HINDUISM

A striking question emerges in relation to Hinduism in the context of philosophical issues in world religions: that whether Hindu philosophy can bring anything to the table itself becomes a philosophical issue. For it has been denied by some leading western thinkers that Hindu philosophy quali es as philosophy, and this itself raises a philosophical issue in the context of world religions which may be articulated as follows: ‘Is Hindu mathematics “mathematics,” is Sanskrit grammar, vyaˉkaran

˙ a,

grammar? Here Rorty would concede the point of any such comparison, for in these disciplines all are agreed about the point of inquiry’ (Mohanty 1993: 318). But Rorty would not concede this point in relation to Hindu philosophy because ‘Indian philosophy is so utterly different from Western that we should not call it “philosophy” ’ (ibid.). The implication is that Hindu philosophy never liberated itself from myth and theology the way western philosophy was able to. This is not quite correct because aˉnvıˉks

˙ ikıˉ, as understood in the Arthasˉaˉstra, clearly involves philosophical inquiry in

the sense that ‘it is pramaˉn ˙ air arthaprakaˉs´anam, examination by means of pramaˉn

˙ as of

all such objects as are known by perception and scriptures’ (ibid.: 317). A similar objection is raised by Heidegger, whose position is summed up by J. L. Mehta as follows: ‘Heidegger agrees with Hegel that “philosophy” is in essence GreekWestern, asserting that there is no other, neither Chinese nor Indian, that the phrase “Western-European philosophy” is in truth a tautology’ (in Mohanty 1993: 319). Additionally, ‘Heidegger believed that with the end of modernity, philosophy has come to an end’ (ibid.: 319). It is helpful to remember here that ‘Heidegger, in an attempt to think about the totality of Western thought, characterizes it as metaphysical beginning with Plato and culminating in Nietzsche – a tradition which has led, in Heidegger’s view, to technology as a way of will to power, of objectifying and calculative thinking’ (ibid.) which is denied to Indian thought. However, this overlooks the obvious fact that ‘if Western philosophical thought has operated with the subjectobject distinction, so has a large segment of Indian thought’ (ibid.: 320). This controversy raises two interesting philosophical issues in the study of world religions. The rst is to draw attention to the fact that although philosophy as a discipline may be associated with critical rationality, ‘a system of philosophy has not merely

to put forward a theory of reality, of man and his relations in the world, of experience and cognition, it has also to ground, validate and legitimize its theory. Philosophers have never agreed as to the norms, the criteria and the sources of such validation’ (Mohanty 1993: 327, emphasis added). This point will become clearer in the latter part of this essay. The second is to draw attention to what have been called the ‘relativist’ and ‘essentialist’ positions. In the usage of these terms in the present context, the ‘relativist’ position implies that two philosophical systems may be so radically different as to be incommensurable, while the ‘essentialist’ position implies that all of them might well constitute essentially the same sort of enterprise. J. N. Mohanty argues that both positions are mistaken in the context of the comparison of Indian and western thought. He believes that ‘there are enough similarities between Indian dars´anas and the Western philosophies to justify translating dars´ana as philosophy – enough differences erupting precisely where similarities rst showed themselves to justify talk of Indian philosophy’ (1993: 330). Whether Indian – or for that matter – Hindu philosophy is philosophy or not thus emerges as a key philosophical issue in itself, compelling us to de ne the term philosophy itself, this illustrates the problem of comparison both in world religions in particular and in phenomena in general. There is now a manifest tendency in certain circles to include the discussion of Hindu thought on philosophical issues concerned with religion and we shall now review the situation in the light of this development (Hick 1990: chs 9 and 11).