Classical Indian: Epistemology and Metaphysics

Overview

Indian philosophy is usually grouped into orthodox schools, which accept the authority of the Veda, and heterodox schools, which do not. The orthodox group includes Nyaya, Vaisesika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva-Mimamsa, and Vedanta; the heterodox group includes Carvaka, Jainism, and Buddhism. This grouping is about Vedic authority, not about quality or about theism: Samkhya is orthodox yet largely non-theistic in its classical form, while Jainism and Buddhism have elaborate theologies and ethics of their own. A second useful division is by the theory of knowledge. Every school must answer three questions: what is a pramana, how many pramanas are there, and what makes a cognition valid. Validity is generally understood as correspondence with the object together with practical success, and error is explained as a cognition that fails one of these tests. A third division is metaphysical: monism holds that only one reality exists, dualism holds that two irreducible realities exist, pluralism holds that many realities exist, and materialism holds that only matter exists. Keep these three divisions separate in answers. A school can be orthodox and dualist, like Samkhya; heterodox and pluralist, like Jainism; or orthodox and monist, like Advaita Vedanta. Confusing the divisions is the most common source of error in this unit. Argument in Indian philosophy proceeds by stating a thesis, giving a reason, and answering objections from rival schools, so examination answers should imitate that form: state the position, give its reasons, note the strongest objection, and say how the school replies.

Vedic and Upanishadic thought

The Vedic hymns praise a world of many gods, cosmic order, and ritual action, and they present rita as the order that holds nature, sacrifice, and moral life together. Over time the centre of interest shifts from the many gods to the single ground behind them. The famous hymn of creation asks what existed before existence itself and refuses an easy answer, and other hymns speak of one reality that the wise call by many names. This movement from polytheism through a unifying tendency to explicit monism is the background of Upanishadic thought. The Upanishads keep the language of sacrifice but turn it inward: the true sacrifice is knowledge, and the true offering is the self understood rightly. The two master concepts are Brahman and Atman. Brahman is the ultimate reality, the ground of the world, described sometimes positively as being, consciousness, and bliss, and sometimes negatively, as not this and not that, because every positive description risks limiting what is unlimited. Atman is the inner self, the witness that is present in waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, and that is not identical with the body, the senses, or the changing mind. The central Upanishadic teaching is that Atman is Brahman: the self at its deepest level is not a separate fragment but the very reality that grounds the world. The illustration of salt dissolved in water is used to make the point: the salt is present throughout though invisible, just as Brahman is present throughout the world though not seen as a separate object. Knowledge of this identity is liberation, because bondage is ignorance that mistakes the changing self for the true self. Karma and rebirth explain how ignorance perpetuates itself: actions driven by desire leave impressions that bind the self to further births, while knowledge cuts the root of desire. The Upanishads therefore combine metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics in one move: reality is one, the self is that reality, ignorance hides it, and knowledge frees. Later Vedanta develops this teaching in different directions, but every Vedanta school claims the Upanishads as its source, which is why the Upanishads are called the end of the Veda and the foundation of Vedanta.

