Greek Philosophy: Pythagoras & Xenophanes

Pythagoras

As mentioned last time, Anaximander had a student named Pythagoras (570 - 495 BCE) who is said to have met Thales, who told Pythagoras to go to Egypt to learn about mathematics, science and the cosmos.  Pythagoras is best known today for the Pythagorean theorem of mathematics, triangular like much of the work of Thales as well as the pyramids of Egypt.  

Pythagoras is the most famous of the ‘presocratic’ philosophers (those who taught before Socrates).  While the Milesians had a school by association, Pythagoras is the first Greek thinker to found a system which for hundreds of years was known as the Pythagoreans.  Pythagoras is also the first to call himself a ‘philosopher’, a lover of wisdom, and he had a great influence on Plato, the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers.  Plato, like Pythagoras, founded a major movement of Platonism (known today as Neoplatonism), and it was from several prominent Neoplatonists (particularly Porphyry and Iamblichus) that we know of Pythagoras and his teachings.  These Neoplatonists believed that both Pythagoras and Plato were sent by the gods to humanity.  While the Pythagoreans only lasted a few hundred years, the Neoplatonists brought much Pythagoreanism along with Platonism into the Islamic golden age and the Italian Renaissance.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, off the Turkish coast of ancient Ionia and not far from Miletus.  He traveled before settling in Croton, a Greek colony in what is today southern Italy.  Pythagoras gathered many students and these Pythagoreans became involved in politics, playing a significant part in the aristocratic rule of Croton.  Like Plato, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, Pythagoras believed in aristocracy through meritocracy, that those who rose in achievement and education should rule society.  Later, the Pythagoreans were persecuted and chased off the island.  Their meeting place was set on fire and many of their members died in the flames.

Pythagoras, like Plato, was revered by later followers as a divine being, and much mythology was added to his biography.  He was said to have been the son of Apollo (a name which the Pythagoreans interpreted to mean ‘Not’ (A) ‘Many’ (poly), a supreme oneness like that of Anaximander’s apeiron and Xenophanes’ god we will examine next).  Like Apollo and the sun, Pythagoras was said to glow with a sagely aura.  The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the place Anaximander places as the center and navel of the earth and cosmos and the place Socrates went to inquire about his own worth, was the home of the Pythia, the priestesses who huffed incense and/or geological gasses to predict the future in enigmatic riddles.  The name ‘Pythagoras’ means ‘Apollo-Priestess Professor’, one who professes the greatness of Apollo’s Oracle to others (as in the Agora, the public square), one who speaks for Apollo like the priestesses, or one who speaks/professes on an equal level with the priestesses.  One delphic priestess named Themistoclea is said to have taught Pythagoras about ethics.

Pythagoras had many legends told about him.  Other than glowing like the sun itself, he was said to have a golden thigh that he showed off once at the Olympic games (it is not written which thigh was golden or why he did not have two), that he could predict the future several generations, that he could translocate (be in two or more places at once, similarly said of some Indian gurus), that a river once welcomed him by calling his name, and, best of all, that he killed a poisoned snake by biting it (an ancient version of the “Bigfoot keeps a picture he took of Chuck Norris” bit).

Pythagoras is said to have traveled extensively and according to Diogenes Laertius studied with the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Judeans, the Indians, and others (note that he mentions the Indians).  While this is the most extensive list of instructive cultures for a thinker so far, as mentioned previously it is difficult to know whether Pythagoras reached all of these places or if he is made to look worldly afterwards.

Xenophanes said Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, and that Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog saying he heard the voice of his dead friend in the dog’s cries.  Heraclitus affirms this too, ridiculing Pythagoras for being the wisest of men, yet believing that in one previous life he had been a sardine, and in another a cucumber.  Heraclitus seems to be using Pythagoras to show us that the wisest are still foolish, only relatively wise themselves.  Like Thales, Pythagoras thought all things were full of souls and/or gods, which required the ethical treatment of all life.

It is difficult to know about teachings of Pythagoras and the practices of the Pythagoreans as they believed in keeping secrets.  In the ancient world knowledge was often kept secret for its own protection, as we will see Plato advocate in his Republic.  The most important teachings are spoken to those one trusts and lived in practice, not written down for unknown people to misinterpret.  Pythagoras was not known to have committed any of his teachings to writing.  Not only was divulging teachings outside community forbidden, new members were tested as to how long they could keep silent, refraining from saying anything to anybody.  The community was divided into the new ‘listeners’ who were instructed in general teachings and the inner circle of ‘learners’ who actively pursued truth and shared their findings only with this group.  Some sources say these were two separate schools, one dogmatic and the other progressive, while others say these were two levels in one and the same school/society.

There were many female Pythagoreans in the community, though all the major Pythagorean texts left to us are written by men and it is unclear what status women would have had.  Some say the Pythagoreans shared all things in common, which is Plato’s ideal of the Republic.  This could include property or relationships and child rearing.  The Pythagoreans were believed to be vegetarian, though it could be that only some types of meat were prohibited.  The Pythagoreans didn’t eat beans, as they were believed to be embryonic souls at an early stage of transmigration (possibly because beans resemble testicles).  Diogenes Laertius says that when the Crotons burned down Pythagoras’ school, Pythagoras tried to escape but found he could not without trampling bean plants, and so he allowed himself to be caught and killed.  All other sources say he escaped, and make no mention of beans being harmed in the burning of the school.


Pythagorean Cosmology & Mathematics

For Pythagoras, the cosmos is ruled by order, specifically mathematics and music.  The story goes that as Pythagoras was passing a blacksmith’s workshop, he heard the various hammer blows harmonizing with each other.  On closer inspection, he discovered that the hammers created different tones proportionately to their size, so a hammer harmonized naturally with another half its size.  While this story is thought to be false, he could have discovered the same in numerous ancient cultures by measuring string lengths of various instruments.

The Harmony of the Spheres (also Music of the Spheres), the mathematical rotations of the planets was seen as a silent symphony.  It was mentioned with the epic poets that larger choral productions involved many singers and instruments along with choreography.  Pythagoras thought this was how the cosmos worked as well as the soul, which was itself like the stars a harmony of numbers and proportions.  Mathematics is unchanging (2 + 3 = 5), unlike the body but like the mind, which is ideal and immortal.  This prefigures Plato who also believed that the ideal and numerical are the supreme causal forces of the physical and material.

Numerology is the study of sacred numbers, back when mathematics and physics were not specialized apart from the religious traditions (like alchemy to modern chemistry).  The Tetractys is a ten dot pyramid, ten being the perfect number.  A sacred symbol to the Pythagoreans, they were said to swear oaths in front of it and that it was revealed to Pythagoras by the divine (likely Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi).  All proceeds out of the great One, the supreme All that Islamic and Christian Neoplatonists later equated with monotheism.  The tetractys series does not simply unfold into a two dimensional pyramid, but a three dimensional pyramid as well (one dimensional point, two dimensional line, two dimensional triangle, three dimensional pyramid).  The pyramid is the shape of fire and light, fire being pointed on top and light shining down through clouds appearing as a pyramid.

The Pythagoreans believed that the world originated out of a singular point (like modern Big Bang Theory), which gave birth to numbers, from which came points, from which came lines, from which came planes, from which came solids, from which came the elements.  Unlike the Milesians, Pythagoras made numbers and proportions the primary element, his arche.  Pythagoras taught that earth is made of cubes, fire from pyramids, air from the octahedron (eight-sided double pyramid), water from the icosahedron (twenty-sided) and the sphere of the cosmos from the dodecahedron (twelve-sided).  The numbers, lines, sides, and things of the cosmos are separated and delineated from each other by void, which is inscribed by the breath of the cosmos.  This void, like the cosmos itself, is not infinite but finite, limited in proportion.

