Eastern Philosophy: The Greatest Thinkers and Sages from Ancient to Modern Times

By Kevin Burns

'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself.'

This Golden Rule of morality espoused by Confucius is just one of the many maxims that originate from Eastern philosophy. From Daoism to Islam, and from The Buddha to Zoroaster, the Eastern world contains some of the most ancient and influential approaches to philosophy that exist to date.

Spanning from 1200 BCE to the present day, this fascinating guide covers a wide breadth of Eastern thinkers including Muhammad, Lao Tzu and Gandhi. These individuals and their philosophical concepts are introduced in a lively and lucid narrative with fascinating biographical detail.

Packed with wisdom spanning thousands of years, Eastern Philosophy introduces some unique approaches to some of life's great questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789508512

Kevin Burns

Kevin Burns (1967-2022) was an architect and ruling elder at Highland Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He spent years teaching Bible survey courses to middle school students (and their parents).

Book preview

Part One

India

Indian Philosophy: Introduction

The defining characteristic of Indian thought, from whatever tradition, is its spirituality.

One of the oldest bodies of literature in human history is that of the Veda, dating from at least as far back as 1200 bce.¹ For this reason alone, Indian philosophy deserves special attention. There are four Vedas: Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda. The earliest and most important is the Rig Veda, while the Atharva Veda is thought to be much the latest. The Vedas were originally collections of hymns (the Mantras). At a later period when formal religion existed the religious precepts of the Brahmanas were appended. Still later, perhaps 1000–200 bce, the philosophical discussions of the Upanishads were also added. So each Veda now consists of these three sections. The Mantra section of the Vedas, known as Samhita has many affinities with the Avesta, the scripture of the Zorastrian religion of Persia (see chapter on Zoroaster). The two traditions share many of the same deities and seem to have been linked at some point. Until recently, it was thought that a tribe known as the Aryans had come from central Asia to both India and Persia, but much of the evidence for this has now been called into question. Present speculations now centre on the existence of a common language usually called Indo-European that seems to underlie most of the languages in a wide area stretching from Iceland to India. The suggestion is rather than there being a single tribe of Aryans (the word means ‘noble’ in Sanskrit), there may have been a much more broadly-based culture spread across the continent. Recent research has even suggested links to some Far Eastern languages, which if true, would radically alter our perception of ancient prehistory.

The Principal Nastika (Unorthodox) Philosophies

Buddhism

Charvaka

Jainism

The six astika (orthodox) Philosophies

Nyaya

Vaisheshika

Sankhya

Yoga

Mimamsa (or Purva-Mimamsa)

Vedanta (or Uttara-Mimamsa)

The traditional division in Indian philosophy is between those schools that are astika or orthodox and nastika or unorthodox. This division dates from the time of the principal challenges to the main tradition, around 600–200 bce. The orthodox schools are those that, nominally at least, accept the Veda as revelatory. However, the question is much more complex than this. Even today it is a commonplace in India that the Vedas are divinely revealed and contain all knowledge, but this does not mean that people actually read them. ‘Veda’ is not a term used with any great consistency, meaning anything from the actual books of the Veda to a kind of divine and transcendent revelatory power, as expressed by a modern thinker such as Vivekananda.

The only school that seriously bases itself on the earlier two parts of the Veda is the Purva-Mimamsa. After that, the Uttara-Mimamsa or, as it is more commonly known, the Vedanta is the most orthodox: Veda-anta means ‘the end of the Veda’, meaning that it bases itself on the Upanishads. However, even here there could not be said to be unanimity. The Upanishads represent a conscious turning away from the ritualized religion of the Brahmanas (the second part of the Veda) and, to a lesser extent, from the nature religion of the early Vedic hymns. So the Vedantin thinkers, the most prominent in India from the early part of the Christian era onwards, are not really interested in much of the Veda. Of the other four orthodox schools, Sankhya is atheistic or perhaps agnostic on the subject of God, and is mainly influenced by the Upanishads; Yoga is theistic but otherwise identical to Sankhya; Nyaya is concerned with logic; and Vaisheshika is a realist philosophy dealing with the nature of the physical world. Some of the philosophies and religions regarded as unorthodox are closer to certain orthodox systems than they are to each other. Buddhism has remarkable affinities to Vedanta despite their antagonism.

