Introduction to South Asian Philosophy

Did you ever teach an Introduction to South Asian Philosophy? Did you focus on what your (Euro-American) students expected to be part of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics…) or did you manage to convince them that Vyākaraṇa, etc. should be part of Philosophy?
The timeline below is my tentative proposal, please feel free to compare it with yours.

Objectives: Familiarise students with a tradition of philosophy they may have ignored so far. Use the chance to make them aware of their prejudices about “Philosophy” and to encourage them to rethink familiar categories such as “Philosophy of Language”, “Ethics”, “Religion”, etc.

Evaluation: Participation in class (questions, lively engagement): 20%. Weekly assignments (2 questions to be answered shortly at the beginning of each class): 25%. Written summary of an additional philosophical conference one has listened to during the semester: 5%. Two papers during the semester (topics to be agreed upon with me): 25% + 25%.

Week 1: 1.What do we mean by “South Asian Philosophy”? Where was it composed? In which languages? By which kind of people? Is there a shared kernel for it? Reading: “Introduction” in Perrett, Introduction to Indian Philosophy and “Introduction” in Ganeri, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy.
2. History of South Asian philosophy: six schools or many more? Reading: Wilhelm Halbfass, “Darśana, anvīkṣikī, philosophy” in his India and Europe.
Week 2: 3. Form of South Asian philosophy: Commentaries and reuse. Reading: “Introduction”, in Elisa Freschi, The Reuse of Texts in Indian Philosophy and Jonardon Ganeri, “Sanskrit Philosophical Commentary”, Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
4. Form of South Asian philosophy: Dialectics and Argumentation style. Reading: B.K. Matilal, “Debate and Dialectic in Ancient India”, in Philosophical Essays. Professor Anantalal Thakur Felicitation Volume.
Week 3: 5. What is present and what is absent in South Asian philosophy, the case of ethics. Reading: B.K. Matilal, Epics and Ethics.
6. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Epistemology and the instruments of knowledge. Reading: Definition of instrument of knowledge from Māmameyodaya of Nārāyaṇa. An Elementary Treatise on the Mīmāṃsā.
Week 4: 7. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Epistemology, common experience and justification. Reading: John Taber, “What did Kumārila Bhaṭṭa mean by svataḥ prāmāṇya?”
Week 5: 8. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Epistemology of testimony. Reading: A. Chakrabarti, “Introduction” in B.K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti, Knowing from words: Western and Indian philosophical analysis of understanding and testimony.
Week 6: 9. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Logic. Reading: Frits Staal, “Indian Logic” in The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Week 7: 10. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Philosophy of Language and the problem of the signifier. Reading: K. Kunjunni Raja, Indian Theories of Meaning.
11. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Philosophy of Language and the problem of the signified. Reading: E. Freschi and A. Keidan, “Understanding a philosophical text: a multi-disciplinary approach to the problem of “meaning” in Jayanta’s Nyayamañjarī, book 5″, in P. McAllister (ed.), Jayanta on Buddhist Nominalism.
Week 8: 12. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Philosophy of Language and aesthetics. Reading: Lawrence McCrea, The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir.
Week 9: 13. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Philosophy of Religion and rational theology. George Chemparathy, An Indian rational theology: Introduction to Udayana’s Nyāyakusumañjali.
Week 10: 14. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Philosophy of Religion and atheism. Reading: Parimal Patil, Against a Hindu God.
Week 11: 15. Selected topics in South Asian Philosophy: Ontology and Metaphysics. Reading: Ch. Ram-Prasad, Divine Self, Human Self. The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries.
Week 12: 16. Selected topics in South Asian philosophy: Contemporary Indian Philosophy. Readings: Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield “Introduction”, in their Minds without Fear, Adluri Raghuramaraju, Modern Frames and Premodern Themes in Indian Philosophy.

Selected Bibliography for final essays:
Christopher Bartley, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy
Erich Frauwallner, The Philosophy of Buddhism
Jonardon Ganeri (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (selected articles only)
J.N. Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy: An Introductory Text
Roy Perrett, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy
John Taber, Kumārila on Perception

Comments and discussions are welcome. Be sure you are making a point and contributing to the discussion.

