turn from ritual to the question of the self. Yajnavalkya teaches at King Janaka’s court that the self (atman) is the unseen seer, “not this, not that”, and one with the ground of the world (brahman). He is questioned by the woman sage Gargi and teaches his wife Maitreyi – figures of the text rather than of record, but evidence that the first Indian debates were not reserved for men.
Stop 2 of 9: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
The Buddha, in the fifth century BCE, rejects the Upanishadic self. Everything is impermanent and conditioned; there is suffering, its origin in craving, its cessation and the path to it. What we call a self is a bundle of changing processes – no-self (anatta). Liberation needs neither Vedic ritual nor a Brahmin priest. His discourses founded a tradition that would carry Indian thought across Asia.
Stop 3 of 9: Mahavira
Mahavira, an older contemporary of the Buddha, teaches the Jain path: non-violence toward every living being, since every living being has a soul, and a theory of many-sidedness (anekantavada) – reality has infinite aspects, and every statement is true only from a standpoint, “in a certain sense”. Jain logic later systematised this as a sevenfold scheme of predication, an early, systematic attempt to think relativity of standpoint without scepticism.
Stop 4 of 9: Brihaspati (Carvaka)
Against all three stands the Carvaka or Lokayata school, traced to a legendary Brihaspati: only perception is a valid means of knowledge; there is no self beyond the body, no afterlife, no karma, and the Vedas are the work of cunning priests. Apart from one sceptical treatise, Jayarashi’s Tattvopaplavasimha, its doctrines survive mainly in the quotations of its opponents – a sign that it was taken seriously enough to need refuting.
Stop 5 of 9: Nagarjuna
Nagarjuna, around 150 CE, pushes the Buddha’s teaching to its logical limit. Everything arises in dependence on something else, so nothing has a nature of its own: all is empty (shunya) – including emptiness. His fourfold negation dismantles every position, his own included, and he distinguishes conventional from ultimate truth. The Madhyamaka he founded became the philosophical backbone of Mahayana Buddhism in Tibet and East Asia.
Stop 6 of 9: Akshapada Gautama
The realists answer with method. The Nyaya Sutra, attributed to Akshapada Gautama, lays down four valid means of knowledge – perception, inference, comparison, testimony – a five-step form of proof and rules that separate honest debate from mere wrangling. For a thousand years Hindu, Buddhist and Jain logicians, from Dignaga and Dharmakirti to Gangesha, argue on this shared ground about what an inference is and what perception delivers.
Stop 7 of 9: Adi Shankara
Shankara, in the eighth century, reads the Upanishads as one doctrine: brahman alone is real, the world of plurality is appearance (maya), and the self is nothing other than brahman – “that art thou”. His Advaita Vedanta absorbs Buddhist arguments while rejecting Buddhist conclusions; opponents called him a crypto-Buddhist. Ramanuja later objected that the self and God remain distinct in a devotional relation.
Stop 8 of 9: Lal Ded
In fourteenth-century Kashmir, the non-dual Shaivism of Abhinavagupta becomes song. Lal Ded, a wandering ascetic, speaks in short Kashmiri verses – among the oldest literature in the language: Shiva is within; whoever seeks him in temple, idol or pilgrimage has not understood; caste pride and learned pretension are mocked alike. Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris both claim her, and her vakhs show how philosophy lived outside the schools, in a woman’s voice.
Stop 9 of 9: B. R. Ambedkar
In the twentieth century the tradition is judged by one of those it excluded. B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family then branded “untouchable” and later chief architect of India’s constitution, argues that caste cannot be reformed but must be annihilated, and that the Hindu scriptures sanction it. In 1956 he and hundreds of thousands of followers convert to Buddhism, which he reads as an ethics of equality and reason – the Buddha’s rejection of Brahmin privilege, taken up as a politics.
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