We can see from this that the traditional definition of orthodoxy is unsatisfactory. By the standards of other philosophical traditions, the Indian one is extraordinary for its flexibility and openness. In the Bhagavad Gita, which is one of the most significant and influential books in Indian culture, Krishna, speaking as an incarnation of God, says, ‘however men approach me, even so do I welcome them, for the path men take from every side is mine’. This should be understood not as a meek ecumenism, but as central to the whole Hindu system, in which the divine is regarded as infinitely beyond any human system of understanding form of devotion, or way of life. This leads to a broad tolerance and even encouragement of alternative approaches. As Hindu scholar K.M. Sen has said, ‘Hinduism is a great storehouse of all kinds of religious experiments’. The real issue in early Indian philosophy is not the acceptance of Veda as normative, but the authority of the Brahmin² caste. The groups that rejected the Brahmins and the caste system are those that came to be regarded as unorthodox: notably the materialist Charvakas, the Jains and the Buddhists. From around 1000 ce, certain orthodox sects began to work against the caste system, allowing lower-caste Hindus to study and participate fully, but this is a much later development.

We have now started to use the word ‘Hindu’, which is inevitable. In many ways it is an unsatisfactory label. It derives from the name of the river Sind or Indus and was the name given to the people who lived beyond that river by their Western neighbours. ‘Hindu’ is therefore cognate with ‘Indian’. As with many Eastern systems, it is hard to say where philosophy stops and religion begins. There are good reasons to question whether Hinduism is a religion at all: it has no founder, no fixed dogma, no consistent set of beliefs and there is no tradition of ‘conversion’ to Hinduism. The Buddha may have defined himself against the tradition, but his doctrines (almost all of which are to be found in the orthodox systems) are far more clear-cut than those he rejected. It would be wrong to regard the Hindu tradition as amorphous, however: rather it is impossible to formalize because of its rich variety. We should also distinguish between the Hindu religion or religions and the earlier belief system of Brahmanism that predominated until about 500 ce.

Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma: the main deities of Hindu tradition.

There seems no good reason to regard the classification of astika and nastika as final. The traditional narrative of India is that the unorthodox nastika systems are rebellions, breaking away from the great tradition. As we have seen, however, the tradition itself is impossible to define either positively or negatively. We speak of Hindu or Jain or Buddhist philosophy, but there is a strong case for grouping them together. India, though huge, is geographically single, being surrounded on three sides by ocean and on the fourth by the world’s highest mountain ranges. Most Indian philosophy is practical, offering means to an end, usually the liberation of the spirit from the wheel of life. The defining characteristic of Indian thought, from whatever tradition, is its spirituality. No other culture is so indefatigably concerned with the human spirit and its relation to the universal.

We will consider firstly the Upanishads and then the schools that emerged from the sixth century bce onwards, followed by the Bhagavad Gita, dated to around the fourth century bce. We will then look at the development of the two most important Indian schools in the Christian era, Buddhism and the Vedanta.

The Principal Upanishads

Various authors, 1000–200 bce

In considering Indian thinkers, it is essential to look first of all at the Upanishads, although their authors are not known. The Upanishads are a fundamental source for all the orthodox Indian systems of philosophy except the Mimamsa, and for many of the unorthodox as well, including Buddhism. According to Radhakrishnan, ‘later systems of philosophy display an almost pathetic anxiety to accommodate their doctrines to the views of the Upanishads, even if they cannot father them all on them.’ If the authors of the Upanishads had been concerned to identify themselves, they would feature prominently in this book. As it stands, some comments are essential.

