Intro Philosophy: Indian Thought

Hinduism & The Upanishads

‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years).  Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians.  As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable.  First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition.  Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma.  Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One, called Brahman, different from the personified Brahma.

There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.  First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice).  In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens.  It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits.  The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna.  Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god.  Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali.  Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.

Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight.  Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques. 

Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing.  This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world.  All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.

There is an ultimate goal to this process.  Initially, there is hope for a better next life.  Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation.  This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions.  This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit.  Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence.  If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.

Beyond better lives, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth.  This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place.  Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture).  This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.

While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total.  In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material wellbeing, ‘artha’.  Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).

Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology.  They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today.  The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world.  In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today.  They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot).  All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus.  Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition.  Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations.  It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.

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.

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.

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 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.

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”.  This is again very similar to things we will read in the Daoist Zhuang Zi.

Jainism

Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” is still practiced today by four million Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say).  There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto.  Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.

Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: anekantavada, the multiplicity and relativity of reality or “non-one-endedness” and syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment that is always the fiber of human truth.  According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of each particular thing, including the self, and the cosmos, the greater whole.  Jains, like Buddhists, believe that things may or may not be as they seem and may or may not be expressible as they are.  Jains believe that there are seven points of view of each and every thing.  Each thing, including the cosmos and the self:

somehow is in a way that is describable

somehow is not in a way that is describable

somehow simultaneously is and is not in a way that is describable

somehow is indescribable

somehow is in a way that is indescribable

somehow is not in a way that is indescribable

somehow is and is not in a way that is indescribable

While other schools, including Nyaya logician/debaters, claimed that Jains and Buddhists are at fault for contradicting themselves and seeing contradicting views in things, the Jains and Buddhists argue that one only falls into problematic contradiction if one makes one-sided claims.  This is a classic duel between all/none logic and some/some-not logic, between the absolutist and the relativist.  The absolutist says the relativist does not have certain truth and contradicts themselves because they are on all sides of the issue, and the relativist replies that the absolutist does not have the full truth and contradicts themselves because they are NOT on all sides of the issue.

Jain texts use the example of hot and cold.  An absolutist would argue that a thing cannot be both hot and cold at the same time, but a relativist would argue that a thing is always somewhat relatively hot and somewhat relatively cold.  To say a thing is simply hot ignores how cold it is, and to say it is simply cold is to ignore how hot it is.  We could supply the example of a refrigerator, which cools on the inside by heating up in back and drawing the heat out of the inside.  A refrigerator is simultaneously hot and cold, and it could not be cold in one part unless it is hot in another.

Jains also, much like the wheel of Lao Zi in chapter 11 of the founding Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, use the example of a pot being solid and empty, there and not there.  In one part, it is, and in another part, it is not.  They use another example of a multicolored cloth, which is and is not many colors all over.  Notice that each thing one can say about anything is true in some ways, but false in others, a very critical way that things are and are not as they are described yet are never fully describable.  Jains argue that one sees and argues for the side of things that one wants to see, that one wants to be true.  This is yet another example of attachment and desire carving the One into many, shining light on some and plunging others into darkness and ignorance.

Jains note that, because human views and descriptions are always one-sided, it is perfectly alright to understand the whole yet lead people in one direction as opposed to another, just as ignorant arguers do, if one sees all of what one is doing.  Jains and Buddhists would see Jain and Buddhist teachers and saints in this light, as always telling what cannot be fully told, as leading us towards what is in all directions to begin with.  It is only a low and ignorant mind that thinks such leading is impossible because it is contradictory.

Jains use the image of a tree, with the absolute view (naya) as the trunk, what one joins after being fully liberated, and the particular view as the branches and twigs.  Notice that the trunk is and is not the twigs, just as the absolute and all-encompassing view is each particular view as a sum of them all but is not each particular view in that it is everything opposed to each particular view as well.

Similarly, Jains argue (like Hegel, who considers seeing being, non-being and becoming simultaneously in things as the first leap of philosophy and associates it with the ancient Greek skeptic Heraclitus) that things simultaneously are and are not because they are being birthed/generated, stable/still, and decaying/transforming at the same time at all times that they are.  Each of these views are false if they are considered independently true as opposed to their opposite, but in conjunction with their opposites they are the whole truth of each particular thing and of truth as a whole.  Notice that the union of stability with transformation as a single whole view is entirely similar to the orthodox Hindu union of Vishnu, the preserver/savior, and Shiva, the destroyer/transformer, in Brahma, the personification of all.

Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets.  People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era.  This is endless, like the cosmos.  The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us.  The Hindus and Buddhists share a similar picture of the cosmos, and the Indian golden age of philosophy, which includes the birth and teaching period of Mahavira and the Buddha, is seen as the apex, the high noon, of this current cycle.  Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).

Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters).  Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara.  Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time.  Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time.  Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.

Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought.  In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin).  Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down.  For Jains, karma is always bondage, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL.  Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.

While there are kinds of karma and attachment that make ourselves and others happy which the Jains call good, they are hindrances to be overcome if final liberation is to be obtained.  If you really, really like waffles, this is fine but to become one with all you must be as indifferent to waffles, neither loving nor hating waffles, as the cosmos.  Jains believe that “good” karma, such as that which causes pleasure when helping others out of compassion, matures and falls off naturally along with the body.  It is easier to get rid of “good” karma which only affects the body, but it is still to be left behind.

Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of attachment and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle.  Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant.  Like Buddhists, Jains believe that one should be disciplined and practice austerities and meditation not just for one’s own salvation, but for compassion and salvation for all living beings.

The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat:  You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana).  Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened.  The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in.  You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shedding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you).  Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.

From the Tattvarthadhigama Sutra, a central Jain text:

“There is a stoppage of inflow of karmic matter into the soul.  It is produced by preservation, carefulness, observances, meditation, conquest of sufferings, and good conduct.  By austerities is caused the shedding of karmic matter…Liberation is the freedom from all karmic matter, owing to the non-existence of the cause of bondage and to the shedding of the karmas.  After the soul is released, there remain perfect right-belief, perfect right-knowledge, perfect perception, and the state of having accomplished all.”

Buddhism

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough.  Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated.  The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.

According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India.  When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man.  The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people.  At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant.  In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man).  When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).

The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities.  The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither).  The Buddha left the jungle disappointed.  He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not  to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life.  After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, the goal of moksha and nirvana that the Hindus and Jains also revere.  This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.

Philosophical Ideas of Buddhism

The Doctrine of the Middle Way: In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes.  As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self.  The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is).  One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.

Doctrine of Impermanence: The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent.  Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice.  Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.

Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada): Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena.  All things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing.  Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things.  Just like Jains, Buddhists believe that because of suffering there is attachment and bondage to particular things, to “this versus that”, such that we come to have one-sided views of ourselves, of particular things, and of the cosmos as a whole.  Growing in wisdom and enlightenment is growing into identity with the whole, with all the sides that human minds can cling to out of despair, anger and fear.  The Buddhists, like the Jains, believe that one does not have a permanent self, and this constant transformation is a central cause of the fear and clinging of the mind to something opposed to an opposite in order to seek stability.  However, because the things and views are not themselves permanent, the mind must jump from one thing to another, seeking ideal stability in each thing and then leaping to the next with the same hope, endlessly without rest unless wisdom is developed and liberation achieved.  The Buddhists use the metaphor of the monkey mind, of a monkey leaping from branch to branch in a frenzy.

Greek Philosophy: Identity, Mythology & Tragedy

What Is Philosophy?

Before examining Greek Poetry, Mythology and Tragedy as the precursors to Greek philosophy, we should discuss what philosophy itself is.

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative).  Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there ever absolute certainties, facts, morals or truths?").  According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.  Questioning and answering, believing and doubting, work together by working against one another.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve.  The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom is similar across all cultures even though beliefs differ widely.  While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word meaning “love (philo) of wisdom (sophy)”, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.

Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, who we will study) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

If "philosophy" means "love of wisdom", then what is wisdom?

The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge (set answers) and wisdom (the ability to find new or contradictory answers, which requires deep questioning).

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.  Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.

Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues.  Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy.  It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks.  It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.

The most primitive societies value individual achievement, which often becomes the subject of legend and mythology.  It is difficult and frightening to oppose common opinion, but worth it.  While many think that Western thought is more individual and free than other traditions, arguments over the meaning of common knowledge and traditions are found everywhere.  In the logic class, we read a text by anthropologist Malinowski who studied the tribes of Papua, New Guinea in the 1940s.  He asks, “Are primitive people logical?”, and he argues that they are.  Human language typically has words for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’, and all the operations of ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and modern European logic.  He gives an excellent example of a tribesman tripping and falling, accusing an evil spirit of causing it, and his fellow tribespeople rebuking him and saying that he is merely clumsy.  

