Philosophers From India

"As an Advaitin, he embraced a metaphysical idealism. But his idealism was such that it recognized the reality and diversity of the world of experience (prakṛti) while at the same time preserving the notion of a wholly transcendent Absolute (Brahman), an Absolute that is identical to the self (Atman). While the world of experience and of everyday things is certainly not ultimate reality as it is subject to change and is characterized by finitude and multiplicity, it nonetheless has its origin and support in the Absolute (Brahman) which is free from all limits, diversity, and distinctions (nirguna). Brahman is the source of the world and its manifestations, but these modes do not affect the integrity of Brahman."

"During the 1930s and 1940s the issues of education and nationalism came together for him, and his vision was of an autonomous India. He envisioned an India built and guided by those who were truly educated, by those who had a personal vision of and commitment to raising Indian self-consciousness."

"In his mind, he had identified the “religious” problem, reviewed the alternatives, and posited a solution - An unreflective dogmatism could not be remedied by escaping from “experiential religion” which is the true basis of all religions."

"While Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) as he defined it best exemplified his position, he claimed that the genuine philosophical, theological, and literary traditions in India and the West supported his position."

"[He] was knighted in 1931, the same year he took up his administrative post as Vice Chancellor at the newly founded, Andhra University at Waltair, served there for five years as Vice Chancellor. In 1936, not only did the university in Calcutta affirm his position in perpetuity but Oxford University appointed him to the H.N. Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics. In late 1939, he took up his second Vice Chancellorship at Benares Hindu University (BHU), and served there during the course of the second world war until mid-January 1948, two weeks before Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi."

"[He] was no longer content simply to define and defend Vedanta. Instead, he sought to confront directly not only Vedanta’s Western competitors, but what he saw as the Western philosophical enterprise and the Western ethos in general."

"Tagore was his most influential Indian mentor. Tagore’s poetry and prose resonated with him. He appreciated Tagore’s emphasis on aesthetics as well as his appeal to intuition. From 1914 on, both of these notions — aesthetics and intuition — begin to find their place in his own interpretations of experience, the epistemological category for his philosophical and religious proclivities...he would repeatedly appeal to Tagore’s writing to support his own philosophical ideals."

"He was for the first time out of his South Indian element — geographically, culturally, and linguistically when he took up the Calcutta and the George V Chair (1921-1931) in Philosophy at Calcutta University."

"Between 1914 and 1920, he continued to publish. He authored eighteen articles, ten of which were published in prominent Western journals such as The International Journal of Ethics, The Monist, and Mind. Throughout these articles, he took it upon himself to refine and expand upon his interpretation of Hinduism."

"What Vivekananda, Savarkar, and Theosophy did bring to him was a sense of cultural self-confidence and self-reliance."

"In 1904, he entered Madras Christian College was trained in European philosophy was introduced to the philosophies of Berkeley, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Fichte, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato among others. He was also introduced to the philosophical methods and theological views of his MA supervisor and most influential non-Indian mentor, Professor A.G. Hogg."

"Throughout the 1920s, his reputation as a scholar continued to grow both in India and abroad. He was invited to Oxford to give the 1926 Upton Lectures, published in 1927 as "The Hindu View of Life", and in 1929 he delivered the Hibbert Lectures, later published under the title "An Idealist View of Life". His most sustained, non-commentarial work, "An Idealist View of Life", is frequently seen as a mature work and has undoubtedly received the bulk of scholarly attention to him."

"[He] has been held in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the West. His lengthy writing career and his many published works have been influential in shaping the West’s understanding of Hinduism, India, and the East."

"The implicit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita by the smarta tradition is good evidence to suggest that an advaitic framework was an important, though latent, feature of his early philosophical and religious sensibilities."

"The theology taught in the missionary school may have found resonance with the highly devotional activities connected with the nearby Tirumala temple, activities that he undoubtedly would have witnessed taking place outside the school. The shared emphasis on personal religious experience may have suggested to him a common link between the religion of the missionaries and the religion practiced at the nearby Tirumala temple."