Aristotle argued against the Pythagoreans saying that, unlike the Milesians, the Pythagoreans base their cosmos on things not perceivable in nature.  We do not see math or unchanging numerals when we look into the world.  It should be mentioned, however, that Aristotle did believe that the heavens are driven by absolute forces and that this comes down and is mixed up and chaotic here on earth unlike its perfect circling in the heavens.

For Pythagoras the cosmos is a series of spheres within spheres.  The earth, which is one of the stars, rotates around a fire at the center (not the sun and thus not a heliocentric theory, as some Indian thinkers held, because the sun is another body entirely for Pythagoras).  This is “Zeus’ guardhouse”, the fire-protected center of the universe.  Day and night are caused by earth’s rotation around this fire, not by the sun or moon.  Around the center rotate earth, ‘counter-earth’, the moon, the sun, the stars, and outside this another sphere of fire.  Aristotle says that because the Pythagoreans thought the number ten to be sacred and central to the order of the universe, the Pythagoreans added ‘counter-earth’ as a body that causes lunar eclipses.

The musical intervals of fourth, fifth and octave were thought to be sacred.  Plato followed Pythagoras in this, and these ‘ratios’ are the basis of our word ‘rational’ (as well as ‘irrational’).  The ‘rational’ is that which is correctly proportional.  Musicians were well aware in earlier cultures that plucking half of a string gives one an octave, three fourths gives one a fourth and two thirds gives one a fifth.

Here is a place for Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato and idealism: the true is what is most beautiful to us, and with Pythagoras and Plato the beautiful musical intervals and symmetric constructions of mathematics are revered as the truly real that gives rise to the physical and apparent.  Asymmetric organic fractal patterns were seen as abhorrent and nonsensical even though Mandelbrot showed how they are the beauty of nature through fractal geometry while working at IBM in the 1960s.  Just like many modern physicists, Aristotle tells us the Pythagoreans assumed the cosmos is governed by a few universal mathematical principles.  Why must the cosmos correspond to simple mathematics, when even math is not entirely systematic (Godel's incompleteness theorem)?

When thinking of a square number, such as those involved in the Pythagorean theorem, it would have been understood by Pythagoras as a square of dots (ex: 9 is a square grid of three rows of three dots each).  Pythagoreans would only be able to square whole numbers or numbers that could be expressed in simple ratios (ex: the square of two thirds is four ninths).

Oppositions, central to human thought, were important to the Pythagoreans, and their set of ten opposites is similar to other systems found accross cultures (some are identical to Daoism).  Limit, odd, one, right, male, rest, straight, light, good, and square were paired against unlimited, even, many, left, female, moving, bent, dark, evil, and oblong.  Note that first is limit/unlimited, from which comes odd/even, from which comes one/many, akin to the generation of the cosmos.  Square and oblong refer to numbers, which are formed in rows of dots as a square or as close to a square as possible.

Particular numbers were associated with important things.  One was associated with mind and essence, as mind is the union and essence of the human individual and of the cosmos.  Four was associated with justice, as it is the first number which is an even number times an even number (2 x 2).  Five was associated with marriage and union, as it is even added to odd (2 + 3), female added to male.  Seven was associated with fulfillment, as children were thought to become adolescents at seven and then adults at fourteen.  


Pythagorean Ethics & Practice

While specifics of Pythagoras’ teachings are blurry, it seems he taught moderation and abstaining from excessive pleasures to thrive in mind and body.  Similar to Indian asceticism, the soul must be ordered and thus purified.  Like Buddhists, Pythagoreans believed that the soul/mind/self is reincarnated until it achieves release into union with the soul of the cosmos, the universal soul.  Unlike Buddhists, Pythagoreans see this as a release from the limitless into union with order, not a release into the limitless which the Pythagoreans believed to be largely outside the cosmos.  

Heraclitus says the Egyptians taught a three-thousand year cycle that takes the soul through all orders of animal life before it is again reborn as a human being.  It is not clear whether Pythagoras adhered to this, but Herodotus says several Greeks did without mentioning names.  Pythagoras saw that the human individual was bound by cycles like the cosmos, and so individuals should strive to adhere to balanced cycles that build one up rather than destructive cycles that tear one apart.

Similar also to Egyptian and Indian doctrines, Pythagorean dietary restrictions aimed at incurring the least amount of punishment and karmic demerit.  Some plants such as beans were thought to incarnate human souls and so were prohibited, but other plants, honey and nuts were acceptable.  It may be that later Neopythagoreans lifted the ban on certain meats or got rid of the dietary restrictions entirely.  Diogenes Laertius mocks Pythagoras with several humorous poems, in one saying that like Pythagoras, he also does not eat living food, but prefers his meat roasted and salted.

Other prohibitions for Pythagoras included not touching white roosters (as they are sacred), not picking up food off the ground (ancient 0 second rule), not eating on the day of an acquaintance’s death, not stirring fire with a knife (as it might offend Apollo), not urinating while facing the sun (again, it’s rude to Apollo), and making your bed every day.  

Some of these prohibitions are symbolic of ethical teachings.  The Maxims of Pythagoras were sayings that are concealed through metaphor from those outside the Pythagorean community but easily understood once explained.  

“Do not poke the fire with a sword” meant “Do not provoke the angry”.  
“Suffer no swallows around your house” meant “Do not associate with the chatty”.  
“Do not unload people, but load them up” meant “Encourage work and virtue”.  
“Do not sleep at noon” meant “Stay aware and alert”.  
“Do not cut wood on the road” meant “Do not use or do privately what should be public”.  
“Sit down when you worship” means “Take your time doing what needs to be done”.  
“Eat not in the chariot” meant “Focus on the task at hand”
“Stop not at the threshold” meant “Be decisive and take a side”.  
“Avoid the weasel” meant “Avoid the deceitful”.  
“Sleep not on a grave” meant “Work rather than rely on inheritance”.  
“Threaten not the stars” meant “Do not threaten superiors”.  
“Do not place a candle against the wall” meant “Do not waste time on the hopelessly ignorant”.  
“Do not speak in the dark” meant “Do not talk about what you don’t know”.

Another symbol used was the Pythagorean Y, in ancient Greek the capitalized letter ‘epsilon’.  One forks into two, the right and left paths.  The right path is tough, but it ends in virtue, peace and immortality.  The left path is easy, but ends in hardship and destruction.  This applied equally to the cosmos and the human individual.  Virtuous things and people prosper and become permanent, like the cosmos itself.

Pythagoreanism was a big influence on later secret mystical societies of the Middle East and Europe such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.  Pythagoreans, like Masons, were said to wear symbols by which they could recognize each other.  Like Masons, many New Age groups take Pythagorean teachings as the sacred wisdom of ancient Egypt, sometimes adding aliens into the mix as the builders of the pyramids and teachers of the Egyptians.


Xenophanes

Born in Colophon, (570 - 475 BCE) near Miletus, Xenophanes was well acquainted with Milesian thought.  The Persians conquered Colophon in 546 BCE, when Xenophanes was in his 20s.  He composed poetry like Homer and Hesiod to express his thought, not prose like Anaximander (and maybe Thales), and would have recited his poetry at various gatherings.  His poetry, of which we still have forty fragments, are famous for ridiculing his fellow poets and philosophers for their views.  While much of his surviving poetry does not have to do with philosophy or skepticism, it is for this that he is remembered and recorded by other philosophers and historians.  Xenophanes is said to have been a student of Anaximander, like Pythagoras, and that he taught Parmenides.  He refers to Thales, Pythagoras and Epimenides, and is referred to by Heraclitus (whose thinking is very similar to that of Xenophanes).

