Introduction to Philosophy 1: 6 Systems of Indian Philosophy

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Haribol so today we will discuss or rather start the discussion on the topic of introductory overview of philosophy Indian and western unlike the previous topic of history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism where things were directly connected with our tradition since here we will connect them occasionally with our tradition but the focus will be not so much in drawing correlations with our tradition or with going into technicalities of various philosophies but in trying to get a broad understanding of the contours in this issue so in the we will start with the Indian philosophy tradition in the history of Indian philosophy basically the various philosophies are classified into two broad categories which are called as orthodox and heterodox orthodox refers to that which accepts the traditional authority and heterodox is that which rejects the traditional authority so the traditional authority in the Indian context was Vedas so the schools which accepted the authority of the Vedas are called as orthodox and the schools which rejected the Vedic authority are called as heterodox so among the heterodox there were mainly three schools there were Buddhism, Jainism and Materialism in Indian tradition it was called as Charvakism so among these three Charvakism never gained really any widespread following although it gained widespread condemnation from everyone else because it was considered to be very conducive to immorality ultimately if there is anything more than materialistic goals of life what is the value for morality except for a utility in morality by which all of us can enjoy sense gratification so the modern materialism that we see today had its counterpart in India in past times in Charvakism so now within the orthodox systems which were there, there were primarily the Shat Darshanas so the word Darshana means philosophy in general the six systems of philosophy in India are generally categorised into groups of two, so we are three groups the first is often thought of as Hindu logic and Indian logic and Indian physics it’s called Nyaya-Vaisheshika so I will discuss this when we provide a group together there is Sankhya Yoga which is actually metaphysics and psychology and there is Vimamsa and Vedanta so now if we look at the traditional understanding of their founders which the Prabhupada mentions these Shat Darshanas in the first Bhagavatam he explains that the speaker of Bhagavatam should be capable of establishing the philosophy of the Bhagavatam in and should be able to refute all other opposing philosophies so now in a sense if we see the founders of these are relatively respected personalities the founder of Nyaya is Gautam Rishi Vaisheshika is Kannada Rishi and Sankhya is Kapila, Yoga is Patanjali Vimamsa is Gemini and Vedanta is Vasudeva, so we have for example the past times of the Gautam Rishi even in the Vedic literature where he is not an infrequent character so now there is a secular or academic understanding of the Siksa Sunda philosophy and there is the traditional understanding so from the academic point of view these three are independent and competing schools of thought and this understanding is borne out to some extent by history because there have been frequent debates between the scholars of these different traditions and particularly influential scholars Kumarila Bhattacharya Vimamsa tradition had a very fierce debate with Shankara and Venkateshwaracharya defeated him and Kumarila Bhattacharya also rejected and he was humiliated and practically starved to death or something like that of course some of these theories will be apocryphal sorry not theory, some of these theories will be apocryphal apocryphal means how much is the reality and how much is the exaggeration and it is difficult to distinguish so anyway the point is that there has been very strong and intense debate between these schools of philosophy so so this really seems to substantiate the idea that all of them were independent schools of philosophy however the tradition is restraining is that actually these are not independent schools these are progressive schools of philosophy and they are all taking up a total total boundary and just like we have a department of physics within the department of physics we may have various sub departments we may have atomic physics we may have nuclear physics we may have high energy physics, we may have astrophysics we may have relativity, we may have quantum mechanics now if we look at it in a broad way we will discern different features one is that these categories within physics will not be necessarily watertight if we talk about say astrophysics in astrophysics we take something from relativity, we take something from quantum physics so even if we take about any branches in it the boundaries will not necessarily be watertight, they may be porous and secondly some some specialised branches may come up with mutually contradictory ideas at some stage just like at present physics is divided not just divided but violently violently intellectual violence violently polarised between quantum physics and relativity quantum physics quantum physics denies the existence of any particles at all all that exists is waves and waves which have probability functions in which at particular stages when they are observed appear to other particles whereas relativity requires the existence of particles and there have been severe debates between physicists also so although for example Einstein and Bohr both of them are physicists there was a time when because of the differences between our quantum physics they came to a terror where they couldn’t talk to each other and the whole community of physics got divided between followers of Einstein and followers of Bohr so but still they are all physicists sometimes within a branch of knowledge also polarities may come up and for specific branches may come up with specific postulates so the traditional understanding is that that actually the data that reveal knowledge and that is taught by Lyapunov in different stages you see that in the Bhagavatam stage there are different branches in Vedic literature there are different stages now these stages why are there different branches there are different stages just like it is said Rig Veda was given to the Siddhaila Rishi and the Siddhaila was given to the Rishi and then he decided to pursue branches so that there could be purpose and specialisation because the Vedic literature was so vast that Brahman extraordinarily empower these all of it but not everybody will express so there is a specialisation so when specialisation is there then there can be purpose study but one inevitable consequence of specialisation is that the human ego comes into one specialisation and we use our specialisation to claim that we are special by saying that our branch is special and our branch is superior so as history passed these became conflicting schools of thought but originally there were progressive schools of thought so let’s look at these quickly but before we go into that one more way of looking at the classification is called as Uttarayavada and Karnayavada so the previous kind of classification is more from a historical point of view this