The word Upanishad is variously derived but probably indicates, ‘sitting down near to’ a teacher. An Upanishad is a philosophical discussion, or a collection of philosophical discussions, often framed in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and a student or in a more dramatic form, such as a contest of sages or a dialogue between a boy and the god of death. One dialogue features a sage whose philosophy is exposed as shallow by the king he attempts to teach. Others are simple expositions without any dramatic context. There are 108 Upanishads, of which around ten to sixteen are regarded as essential. The earliest Upanishads, sometimes known as the ‘Vedic Upanishads’ because their authorship is thought to date from as early as the later parts of the Vedas, include the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads. The ‘Middle Upanishads’ such as the Isha and Katha date from around the same period as the Bhagavad Gita (c. 500–100 bce), while others such as the Mandukya have a slightly later date.

The greatest commentator on the Upanishads is undoubtedly Shankara. Some of his commentaries may be by later Shankaracharyas (Shankara Teachers) but regardless of this, the Advaita Vedanta philosophy which he derived from the Upanishads, following Badarayana and Gaudapada, came to be identified with that of the Upanishadic thinkers. Others within the broader Vedanta tradition such as Ramanuja or Madhva advanced their own theories of what the Upanishads said. An impartial reading shows that the Upanishads cannot be said to ‘really’ teach any of these alternative views. The attempt to foist a particular consistent philosophy on the Upanishads obscures rather than illuminates what they are: a magnificent set of speculations on the most fundamental questions facing humanity. A scientific analogy would be with the theories on the nature of light: scientists have found evidence to support its being particle-like as well as wave-like. Today, science can only say that it seems to be both a particle and a wave depending on one’s viewpoint, or that the nature of light is something else that has the qualities of both. Radhakrishnan’s comment is telling: the Upanishads ‘have the consistency of intuition rather than of logic’. Just as scientists must admit that the nature of light is not logical at the present level of understanding, so philosophers must admit that the different metaphysical theories in the Upanishads, though not entirely consistent, seem independently and intuitively valid. They are not without their deficiencies, but are of unquestionable greatness.

Historically, the earliest Upanishads were written after the earlier parts of the Vedas. The attitude to the Vedic hymns in the early Upanishads is, on the whole, respectful; their view of the Brahmanas, the formalized sacrificial religion of the Vedas, varies from one of respectful distance to one of amused contempt. On the whole, the Upanishadic thinkers wished to preserve the culture from which their philosophy grew, without necessarily respecting all of its rigid superstitions (an attitude not unlike that of Confucius in Chinese culture). The first six Upanishads are written in prose. Later Upanishads are written in verse and refer to the Gita and to the later philosophies such as Sankhya and Yoga.

The Vedas already contained the idea of a single reality, a divine funda­mental and transcendent principle that corresponds to the Brahman or Absolute of the Upanishads. A concept that seems to be original to the Upanishads is that of the Atman or self. The Vedic background already contained the idea of an objective God essence; the Upanishadic thinkers posited a subjective Man essence. Their reasoning is as follows: I am not the body, because the body is impermanent and subject to growth and decay; I am not the mind and its thoughts and feelings and dreams, because they, too, change and pass away; I am not the consciousness in deep sleep, because although there the perception is freed from duality and division, it comes to an end on waking; what I am is the witness of all that persists through all these states³. The Atman is thus the eternal subject: anything that is perceived is an object, and therefore external; only that which perceives all and is not itself perceived can be the true self, the Atman. Although negatively defined, the Atman is a positive being, enjoying all. It is not to be confused with the ego, or as the Sanskrit has it, ahankara, the artificial sense of individual self.

One of the most important questions in philosophy is that of the relation of man to God, or of the world to the transcendent. The Upanishads assert that the Atman is the Brahman: ‘sa Atmatvam tat asi’; ‘That self, you [the Brahman] are that’. If all that we had left of the Upanishads was this one idea we would acclaim the culture that produced it as one of the high water-marks of human history and long to know more. The identity of the individual and the universal is one of the few truly necessary ideas to be considered and either accepted or rejected in philosophy.