Xenophanes was critical of Greek culture valuing military might and athletic ability, a fan of inquiry and the endless pursuit of truth.  In the only written text we have from the brief period of Athenian democracy (as they did not keep records) speech of Pericles the general gives a speech to the assembly saying, “We have learned study like those from the East, without compromising our manliness”.  Clearly, the Athenians valued education but saw it as potentially effeminate compared to fighting with spears.  Xenophanes wrote that a city would not be well governed by a great boxer or sprinter, but could only prosper under a wise and knowing leader.  

The Milesians, as shown previously, thought that the cosmos was divine and intelligent, but were concerned with the processes of nature and the elements rather than anthropomorphic gods.  While this is implicit in the Milesians, it is not explicitly said that the forces ruling the cosmos are non-anthropomorphic.  Similarly in India, logicians such as Kanada and Gotama, as well as the philosophers of the unorthodox schools such as Jainism and Buddhism, spoke of forces other than gods at work in the cosmos without explicitly calling the anthropomorphic gods of the Vedas and Epics into question.

Xenophanes openly ridicules the idea of anthropomorphic forces, calling it conceit.  Says it is foolish to see the cosmos ruled by human like chaotic and selfish beings rather than order itself.  Such gods are incapable of ruling the cosmos and giving it the order we see.  Our cosmos is rational and comprehensible.  This is early rational theology, also employed by Muslims who saw algebra as the reasoning and active ordering of the cosmos.  Mutazilites, a sect of Muslims who argued that God and the cosmos is order itself and so God is not free to contradict himself or be unreasonable, debated furiously with other Muslims who argued this view contradicts God’s omnipotence.  A being of pure order and necessity should not have to make choices.

Xenophanes said the Homeric Olympian gods are immoral and disorderly, lower in many acts than human beings, and that the stories of gods fighting Titans, giants and centaurs are “the forgeries of our fathers”.  This is not mindful of the gods.  Note that Xenophanes believes there are gods, but that Homer and Hesiod, the orthodox sources of the Olympic myths, are not pious enough, do not revere the gods enough.  Homer and Hesiod say the gods steal, rape, cheat on their spouses and deceive one another, all the things human beings despise in each other.  The gods are not causes of or responsible for evil.  Rather, it is falling away from the infinite and divine which is the cause of evil, chaos and suffering.

Do the gods have human form?  Xenophanes notes that the Ethiopians say gods are dark skinned and flat nosed, while the Thracians (like the slave girl who laughed at Thales falling into the well) are blue-eyed and red-haired.  Ethiopia was the southernmost nation of people (inhabited, according to Anaximander, Xenophanes’ supposed teacher, by fire people) and Thrace was the northernmost nation (inhabited, according to Anaximander, by snow people).  Xenophanes is drawing a comparison between the extremes, implying that for the Greeks and Egyptians, people who occupy the center of the world according to Anaximander’s map, are just as foolish as the extreme peoples on the outskirts in depicting the gods to look like themselves, or even to look like human-animal hybrids such as the Egyptian gods.  Xenophanes argues that even animals would fall for this sort of mistake if they were capable of doing so.  Thus comes the most quoted of lines from Xenophanes’ poetry:

“If oxen and horses had hands and were able to draw with their hands like humans, horses would draw the gods as horses, and oxen would draw the gods as oxen, and each would give them the same shape as themselves.”

Xenophanes argued that those like Hesiod who claim that gods are born are just as impious, just as atheist, as those who say the gods are not immortal and can die, as both necessarily mean that there is a period of time without the gods, when they do not exist.  For Xenophanes, immortality means equally that one never dies and that one was never born.  Note that those who believe in the Homeric traditional culture and Hesiod’s Theogony would say that it is Xenophanes who is the atheist, ‘atheist’ here meaning one who does not believe in the gods the way that the speaker of the term does.

Xenophanes denied that there is any hierarchy of the gods, directly attacking the idea of Zeus as prime ruling father god.  If the gods are supreme, then they can have nothing above them, not even each other.  The immortal and infinite can not be constrained by anything.  This is similar to Anaximander, who argued that the primordial infinite apeiron could not be constrained in having a particular quality or character.

For Xenophanes, the gods do not meddle in human affairs, and they are not many at all.  Xenophanes is outspoken in his monotheism.  There is one infinite, similar to if not identical with Anaximander’s apeiron, and this thing does not move, is not more here rather than there at this time versus that time, and is not affected by anything.  Strangely, Xenophanes speaks of the (many) gods, and yet says there is only one god.  Xenophanes is in complete disagreement with Homer and Hesiod, as they said that the gods moved about and were the primary agents of human affairs, such as in Homer’s Iliad where they are on all sides of the siege of Troy.

Xenophanes argued that there is one divine god which is not at all like mortal humans in either body or mind.

“All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears...But without effort he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.”

This creates a problem Plato tries to solve with the Demiurge in his Timaeus, and it remained a problem for Neoplatonism for centuries: how can the supreme One perceive and think without moving or having character, without being at one time this and at another that.  Can thought be effortless and unaffected?  Can there be thought or perception without motion?  If perception and thought are reactions to things that are then nourished or rebalanced, it would seem so.  The contradictions of Homer and Hesiod lead to further contradictions of Xenophanes, which lead to further contradictions of Plato and the Neoplatonists.  This follows Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift, that a model has problems but is sufficient until those problems become apparent, which leads to a new model that solves the older problems but creates new ones in the process.

Xenophanes seems to remove the infinite categorically from particular things, which do move here and there and are affected by each other.  However, if all things are of this infinite in extension, are one and the same as it, the way that branches are extensions from the trunk of a tree, one and the same as it, the trunk can be said to not move or be affected by anything, the branches can be said to move and affect each other, and yet the trunk is one and the same thing as each individual branch.

Xenophanes agrees that the cosmos is ruled and ordered by the divine, but disagrees with the conceptions of the poets as well as the various traditional peoples of the known world.  This is coming about due to contact with multiple cultures, from which Xenophanes knows that all peoples believe in the divine but disagree as to its form and character.  Xenophanes says that this is because the infinite, as Anaximander argues, has no character, and so each people (such as the Greeks, the Ethiopians and Thracians) see the gods through their own cultural understanding just as, in the Indian story, each blind man feels a part of the elephant and thinks his part is characteristic of the whole.

Some have said Xenophanes is the father of skepticism, picked up and furthered later by Heraclitus and Pyrrho.  Dogmatists tend to put truth out in the world, while skeptics tend to put truth in the head.  This is also referred to as psychological skepticism: truth is shaped in the mind, not simply given in the world.  Nietzsche, who likes Xenophanes and Heraclitus, says we should distrust the falsification of the world by grammar and logic to achieve greater understanding of ourselves, our world, and our role in the world.  Xenophanes writes:

“No one has seen nor will know the truth about the gods or all the things I speak of, for even if one should say what is true, they do not know but rather place beliefs over all things.”

Superstition means standing something on top of something else.  Radical skepticism would say that all conceptions and knowledge are superstition, with some being quite useful and others quite useless.  In a softer form this is also known as pragmatism, the position that knowledge and truth are not absolute correspondences but useful tools.

If so, then why is Xenophanes telling us about what he knows about, which are things no one can ever know about?  In what may be the conclusion to Xenophanes’ book, he says, “Let these things be believed as resembling the truth.”  So Xenophanes does believe in correspondence, but only a relative and not absolute correspondence which he says is impossible.  