is more from a philosophical point of view so previous classification was based on whether people accept the Vedic authority or not and then what is the difference between six systems of schools six systems of philosophy in India that all of them may accept the Vedic authority but they interpret the Vedic authority in different ways and they say that the Vedic authority substantiates their school of thought but another way of looking at it is called as Satkaryavada and Satkaryavada so a Satkaryavada means that the cause and the effect have no relationship with each other and Satkaryavada means cause and effect are related with each other in fact what is the relationship? the effect is present in the cause so according to Satkaryavada the idea is that if the effect and cause are related with each other then why should one differentiate them one can as well call them as the same thing whereas according to Satkaryavada if the effect is not present in the cause there is no way that the effect can be produced from the cause just like we cannot produce oil from a stone we can produce oil from a ground because oil is present in the ground in latent form so if the effect were not present in the cause originally no amount of manipulation or change will ever bring the effect out so the philosophy of Vedanta and most of the Vedic schools of thought they are it’s a Satkaryavada in fact Janmashtami itself is a direct declaration of Satkaryavada so the idea is that everything is coming from Brahman everything is coming from that absolute truth so this is the founding premise of the school of Vedanta before we come to the school of Vedanta let’s look briefly at the other schools so Subhadra Narayan has written a book on Vedic systems of philosophy and it’s a intricate and technical book but the important point is though we may not go into the technicalities of the book we will be focussing on the broad contours of Vedanta so in Vedic systems of philosophy the discussion generally starts with Nyaya-Vaisheshita so now how it is as I said they are not watertight in their definition and these many of the schools have borrowed concepts from each other and ultimately we understand that they are not borrowed from each other ultimately these are originally there in the Veda but certain schools have emphasised them more and that’s why they were said to be belonging to those particular schools so the word Nyaya actually means logic so the Nyaya Sutra of Gautama starts with the idea that we need to have clear and systematic logics to arrive at any ultimate goal so logic is not given necessarily an independent authority which is contradictory to the Vedas but the idea is that even the Vedas often they contain different constrictions and if the Vedas are true then the Vedas also have to be harmonised with our experience if for example the hypothetical case is that it doesn’t happen but if the Vedas say that time is cold and the experience has to be hot so then we will leave some sort of logic to be able to harmonise the two the point is that many times people criticise religion they say that if you accept scripture as authority then what is the what is the role for the human intelligence what is the role for progressive thinking because scripture in one sense contains progressive thinking what is true then what about things that people learn from their experience what about the progress of science this is one point there is a difference between Indian philosophy and western philosophy because of which Indian philosophy was often the object of criticism for western philosophers what was that Indian philosophy is tied down to a book so it’s not independent in its thinking later on when we look at the history of western philosophy we will see that if we look at the lives of western philosophers although they lived in a Christian world their thinking their intellectual quest was very much uninfluenced by Christianity rather probably only their presentation was shaped by Christianity because if they opposed Christianity they could be burned in the fire like Bruno was so they probably presented themselves as a little more sophisticated but the Bible itself didn’t contain much philosophy and in the Christian tradition it was Saint Augustine in the 4th century who integrated the biblical teachings with the Greek philosophy that had been there in Europe before Christianity took over so Augustine is said to have synthesised the Christian theology with Platonic philosophy Plato was a famous Greek philosopher was a disciple of and later on in the 12th, 13th or 14th century just before the rise and subsequent flourishing of times there was another prominent Christian theologian named Thomas Aquinas so Thomas Aquinas integrated Christian theology with the philosophy of Aristotle Aristotle was a disciple of Plato so he directly opposed many of the teachings of Plato and in one sense there was a direct conflict between the disciple and the teacher so in the Greek philosophy there was Socrates was the primary teacher, of course there were many philosophers before him, I think there was Simpson was the philosopher, but among the most famous Socrates was most famous but Socrates did not write anything and Socrates was killed and poisoned even when he was quite young so Socrates and his works and his ideas are known primarily to Plato, his disciple his principal disciple so normally Socrates and Plato are sort of together and it is understood that Plato may not always respect Socrates entirely Plato may have developed Socrates ideas for him so but Aristotle who was a disciple of Plato completely went against Plato’s ideas so anyway, the point which I am making for our discussion here is that Christianity itself although it dominated the European mainland for almost 1500 years from the 3rd, 4th century onwards till 18th, 19th century but it did not have much intellectual influence on the founders of on the founders or pioneers of modern western philosophy and because they had to sort of in many cases reject the naive constructs of Christian theology they felt that if any other school of thought any other system of philosophy restricts itself to adherence to a particular set of scriptures, then it does not deserve to be called a philosophy at all because philosophy is that which you can do logical rational thinking about fundamental difference between philosophy and theology is that philosophy is that which you can logically think and reason about theology is what we have to accept based on presumptions so God exists is a matter of philosophy, philosophical discussion, so we can make arguments for the existence of God, we can make arguments that he is the existence of God but if we say that Krishna is God, this is a matter of theology because there is very little reasoning that we can do for the idea that God is a blue ewe who wears a peacock feather and plays the flute for this we have to depend entirely on reasoning and that is the fundamental difference between philosophy and theology but again the boundaries are not so so quarter tight they are porous, especially in the Indian context because philosophy and theology were always integrated together but in general even about philosophical issues even when they were based on scriptures there was huge scope for reasoning why was there scope for