Three Conceptions of Indian Philosophy
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Abstract
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY has been more an antiquarian's interest, a study of something dead and gone, a preserve of the Indologist, something relevant only to the student of ancient India, its thought and its culture. It hardly forms a part of the philosophical climate of today--no, not even in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle form a part--and this not even in India, where, at least, it may legitimately be expected to be so. The fault for all this lies squarely on the shoulders of all those who have written on the subject and tried to create an impression that Indian philosophy is not philosophy proper, but something else--something which they regard as profounder and deeper, but certainly not the sort of thing which goes under that name today. If such be really the case, then philosophers, whether Indian or Western, are surely justified in ignoring it since its propounders have already proclaimed its irrelevance to their purposes. Indian philosophy, on the very first page of any book dealing with the subject, is proclaimed as something dealing with the final and ultimate liberation of the spirit or what is technically known as moksa. This, it should be remembered, is not, in the opinion of these authors, just one among the many things it deals with. Rather, in their opinion, it is the focal concern around which the whole of Indian philosophy is woven and in the light of which alone it achieves its distinctive sense and uniqueness in contrast with the other philosophical traditions. Even more than this, the view openly contends that it is only in this perspective that Indian philosophy makes any sense at all. This is a view of Indian philosophy which is widely shared by experts and laymen alike. It is treated as axiomatic by almost all who write on the subject. It seems to require no proof for its establishment. Prima facie, it should strike us as a great problem to be solved as to how all the varied problems which Indian philosophy has dealt with in its age-long past are concerned with or related to the single issue of spiritual liberation which is supposed, by common consent, to be its central concern. However, it does not seem to strike anybody as a problem at all. Each writer, after making the claim on the first page or in the first chapter, goes merrily along forgetting about it and writes of other