Nevertheless, there is progress: “By no means did the gods reveal all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, by searching, they discover better.”  This is optimistic skepticism, not pessimistic.  It is not that there is no truth, but because relatively more truth can always be discovered there is no absolute truth.  Xenophanes believes that his beliefs are relatively true compared to others, but that they are not absolute in and of themselves.

Displaying perspectival relativism like Heraclitus (and Daoists like Zhuangzi), Xenophanes says if there was no yellow honey people would say that figs are much sweeter than they do.  This means that figs are perceived to be less sweet only because we have something sweeter to compare it to.

For Xenophanes, the world within the cosmos is also eternal, never having been born and undying.  He argues the rainbow is not a goddess but a multicolored cloud.  All things, including rainbows, are made of earth and water.  Air comes from water, such as wind from the ocean.
The opposition of wet water and dry earth is the primary dynamic of elemental interactions, rather than the hot and cold for Anaximander or dense and rare for Anaximenes.  Xenophanes argues that sea shells and fossils of fish found in mountains showed that those lands were underwater previously, and that the earth had interacted with the water such that the water had been used up and the mud congealed into stone.  This is quite correct, other than the production of elements out of water and earth.

To explain this, Xenophanes says the world alternates between wet and dry periods, and humanity dies out in the wet periods and flourishes in the dry.  Heraclitus thinks wet is desire and dry is good for soul, making it wise.  It is also very similar to kalpas of Indian thought, in which there are cycles of the rise and setting of culture and ‘religion’ or systems of thought.  Xenophanes is attempting to explain the flood stories of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia and Noah of the Judaic Old Testament, as a great flood wiped out civilization that then grew back when the waters receded.  The seasons would be microcycles within the larger cycle, dryness in the summer before the fall harvest, wetness in the winter before the rebirth of spring.  Anaximander also held that the world is in a drying period, but many believe that he saw the drying as a final phase before the world is absorbed back into the infinite.  

As a final note, on drinking Xenophanes says it is not wrong to drink as much as an elderly person could such that they can get home without the assistance of servants (clearly a problem of the time) and a great person speaks of virtue and noble deeds when they drink, unlike others who speak of bawdy and base subjects.  Clearly, it is not drinking but topic of conversation that can be evil.

Logic: Indian Logic, Kanada & the Nyaya

Kanada and the Beginnings of Indian Logic

You may notice that Kanada’s text, the Vaisheshika Sutra, is very hard to read.  The introduction says that this is the first translation of this important text into English, and this was done and published in New Delhi, Northern India, in 2003.  There is no British or American publication of this text.  As you read Aristotle in the next weeks, consider how well Aristotle speaks in English when there is support and funding for the publication.  If you compare this to the translator’s edition of Aristotle, you find that Aristotle speaks in fragmented words and the translators polish it and interpret it to get Aristotle to sound that good.  This is unfortunate, for Kanada may have been the first atomist and one of the first logicians.

The Vedas are India’s earliest texts and traditions, consisting of many stories of gods and cosmic origins.  Much philosophy and cosmology are contained in these texts.  It is believed today that they were formed from earlier oral traditions into the standard written texts around 1200 BCE.  Four hundred years later, around 800 BCE, the Upanishad texts taught the ‘inner meanings’ of the Vedas, drawing philosophical lessons from the tales of the gods.  ‘Philosophy’ is darshana, ‘seeing’.  The Upanishads preach liberation by knowledge.  The most famous quote is “Tat tvam asi”, or “That is you”.  Whatever is other to you is in fact your own self.

200 years later, around 600 BCE (Kanada’s time), India was experiencing a third wave of philosophy including the logicians, atomists, Jains and Buddhists.  This is the time when Kanada, Gotama (next week), and the Buddha were supposed to have lived and taught, and schools of their followers flowered in the next several hundred years (the same time as philosophy and logic were flourishing in ancient Greece).

At this time, India was producing superior steel (wootz) that the Chinese, Romans and Egyptians highly prized.  The Chinese tried for centuries to reproduce it at home but without success (until they invented cast iron which is the material of the medieval European blacksmith).  The Romans sold German tribes people (like me) as slaves in India in trade for this steel, dies, spices and other goods.  Alexander tried to conquer India, and failed, because of these goods.  This means that Kanada, Gotama and Buddha were living in the inter-connected and international ancient world.


Kanada’s Life and Legend

Kanada’s dates are debated.  Chinese scholars sometimes put his texts at 1000 BCE, while our scholars often put them at 200 BCE or even 100 CE.  This is quite political, because the Chinese tradition comes very much from India and the European tradition comes very much from Greece.  The publisher of this texts says it is safe to say that Kanada lived and taught by 600 BCE at the latest.

Kanada’s name means, ‘One who eats grain’, but it could also mean, ‘One who gathers particulars.  We will see how this is central to logic and Kanada’s teachings.  He is also known as ‘The Owl’, or Uluka.  Legend has it that he was so ugly in appearance that he frightened young women, so he only ventured out at night, sneaking into granaries to eat corn and rice grains/particles.  Another story is Shiva taught him in the form of an owl.  Notice that there are many traditions and versions, some mixed with the stories of the Vedic gods.

Kanada began what is known as the Vaisheshika school, and thus his text is the Vaisheshika sutra.  Vaisheshika means particular, but also particle, atom, particular, special, specific, and distinction.   Kanada may have been the first logician and atomist in recorded history, but as we have seen this is still a debate that can be quite political.  Gotama’s Nyaya (Logic/Debate) school borrowed much from Kanada in forming rules and manuals of debate.  It is believed that Jainism and Buddhism took both of these systems and developed them in a skeptical and relativist direction.  Thus, Kanada and Gotama are positivistic logicians who are seeking atomic truths (universal, necessary and certain), and the Jains and Buddhists are skeptical logicians who criticize positivistic thinking with relativity and skepticism.

The two schools of Kanada (Vaisheshika) and Gotama (Nyaya) focus on inherence (how the particular individual is a member of the general group) and inference (conclusions that can be drawn about the particular individual when one knows the general group).  Two types of inherence which allow us to make valid inferences include speciation (groups that have typical qualities) and causation (events in time that lead from one to another).

Kanada set out his Vaisheshika system and its seven objects of knowledge to understand the world (cosmology or physics, but in the ancient world this extended to biology and psychology).  Gotama, who we will study next, was concerned with debate and logical argument.


The Vaisheshika System

First, we will go over Kanada’s seven objects of knowledge, and then interesting points in the following chapters Kanada makes that are important for logic and physics.

1) Substance (dravya): nine in number (air, water, fire, earth, ether, time, space, self and mind).  These are composed of particles or atoms that are eternal and uncreated (thus they can’t be created or destroyed).  Newton, like medieval alchemists before him but unlike modern physics and chemistry, believed in ether, the glue element that sticks the others together in combinations.

2) Attribute (guna): quality (color, texture, odor, taste) and quantity (number, measure, distinction, conjunction, disjunction).  Kanada argues in the text that attributes are not substances, but reside in substances and can cause substances, other attributes and actions.

3) Action (karma): note that karma is the physical energy and motion that makes kicking someone cause pain and also gets the kicker reborn as a cockroach (most only know of the second as a religious concept, but like Chinese Chi it is equivalent to physical energy and is often identified with the element fire in ancient systems).  Kanada argues that substances and attributes can cause actions but actions themselves cannot produce other actions.  He also argues action belongs to one substance, not many (note that the Buddhist “sound of one hand clapping” is a counter argument to this point, and that Gotama differs from Kanada on this also).