reasoning? because of various reasons first is that there often seem to be internal contradictions in Vedic literature second is that what the Vedic literature said may sometimes seem to contradict our everyday experience and thirdly, sometimes the Vedic literature statement itself may be so terse, so brief inside that they may require interpretation and the interpretation can go along contradictory lines and therefore there has to be logic to establish what the actual interpretation is so Nyaya is that logic so this whole discussion I did for the point of talking about the importance of logic in the Indian tradition just because we accept scripture does not mean that we reject logic as far as Gaudiya principle that logic in itself is not conclusive that is inconceivable, cannot be understood through logic that is true, but then we don’t say that everything is a Chintu sometimes some devotees have a tendency that if some questions they can’t answer they say it is a Chintu that is actually an abuse of the principle of Chintu Chintu is a very specific concept and if we look at Shiv Goswami’s Sandarbha, there is so much systematic development of logic so logic has a very important place, but it does not have an all important place London’s wisdom philosophy is that logic would be an all important and when logic is made all important logic in itself is never conclusive because firstly logic depends on the expertise of the person who is arguing with the logic according to their concept and a greater logician can only come up and refute the previous logician that’s why the Mahabhaya says but logic in and of itself is important so now there is some confusion among terms which I would like to clarify to you Nyaya is a distinctive school of thought and at the same time within Vedanta so now Vedanta is one school of thought there are Nyaya Sutras, there are Mimamsa Sutras there are there are literatures similar to Samukhya Vaisheshika Sutra, so like that there is Vedanta so Vedanta Sutra is constituting the definitive body, the definitive book definitive means final authority definitive book for the school of thought called Vedanta so the Gaudiya Vishnu school of thought is common in the Vedanta school of thought but now within Vedanta Vedanta school of thought if somebody has to establish an authority then they have to write commentary on three critical books as we discussed earlier on there are the Upanishads, there is the Bhagavad Gita and there is the Vedanta Sutra so the Upanishads are considered to be the Shruti Bhagavad Gita is Shruti and the Vedanta Sutra is considered to be Nyaya so these are the Prakharas three founding pillars so if anybody has to establish their philosophy to be Vedantic so Bhagavad Gita Upanishads and Vedanta Sutra, all three are within the purview of Vedanta the school of thought called Vedanta, so Vedanta Sutra is like a primary book of the school of thought called Vedanta and anybody who wants to show that their philosophy is Vedantic has to write commentary on these three books so now within these three books as I said the Upanishads are called as Shruti the Bhagavad Gita is often called as Shruti and the Vedanta Sutra is called as Nyaya so the Nyaya aspect of Vedanta, so that means this Nyaya refers to not the school of thought called Nyaya, it refers to the approach of that school of thought used by the Vedanta Sutras so now if we look at the Vedanta Sutras they are extremely diverse and they use they are basically an exercise of logic a very rigorous exercise of logic Vedanta Sutra primarily tries to establish how the Upanishads are not contradictory the Upanishads have an internal coherence within them and by trying to change the internal coherence the Vedanta Sutra comes up with aphorisms which we can’t find apparently already Vedanta Sutra of the Upanishads but in that process the reconciliation that is given by the Vedanta Sutra is itself so terse so brief that often that has become a matter of debate for religious scholars but the point is that Nyaya the primary influence of the Nyaya school of thought is that their principles of logic were used for compiling the Vedanta Sutra alias Vedu and by also for writing commentaries on the Nyaya aspect of Vedanta that is the Vedanta Sutra so now going forward to Vaisheshika so Vaisheshika refers to Vishesh and what is Vishesh basically this is often called as Indian physics or this is often said to be the most scientific among all the Indian schools of thought it also talks about atoms and molecules so Vaisheshika tries to analyse matter to see what its primary components are so now to talk about how all these schools are progressing as in the traditional understanding so a quick introduction may help us understand that so Vaisheshika ultimately all the schools of thought are trying to search out what is the truth so what is the ultimate truth so for now if we move towards the truth if we look at matter we can see that matter has a lot of variety you see different colours, different odours, different tastes but if we go deep down there is just atoms and molecules now again in Vaisheshika the definition of atoms and molecules is different from the definition that we normally use but anyway that is not the important issue here but the point is all the schools of thought are trying to go towards what is the ultimate reality so we move forward from the first point that is we see the visible world but beyond the visible world there are some intermediate components that are atoms and molecules so now Vaisheshika it takes us one step forward just like if we have a university if somebody wants to get a doctorate there will be multiple stages so first there will be primary school, then there will be secondary school, then higher secondary school then maybe there is graduation then there is post graduation, masters maybe thereafter there is doctorate so just as normal academic education can have these six stages so these six schools of thought are progressive in that sense so in any school of thought one will have to use logic so Nyaya creates the foundation for that then Vaisheshika helps one understand ok the visible world is not the actual reality there are some underlying elements that constitute the actual reality so in that sense it’s progressive, it’s taking us further it is not the complete realisation so going further from here is Sankhya Sankhya analyses the world not just in terms of its atoms that make it but in terms of the elements that make it so the elemental theory was also used in western school of thought but eventually the elemental theory was abandoned because it was felt that the differentiation of elements is based on properties that are superficial, that are not integral so the idea in western school of thought was that we may differentiate into earth, water, fire, air but ultimately earth, water, fire, air are made of some further common elements and those common elements are atoms and molecules so that’s why the elemental theory was replaced by the atomic theory in western intellectual history but our point is with respect to Sankhya Sankhya does the analysis of the elemental theory of the universe into elements and then in the Mahabharata it is described that over a period of time three kinds of Sankhya evolved we can simply refer to them as the 24, 25, 26 