ABSTRACT
The author of present work has a background of nearly forty years of teaching Indian philosophy to Indian students and of nearly twenty years of teaching Western students. The book attempts to overcome many of the difficulties which Western students encounter in studying Indian philosophy and also to remove many misunderstanding about it, such as that it is all pure mysticism without logic, that it is based upon some supernatural intuition, that it is only or mainly the philosophy of the worship of Śakti or Mother Goddess in the form of sexual energy, and that it has no academic side. The book tries to convey — within the scope of an elementary work which it is — that Indian philosophy has as intricate and complex metaphysical and epistemological theories as many others and that in fact these disciplines — epistemology and metaphysics — are an essential and necessary part of Indian philosophy, as they ought to be of any philosophy that claims to be a philosophy of life. And this claim of philosophy ought constantly to be kept before our minds. For if philosophy gives up the task of being a philosophy of life, there is no other subject to undertake the task. Hegel's view that a culture without philosophy —by which he means metaphysics — is like a temple without the holy of the holies applies well to Indian philosophy, which is the holy of the holies of India's culture and way of life. We may also remember Santayana's observation that there were only two metaphysical nations, the Greeks and the Indians. Metaphysics with all that it implies, particularly logic and epistemology, was a gift of nature to the Greeks and the Indians and points to the holy of the holies, however defined or described.