4) General (samanya): the universal or group, such as the general group (speciation) of all cows or the general event (causation) of a rainstorm (in which clouds cause rain).

5) Particular (vishesha): the individual or specific, such as the individual cow or the individual event of a cloud causing rain.

6) Inherence  (samavaya): the particular being included and conforming to the general.  We can make inferences based on inherences.  If we know that the general group of cows have horns, then we know that this particular cow must have horns.  Likewise, if we know that generally rainclouds cause rain, then we can infer that this particular rain must have been caused by clouds.

7) Non-existence or Emptiness (abhava): non-being, nothingness and void.  Nuf said.

Kanada tries to give a systematic account of the many types of each object and the relationships between each object (ex: substances and qualities can produce actions, but actions cannot).

In the second chapter, Kanada gives us an early understanding of what would later be called Modus Tollens in European Logic following Aristotle.  Kanada writes “in the absence of cause is the absence of effect but in the absence of effect there is no absence of cause”.  This means that if you know “If P then Q”, then you also know and can infer “If not Q then not P” but you do not know and cannot infer “If not P then not Q”.  This is very important to understand for basic logic, and many people make the mistake of thinking that one can infer “not P then not Q”.

Kanada discusses fire as energy.  It is interesting that fire was the most common form of energy seen and used in the ancient world, whereas electricity is the most common form seen and used in the modern world.  Thus, the Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and Chinese thought of energy as fire whereas we think of energy as electricity.

In the third Chapter, Kanada describes types of proofs and fallacies.  Gotama and the Nyaya school try to give an entire encyclopedia, and disagree with Kanada on many points.  Kanada like Aristotle argues that you can disprove arguments by finding contradictions and that you cannot infer the general from the particular (you cannot infer that all cows have spots from the individual cow that has spots).

Kanada argues that sound is caused and therefore it is impermanent.  Some have argued this seems to be a subtle critique of the earlier Vedic tradition (like arguing “paper is perishable” as a safe and subtle way of suggesting that the Bible must be temporary, not eternal).

Kanada argues that things move downward naturally, so things must have additional causes/forces to move sideways or upward (thus, smoke shows additional force or energy, namely that it has fire in it and fire moves upward.  He also argues thus that water moves upward by sun/fire in it, then comes downward in cycles.  Then, when the water collects in clouds, it causes the fire to be released as lightning.  He argues that the arrow flies first from cause and then from inherent tendency to remain in motion, similar if not identical to the modern concept of ‘inertia’.

Kanada says there are many organs in the body, but each has its own particularity as they have different causes/purposes.  We believe this today, but consider the ancient world understanding that Aristotle shared called the teleological view: every individual thing has a particular purpose as if the whole is conscious.  There is a Roman stoic writer who speaks of the horrible mystery of underground caverns that seem to exist in spite of no animals or humans being present.  This is a horrifying mystery because without conscious use, the ancient mind would be baffled by its existence.


Gautama and the Nyaya School of Debate

Medhatithi Gautama, who lived sometime about 550 BCE, is considered the founder of the Nyaya school and the author of the Nyaya Sutra, a textbook and manual on logical debate.  The Nyaya Sutra was not the first Indian text concerned with logical argument and analysis, but it became one of the most popular and thus foundational for the Nyaya school.  It is believed that the Jains and Buddhists, who are more skeptical thinkers about logic but very involved in debate, later took much from the Nyaya Sutra and school.  Nyaya means “right”, “just”, “justified” or “justifiable”, the same way we use ‘logical’ to mean ‘right debate or speech’.  The school reached its height in 150 CE, but it traces itself back to Gautama and his teachings.

Gautama is also called ‘Akshapada’, ‘Eyes in the Feet’, from a legend that he was so deeply absorbed in thought one day on a walk that he fell into a well, and God (Brahma) gave him eyes in his feet to prevent this from happening again.  Notice that, like the Vaisheshika ‘particular’ school, Nyaya is concerned with putting particular things into categories and relationships.  Objects and substances can be called the ‘feet’ of things, and their families or causes (generalities) the head or mind of things.

The Buddha, who also lived sometime around 550 BCE is also called Gautama or Gotama.  Some scholars used to argue that Gautama may have been the Buddha himself, but in fact they were two different founders of two different schools who were both from the Gautama region in Northern India which is how they share the name.  Gautama, Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), were also of the warrior caste, the second class in the Indian caste system beneath the first class Brahmins, the Vedic priests and scholars.  This shows that the period produced new thinkers with new ideas that were questioning the established Vedic tradition, and the schools of this period are known to have become very popular because they were open to people of all castes including the lowest.  A story from the period says that a scholar who gave up on the Vedas and turned entirely to logic turned into a Jackal.  This story was obviously told by Vedic scholars and priests who found the new systems a threat to the old established traditions.  Like science in Europe, however, the new ways were gradually added to the old ways, until the new system was an old standard alongside the Vedic traditions.

The Nyaya Sutra is one of many debate manuals that was written for Indian philosophical or cosmological debates.  Questions asked included: “Is the self/soul/mind eternal or temporary?”, “Is the world and its laws eternal or temporary?”, “Is it better to renounce or indulge in luxuries?”, “Are there particular things which are sacred or is everything equally sacred?”, and, a question seen last week in Kanada’s text, “Is sound (and thus the oral tradition of the Vedas) eternal or temporary?”.  This last question is central to the Nyaya text and Gautama’s form of proof that we will study.

It is noticeable that many of these debates are concerned with distinguishing the eternal from the temporary.  In ancient world cosmology, the eternal was the sacred and the object of true knowledge.  If one could determine which things and laws are eternal, one would grasp the ways of the cosmos.

Notice that these debates (vadas) are also all of the form: Is object X in group Y or group not Y?  We will call this the Form of Nyaya Debate or Nyaya Vada.  If one could justifiably claim that all Xs are Ys, one could then argue for further truths based on the established truths.  Jains and Buddhists also took this form as fundamental.  For instance, the Vedic priests argued that the self/soul/mind was eternal, while the Jains and Buddhists argued that it is temporary.  In Greek thought, particularly with Plato and Aristotle, this arguing back and forth between opposite positions is called “Dialectic”.

Later, in Buddhist debates about 200 BCE, just after Nyaya hits its height, three areas of debate for a proposition were conducted in order:  “Is X always Y?”, “Is X everywhere Y?” and “Is X Y in everything?”.

In ancient India, a king, authority or rich patron would organize a debate and banquet, invite participants from various schools of thought to debate (often the teachers of competing rival schools, like a competition in a Kung Fu movie).  Women were not unheard of as debate participants, but not nearly as common as male debaters (one can unfortunately say this of American and British philosophical departments today).

Debate manuals like the Nyaya Sutra were designed to introduce students and scholars to typical forms of argument as well as methods of attack and defense.  They also listed fallacies, types of false arguments that sound solid but have flaws.  The Nyaya Sutra tells us that the best debater will not take cheap moves, ‘quibbles’ or ‘clinchers’, but one is free to make them at one’s own risk.  The text is surprisingly honest and insightful on this point.  By using deceptive reasoning, you could win the debate but you could also could lose if your opponent points out your errors or shortcuts.  This is still true of argument today even in the most casual setting, and a good reason that looking into old Logic texts like the Nyaya Sutra is still useful today.  Aristotle’s Organon, his ‘Tool’, are six books that cover different areas of debate and knowledge, similarly dealing with construction of argument and fallacies.  Aristotle also must straddle the sometimes contrary goals of arguing truth and winning the debate.