Sankhya so the Sankhya has only 24 elements that is the 24 material elements and then doesn’t go beyond anything further that means it doesn’t posit anything spiritual at all so interestingly when Krishna talks about Sankhya in the Uddhava Gita in the 11th canto, he says that different thinkers have analysed the material creation in different ways and they have all learned expertise and Vishnacharya Thakur’s commentary mentions over there that actually Krishna appreciates their expertise in analysing this universe in different ways because they are trying to arrive at the roots so in Sankhya in the analysis of the universe sometimes you may have the idea that there are 16 elements to creation, sometimes there may be the idea that there are 20 elements, 24 this variety is okay, it’s acceptable but now the 25th Sankhya says that actually there is practically a level beyond that of Purusha so that Purusha is considered to be just one entity who has got fragmented into many so that idea is the idea of impersonalism or monism and then the 26th Sankhya which is actually the Sankhya of Lord Kapila in the Bhagavatam and Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita we say that yes beyond the 24 elements of creation there is a 25th element that is the individual soul and that is the infinitesimal individual soul and the 26th element is the supreme soul sorry this is the 25th element time, as I said that there are different ways of analysing it the point which we are making over here is that there is the Sankhya school of thought developed over a period of time and we are not talking here about the Bhagavat Sankhya presently we are talking about you know Lord Kapilade who taught Sankhya in the Bhagavatam but the primary book for Sankhya is the book called Sankhya Tarika by Kishore Krishna few times Chakraborty has commentary for Kishore Krishna so what happens is in the Bhagavad Gita integrate Sankhya into their philosophy but then they show how Sankhya is actually the key stick so traditionally Sankhya may or may not be a key stick the material elements may all die that is there or the material elements along with the spirit might be there but there may be no supreme spirit the idea is that enquiry is not born that far it’s like not everything about mathematics is taught but secondary school students just the analysis is going deeper and deeper so in Sankhya, yes, look at the material elements and then beyond the material elements look at the spiritual so after Sankhya once we have some understanding that there is something spiritual then how does one actually start the process of reaching that spiritual so or connecting with that spiritual that is the process of yoga and before we go to yoga we come to Nimamsa so once we understand that there is something spiritual and there is something which survives death then the idea is is there a better life available for me beyond this so Nimamsa is a school of thought which focusses on a post-mortem existence but the thinking has not yet evolved so much that one can think entirely in terms of spiritual enjoyment the idea is in Nimamsa, like we have Karmanohamsa in Kapilavastu to Ayangarindra so in this Karmanohamsa the idea is that heaven is to be attained and heaven can be attained by the performance of Dharma and in Nimamsa the primary thing is to do the rituals of given in the Vedic literature and by the rituals attain the heavenly registration where one can enjoy so the Nimamsa Sutra starts with Athato Dharma Jignasa so why Dharma Jignasa because the idea is Dharma is what is all important and once one understands Dharma then one can understand the potential for that so the idea is ok I understand this world is a place of memories and I need to go beyond this world to some other world where there is greater happiness but because one’s perceptions have not evolved so much so one can think of higher happiness only in terms of mental happiness one cannot think of higher happiness in terms of spiritual happiness and so one thinks of heavenly attainment and that’s why Lord Krishna in one sense to refute the Nimamsic idea of that the higher happiness is in any way substantially better there is the idea that Abrahm Guna Loka Sudara Vati Moheji Lord Krishna says in 8.16 that this whole world is a place of memories whole universe in fact is a place of memories so Nimamsa in one sense may accept the existence of God but actually it says that even God is subordinate to or rather not God but Gods Gods are subordinate to sacrificial rituals if one does not Dharma even God is forced to do the results so here the idea is one has gone beyond materialism at least in this worldly sense to a materialism of the other worldly things and to a large extent Christianity and Islam function at this level not that they have the philosophical justification of Nimamsa nor do they have the ritual precision that characterises Nimamsa nor do they have the implicit faith that is there in the Vedas but the level of attainment is this if you look at the descriptions of paradise that is given in the Quran or for that matter even in the Bible it is largely religious enjoyment so every Jihadi is promised of course according to a misinterpretation of the Quranic Aramaic interpretation according to a particular set of followers of Islam that every Jihadi who dies will get 7 to 3 virgins to enjoy for all of eternity so then what is the role of Allah Allah is basically going to maintain these virgins for his Jihadis to enjoy there is really not the understanding that God is the enjoyer and I am the servant the idea still remains that I am the enjoyer so there is in the Quran that I mentioned that one will attain Jannah but then there are 7 levels of Jannah and above those 7 levels of Jannah is the throne of Allah that is roughly analogous to the 7th level of Jannah but the important point here is that the understanding in the Quran is that I am the enjoyer and I can enjoy better than the sacrifice and that was the logic when even demons like Hiranyakashipu or Ravana also perform sacrifices but they do not in any way become free from the enjoy mentality and they have the idea that we want to be the enjoyers and the sacrifices will enable us to become enjoyers so now coming to Yoga the word Yoga means to connect and Yoga actually involves a lot of sacrifices not in terms of performing rituals of Yajna but in terms of bodily and mental difficulties so once one understands this sound here that spirit is different from matter and that spirit will survive the destruction of material bodies then one says that not in terms of better enjoyment at a material level but of complete disentanglement from matter so Yoga is not just a practise, although practise is involved in Yoga but there is also school of thought which leads one to disentanglement from matter and in Yoga at the last stage when one comes to Dhyana, Dharana, Samadhi at that time Yoga essentially becomes God centred but that God centredness may not necessarily be devotional always in the way Yogis practise it nowadays because the understanding of God is not very clear so in Yoga the focus is the discipline of the body and the mind to disentangle the soul from the prison of the body and the mind then we come to Vedanta so basically in Yoga the thinking has evolved to a level that one understands