"As an academic, philosopher, and statesman, he was one of the most recognized and influential Indian thinkers in academic circles in the 20th century. Throughout his life and extensive writing career, he sought to define, defend, and promulgate his religion, a religion he variously identified as Hinduism, Vedanta, and the religion of the Spirit."

"In Kalki, or the Future of Civilization, he deals with the fact that although science has helped us to build up our outer life, we are not above the level of past generations in ethical and spiritual life. If anything, we have declined. Our natures are becoming mechanized. Void within, we are being reduced to mere members of a mob. There is a tendency to seek salvation in herds. For a complete human being we require the cultivation of the grace and joy of souls overflowing in love and devotion and the free service of a regenerated humanity."

"In Indian Philosophy he not only laid a stone foundation surely and truly but also built an edifice that shall outlast any philosophic storm. It was not so much a history as an exposition, and the exposition was vivid, vital and gripping. It was full of feeling. It made an epoch by itself. It was the two volumes of Indian Philosophy in the "Library of Philosophy" that showed that there was hardly any height of spiritual insight or rational philosophy attained in the world that has not its parallel in the vast stretch he dealt with that lies between the early sages and the modern Naiyaikas [leaders]."

"He attended Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, a school run by the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in America where he was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which emphasized a righteous God, unconditional grace, and election, and which criticized Hinduism as intellectually incoherent and ethically unsound. This is where he encountered what would have appeared to him as crippling assaults on his Hindu sensibilities. He also would have witnessed the positive contributions of the social programs undertaken by the Mission in the name of propagation of the Christian gospel."

"Religion to him is essentially a concern of the inner self securing a spiritual certainty which lifts life above meaningless existence and dull despair, giving worth to values, meaning to life, confidence to adventure. He was impatient of the sorry scheme of things of the present day when the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. He thought of a day when the strong cease to be greedy and the weak learn to be bold. For things were never settled quite until they were settled right."

"He had always defended Hindu culture against uninformed Western criticism and had symbolized the pride of Indians in their own intellectual traditions."

"The tradition of the Rishi is alive in India even today. He was the twentieth century equivalent of the ancient Hindu Rishi; the inspired philosopher at whose feet the tempests lose their guile. When he first lit the lamp of Indian philosophy in the West it made the European savants blink. It also illumined his own face to the world. With him philosophy was not a bare catalogue of fatiguing facts and tiring theories of dead authors and their musty old writings but a fascinating story that grips the mind and enthrals the imagination. This modern Recording Rishi of Indian philosophy, unlike other historians, used his scholarship to wrest from philosophical watch-words the thoughts embedded in them and reset them like jewels in epigrams giving out a strange new brilliance."

"He was not dull. A tall lanky virile Andhra, well-dressed and spic and span, he stood upright with an intense vitality filling his eyes welled with visions. His speech was pithy, — polished and precise. He studied philosophy as a scientist — not as a moralist."

"He had raised himself step by step. When would he reach the summit of the Mount Everest of his career? Would he aspire to higher things in the life and emulate such a man as Woodrow Wilson, who has at one time a professor; and ended up as President of the United States of America?"

"He inherited from his upbringing a tacit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedanta and an awareness of the centrality of devotional practices associated with the smarta tradition."

"He was a philosophicalbilinguist who acted as the liaison officer of Hinduism. He was equally well-versed in Western philosophical thought and in Eastern. And he expounded the East to the West and the Occident to the Orient. But it was no mere exposition — originality in philosophy, as in 'poetry, consists not in the novelty of the tale or the light and shade distributed over the canvas but the depth and subtlety made to dominate the details. In this sense, he was original in his exposition as a poet or a painter in expression. He had found a new technique in the presentation of Oriental philosophy. He presented ultimate truths of religion in the psychological idiom of this age."

"The creeds of religion correspond to theories of science... intuitions of the human soul should be studied by the methods which are adopted with such great success in the region of positive science."

"It is for philosophy of religion to find out whether the convictions of the religious seers fit in with the tested laws and principles of the universe."

"The marginalization of intuition and the abandonment of the experimental attitude in matters of religion has lead Christianity to dogmatic stasis. It is an unfortunate legacy of the course which Christian theology has followed in Europe that faith has come to connote a mechanical adherence to authority. If we take faith in the proper sense of truth or spiritual conviction, religion is faith or intuition."