The Nyaya Sutra and System

The Four Sources of Knowledge are Perception, Inference, Comparison, and Testimony.  All of these can potentially give valid knowledge, but there are problems with each.  Perception is seeing or experiencing something for oneself.

Perception can only be valid if it tells you something determinate that doesn’t vary or change.  Two examples of false perception given in the text are confusing smoke and dust, and thinking that the hot earth is wet when in fact this is a mirage.

Inference is knowledge of an object produced by perception.  This shows Induction of perception passing into Deduction of inference which is still held in Philosophy and Psychology today.  There are two kinds of inference that one can have based on perception of associations (like rain always falling from clouds).

First, there is inference from perception of cause the knowledge of possible and potential effect.  For example, if one sees dark rain clouds, one can infer that it may possibly rain.  According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens (a basic form of Logic we saw first last week with Kanada), this is knowledge of a possibility, a potential, but not a certainty.  If one sees clouds, it is wise to get ready for rain but it is not certain that it will rain.

Second, there is inference from perception of effect to knowledge of cause.  For example, if one sees rain one knows there are clouds or if one sees a swollen river one knows that it must have rained.  According to Kanada, Gautama and Modus Tollens this sort of knowledge is certain provided that one is not deceived.  For example, if one sees smoke and it is not in fact dust then one knows that there is fire.

Comparison is knowledge of a thing by comparing it to something else that is similar or different.  For example, if one knows that cows are mortal and temporary, one is quite justified in believing that horses, quite similar to cows in many ways, are mortal and temporary.  Comparisons can often lead to valid beliefs, but there is the possibility of error.  An example is believing wrongly that a horse has four stomachs because one knows this is true of a cow.
Testimony is instructive words from a reliable person or authority.  There are two types, testimony of the perceived and testimony of the unperceived. The text gives the example of a physician saying butter makes you stronger as perceived and a priest saying you win over heaven with horse sacrifices as unperceived.  Notice that, like Kanada’s text, this is a subtle attack on the older Vedic ways and suggests that they are uncertain compared to inferences drawn from perception.  The Nyaya school is founded on the idea that valid deductive inferences must be based on regular and invariable perception, quite comparable to the modern scientific method.


The Form of Nyaya Proof

Some authors have claimed that Aristotle’s syllogisms are deductively valid but the Nyaya proof is not and based on induction.  Actually, Aristotle has many syllogisms he admits are not deductively valid on their own and he also believes that one can only argue based on what one perceives and one can be mistaken exactly like the Nyaya School and Gautama.  We can see induction and deduction working together in both Aristotle’s syllogisms and Gautama’s form of proof.  As can see in the text, there are five steps but as the Buddhists correctly perceived the first and second are identical to the fifth and the fourth.  To make it easier, I have boiled it down to two steps.  The first is a general rule backed by an example.  The second step is a reason which leads to a conclusion.  The text gives us an example:

Wherever there is smoke there is fire (rule), as in a kitchen (example).
Because there is smoke on the hill (reason), there is fire on the hill (conclusion).

For each of these parts, there are particular sorts of questions or doubts one can raise.  If one is in a debate against an opponent, it is critical to know the sorts of doubts that one can raise against the opponent’s argument as well as the doubts one’s opponent can raise against one’s own argument.

The text gives us examples that can be used against its own example of proof.  One can argue that an iron ball is on fire, but there is no smoke as a counter example to the rule “Wherever there is smoke, there is fire”, or one can argue that dust can be confused with smoke, so “There is smoke on the hill” may be misperception.

There is also two types of proof, positive homogeneous (proof by sameness) and negative heterogeneous (proof by difference).

Example of Proof By Sameness:

Whatever is produced is not eternal, as a pot.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.

Notice we saw this in Kanada’s text, and scholars have suggested it attacks the older Vedic tradition.  The example above concerning fire on the hill is also a proof by sameness.  This is quite similar to the structure of Aristotle’s most famous and basic syllogism:

If B, then C (plus example D), (If smoke then fire)
If A then B, then (if hill has smoke)
A then C (hill has fire)

Example of Proof By Difference:

Whatever is eternal is not produced, as in the soul.
Because it is produced, sound is not eternal.


Doubts, Fallacies and Quibbling

Doubt comes from five sources.  There is doubt by sameness (ex: seeing in twilight, can’t tell bush or man), by difference (ex: seeing two men in twilight, and thinking still one is a tree), by conflicting testimony (ex: Hinduism says there is an eternal soul or self, while Buddhism says there is no eternal self or soul), by irregular perception (ex: one sees a horse with horns attached to its head and questions whether horses can have horns), and by irregular non-perception (ex: one sees a cow with its horns removed and questions whether cows can have no horns).
Fallacies are false arguments.  Examples include changing the thesis, contradicting the thesis, meaningless utterance, incoherent speech (‘colorless sleep furiously green’ is a famous example by Noam Chomsky), repetition, silence, ignorance (failing to understand typically), evasion (‘I am called by nature’, ‘I have another appointment’), sharing the fault (problem with both sides), overlooking fallacies, pointing out false fallacies.

Quibbling is objecting to an argument as a fallacy when it is not actually a fallacy.  Quibbling can lose a debate just as surely as giving a fallacious argument.  The text gives three types: Term (ex: Someone claims to have a new (“nava”) blanket, but this is confused with the claim of nine (also “nava”) blankets), Genus (ex: Someone claims Brahmins are educated but the opponent objects that some Brahmins are two years old), Metaphor (ex: Someone claims poetically, “The scaffolds cry out”, and the opponent objects, “Impossible, they are inanimate objects”).

Logic: Indian Logic Assignment

                                                                                 NAME__________________________
BCC Logic  

Indian Logic Assignment

1) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If p then q”, we also know:




2) According to Modus Tollens, if we know “If there is rain there are clouds”, we also know:




3) Give the form of Nyaya debate (both sides) using x and y.



4) Give an example of a Nyaya debate (both sides).



5) Give the four sources of knowledge according to the Nyaya Sutra, with an example for each.





6) Give an example of a Nyaya proof (rule, example, reason, conclusion).









7) What is the difference between a fallacy and quibbling?

Asian Philosophy: The Upanishads & Hindu Epics

Last time, looking at the Vedas, we saw that many different traditions and interpretations flourish in Indian thought and Hinduism.  We also briefly discussed that the Vedas were followed by the Upanishads and then by Vedanta, both which extended the interpretations of the Vedas toward philosophical monism beyond any specific deity or dogma.

In the sections of the Vedas in your reader, we can see several passages that foreshadow the Upanishads and their more monistic understanding of the metaphoric narratives.  This is also how we can understand the Hindu Epics we will examine this session.  Often, teachings of the ancient world that are legendary can be understood by the common person as a real and miraculous event of history while the elite and wise could understand the legend as containing a deeper truth that can be transmitted to the common people as a story to be taken as history but which is more properly revealed as a metaphor.  Particularly aided by the plurality of stories and traditions accepted into Indian and Hindu thought, there is much room for skepticism and subjectivism concerning conflicting truths and the shared common meaning having more importance than the conflicts in literal meaning.  This is reflected in these Vedic passages, which were then extended in the Upanishads and Vedanta.

