From: cco.caltech.edu!vidya (Vidyasankar Sundaresan)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Relevance and Irrelevance of various Indian philosophies
Date: 21 Jan 1993 23:11:53 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
NNTP-Posting-Host: scratchy.caltech.edu
Originator: vidya@scratchy

In article <1993Jan20.201740.23636@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>  
prh2s@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Patrick Ray Harrison) writes:
- In article <1993Jan20.153704.26220@cs.sfu.ca> mahajan@cs.sfu.ca (Sanjeev  
Mahajan) writes:
- >Whatever be
- >the philosophical import of the Vedaanta, it is clear that a philosophy  
that
- >condemns the material reality and hence scientific enquiry cannot
- >engender an environment conducive to progress of science. 
- >
- >An immediate question then presents itself. Why, if it 
- >was deleterious to scientific progress, did the Vedaanta become one of
- >the most dominant philosophies in India? A satisfactory answer to
- >this question requires a thorough study of social and economic factors
- >of the times when the philosophies such as the Vedaanta were taking
- >shape. For now, we will only observe that, by the end of the later
- >Vedic period or the Upanishadic period, the tyranny of the hierarchical
- >varnaashrama-dharma, with the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas at the top,
- >Vaishyas in the middle and the shoodras at the bottom, had already  
taken 
- >hold on the Indian mind. Manual labor being relegated to the shoodras,
- >the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas became what in modern terminology would
- >be called the leisure classes. It then became necessary for such
- >dominant and powerful classes to not only rationalize, but to glorify  
their
- >parasitic and leisurely existence. Naturally such glorification could
- >only come about by condemning manual labor as inferior (the smritis
- >clearly lay down a code wherein it is not legal for a Brahmin or a  
Kshatriya 
- >to do manual labor to earn a living). This could be easily achieved
- >if one could conjure up a grandiose philosophy which would deny the  
existence
- >of the material world, or at the very least dismiss it as an illusion
- >and attribute its existence to the `bhrama' on the part of an  
unenlightened
- >observer. Vedaanta is a philosophy that served this purpose adequately
- >and beautifully.
- 
- I should like first to respond to the second point--i.e., that Vedanta  
was an
- ideology formulated by the upper classes/castes to suppress the  
"workers"
- and keep them from recognizing and voicing their grievances.   
Considering
- the early history of Upanishadic religious renewal (paralleling and  
perhaps
- even fuelling the rise of Buddhism), it is hard to conclude that this
- philosophy was class-biased; on the contrary, the removal of the supreme
- religious experience from the hands of Brahmin priests and their rituals
- and the proclamation of the essential unity of all things in Brahman  
offered
- the possibility of the breakdown of class biases and caste restrictions.

Wrong on two counts. The Upanishadic revival was in the eighth century  
A.D. brought about mainly by Adi Sankara and his successors at the four  
monasteries he established. Buddhism flourished from the 5th cent. B.C. to  
roughly the eighth cent. A.D.. Sankara's main mission was in  
reconstructing the philosophy of the Upanishads and was directly opposed  
to Buddhistic philosophy on many points. We are talking of two different  
periods of history here. 

Secondly, even though philosophically it might have been possible to  
remove religious experience from the hands of Brahmin priests, practically  
that could have never been possible. Advaita philosophy, when translated  
into a religion makes spiritual and religious experience an extremely   
personal and individual one. Not every man is prepared to do that. In  
general people like to call themeslves religious so long as they observe  
external elements of religion such as church attendence etc. ( In Hinduism  
this translates as visits to temples, having a ceremony performed to mark  
occasions like marriages, child-birth etc.)  






  Of
- course this development was slow, and even now is far from complete, but  
when
- one considers the truly revolutionary, "grassroots" movement of early
- Buddhism, and the message of social equality preached by late  
19th-century
- Vedantists (especially the Samaj and Ramakrishna), it appears that  
Vedanta
- need not be an instrument of class oppression, that it may in fact offer
- a philosophy compatible with democratic and socialistic political  
movements.

Again, Buddhism is not Vedanta. 19th century leaders like Vivekananda and  
others tried to assimilate Buddhist precepts with Advaita Vedanta (which  
is only one type of Vedanta - there are other interpretations of Vedanta  
called Vishistadvaita (Ramanuja's school) and Dvaita (Madhva's school)). 

I do not agree with the use of the word oppression as used by Sanjeev. The  
dynamics of caste and class operated in very subtle ways in medieval  
India. The varnaasrama dharma should be interpreted based on its own terms  
- not in terms of what we view today as good or bad. In other words, that  
was a sociological model on which Indian society was based at one period  
of time. Do not take potshots at anything to do with it, just because of  
the present degradation of the caste system. Read the book 'The Religion  
of India' by the early 20th cent. sociologist Max Weber to understand what  
I mean. 