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16 thoughts on “Introduction to South Asian Philosophy

  1. I have not had the pleasure of teaching a full introductory course on Indian philosophy in recent years, only a survey in two sessions as a part of our Einführung in die Indologie (‘Introduction to Indology’). There I focus on what I find significant, from a contemporary point of view that tries to do justice both to contemporary Indian interests (as I have perceived them during my years in India, in discussion with scholars in Karnataka) and to the interests of Western students. That includes philosophical anthropology, ethics, metaphysics, and the conceptually sometimes difficult relationship between what in the West are categorizingly considered philosophy and religion. What I ignore almost completely is dead history (e.g., most of the ṣaḍdarśanāni, like Pūrvamīmāṃsā and Vaiśeṣika). I only briefly touch upon socio-political issues (like the classification āstika vs. nāstika, which is philosophically practically meaningless) and concentrate on the three Vedāntas and Jainism. Thus I focus on what interests Indian thinkers today (as I know them) as alive and relevant in their heritage and at the same time try to show my students why the study of Indian philosophy is useful also for people outside India who have not purely historical interests.

    • Thank you, Robert, this is really interesting (although I cannot agree with your neglect of Pūrvamīmāṃsā, without which I think theistic Vedānta cannot be understood). How do your students react?

      • My students react as if they understand everything. 🙂 But this is also substantiated in the examinations.

        I believe theistic Vedānta (any Vedānta; why ‘theistic’?) can be understood perfectly well without Pūrvamīmāṃsā, just as one can master the French language perfectly without having learnt Latin: you focus on the contemporary, living functionality of ideas. I stand open to correction, but my impression is that what remains of Pūrvamīmāṃsā in Vedānta is little more than sophistry to reserve a niche for the Vedas (which became philosophically irrelevant already very, very long ago) and thereby preserve a place of special social privilege for brahmins, who alone have the right to teach the Vedas. Similarly, although some terminology and ideas have been taken over in the Vedāntas from Nyāya and Sāṅkhya, those systems are now extinct, have been totally superseded by Vedānta, and one need not study Sāṅkhya or Nyāya in order to understand Vedānta. The functionality of those ideas and terms becomes sufficiently clear in Vedāntic texts.

        Of course, if your main interest is historical and you wish to understand from where the whole of historically grown Vedānta got certain notions, then you have a lot of reading to do, including Pūrvamīmāṃsā. But if your questions are different (e.g., ‘why should I occupy myself with Indian philosophy at all?’, ‘what do I get out of it for my own life, here and now?’, or ‘what is going on in the thoughts of this cultured Indian person standing in front of me?’), then your time can be used far more efficiently. (I learnt French because I wanted to read French literature and speak with francophone persons; I did not need Latin.) And to come back to the students’ reactions: when in the past I spoke about the Pūrvamīmāṃsā theories about the permanence of sound, the apauruṣeyatva of the Vedas etc., I saw expressions of hilarious amusement on the faces of some, and expressions of intellectual horror on the faces of others. Pūrvamīmāṃsā creates the impression of Indian philosophy being a useless thing, cleverly backward and silly, and a total waste of time, and it turns students away.

        • Dear Robert,
          well, one of my methodological strongholds is that the text I am reading cannot be non-sensical. If it seems to be saying something absurd like “the Vedas have no author”, it must be because I am misunderstanding something. In this case, my misunderstanding is based on my prejudices about the necessity of an origin of the world and in general of a time zero in which everything must have originated. I find it philosophically very stimulating to force students to rething such basic prejudices.
          As for the second example you mentioned (“sound is perpetual”), the problem is only due to secondary sources, who missed that śabda in Mīmāṃsā does not mean the same as in Nyāya. No Mīmāṃsā thinker claimed that the physical phenomenon of the propagation of sound-waves from a given source will never cease.

          More in general, I find it fascinating that you are enabling your students to be in touch with debates which are relevant for today’s Indians.
          You are right that I am interested in questions connected with the history of South Asian philosophy. I am also interested in philosophical ideas themselves, so that I like engaging with ideas even if they are now absolutely out-of-fashion, since I like the chilling effect of the encounter with something unexpectedly far from one’s (pre)judices.

          • > More in general, I find it fascinating that you are enabling your students to be in touch with debates which are relevant for today’s Indians.

            After all, my position here in Munich is officially in ‘Modern Indology’, i.e., what is of current relevance ☺, although obviously it is difficult to understand the present without having understood certain earlier factors that have created the present.

            > You are right that I am interested in questions connected with the history of South Asian philosophy. I am also interested in philosophical ideas themselves, so that I like engaging with ideas even if they are now absolutely out-of-fashion, since I like the chilling effect of the encounter with something unexpectedly far from one’s (pre)judices.

            That is an endeavour that certainly is justified in its own way (a curiosity about ideas for their own sake, irrespective of what happened to those ideas later) – even though a modern ‘politically correct’ critic would probably say: a very ‘Eurocentric’ way, and a hyper-‘politically correct’ critic would go still further and say that you are ‘misappropriating the cultural heritage of an erstwhile colonized people in an Orientalist discourse that disenfranchises and disempowers the rightful bearers of a cultural tradition in an act of Western intellectual neo-colonial hegimonism that blatantly disregards the inner dynamism of other cultures’ (or something with a similar sound to that).