In a hymn to Indra, the storm father god who was often the chief sky father all god until unseated by Brahman (a more abstract, all-godhead), we find that we should praise Indra, if indeed he does exist.  It asks, if someone wishes to purchase Indra from me for a modest price, you can return him after he has slain the demons.  This is surprising humor found in the central Veda, the Rg Veda.  A hymn to Vishvedevas asks, “Who hath beheld him as he sprang to being, seen how this boneless One supports the bony?  Where is the blood of earth, the life, the spirit?  Who may approach the man who knows, to ask it?”.  The boneless One, a humorous portrayal of the monistic All which has no bones because it is one without any articulation or part, supports all the many things with their many parts.  Whenever we say, “All” or “reality”, we are summing everything together effortlessly without any divisions and without leaving any particular thing out.  A hymn to frogs tells us that, just as Vedic priests gather together with their rituals, so too do the frogs gather around the pond croaking to celebrate the first rain.  This is remarkably similar to a passage of Zhuang Zi, the Daoist patriarch, who asks if the supreme wisdom of humans is any different from the chirping of baby birds we will read much later in the course.  Another hymn asks for blessings for the “liberal worshipers”, who will hopefully turn in faith to the gods rather than doubt their existence with philosophical monism.  Notice that the hymn refers to these skeptical and philosophical individuals as “worshipers”, not as atheists or heathens.  

It is just these sort of individuals who would go on to write the Upanishads, the Vedanta and both the orthodox and unorthodox schools of Indian thought, including the Jainism and Buddhism we will study in the next few weeks.  As the Upanishads continued to gain teachers and followers, there was a new flowering of many schools of thought between 700 and 400 BCE that took much from the Vedas and Upanishads but developed the teachings in new directions.  These new schools often rejected the caste system (still in place today in spite of these ancient rebellions) and thus gained massive followings among all classes and castes of India.  Jainism was one of the first, but it was quickly developed and transformed itself into a religion that is possibly the most popular system of thought in history, Buddhism.

The Upanishads (beginning in 800 BCE, most having been written by 600 BCE) were philosophical teachings about the soul/self (atman) and how to release the soul from desire and identity to merge with the great One and All (the goal of moksha or nirvana, discussed last time).  The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind/soul/self.  The self (atman) was to be united with the supreme reality, oneness, and spirit of all, Brahman.  ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near/beside”, (upa, ‘near’, ni, ‘down’, sad, ‘sit’) as these are the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and knows their secret  and hidden ‘inner’ meaning.  The students who were talented and advanced would sit down beside the teacher after the normal lecture to get the advanced, inner teaching that the normal students were not ready to hear.  Unfortunately, there are no authors to which the texts are ascribed, having been lost to history.  Perhaps some of these teachings are as old as the Vedas, and were only written down after 800 BCE.  There are over 200 Upanishad texts, though there are 10 central Upanishads.

One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”.  No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things.  This means there is no complete distinction between any ‘this’ or ‘that’, and thus no complete distinction between atman and Brahman, or between any of the gods and Brahman.  This is similar to another passage of Zhuang Zi the Daoist, one of my favorite skeptical passages of philosophy, which says, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”.  Notice the monism that unites all connecting not only the various Hindu gods together but all individuals in the singular One of reality.

In Indian artwork, for all schools of Indian thought including both Hinduism and Buddhism, one of the most common hand gestures or ‘mudras’ is the thumb and index finger touching forming a circle with the rest of the fingers extended, much like the ‘OK’ hand sign.  The thumb and index finger are symbolically pinching the seed, grain or essence of a thing.  While we may be skeptical of spiritual powers associated with hand gestures, hand and finger positioning has been shown to stimulate the same areas of the brain as counting, numbers and language.  This is likely because the development of number and language systems went ‘hand in hand’, so to speak, with the earliest gestures for primitive communication.  We naturally begin and often continue counting on our fingers, and use our fingers to point, intend and indicate.  The sages instructing students in the Upanishads and the Buddha are often portrayed displaying the essence/grain mudra, as it is associated with not only teaching, and teaching about essences (such as, the self is essentially, at bottom, basically an illusion), but also on a deeper level the supreme One which is the true undifferentiated reality supporting and consisting of all particular things and all individual selves.
Just like the unorthodox systems of Jainism and Buddhism would do later, the Upanishads point beyond particular duties to ritual, sacrifice, caste or class to the supreme goal of self-liberation.  This had a great appeal to those who were not Brahmins, the priests who formed the top level of the caste system.  While the Upanishads did not say to abandon the caste system, the teachings were applicable to all.  As we will see, Mahavira who founded Jainism and the Buddha both had great appeal as they openly said that one did not need to be reborn as a priest to have a shot at nirvana.  Rather, one could have it in this very life and not need to reposition oneself for a better life through karma.  Both Mahavira and Buddha were warrior’s sons and so were second class themselves.  We can see that, as the Upanishads caught on and became one of if not the most influential source in the further developments of Indian thought, people increasingly questioned the Vedas and the caste system even as they continued to retain them as many still do today.

Let us read selections from the Upanishads.  In the Isha Upanishad, we find:

“Onward, descending, go whoever are slayers of the self.  Unmoving, the One is swifter than the mind…It moves.  It moves not.  It is far, and it is near.  It is within all this, and it is outside of all this….What delusion, what sorrow is there, of him who perceives the unity!  The bright, the bodiless, the scathe-less, the sinew-less, the pure…Appropriately he distributed objects through the eternal years.  Into blind darkness enter they that worship ignorance.  Into darkness greater than that they that delight in knowledge.  Other, indeed, they say, than knowledge!  Other, they say, than non-knowledge!...Knowledge and non-knowledge: He who this pair conjointly knows, with non-knowledge passing over death, with knowledge wins the immortal.  Into blind darkness enter they who worship non-becoming.  Into darkness greater than that they who delight in becoming.  Other, they say, than origin!  Other, they say, than non-origin…Becoming and destruction: He who this pair conjointly knows, with destruction passing over death, with becoming wins the immortal.

Notice this passage suggests that the One moves and does not move, is knowledge and the opposite of knowledge, is the permanent and eternal as well as endless transformation, both evolution and decomposition.  It warns that you can fall into ignorance by preferring any one of these to its opposite, as you would then be following a part, not the whole.  Remember that Vishnu is the great savior and preserver god in the Hindu tradition, and Shiva is the great destroyer and transformer god.  This Upanishad is quite compatible with seeking a union of Vishnu, Shiva and all of their incarnations as not only Brahma, the singular One personified as a god, but Brahman, the One as un-personified, as beyond personifications and anthropomorphism.

In the Katha Upanishad, a dialog between the sage Naciketas and Yama, god of death, the good is praised above the pleasant.  As the sourcebook points out, this is very similar to what Socrates argues in dialogues written by Plato.  The highest mind is to be pursued, rather than the simple passing pleasures.  Naciketas says to Death, after being taught: “Ephemeral things!  That which is a mortal’s, O End-maker, even the vigor of all the powers, they wear away.  Even a whole life is slight indeed.  Yours are the vehicles!  Yours is the dance and the song!”.  This passage uses ‘vehicles’ as vessels or individual things that convey pleasure or anything else.  The vehicle is a popular metaphor for teaching or school in Indian thought, and as we will see the various schools of Buddhism are known as vehicles.

Yama replies that those who teach that reality is some part rather than the whole are blind men led by a blind man.  This is, in fact, the origin of the phrase, “blind leading the blind”.  Yama says, “Him who is the bodiless among bodies, stable among the unstable, the great, all-pervading self, on recognizing him, the wise man sorrows not”.  Yama uses a metaphor used by Plato through the mouth of Socrates, the self as charioteer, the body as a chariot, and the senses and passions as the horses.  Yama tells of a complex stack of higher and truer selves: “Higher than the senses are the objects of sense.  Higher than the objects of sense is the mind, and higher than the mind is the intellect (buddhi, also ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’, just as the Buddha is the ‘awakened one’).  Higher than the intellect is the great self.  Higher than the great is the un-manifest.  Higher than the un-manifest is the great person.  Higher than the person is nothing at all.  That is the goal.  That is the highest course.”