that better mental enjoyment will not do one has to go beyond mental enjoyment to spiritual liberation but the understanding of what happens after spiritual liberation is crazy in Yoga that’s why the Vedanta which is the final and the most evolved of all the schools of Yoga, so it is like the doctorate level understanding so Vedanta starts with the enquiry by Atharva Brahmachit what is the goal that is to be attained what is that absolute truth which underlines the stratum for all of reality so that is what will be the goal in Vedanta, so in this way these schools of thought are progressive and when each of them try to become independent then they become competitive but original understanding is they are progressive so among these six schools of thought as of now today the most widespread are Vedanta and to some extent Yoga, so the other schools of thought are more theoretical than widespread, in fact modern Hinduism as people follow the Vedic tradition is mostly dominated by Vedanta and to some extent Vedanta being the sixth school of thought integrates the important insights from all of them so now when we come to Vedanta we have to recognise that Vedanta, the school of thought is dealing with very serious philosophical issues so we will discuss those philosophical issues tomorrow, in the next class in more detail but I will just outline the foundation of that discussion so as I said earlier Vedanta focusses on Suktaryava and the effect is present in the cause, so if the effect is present in the cause then how does the effect have so many characteristics that are different from the cause that is the fundamental question, what does it mean your God or absolute truth of Brahma is conscious, whereas the material world that we see is unconscious God is Anandamaya, whereas this world is Bukramaya so we should say that God is a united integrated reality whereas here we see so much variety so Shankaracharya in his Vedanta Siddha Bhashya Charanika Bhashya it is called, so here is the fundamental question that just as gold cannot produce mud similarly Brahman cannot produce this world because gold and mud are of two different categories of substances similarly Brahman and this world are entirely different in their nature and here we see that Indian philosophy goes much deeper than western philosophy in the sense that in western philosophy one of the major problems which to some extent also cause the downfall of Christianity is the problem of evil the problem of evil is that if God is good then why does evil exist in this world so in western philosophy this evil is classified into two parts, one is moral evil and the other is natural evil natural evil means say earthquakes, tsunamis and such disasters happen so especially in the 14th and 15th century there was a black plague which decimated half of Europe and there were Catholic priests who were doing all sorts of incantations and invocations and nothing was happening so that was the time when basically the problem of evil was broadcast very very much supported by the critics of Christianity, the idea is if God is good, why is there evil now because Christianity has dictated the incarnation in its early history so the problem of evil because we can’t see karma acting and it is very difficult to explain but the idea is that okay, God has created this world and in this world there is evil so why does the evil take place so the first evil is natural evil that means by nature acts indestructibly and second is moral evil moral evil means that why does the world exist in a way that it tempts people to act immorally so the temptations towards immoral living are very strong in this world and even Jesus said that the path to heaven is steep and narrow whereas the path to hell is broad and wide, smooth so the point is that why does moral evil exist why do people act in evil so even for the students of Christianity the idea was that because Adam ate the forbidden apple so Adam chose evil by listening to Satan and because Adam chose evil by listening to Satan so all the descendants of Adam have also become contaminated by sin and have tendency towards evil their idea is that evil is like a genetic defect that is passed on from Adam which is a very strange idea our understanding is that every soul by its own karma cultivates certain moods and depending on those moods the soul is cultivated in this and in this life the soul finds certain temptations greater than certain others in this so within their philosophy they have only one life then why are certain people most susceptible to temptations why are certain people less susceptible to temptations some people they may never be troubled by illicit sexual desires in a uncontrollable everybody feels troubled by lust but for some people the temptations are completely intolerable and some people they are they are manageable so why the difference so the if all of us are descendants from Adam and if all our sinful propensities have come from Adam only then why is it that different people have different levels of sinful propensities so this is something which they cannot answer but the important point is their idea is that ok overall the world is good and but within this good world there is bad what is the bad there is natural evil and there is moral evil but the Vedanta philosophy takes the question to a much deeper level, it doesn’t say that this within the world there is bad the world itself is bad that’s why it says so the Vedanta philosophy takes it to a much deeper level rather than asking what western philosophy or christian philosophy may not be able to answer so why does a small baby die with a terrible disease but Vedanta philosophy asks why does anybody die why does anybody die at all because whether a person dies as a baby prematurely or a person dies as a grand old man actually nobody wants to die so whereas Brahman is eternal matter is temporal so how can the eternal Brahman have produced something temporal so this is the fundamental philosophy question within the Vedanta and we will discuss in our next class how Shankaracharya tries to resolve it and then how Ramacharya refutes that resolution and comes up with a different resolution and then we will talk briefly about how our Gaudiya Acharya talk about this resolution so to summarise what we discussed today we started by discussing about the six schools of philosophy and before that we discussed about orthodox and necrodox so we are not going into the technicalities of any philosophy in detail nor are we going to compare each philosophy with Gaudiya Vaishnavism what we are focussing on is to get a broad contour idea so we discussed how Nyaya logic is not necessarily abandoned when we are looking at this picture logic can and needs to be used for understanding ambiguous statements in picture for reconciling contradictory statements in picture and for reconciling picture with ordinary experience so Nyaya is full of parts of the foundation and it has developed rhetorical and logical tools and skills which are used by all schools of thought so then we discussed about the other schools of thought Vaisheshika, how the progression is ok matter is there but we see the variety beyond that there are some fundamental attributes of the reality Sankhya says look at the element of the reality and then you see there are