Carvaka, Jainism, Buddhism

Carvaka, also called Lokayata, is the materialist challenge to the whole orthodox edifice. It accepts perception alone as a valid means of knowledge and rejects inference as a means of knowing anything beyond what is perceived, on the ground that no perceived connection can guarantee an unperceived conclusion. From this epistemology follows a stark metaphysics: only the four elements earth, water, fire, and air exist, consciousness is a product of matter organised in the body as intoxicating power arises from fermented ingredients, and there is no soul surviving death, no god, no karma, no rebirth, and no liberation beyond death itself. Ethics follows directly: since this life is all there is, the good is pleasure here and now, pursued sensibly rather than sacrificed for an imagined future life, and rituals for the dead are dismissed as inventions of priests for their own livelihood. The strength of Carvaka is its demand for evidence; its weakness, pressed by Nyaya, is that everyday life itself depends on inference, from smoke to fire and from past experience to future action, so rejecting inference entirely undermines the very prudence Carvaka recommends. Jainism answers materialism with a thorough pluralism and a distinctive epistemology. Reality consists of many souls and many non-soul substances, including matter, motion, rest, space, and time. Every soul is in itself omniscient, but karmic matter clogs it and limits knowledge, so ordinary knowledge is partial. Jain epistemology therefore distinguishes direct knowledge of the soul from indirect knowledge through the senses and the mind, and it grades knowledge from ordinary sense knowledge through scriptural knowledge to clairvoyance, telepathy, and omniscience. Its most original contribution is the doctrine of many-sidedness: reality has many aspects, and any single statement captures only one aspect under a particular standpoint. Hence the doctrine of conditional predication, which qualifies every claim with perhaps, meaning from a certain standpoint. Jain ethics is the ethics of non-violence carried to its limit, with the three jewels of right faith, right knowledge, and right conduct, and the five vows of non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, celibacy, and non-possession, observed strictly by monks and in modified form by householders. Buddhism rejects both the eternal soul of Jainism and the materialism of Carvaka. Its marks of existence are impermanence, suffering, and non-self: everything conditioned arises and passes, clinging to what passes produces suffering, and there is no permanent self behind the changing aggregates. The five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness exhaust the person, and the person is a process, not a substance. Dependent origination explains how suffering arises through a chain of conditions beginning in ignorance, and the four noble truths diagnose suffering, name craving as its cause, promise its cessation, and prescribe the eightfold path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Buddhist epistemology, developed later by Dignaga and Dharmakirti, accepts perception and inference as the two valid means of knowledge, defines perception as free from conceptual construction, and treats inference as grounded in invariable concomitance. The momentariness doctrine holds that everything lasts only a moment, which raises the famous problem of how memory and moral responsibility are possible without a continuing self, answered by the continuity of the causal series rather than by a substance.

Nyaya and Vaisesika

Nyaya is the school of logic and epistemology, and Vaisesika is the school of categories and atomism; they are traditionally studied together because Nyaya supplies the method and Vaisesika supplies the ontology. Nyaya accepts four pramanas: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. Perception is defined as cognition arising from contact between sense and object, and it is divided into ordinary perception, where the sense actually contacts the object, and extraordinary perception, where contact is mediated, as in perceiving a whole class through a common property or perceiving all instances through knowledge of a universal. Inference is the knowledge of something unperceived through a mark connected with it, and its classical form has five members: the thesis, the reason, the example, the application, and the conclusion, illustrated by inferring fire on a hill from smoke, as in a kitchen. The heart of inference is invariable concomitance, the relation that wherever the reason is present the thing to be proved is present, and Nyaya analyses the fallacies that arise when this relation fails: the erratic reason found with and without the conclusion, the contradictory reason proving the opposite, the counterbalanced reason matched by an equal reason for the opposite, the unproved reason whose subject or concomitance is not established, and the mistimed reason whose conclusion is already refuted. Comparison is knowledge of a new object through similarity with a known one, as when a person who knows a cow recognises a wild ox as similar to a cow; testimony is knowledge from a trustworthy speaker, with scripture as the highest testimony on matters beyond the senses. Vaisesika lists the categories of reality: substance, quality, action, generality, particularity, inherence, and later non-being. Substances are nine: earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, space, self, and mind, with the first four composed of eternal atoms. Atoms are partless, invisible, and eternal, and they combine into pairs, then triads, and then perceptible objects; the qualities of the composite, such as colour and taste, arise from the qualities of the atoms, though Vaisesika debates exactly how. Causation is analysed into inherent cause, the substance in which the effect inheres; non-inherent cause, the quality or conjunction that helps produce it; and efficient cause, the agent or instrument. Liberation in Nyaya-Vaisesika is the complete cessation of suffering through right knowledge of the categories, which stops the cycle of birth by removing the false knowledge that produces desire and action. God is admitted by later Nyaya as the efficient cause of the world, who arranges atoms and dispenses the fruits of karma, but God is not the material cause, since atoms and souls are eternal and independent.