In the Mundaka Upanishad, we read: “There are two knowledges to be known, as indeed the knowers of Brahman are wont to say: a higher (para) and a lower (apara).  Of these, the lower is the Rg Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, and the Atharva Veda (the four principle Vedas, the central canonical and dogmatic texts above which there is no other).  Now, the higher is that whereby that Imperishable is apprehended.  That which is invisible, ungraspable, without family, without caste, without sight or hearing is It, without hand or foot, eternal, all-pervading, omnipresent, exceedingly subtle, that is the imperishable, which the wise perceive as the source of beings…He who knows that, set in the secret place of the heart, he here on earth, my friend, rends asunder the knot of ignorance…What that is, know as being and non-being, as the object of desire, higher than understanding, as what is the best of creatures!...Taking as a bow the great weapon of the Upanishad, one should put upon it an arrow sharpened by meditation.  Stretching it with a thought directed to the essence of that, penetrate that imperishable as the mark, my friend…As the flowing rivers in the ocean disappear, quitting name and form, so the knower, being liberated from name and form, goes unto the heavenly person, higher than the high.  He who knows that supreme Brahman, becomes very Brahman.”

In the Chanddogya Upanishad, we see Jabala leaving to study sacred knowledge and seek a teacher, so he asks his mother what family he comes from.  This is important, as family is caste and ethnicity according to the tradition and purity laws.  His mother tells him, and he in turn tells his teacher and sage, that when she was young she was a maid and got pregnant and does not know who his family is.  His teacher replies that he will accept him as a student, as only a Brahmin, the top priestly caste, could answer that way.  This is an interesting reversal, considering that the Brahmins are supposed to be pure and preserve their purity, while his mother’s story seems anything but top caste or pure.  He then begins to be taught:

“In the beginning, this world was just being (sat), one only, without a second.  To be sure, some people say in the beginning this world was just non-being (asat), one only, without a second, from that non-being, being was produced.  But verily, how could this be?...It bethought itself, would that I were many.  Let me procreate myself…As the bees prepare honey by collecting the essences of different trees and reducing the essence to a unity, as they are not able to discriminate, ‘I am the essence of this tree’ or ‘I am the essence of that tree’, even so, indeed, all creatures here, though they reach being, know not ‘We have reached being’.  Whatever they are in this world, whether tiger or lion, or wolf, or boar, or worm, or fly, or gnat, or mosquito, that they become.  That which is the finest essence, this whole world has that as its self.  That is reality.  That is self.  That art thou.  (This is the place where this central thought, ‘Tat tvam asi’, is written.)

The sage asks Jabala to bring him a fig, and then cut it up.  He asks what is inside, and Jabala says seeds.  He asks Jabala to cut the seeds, and asks what he sees inside, and Jabala replies, ‘Nothing’.  The sage responds, “That is the essence that you do not perceive, and it gives rise to the entire fig tree”.

Then the sage asks Jabala to put salt in water so it dissolves and asks him to sip from several sides, and each time Jabala replies that he tastes salt.  Like the inside of the fig seed, the sage says that the essence of all is hidden yet perceivable in all things equally.

In a hilarious passage of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, a student questions that master about how many gods there are repeatedly, and the master keeps changing his answer.  At first, he says that the Vedic hymn to all the gods says there are 303 and 3003, which would be 3306 all together.  Then he says there are 33, then 6, then 3 (likely Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma), then 2, then one and a half, and finally one, which is breath and Brahman.

The sage goes on to teach the student: “There are two conditions: being in this world and being in the other world.  There is a third condition that is being in sleep.  By standing in this condition one sees both of the others…When one goes to sleep, one takes along the material of this all containing world , himself tears it apart, himself builds it up, and dreams by his own brightness, by his own light.  Then this person becomes self-illuminated.  There are no chariots there, no spans, no roads, but he projects from himself chariots, spans, roads.  There are no blisses there, no pleasures, no delights, but he projects from himself blisses, pleasures, and delights.  There are no tanks there, no lotus pools, no streams, but he projects from himself tanks, lotus pools and streams, for he is a creator.  While he does not there know, he is truly knowing, though he does not know, for there is no cessation of the knowing of a knower, because of his imperishability…There is on earth no diversity.  As a unity only is it to be looked upon, this indemonstrable, enduring being, spotless, beyond space, the unborn self, great enduring.”

In the Maitri Upanishad, we read, “In this cycle of existence I am like a frog in a waterless well…In thinking ‘This is I’, and ‘That is mine’, one binds oneself with oneself, as does a bird with a snare…Therefore, by knowledge (vidya), by austerity (tapas), and by meditation (cinta), Brahman is apprehended…For thus has it been said: He who is in the fire, and he who is here in the heart, and he who is yonder in the sun – he is one”.


The Hindu Epics: The Ramayana and Mahabharata

As the Upanishads gained prominence and pushed towards philosophical monism, for Brahman beyond even the personification of Brahma, the Hindu tradition simultaneously gathered theistic traditions together in the great epics.  These tails tied many gods together along with Hindu traditional law and philosophical teachings of the Upanishads.  This is why these texts have such a key role in Hinduism.

The Ramayana is a story of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, and his quest with Hanuman, the monkey god, to rescue his wife Sita from the demon Ravana.  There are two moments of the Ramayana that fit with what we are studying.  In the beginning of the story, Ravana is a demon but also a sage who meditates for an impossibly long time and grows nine other heads that give him all the magical powers in the world.  Having obtained everything achievable, he decides to end his existence and proceeds to cut off one head at a time and throw them into a fire.  Just as he is about to cut his original and final throat, Brahma appears and says that he will grant Ravana whatever he desires, and Ravana asks to never be killed by gods, spirits or demons.  Brahma grants this, and from this moment on Ravana is the villain of the story.  The first thing Ravana does is go to Shiva, who is portrayed as stoned on bhang (milk steeped in pot), and demand Shiva, the destroyer, submit to him.  Shiva responds by lifting a finger and imprisoning Ravana in stone for thousands of years.  When Ravana finally breaks free he is quite pissed, Vishnu decides to be incarnated as Rama so that Ravana can be killed by a mortal human.

In the second moment, when Rama is following Brahma and his consort goddess Gayatri through the jungle, and as the goddess sways as she walks Rama (who is, of course, identical with Brahma not only as an individual but an incarnation of a central god himself) catches glimpses of Brahma.  This is clearly symbolizing desire as in motion (as the hips of a goddess), and even though it too is one with all you can see glimpses of the All amidst and beyond the motions of desire.

The Mahabharata is ridiculously long.  It is almost two million words, ten times the length of the Odyssey and the Iliad, the two Greek Epics.  The central and most celebrated part of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavadgita, the story of crown prince Arjuna hesitating before fighting a civil war against his family and former friends and teachers, and then being counseled by Krishna as an incarnation of Vishnu that as a warrior it is Arjuna’s duty to fight the just fight even if is against everyone else.  Along the way, Krishna explains Hindu doctrines of past lives, karma, liberation, the caste system, and duty.  In the peak moment, Krishna reveals his true self to Arjuna, which is so dazzling, complex and monstrous that Arjuna trembles with fright.  Krishna teaches Arjuna that if you do your duty not for yourself but for the cosmos, you are free of doubt and death.