This being so, the next question is of what relation the absolute reality bears to the world. The most common modern view follows Shankara in maintaining that the world is an illusion or maya superimposed on the fundamental reality of the Brahman. This does not seem to be borne out by the Upanishads, which nowhere deny the reality of the cosmos. To say that the final reality is Brahman or Atman is not to say that the world is unreal. Illusionism or vivarta as a doctrine did not exist until the Madhyamika Buddhism of Nagarjuna, where it is called shunyata (emptiness). From there it was adopted by Vedantins from Gaudapada onwards. Illusionism is a possible interpretation of the Upanishads, but it could not be said to be essential to them. An alternative view is held by the followers of Ramanuja, who assert that the Upanishadic view is a qualified non-dualism, Vishishta-Advaita: the world has reality, but at a lower level than the Brahman. The Advaitins maintain that the ultimate reality is one and unchanging; the Vishishtadvaitains hold that the world is the expression of the ultimate. A sensible view seems to be that the Upanishadic thought contains both possibilities but sees no contradiction.

A second area of controversy between these two great views of the Upanishads is as to the nature of God. To Ramanuja, the God of the Upanishads is the Ishvara, the beloved Lord or Saguna Brahman. To Shankara it is the unqualified Nirguna Brahman, impersonal, absolute, beyond human definition, one without a second. Both schools regard the other’s ultimate to be a preparatory stage for theirs. Shankara’s approach is lofty, intellectual and superhuman; Ramanuja’s is warm and devotional. Again, it is not necessary for those without a partial interest to choose.

This brief examination of the ideas of the Upanishads could wrongly suggest that they are dry and intellectual. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Upanishads – especially the earlier prose Upanishads such as the great Brihadaranyaka – are playful, literary, entertaining and full of the joy of untrammelled philosophy. Many are cast as dialogues, anticipating the philosophic atmosphere hinted at in the Analects of Confucius or found in the Socratic dialogues. Indeed, recent research suggests that the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales and Parmenides developed their philosophies from ideas that had found their way to Greece from the Upanishadic thinkers of northwest India.

The great figures of the Upanishads are well aware that the ideas they deal with are audacious and improbable to ordinary awareness, and revel in the humour of the situation. One comes away from them with the exalted sense of an open society of passionate seekers, living in the real world but looking beyond it.

Charvaka

c. 600 bce

The name of the materialist philosopher Charvaka is doubtfully derived from a word meaning ‘sweet-tongued’, indicating perhaps the importance of pleasure, a key doctrine. Also known as Lokayata, perhaps best translated as ‘[the philosophy] of the world’ or ‘of the people’, Charvaka’s philosophy seems to have enjoyed wide popularity up until its disappearance in medieval times. This may have been more due to its convenience as an explanation for pragmatic self-interest than to a genuine interest in its philosophical value, just as Epicureanism was a pretext for hedonism in the West. His doctrines are said to be embodied in the lost Barhaspatya Sutras. Since no work of his and few works of his followers’ (known as Charvakas) are extant, much of what follows is speculative. It is often difficult to surmise what the original teaching of Charvaka was and what was a later addition. The only substantial systematic work of Charvaka philosophy comes from almost a millennium after Charvaka himself, the Tattvopaplavasimha of Jayarasi, which argues that nothing is real except the evidence of the senses and that therefore morality is an illusion. Again, this may be a corruption of Charvaka’s original doctrine. The philosophy is best known from its numerous refutations by other schools, both Hindu and Buddhist, who regarded it as the lowest form of philosophy and ethics. One aphorism of Charvaka became a well-known Hindu proverb and gives a flavour of the school: ‘Live well, as long as you live. Live well even by borrowing, for, once cremated, there is no return.’

‘Live well, as long as you live. Live well even by borrowing, for, once cremated, there is no return.’