            Though I have little patience with the censorship of such critics (and I usually let them know that very soon), I do understand, through my many years of living in India, what the basis of such sentiments is. Much of the study of Indian philosophy abroad in effect leads to a kind of study of Indian culture without living Indian people, because it is prompted by non-Indian curiosities and fashions of the moment. Parallel discourses have arisen that hardly touch each other. There are good and not-so-good aspects to the matter. The 19th-century fashion of monism has led, on the one hand, to the thorough study of Advaita and certain Mahāyāna Buddhist systems, and to the relative neglect of just about everything else on the other.

            The choice for a continuation of such studies in the West in their traditionally grown form, or for a rather radical overhaul (as I advocate), will be based on considerations like the following:

            (a) Pro tradition: one has a base of historically grown knowledge on which one can continue. Certain curiosities are satisfied (this is not unimportant!).
            Contra tradition: to some extent we are inside a non-Indian cocoon.

            (b) Pro overhaul: we establish a genuine intellectual exchange with living cultural tradition(s) in India. We will deal with philosophical questions of contemporary significance.
            Contra overhaul: we must partly re-orient ourselves and focus on the cultivation of partly other language skills (the Sanskrit of later texts is stylistically often markedly different and is basically that which is used by scholars today; also, a working passive knowledge of relevant modern Indian languages is highly useful).

            I must admit that I was repeatedly quite annoyed with my (absent) revered academic teachers whenever I tried to join in a philosophical discussion in India with persons who were highly educated in a traditional way and I then discovered that the questions that are pursued in these circles are sometimes radically different from what is pursued overseas. I could not follow their discussions because (to give just one example of a shortcoming) I was taught that Indian philosophical history stops shortly after Śaṅkara because with Rāmānuja and Madhva bhakti creeps in, and thereby Indian philosophy stops being philosophical and becomes ‘sectarian’ and uninteresting. (This idea is actively and explicitly fostered by certain modern Advaitins.) I felt that I had to discard a lot of what I had learnt as a student, and that I had to seriously update myself in order to understand what the concerns of our contemporary colleagues in India are.

            Therefore, if I (emphasis on this ‘I’, with my personal interests, which I believe others share with me) were to design a comprehensive introductory course in Indian philosophy, I would de-emphasize what I consider the antiquarian interests of my early teachers and recognize, more than they did, today’s living traditions, also because these demonstrate the long-term potential of certain key ideas.

            > one of my methodological strongholds is that the text I am reading cannot be non-sensical. If it seems to be saying something absurd like “the Vedas have no author”, it must be because I am misunderstanding something. In this case, my misunderstanding is based on my prejudices about the necessity of an origin of the world and in general of a time zero in which everything must have originated.

            Perhaps I should mention that already centuries ago, Indian philosophers from other schools objected to such absurdities, without thinking of themselves as prejudiced? For instance, Jaina thinkers do not accept “the necessity of an origin of the world” (for them there is no sṛṣṭi and no pralaya), and nevertheless they (e.g., Bhāvasena, writing in the 13th c. CE) think that such Mīmāṃsaka ideas are absurd.

          • Dear Robert, I am answering here because we reached the max. level of depth in answers, but I am replying to your reply on February the 26, 12.40 pm.
            I agree with more of your position than I can disagree with, especially (you probably guessed it) with the fact that Indian Philosophy does not stop with Śaṅkara (in fact, with Śaṅkara the fun has just begun). I also agree that it is a worthwhile experience to engage with modern and contemporary philosophy in India and in South Asia in general and that it is good to learn for this purpose also Hindī, Tamil, Bengali… (you name it).

  2. Your paragraph on objectives is addressed to an audience in the third person plural. Students. I recommend changing that to the second person singular. Address your individual students directly and personally.

    • Thank you, Dominik! Please note that I am not going to use this syllabus (at least not in the immediate future). I am trying to imagine a plausible syllabus (and remotely hope it can be useful also for some readers).

  3. Thanks for sharing this, Elisa. I am impressed by the readings you selected for your students – you must have very dedicated and advanced students! I am surprised, though, that your syllabus is dominated by secondary literature. Are your students reading any original texts from South Asia? If not, why? I cannot imagine that a course introducing Greek philosophy, Kant, or analytic metaphysics would not focus on original texts from these authors or traditions. Why should that be different for South Asia? Are you afraid that students will lack a context that will make these texts unintelligible? As Martha Nussbaum argues, students often lack the context to Greek philosophy as well, and this does not prevent instructors to let them read Plato or Sophocles directly. I had students read Nāgārjuna, Praśastapāda, or Udyottakara without much context given to them, just as a philosophical exercise, and the experience was in no way less conclusive than their reading of Aristotle or Descartes. But I imagine that it depends on whether you want the course to have more of a philosophical or historical inclination.

