Indian Mythology and Philosophy

When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest. —Chandogya Upanishad

Sitting down with the Bhagavad Gita at the age of sixteen opened many new channels in my mind. Ever since, for the past thirty years, I have been searching for a book on Indian thought that ties it all up, completely and succinctly. Write the book you want to read, they say—and this, here, is it.

Indian thought is complex and contradictory, making it hard to research and write about. There is a staggering amount of material to sift through. There are not one but four Vedas, each with four layers, and, within each layer, several commentaries written over several centuries. The Mahabharata, the longest poem in the world, has six times as many lines as the Bible. And then there are the Vedangas, the Shastras, the Puranas, the Tantras, and the extensive literature of the philosophical schools… Almost every position, including materialism and hedonism, has been defended by someone at some time.

Indian philosophy, unlike its Greek counterpart, is usually pursued within a religious context, with no clear divide between philosophy and theology. The central problem is the nature of the Self, or Atman, and its relation to the Absolute, or Brahman. On this basis, Indian philosophy is divided into schools, or darshanas (‘visions’), rather than into branches such as epistemology and metaphysics. That said, Hinduism is a lot looser than the Abrahamic religions, with no founding prophet, no single scripture, no central authority, no core doctrine or code of conduct, and no clear concept of God. Hindus might coherently think of themselves as monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, deists, agnostics, or anything in between. India is a world unto itself: as a religion, Hinduism developed more as a negative concept of contradistinction, and it might be said that Hindus are only Hindus insofar as they are not anything else.

The Buddha explicitly rejected a creator God, yet Buddhism is counted as the fourth largest world religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—suggesting that the hallmark of religion is not a belief in a creator God, or any god, but a belief in the conservation of values, that is, in something like karma, about which the Indian religions, especially Jainism, have a great deal to say. Karma is the greatest constant in Indian thought, lending a family resemblance to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi, for one, regarded Buddhism and Jainism as traditions of Hinduism, which has adaptively assimilated the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, after Rama and Krishna. In Hindu thought, the universe has a moral order that is independent of the gods, who are less than omnipotent. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra, the king of the gods, is made to wait 101 years before being told the secret to the self—not a bad deal, considering. Towards the end of the Mahabharata, Krishna is killed by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer.

Hindu cosmology is on a colossal scale. The universe contains not one world but thousands of millions. According to the Puranas, Vishnu’s ten avatars span a cyclic age, or maha yuga, which is 4.32 million years long. A thousand such cycles amount to a single day of Brahma, or kalpa, which is 4.32 billion years long. At the dawn of each kalpa, Brahma re-emerges from a lotus that has stemmed from the navel of Vishnu. A god lives for an entire kalpa but does not survive its dissolution.

Hinduism has been called Sanatana Dharma, ‘Eternal Order’, without beginning or end. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it arose out of a long process of evolution that began in pre-literate mythical-ritualistic-sacrificial times. From the first Upanishads (c. 800-600 BCE), the Vedic religion became much more introspective-speculative-philosophical, with a monkish, but still elitist, emphasis on renunciation and liberation that, not coincidentally, matched with Buddhism and Jainism. In the Bhagavad Gita, composed several centuries later, Krishna makes a strong case for devotional theism, which is the form assumed by modern, popular Hinduism—epitomized in the West by the Hare Krishnas.

Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels, and eager to point them out. One is tempted to ask: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?

For all the similarities, the Indian way is another way of doing philosophy and arriving at the same insoluble problems, like the problem of evil and the problem of free will. The Indian way is another way of being human, another way of being alive, and a great complement to the Greek or Western way.

I say: elephants as well as horses for the armoury of the mind.

A fascinating, in-depth history … Burton draws from a variety of resources to craft a rich, multi-layered picture of India. —The BookLife Prize

About the book cover

The Sanskrit ligature on the book cover stands for the sacred sound Om, which may be chanted before a mantra or during meditation. It is often found at the beginning and end of sacred Hindu texts, and has many names, including the pranava [‘fore-sound’] and udgitha [‘chant’, ‘cosmic song’].

In Indian thought, from the earliest times, there is this notion that the word abstracts from the object, and that Brahman or God, being the ultimate abstraction, abstracts from the word. Language is, therefore, the link between man and God.

Like the Egyptians, the people of the Vedas believed that the word had a magical power which complemented its meaning—a view of language that we still retain when we speak of ‘spelling’ a word. Even away from the sacrificial fire, at work or at home, or in love, words have no effect (or some other effect) if they are not the right ones.

If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

All day, every day, we are casting spells without even knowing it, abusing the word and weighing down our souls.

By the time of the earliest Upanishads, Om had become the quintessential word: a cosmic sound and mantra that invoked consciousness, reality, and Brahman or Oneness.

In the Mundaka Upanishad, Om is compared to an archer’s bow, by which Atman (the Self) is able to reach its target of Brahman. Only by the focused mind or undistracted person is Brahman to be penetrated.

The Ancient Wisdom series

The best, most beautiful, and most powerful ideas of the Classical World.

The first three books in the Ancient Wisdom series survey a thousand years of Western intellectual history, from the rise of the Greek city states to the peak height of the Roman Empire. This uniquely fertile period, which encompasses the Golden Age of Athens, began in mystical, mythological thought, and culminated in the hyper-rational, hyper-practical philosophy of the Stoics.

The incipient Christian religion absorbed and adapted, and for a long time occulted, many ancient doctrines, which is why, despite their remoteness, they can seem so strangely familiar. In the late Middle Ages, the rediscovery of Plato fuelled the humanistic Renaissance, which pushed back against the Church.

The Renaissance was a time of great hope and optimism, which, in many ways, proved premature. Faith provides a compelling reason to live, and a compelling reason to be good, which, for better or worse, many people have lost. For all our progress in science, technology, and education, more than one in five adults are now suffering from some form of depression. It’s almost as if we’ve come full circle, minus the philosophy.

Might it then be time to look afresh at these ancient ideas and find in them a happier way of living? Might it be time, in other words, for a new Renaissance?