"The truths of the ṛṣis are not evolved as the result of logical reasoning or systematic philosophy but are the products of spiritual intuition, dṛṣti or vision. The ṛṣis are not so much the authors of the truths recorded in the Vedas as the seers who were able to discern the eternal truths by raising their life-spirit to the plane of universal spirit. They are the pioneer researchers in the realm of the spirit who saw more in the world than their followers. Their utterances are not based on transitory vision but on a continuous experience of resident life and power. When the Vedas are regarded as the highest authority, all that is meant is that the most exacting of all authorities is the authority of facts."

"We have spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others, sruti or what is heard, and smṛti or what is remembered. Śaṅkara equates them with pratyakṣa or intuition and anumana or inference. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change."

"While no tradition coincides with experience, every tradition is essentially unique and valuable. While all traditions are of value, none is finally binding."

"Hindu maxim that theory, speculations, [and] dogma change from time to time as the facts become better understood."

"If philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience. The Hindu philosophy of religion starts from and returns to an experimental basis. Hindu thinker readily admits of other points of view than his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention."

"Hinduism accepts all religious notions as facts and arranges them in the order of their more or less intrinsic significance. The worshippers of the Absolute are the highest in rank; second to them are the worshippers of the personal God; then come the worshippers of the incarnations like Rama, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha; below them are those who worship ancestors, deities and sages, and the lowest of all are the worshippers of the petty forces and spirits."

"Religion is a kind of life or experience."

"Religion in terms of “personal experience is an independent functioning of the human mind, something unique, possessing and autonomous character. It is something inward and personal which unifies all values and organizes all experiences. It is the reaction to the whole of man to the whole of reality. It may be called spiritual life, as distinct from a merely intellectual or moral or aesthetic activity or a combination of them."

"Religious intuition informs, conjoins, and transcends an otherwise fragmentary consciousness."

"Asceticism is an excess indulged in by those who exaggerate the transcendent aspect of reality. Instead, the rational mystic does not recognize any antithesis between the secular and the sacred. Nothing is to be rejected; everything is to be raised."

"The idea of God is an interpretation of experience."

"Religious intuition is a unique form of experience. Religious intuition is more than simply the confluence of the cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical sides of life. However vital and significant these sides of life may be, they are but partial and fragmented constituents of a greater whole, a whole which is experienced in its fullness and immediacy in religious intuition."

"The Vedanta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance."

"The moral hero, guided as he or she is by the ethical experience, who carves out an adventurous path is akin to the discoverer who brings order into the scattered elements of a science or the artist who composes a piece of music or designs buildings."

"Feeling the unity of himself and the universe, the man who lives in spirit is no more a separate and self-centered individual but a vehicle of the universal spirit. [Like the artist, the moral hero does not turn his back on the world. Instead], He throws himself on the world and lives for its redemption, possessed as he is with an unshakable sense of optimism and an unlimited faith in the powers of the soul."

"[The moral hero is] fighting for the reshaping of his own society on sounder lines [his] behavior might offend the sense of decorum of the cautious conventionalist."

"Intuition must be not only translated into positive and creative action but shared with others. There is a sense of urgency, if not inevitability, about this. One cannot afford to be absolutely silent and the saints love because they cannot help it."

"Poetic truth is different from scientific truth since it reveals the real in its qualitative uniqueness and not in its quantitative universality. Poetry is the language of the soul, while prose is the language of science. The former is the language of mystery, of devotion, of religion. Prose lays bare its whole meaning to the intelligence, while poetry plunges us in the mysterium tremendum of life and suggests the truths that cannot be stated."

"If the new harmony glimpsed in the moments of insight is to be achieved, the old order of habits must be renounced. Moral intuitions result in a redemption of our loyalties and a remaking of our personalities."

"If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it fulfills its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change."

"The institution of caste illustrates the spirit of comprehensive synthesis characteristic of the Hindu mind with its faith in the collaboration of races and the co-operation of cultures. Paradoxical as it may seem, the system of caste is the outcome of tolerance and trust."