Another anthropologist, Radin, notes in his book Primitive Man as Philosopher that if you bring tribal elders together to discuss the myths of their tribe, they will each tell a slightly different version of each story and even when they tell the same version they argue over its interpretation.  Some such as Barthes (mentioned last class) and Latour argue that it is modern people such as ourselves who are unwise enough to think that there is simple objective truth without perspective and interpretation, as tribal people know all too well that the version of history their uncle tells them is as good as meaning gets, while modernity gives us institutions that, while still all too human, are monolithic and difficult for the average person to question.  Perhaps it is more that it is difficult for human beings to question traditions and institutions, but they inevitably question anyways, and so value the wisdom of those who can see the counterintuitive beyond the intuitive, the deeper truths beyond the surface.

Who Were The Greeks?

The mythology and history of ancient Greece, like that of other ancient cultures such as the Indians and the Mayans, was recorded in poetry and song.  As mentioned last time, it was only with Alexander and his brief empire that the city states of ancient Greece were united as a single state, though they shared a common language and tradition for centuries before.  The two largest ethnic groups were the Ionians (of the Turkish eastern half of ancient Greece) and the Dorians (of the western half, what is today the modern European nation of Greece).  There was a genealogical myth shared by these and other groups of a King Helen who had three sons (Aiolos, Doros & Xouthos) whose descendants became the tribes of interrelated but distinct ancient Greeks.  This is very similar to the Old Testament narrative of Noah, whose three sons repopulated the world after the great flood.  Both stories explain the diversity of human ethnicities and cultures by way of a single family of origin.

As a side note, Nazi historians along with other Europeans theorized that a Germanic invasion of the Dorian lands was the ethnic spark that gave birth to Athens and the West, giving European civilization a Germanic Western European origin, the so-called ‘Dorian Invasion’ theory.  

While Alexander was the first to bring the city states together as one political entity, much of ancient Greece was brought together with a common purpose during the fifty years of the Greco-Persian War (499  - 449 BCE), just as ancient Greece was beginning to rise and a hundred years before Alexander’s empire.  Cyrus, emperor of Persia mentioned last time, conquered Ionia in 547 BCE, but the Ionians revolted fifty years later with support from the Dorians and others.  The center of the rebellion was Miletus, near the modern day Turkish city of Anatolia, the home of the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, known as the Milesian School).  Darius, son of Cyrus and heir to the Persian Empire, sought to secure Ionia and then attack Athens and other city states that supported the Ionian rebellion.  In 490 BCE, the Persians were defeated at the battle of Marathon.  While Darius’ son Xerxes succeeded in overrunning all of Greece ten years later, the Persians were eventually expelled and the city states formed the Delian League with Athens as a leading member.  After Ionia was freed from Persian rule, a treaty between Athens and Persia brought an end to the wars.

Herodotus, who grew up during this period, noted that the Persians did not build statues of gods when they conquered a place, as they did not have anthropomorphic gods.  Last time it was mentioned that Persian Zoroastrian monotheism was influential on the ancient Greek philosophers, pushing them to abstract beyond their common tradition of polytheistic gods.  In another parallel with Islam, European Protestant Christianity was influenced by Islamic art in the centuries following the crusades.  As muslim armies made inroads into Europe, the Europeans wondered why Islam was so successful.  Turning to the Bible, reading that God uses foreign enemies to punish his people for doing wrong, and he punished the Israelites for worshiping idols as images, the Iconoclasts of Europe (the origin of the term, which today denotes those who go against the ways of things) ditched the statues of saints and other icons to be more like the successful muslims who avoided images of saints and preferred to represent God and the order of nature through abstract geometric patterns.  These Iconoclasts paved the way for the Protestant reformation.  In both ancient Greece and medieval Europe, we see an imitation of an intimidating enemy that results in abstraction, seeking truth in a form deeper than immediate appearances.

Freedom and Ancient Greece

Much has been made of Greek freedom.  The freedom of the ancient Greeks is often celebrated as the origin of Greek philosophy and the distinct culture of ‘The West’.  The theory is that the ancient Greeks were a culture that appreciated freedom, which led Greek philosophers to be independently individual in their free reasoning, which created a culture that was distinct from the rest of the ancient world in terms of freedom and reason, which led to later European distinction in science and philosophy.  As the Greeks repelled the Persians, at the time they were rising in power and wealth, much was said and written about the Greeks sharing a sense of freedom and autonomy.  