spiritual components also that are there Mimamsa says ok let’s try to go to heaven so that we can enjoy better because here there is not enough enjoyment, Yoga goes further and says ok enjoyment at material level is always frustrating so disentangle matters in the spirit but what after that that is told by Vedanta that actually there is absolute truth and we have to relate and live with that absolute truth that is the revelation of Vedanta so are there any questions yeah sure not fundamentally it is important it is important not fundamentally scripture is fundamental philosophy of language has a distinct category within philosophy is a relatively recent phenomena even within western philosophy but the concepts of philosophy of language are very much there within Indian philosophy also now I have given an elaborate answer to the question about what is the difference between and how can we understand that the holy name and Krishna are non different so in that answer I have explained that when we talk about sound sound has two aspects, there is Swara and there is Shabda so Swara for example it does not in itself convey any meaning but still it has an effect, so that effect is not so much on the intuition on the head but on the heart to you too whereas Shabda is a sound which has cognitive meaning which conveys something meaningful so this is a good outline but the important point is philosophy of language the basic concepts are many in that but among them the primary concepts would be that is language something static or is language itself something that varies now we know the history of language and language varies then is meaning something that exists independent of the language or is it dependent on the language and third question is whether whether there is a constant meaning for all audiences or the meaning is formed by the audience, postmodern idea is that there is no original meaning in any book and even the author’s meaning is not the original meaning but the original meaning is that every generation has its own meaning depending on what they find relevant in inspiration so the idea is that philosophy of language is a technical field and unfortunately in western school of thought philosophy of language has been developed a lot but that has not been because of some specific excessive interest in philosophy but simply because as if you later on study western philosophy what happened was originally that philosophy and science were sort of subordinate to theology because when the catholic church was moving in the western world philosophy and science were subordinate to theology, whatever the bible said was final rule and philosophy and science had to so so eventually as the theology of christianity was repeatedly found wanting because of the progress of science so eventually western philosophy arrived at a decision that because the invisible realm cannot be perceived by any means its existence cannot be justified and therefore any reasoning that involves anything non-empirical is just a waste of time so now western philosophy has largely now if you remove the invisible realm from within the realm of philosophy then what remains practically very little or nothing remains so that’s why western philosophy now has been reduced mostly to semantics where philosophy means that we analyse the meanings of words and the possible interpretations of words and the philosophy of language is important in western philosophy but as a form of philosophy language in and of itself if it is not accompanied or preceded rather by an underlying world view it doesn’t lead to any further insight into the truth because language has to convey a particular school of thought but if no school of thought is accepted I find especially no school of thought that proposes anything non-empirical except to the authority then there is very little scope left for philosophy of any sort or for that matter philosophy of language to proceed further it’s like now language is like to put it simplistically language is like a map so now if we have the idea that there are different ways in which the map can be understood this symbol over here can mean this this symbol can mean a city it can mean a town or maybe it can mean a river also so now we need proper system of interpretation so that what is actually a river is not thought of as a mountain by somebody else but what will happen in western philosophy is that if we have a map but first we decide that the map is depicting a territory and territory is non-existent then what is the use of interpreting about the map so like that what has become the sort of foundational assumption of western philosophy is that anything non-empirical is not worth discussing because it just cannot be verified therefore the spiritual realm has been removed from the map from the discussion arena of philosophy in modern western philosophy and that’s why philosophy has been largely reduced to semantics analysing the meanings of words ok any other questions no your voice is very low yes that is inevitably true so yes good question, it’s a valid question and basically the idea is sometimes we may use the word like scientific proof for the existence of soul a scientific proof for the existence of god so this is ok but actually it’s not very correct because a scientific proof of Vedic literature would be fake so what do you mean by scientific proof we mean proof for pratyaksha and anumana and pratyaksha and anumana are actually subordinate to shabda so pratyaksha and anumana are like children and shabda is like the natural mother so actually speaking this is not correct we do not say that pratyaksha and anumana prove shabda, shabda is self evident but pratyaksha and anumana can also we can show how pratyaksha and anumana are also doing the same understanding as given by shabda so in modern science there was one time a huge conflict between pratyaksha vathis and anumana vathis pratyaksha vathis are the empiricists and the anumana vathis are the rationalists so empiricists say like what we observe empirically that is the ultimate reality and rationalists say that which we can reason about is the ultimate reality so physics was disrupted to some extent essentially to some extent the conflict between Einsteinian physics and quantum physics can be called as a conflict between empiricists and rationalists of course Einstein was not entirely an empiricist and relativity is not entirely empiricist but the point is that originally science was proposed science was supposed to be to propose theories to explain observations so for example Newton observed a fruit falling then he proposed a theory Newton’s principle of gravity to explain that but as the theory started developing and developing more and more the theories came up with ideas that had very little bearing with observations so for example now there is a superstring theory which proposes something like 11 dimensions now what those 11 dimensions mean is something which is practically impossible to understand so I have written an article which is actually seen believing on the website there I quote one scientist he says that stop thinking start calculating what is the idea of stop thinking start calculating don’t try to see how this makes so this is David Merman shut up and calculate the idea is that don’t try to see how so