- (Note that I say "*need* not"--Vedanta could be used in the way Sanjeev 
- describes, but such a function is not so inevitable as I believe he  
would
- suggest, nor is the origin of Vedanta so indisputably linked to class
- oppression as he would imply.)
- 
- As for Sanjeev's first point--that Vedantic philosophy discourages  
scientific
- "progress"--I would again have to disagree.  Especially considering that 
- perhaps the most conspicuous and influential Vedantist of the past 100  
years,
- Swami Vivekananda, set before both his Eastern and Western disciples an  
agenda
- for incorporating Vedantic philosphy, yogic psychology, and Western  
physical
- science, I cannot see how one can make the claim that Vedanta is  
obscurantist
- with regard to scientific understanding.  


Sanjeev's statements are made based on a partial and incomplete  
understanding of what any brand of Vedanta says (probably no understanding  
at all, but I give him the benefit of the doubt). It was Buddhism which  
denied reality, not Vedanta. Dvaita Vedanta is the most 'realist',  
Vishistadvaita removes the conflict between mind and matter by the concept  
of Bhakti. You do not deny material reality when you choose to show  
devotion to God. Advaita separates out Absolute Reality and Relative  
Reality. The Absolute Reality is the Brahman in Which all things merge,  
but once you accept that, nothing stands in the way of scientific inquiry  
in the Relative Reality that we all live in. 

The propounders of the Indian philosophical systems were the first people  
in the world to lay the foundations of logic on firm footing. Their  
arguments are extremely analytical and no one can find fault with them.  
You may find fault with their assumptions or certain a priori statements  
they make without proof, but given those assumptions, they are extremely  
methodical in building up on them. That process closely parallels the  
scientific method as known in modern day science.  




Our chief problem may be not a
- division between Eastern philosophy and Western science, but rather an
- overly alacritous merger of the two (e.g., in books such as the _Tao of
- Physics_) that offers reductive, reified versions of both, and indeed  
keeps
- many people from progressing in their understanding of either one.  The  
fusion
- of quantum physics and the philosophical nonmaterialism of Vedanta,  
tempting
- though it may be as a supposed "validation" of spiritual truth, offers  
only
- one perspective on the relationship between subject and object, cause  
and
- effect, material and nonmaterial.  If all physics is reduced to quanta,  
or
- all Vedanta reduced to a doctrine about maya, we have then lost our view  
of
- a world of tangibility, a world of "brahman-with-form."  For both the
- scientist and the Vedantist, surely the interplay between formal and  
formless
- existence is the complete picture, the whole of which we are a part.   
And if
- this is the case, what barrier does Vedanta construct to our development  
in
- the scientific study of the material world?  May we not study effects as
- well as causes, superstructures as well as foundations?  Vedanta's  
message
- that the material world is illusory means that we ought not attach to it  
our
- happiness, our serenity, our sense of self-worth; it does not mean that  
we can
- not wonder at the material world, puzzle over it, test its depths, and  
seek
- to understand its motions.


Exactly. There is a story of Sankara about this illusion business,  
probably apocryphal, but it serves my purpose. This was a favourite of  
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. A king wanted to clear his doubts about the  
concept of the world being illusory. One day without warning, he set loose  
an elephant which had been provoked to madness, on the street where Adi  
Sankara was walking. Seeing the elephant behind him, Sankara quickly  
climbed up a nearby tree and let the elephant pass. When he came down, the  
king asked him, "Wasn't that elephant also illusory? In that case, why did  
you run to save your life?" Sankara replied, "The elephant, its madness,  
my body - all of these are products of illusion. But within the terms of  
this illusion, the madness of the elephant and my life are both relatively  
real. There is no illusion in my assuming that if I did not run for my  
life, I would have been killed by that elephant." 

Thus from the standpoint of Advaita, scientific enquiry may be on a lower  
level, as it makes its object of enquiry, not the Absolute Reality i.e.  
the Brahman, but Relative Reality. However nothing prevents one from  
indulging in scientific enquiry, in order to understand this Relaitve  
Reality. 
- 
- Although I have some problems with the representation of Vedanta in  
Sanjeev's
- post, I would like to express my agreement with his main point:  that it  
is
- a horrible thing when religion becomes (as it can, but not as it must) a  
tool
- of oppression, and an obstacle to making people's lives better.  Such  
religion
- is not religion at all, but merely secular ideology.  Perhaps the best  
thing
- we can do is harmonize spirituality and social reform; certainly I  
believe
- this a better option than the rejection of one in favor of the other.
- 

It has become fashionable to berate Vedanta and Vedantists for almost  
anything that has gone wrong with India today. It is not any philosophical  
system or religion which is at fault, but the practitioners of that  
system, i.e. the Indian people themselves. Before writing some slip-shod  
article to blame almost anything you can get hold of, try to understand  
what you are talking about. 

It is heartening that at least some people try to do that. But as in  
anything that Indians do, we probably require some foreigner to teach us  
about ourselves. We learn our Sanskrit from Max Mueller, our Vedas from  
English translations, our own languages and their rich literature from  
English translations of French/German/Russian translations done by other  
Europeans. 

Oh God, save us Indians from ourselves.

S.Vidyasankar




- Patrick
- Charlottesville, VA
- prh2s@faraday.clas.virginia.edu
-