    • Thank you, Pierre-Julien, I certainly agree on the importance of reading primary texts. The only limitation with primary texts is that there are not that many which are understandable on their own to philosophically inclined students (I mean, on the level of John’s translation of the Ślokavārttika, chapter on perception). Which ones worked for you? Or did you preper your own ones?

      • I completely agree that we are still lacking good translations, or even just translations of so many texts to be able to teach Indian philosophy at a level comparable to, say, Greek philosophy. But I think as a teacher (and not as a scholar doing research), you can make some compromises with translations – even when I teach Plato, I constantly criticize translations and suggest to students to change a sentence or a term. I have used different techniques for Indian philosophy: I have used existing translations that are dated but still much usable, such as Jha’s translations of the Nyāya-sūtra, Praśastapāda’s bhāṣya, or even some Mīmāṃsā texts he translated; we are also lucky to see translations being published that are getting more and more accurate (the recent translation of selected passages of the Nyāya-sūtra by Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips is opening up possibilities, which I am exploring presently in a seminar on metaphysics); I have also translated passages I needed for which I couldn’t find acceptable translations, such as excerpts from the Milinda-pañha (I so wish that this text would receive a new, elegant English translation!) or the Bodhisattva-bhūmi. Mainly my point is that I believe it is now possible to have students read English translations of original texts, more than, say, 15 years ago. And I can only hope it will get better and better. If we don’t give them access to these texts, even in translations we might deem not fully accurate, we are still shielding them from these authors and ideas, because I don’t think secondary literature is enabling a philosophical reflection in the same way and with the same strength as primary texts. Moreover, we perpetuate the inequality between “Western” and “non-Western” philosophies by providing students with primary and secondary texts respectively – I would never have fallen in love with Plato or Vasubandhu had I only read academic commentators (with apologies to academic commentators, and the confession that I am one as well).

        • Thank you, Pierre-Julien, I full-heartedly agree.
          That being said, I am happy there are now some good translations and I think that we scholars should invest more time in preparing translations and/or finalising the translations we prepare anyway.

  4. One of the most helpful pedagogical essays I’ve read is J.Z. Smith’s “Narratives into Problems” which, while it aims at a certain context (the US liberal arts system) and discipline (religious studies) has been helpful for me in thinking about what an intro course might do (link: http://www.bu.edu/cas/files/2011/12/Smith-College-Intro-Course.pdf)

    Against that background, I’ve designed classes that try to take relatively bite-sized chunks of literature, ensure there are clear conversation partners between texts, and make explicit the problems we’re asking (such as what counts as “philosophy” and why, what norms govern reasoning, etc.) Usually I try also to pair at least some small section of a primary text with historical context-setting, so that students are grappling with the thinkers themselves. This may mean just a few verses from Bhartṛhari, for instance, given its difficulty, but at least they are engaging with it.

    I also try to design clear “units” so students don’t get whiplash from shifting gears each week—and they gain a sense of accomplishment for a certain topic. As well, I really try to ensure that the first and last week are set aside for reflection on what’s to come and what has happened, rather than adding a new idea. This doesn’t answer the content question, but within this framework, one can introduce students to South Asian philosophy by choosing a few voices that represent different perspectives, and I hope, students will understand that the course is not comprehensive, but representative, and find places they wish to go further. So even if we only talk about a handful of thinkers and don’t include one from every traditional śāstra, they gain some sense of what it is to study South Asian philosophy, and how these questions are still alive today.

    Finally, on that point, I’ll note that I’ve taught Mīmāṃsā philosophy in several different courses now, and students have found it simultaneously challenging, perplexing, and, I think, invigorating. In one course, even before I had introduced them to its importance for later alaṃkāraśāstra, students got excited that it seemed applicable to literary interpretation. In another, we paired Kumārila on secondary meaning with some contemporary approaches to metaphor. I’ve had students make applications of vidhi to contexts as diverse as feminist philosophy (via speech act theory & pornography) and thinking about the structure of recipes in cookbooks (where certain portions are essentially filled by atideśa—I think they were inspired by Don Davis’ comparisons with tax law). So I am dubious that students will not be able to make connections with it just because it is very old or lacks a current living tradition.

    • many thanks for these very useful suggestions, Malcolm. And congratulations for the ability to engage with your students and their world!