calculation or mathematics is the basis of much of rationality whereas empiricism is the basis of perception so shut up and don’t try to see how it makes sense the whole idea of antimatter or the whole idea of parallel universes the idea that all of us have many parallel selves that are splitting into various selves further at each moment these are utterly counter intuitive and counter empirical but still that’s what scientists are proposing now so the point I am making is perception of antimatter is true that they are in confusion and perception of antimatter like parallel children only the shabda comes along the mother and the mother says this is what this is and the children accept it if the children accept it then the parallel will stop the parallel will go on forever but because people have faith in perception of antimatter so then we can show how shabda can also be understood in developed fiction and that is something which throughout every generation the acharyas have done that especially in modern times it has to be done more because the variety of perception of antimatter is far more in modern times than it was in earlier times but it is true the simple example is that Dhritarashtra has come up with this whole book called forbidden archaeology in which he shows that there are so many fossils which are very ancient and therefore these fossils stand as a very strong evidence that contradicts our theory of evolution and that requires an alternative theory so now some subsequent analysis by some other scientists using some other dating methods may lead them to the conclusion whether honest or distorted that ok this fossil is not his own, he says that this is so many millions old but it is only from thousand years so now this is possible so when some evidence of fiction breaks down then what do we do then we have two options one is try to repair the evidence, repair the argument by reputation or just take up another argument it is like suppose I have to go for a outreach programme and in order to reach there I use a car when I use a car to get there fast enough along the way my car breaks down if my car breaks down I have two options one is that I try to fix the car or I just take another car, I hire a taxi or get another car from some other location and go and reach the programme so for me the car finally is a utilitarian purpose my primary purpose is to reach the programme for my outreach so reaching the programme is like giving people faith in Shabnam and travelling by car is like using Pastakshana Hanuman so the nature of Pastakshana Hanuman is that they are going to break sooner or later you say the car will break but for us, Pastakshana Hanuman are non-dialogical so by Pastakshana Hanuman nothing is proven to be by Pastakshana Hanuman we can show people how the Vedic truths are valid and that will help people to get freed from Vedic truths but in certain cases Pastakshana Hanuman will be retrieved by human beings so now Shri Prabhupada for example quotes in Manasiddha Bhagavatam he quotes about how the female brain is bigger than the the female brain is smaller than the male brain and therefore it is going to have a huge impact on men and then he goes on to say how the male body is more beautiful than the female body now Shri Prabhupada got this evidence during his Scottish Scottish Church College days there was a Christian teacher who was also having similar sort of thoughts and he quoted some scientists and Prabhupada said look at this now subsequent research has shown that actually it is not a universal property first of all the size of the brain depends on the size of the body of the person so you know a fat female may have a bigger brain than a small female and then the second issue comes back to that even if the brain is smaller or bigger does that necessarily mean that the intellectual capacity is smaller or bigger so the point is that that Prabhupada may have used a particular argument which may or may not be valid and it’s fine so because ultimately scripture is the truth and to help people understand scripture the Acharyas may use different strategies so one strategy is to use contemporary knowledge and show how scriptures truly qualifies as contemporary knowledge but as contemporary knowledge changes then things will change for example A. P. Prabhupada talks about the principle that unless we accept the authority of God there will be conflict and war and then he talks about communism and capitalism and a large part of the purport is devoted to that so now we may say that already the battle between communism and capitalism is over so then the example has become irrelevant but the principle remains fairly relevant so just as some examples may become irrelevant over a period of time sometimes some arguments may also become irrelevant when the arguments become irrelevant the principle doesn’t become irrelevant the principle is supported by arguments which are in the realm of animosity and our principle is supported by observations which are in the realm of fiction but our purpose is not to be not to be observation of the arguments of the principle and therefore the arguments can be now there is a standard argument against evolution that the Christian creation is also used that if man has come from monkeys then why are monkeys still not existing and why have they not become extinct and why is it that if man has come through the individual species to the monkey why has the individual species got extinct so what happened is this argument was strong at that particular time when Robert learned about it in his college days and subsequently evolutionists have mocked their theory and now according to current evolution theory they don’t say that man has come from monkeys they have very intelligently changed the theory intelligently cunningly they said that man and monkeys come from a common ancestor and that common ancestor has evolved into man and monkeys and the common ancestor has become extinct so now this is just a intellectual split of hands but at first level one may hear this you may feel that oh this argument is is wrong it is refuted but it is refuted because the origin has come up with something new then we have to come up with new arguments so Prabhupada’s point is not that not a specific point of why monkeys have become extinct his point is to critique evolution so we may not be able to use the same argument which Aryans at that time had used in the past so the point when we have to follow the acharya that’s why if somebody says following the acharya means parroting the acharya that is not going to work following the acharya means understanding the principles upon which the acharya was living and following that so those same principles may have to be refuted in a different way or same principles may have to be presented in a different way and prevailing arguments may have to be refuted in a different way so the important principle is that yes it is possible that perfection of the mind may change and when we are using when we are using logic to reconcile scripture with ordinary experience now it is not that ordinary experience is to be entirely rejected ordinary experience is also important but the mistake is to make ordinary experience as all important because during our ordinary experience generally we cannot experience the spiritual