Samkhya and Yoga

Samkhya is a dualist realism: two ultimate realities exist, purusha and prakriti, and neither can be reduced to the other. Purusha is pure consciousness, inactive, unchanging, plural in number, and a mere witness. Prakriti is the material ground of the world, active, changing, single, and composed of three strands or gunas: sattva, lightness and clarity; rajas, activity and passion; and tamas, heaviness and obscurity. In the unevolved state the gunas are in equilibrium, and evolution begins when that equilibrium is disturbed in the proximity of purusha, though purusha itself does nothing. Evolution proceeds through a definite order: from prakriti comes intellect, from intellect comes ego, from ego come the mind, the five sense organs, the five organs of action, and the five subtle elements, and from the subtle elements come the five gross elements. The world we experience is thus a transformation of prakriti, and Samkhya causation is the theory of pre-existent effect: the effect already exists in the cause in potential form, as oil exists in the seed and the pot exists in the clay, so causation is manifestation rather than creation from nothing. Knowledge in Samkhya comes through perception, inference, and testimony, and liberation is the discriminating knowledge that purusha is distinct from prakriti. The classic illustrations are the blind and the lame: prakriti is blind activity and purusha is lame vision, and together, like the lame man carried by the blind man, they produce the world, until purusha sees that it was never truly bound. Yoga accepts Samkhya metaphysics and adds God as a special purusha untouched by afflictions, actions, and their fruits, and, more importantly, adds a practical discipline for realising the distinction. Yoga defines itself as the cessation of the modifications of the mind, and it prescribes the eight limbs: restraint, observance, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and absorption. The afflictions to be removed are ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. Through sustained practice and detachment, the mind becomes still, the seer abides in its own nature, and the purusha is isolated from prakriti, which is liberation. The difference between the schools is therefore practical rather than metaphysical: Samkhya liberates by knowledge alone, while Yoga liberates by knowledge disciplined through practice, and Yoga theism is optional to the system in the sense that liberation does not depend on divine grace.

Purva-Mimamsa and Vedanta

Purva-Mimamsa, the earlier inquiry, is the philosophy of ritual and Vedic interpretation. It defends the eternal, authorless Veda against the charge that scripture is a human invention, argues that words have an eternal connection with their meanings, and holds that the Veda is the sole authority on dharma, which cannot be known by perception or inference. Its epistemology is the most generous in the tradition: it accepts perception, inference, comparison, testimony, postulation, and non-apprehension, where postulation explains a fact by assuming what must be true, as when a person known to be alive but not at home is postulated to be outside, and non-apprehension is the knowledge of absence, as in knowing there is no pot on a bare table. Its theory of truth is intrinsic: a cognition is valid in itself unless a defect is found, so validity is the default and error needs explanation, whereas Nyaya treats validity as established by successful action. Its theory of error explains mistakes like seeing silver in a shell as the non-apprehension of the difference between the presented silver and the remembered silver. Metaphysically Mimamsa is a pluralist realism: souls, matter, and gods of the ritual are all real, the world is eternal, and liberation is the cessation of suffering through the exhaustion of karma, achieved partly by obligatory duties and by refraining from forbidden acts, though its emphasis falls on dharma as duty rather than on liberation as an experience. Vedanta, the later inquiry, takes the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra, and the Bhagavad Gita as its three sources and asks what Brahman is and how the self relates to it. Advaita, taught by Shankara, answers that Brahman alone is real, the world is appearance superimposed on Brahman through ignorance, and the individual self is identical with Brahman; liberation is the knowledge that dispels the superimposition, illustrated by the rope mistaken for a snake, where the snake was never real and knowledge does not destroy anything but reveals what was always there. Advaita distinguishes three levels of reality: the absolutely real Brahman, the empirically real world of practice, and the illusory object of a dream or mistake, which is why the world can be both useful and ultimately unreal. Visishtadvaita, taught by Ramanuja, answers that Brahman is real, the world and souls are real, and they are related as body to soul: Brahman is the inner controller of a world that is its body, qualified by sentient and non-sentient modes, and liberation is loving devotion and surrender that bring the soul to dwell with God without losing its distinctness. Dvaita, taught by Madhva, answers that God, souls, and matter are eternally and irreducibly distinct, that difference itself is real in five forms, and that liberation is nearness to God through devotion, with souls differing eternally in capacity. The three schools thus agree on the authority of the Upanishads and disagree on whether reality is one without difference, one qualified by difference, or irreducibly many, and examination questions almost always ask for exactly that comparison.

Pramanas accepted by the main schools

Three Vedanta answers to the relation of self and Brahman