Charvaka was unorthodox in that he rejected the authority of the Veda, as well as the existence of God, an afterlife and the self. Of the three pramanas or means of acquiring knowledge accepted by all the orthodox schools, he rejects both inference and revelation (or verbal testimony). Charvaka accepts only sensory perception, which in some ways anticipates the modern Empiricists, notably David Hume. The Charvaka argument against inference is as follows. The classical Indian example of inference is ‘Where there is smoke, there is fire. There is smoke in the mountain. Therefore there is fire in the mountain’. Charvaka says that unless we have seen all examples of smoke and fire, we cannot know that the initial premise is true. If we had seen all examples then we would have no need to infer the existence of fire in the mountain, because we had seen it. Thus inference is impossible or unnecessary. This foreshadows Western critiques of inference and inductive reasoning.

Charvaka’s attack on testimony is even stronger: if someone tells me something, I must infer a fact from his or her words, such as ‘I have seen fire’, that I have not myself perceived. However, not only is inference invalid, the words may themselves be a lie. Thus testimony is still more unreliable. This last example illustrates a limitation in the knowledge that can be gained through such a severely positivist outlook: we are prevented from accepting inference and testimony even hypothetically (‘let us assume that Kate was telling the truth when she said that the house is on fire’). Jayarasi in his Tattvopaplavasimha (delightfully translated as ‘The Lion That Devours All Categories’) takes this to its extreme. Not only are testimony and inference invalid, even sense perception is not totally reliable. Therefore we cannot conclusively know anything about the world. The Charvaka philosophy, because it makes no assumptions and appeals only to common sense, is therefore the only acceptable view.

A key problem for the Charvakas is the evident existence of consciousness. Their solution is similar to the theory of a ‘primeval soup’ from which life emerged, but they use the analogy of making alcoholic liquor. None of the ingredients are alcoholic but through mixing and the fermentation process, alcohol eventually appears. Thus, consciousness (and indeed life) is the result of the right combination of elemental substances. Only matter is real and inference is invalid so we cannot prove the existence of the self, God, afterlife or anything else not perceivable by the senses. Note the similarity of Charvaka’s views to those of present-day theorists of science, who face the difficulty of building an ethical system on materialist foundations. Charvaka, of course, has no such problem.

Bathers in the River Ganges during the Kumbha Mela Festival in Varanasi (formerly Benares). The festival takes place at the confluence of three sacred rivers (the Ganges, Yamuna and the now-invisible Sarasvati), the holiest of Hindu sites. Bathing here is said to purify the body and the soul and leave one free from the continuous cycle of birth and death.

Of all other philosophies, Charvaka’s particular distaste is reserved for the Mimamsa (see Jaimini), which is principally concerned with the Vedic rituals and way of life. The Vedas enjoined devotees to earn the approval of the gods and ancestors through the performance of rites, and to give gifts to the Brahmin priests. For the Charvakas this system is designed self-servingly by the Brahmins for their own ends. The Mimamsa philosophy was easy meat for the devouring lions of Charvaka, but the attacks it suffered were to strengthen it in its later, more rational re-emergence, for example in the work of Kumarila. This is just one example of the useful effect Charvaka was to have on other philosophies, compelling them to defend and improve their ideas against his ruthless opposition. As Radhakrishnan observes in Indian Philosophy, ‘When people begin to reflect with freedom from presuppositions and religious superstition they tend to the materialist belief, though deeper reflection takes them away from it’. For all its faults, the materialism of Charvaka is a natural and positive step away from the rigidity of ritualism.

Of the four traditional Hindu social values, Charvaka rejects dharma (duty) and moksha (liberation) because they are not based on the senses. Of the other two, Charvaka holds that the chief aim of life is kama (pleasure) and the chief means to that end is artha (wealth). The pleasures to be desired are eating, drinking, song and women. Any means towards these ends are acceptable so long as they are successful. The Charvaka system does attempt to rein in unfettered pleasure-seeking, because this leads rapidly to pains such as illness. As natural supporters of ‘might is right’, many of the Charvakas are said to have written Machiavellian handbooks for the education of rulers. An example is the Artha Shastra (Handbook of Profit) of Kautilya, written around 300 bce. As chief