realm of reality so at the same time ordinary experience has its boundaries because that’s how we navigate reality so if we expect that in the name of following Krishna consciousness people have to reject everything that they have learned from ordinary experience for most people that will be too much of a demand for faith so Krishna consciousness now if you seriously think about this imagine that in the temple some food some valuable item gets stolen then what will we do if that was kept in a particular room then immediately we will appoint a team and then did you see anybody going inside that room you will say ok you all could have known that there was something valuable over there these are the people you could have known then we will round up so basically if somebody has to know from the temple then what means did somebody go over there so basically what are we using, we are using prospection anuman now in this case we have no shabda we don’t have Krishna telling you so and so was the thief so although sometimes in our neophyte stage we totally dismiss prospection anuman and say that shabda is only truth if we look at our own lives as devotees we do rely on prospection anuman isn’t it no it is not that if somebody comes late for mangal arati, how do you judge somebody late for mangal arati, it is a prospection there has to be prospection present in the temple all of you are not learning your arati still with this, so obviously prospection anuman has that validity the mistake of modern science if you absolutise the authority of prospection anuman so prospection anuman has that authority but they do not have absolute prospection, prospection anuman cannot lead us to absolute truth but they can give us some level of operational truth and this operational level of reality is often what dominates most in this mind and therefore one of the challenges which we face when we are making the Vedic planetary events, to reconcile the bhagavatam literature of cosmology with the modern understanding of the cosmology so and the everyday experience of people in terms of what they see in the sky so that was what Shri Adhopa wanted the cosmology team scientists to do, he said that you should be able to explain eclipses you should be able to explain seasons you should be able to explain the phases of the moon and you should be able to explain the alteration of days and nights, so basically people interpret cosmology what is the effect of cosmology these are the four main things eclipses, phases seasons and day and night Shri Adhopa said that ultimately whether we have we have modern cosmology or we have Vedic cosmology before modern cosmology came up before Copernicus there was Ptolemy’s cosmology and Ptolemy’s cosmology was also in its own slightly twisted way able to explain eclipses not very properly not very precisely so now what happened was that Copernicus was able to explain that same thing in a more satisfactory and a less convoluted way so and that’s why it didn’t exist, so eventually Shri Adhopa said that we should be able to base away the cosmology what are these four phenomena they are everyday experience, so we have to reconcile future with everyday experience and he did not do it, only then will our demand for faith from people not be too unreasonable to them it’s not that we have to expect people to reject everything that they believe in and just accept what Shastra says you know Shastra makes sense even in terms of everyday living and Shastra makes sense of things which are beyond everyday living so it’s not that we reject our everyday knowledge but we recognise that there is much that is beyond the scope of everyday knowledge and what is beyond the scope of everyday knowledge is illumined by Shastra, so but then if Shastra is saying something which contradicts everyday knowledge then we will have to explain to people how that is to be reconciled, so I will conclude with this final point that scriptural knowledge contains three aspects parameters, one is that which is more or less an agreement with perfection and demand second is that which is contradicting perfection and demand and third is that which is entirely beyond perfection and demand so what do we mean by one that is say that is in agreement with perfection and demand for example scriptures talk about say there is Vrindavan which is the place of Lord Krishna now in today’s geography also we have a place called Vrindavan that is the flourishing abode of Lord Krishna flourishing dhama of Lord Krishna even today or some aspects of say scriptures agree with everyday experience based on perfection and demand phenomena, past life memory, near death experience where the soul and the body can separate from each other and so it can even go to another body now there may be some aspects of scripture which contradict everyday experience and that is the Vrindavan cosmology and there are some or rather they contradict perfection and demand and there are some aspects of scripture which are ultimately beyond perfection and demand so you can imagine scripture as a circle and it has three sectors so in agreement with perfection and demand in contradiction to perfection and demand and beyond perfection and demand so the idea that Krishna is God and there is a spiritual world and there is a hierarchy of planets in the spiritual world and one of Vrindavan is the highest this is something entirely beyond perfection and demand so our primary focus is this third sector our primary focus is that we want to go to Vrindavan go back to the spiritual world so then what do we do but people may not just immediately accept the idea of Goloka Vrindavan and Krishna and all the Gopis there and everything like that so then we take the part of scripture which is in agreement with modern science, modern perfection and demand so we may talk about how the mind is such a big trouble for people and the various scriptures offer insights by which the mind can be controlled and decision so this is something which people want and they try to do it but they are often unable to do so we use the section of scripture which is in agreement with perfection and demand to help people develop faith in scripture and then eventually we focus primarily in that part of scripture which teaches us transcendence so that’s the general overview of scripture that our focus is primarily the transcendental aspect of scripture and then we use the agreement part of scripture to take the beautiful page of transcendent life and that which seems to disagree then we will have to explain it in a way by which that doesn’t stop people from practising the transcendental life and as people start practising spirituality and then they start experiencing the benefits of spirituality in their own lives then their faith will increase more and more and when their faith increases more and more then naturally, firstly it will be easier for them to accept what seems to contradict science also and secondly, that will not be a mental issue for them who will understand ultimately that this is realistic so, whether the male mountain is of this height or that height, ultimately if we go back to spiritual world, it doesn’t matter to us so, we have to have a clear understanding of what is our emphasis by presenting scripture. Is that clear? So, thank you very much for listening.