This was not freedom for individuality, but political freedom of the city states, both from Persia and from each other.  Socrates was killed in Athens for leading the youth astray from the traditional understanding of the gods.  There are similar parallels with struggles in later Europe and the American Revolution.  In the movie Braveheart, when William Wallace (played by a blue-painted Mel Gibson) famously yells, “They will take our lives, but they will never take OUR FREEDOM!”, he does not mean individual rights and liberties, but rather that the common people should be owned and controlled by the local Scottish noble lords, and not the noble lords of England.  

During the American Revolution, the colonies wanted freedom from Britain and each other, but they did not want freedom for their slaves any more than the ancient Greeks did.  The Bill of Rights originally did not grant freedom of speech, religion or gun ownership to individual citizens, but prevented the federal government from limiting the state’s rights to limit their own individual citizens.  Several states had particular denominations of Protestant Christianity as their official state religions, because the federal government could not limit their ability to practice a collective religious freedom that limited individual religious freedom.  One British lawmaker wrote a rebuttal to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that the American slave-masters had no right to speak of appreciating liberty or standing for freedom.  British spies circulated rumors among slave plantations that the British would free the slaves if the slaves revolted and sided with the British against the revolution, which was likely mere propaganda rather than a sincere political promise.

Today American conservatives argue that limiting the freedom of religious groups and business interests is anti-freedom and therefore un-american, while progressives argue that religious groups should not have the freedom of state-sanctioned prosthelytizing, and corporations should not have the freedom to change laws and precedents, as both limit the freedom of individuals to challenge their dominance.  If a teacher has the freedom to lead a classroom in prayer, this limits the freedom of individuals who wish to pray differently or not pray at all.  If a corporation has the freedom to change laws or affect which laws are enforced, this limits the freedom of individuals who are harmed or seek to prevent harm by the corporation.

In sum, while the ancient Greeks did appreciate a particular freedom from Persia, what was freedom for some was slavery for others.  If I have the freedom to eat as much of a cake as I want, this prevents anyone else from having this same freedom.  As Heraclitus (who we will examine soon) argues, what is good for one can be bad for another, such as salt water being poisonous to us but delicious to fish.  Considering that the freedom of first-world consumerism is bought at the price of third-world indentured servitude (the debt and control not by accident but by design), the freedom of ‘The West’ is its opposite for others.

The Ancient Greek Poets & Epics

The two poets Homer and Hesiod, both of whom are thought to have lived and composed the great Greek epics about 700 BCE, are two of the central sources from which the ancient Greeks drew a common cultural tradition.  Homer is said by most ancient sources to have been Ionian but by some to have been Babylonian.  He is the great original Greek poet/historian, followed by Hesiod who many consider to be an inferior imitator.  Homer wrote the Iliad, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus or Ulysses’ ten year quest to sail home from the Trojan War.  

Myths are not monolithic, but subject to various tellings and interpretation.  Homer and Hesiod both brought together the various mythologies of ancient Greece and through the medium of poetry and song created new consolidated versions that became the central common cultural standards, institutionalized and ritualized.  This is a typical pattern found accross human cultures, found also in the great Indian epics (the Ramayana and Mahabharata) as well as the Old and New testaments of the Bible.  Modern scholarship finds discrepancies between various parts of these central traditional texts and theorizes about the various versions and why they differ.

Homer’s Iliad takes place during the Trojan War, which famously began after Paris kidnaps Helen and takes her to Troy, prompting a war with the Greek alliance.  The Iliad begins as the Greek King Agamemnon refuses to return the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo he has captured as a slave.  In response to Agamemnon’s refusal, Apollo responds with a plague.  Apollo, who was originally a local god of shepherds and musicians, had become the Greek god of light, the sun, truth and music.  Apollo’s son, Asclepius, became the god of mystical knowledge and wisdom.  When Socrates dies, in Plato’s account the last thing Socrates says is that he owes a rooster to Asclepius, apparently wishing to perform an animal sacrifice as a thanks for the gift of wisdom which sees beyond life and death.  

Odysseus (also Ulysses, the protagonist of the Odyssey) brings the priest’s daughter back to Troy, prompting a disagreement between Achilles and Agamemnon.  Achilles, refusing to fight, allows the Trojans gain the upper hand, prompting the great Greek gods to interfere with the conflict on all sides, themselves in conflict over the outcome.  Later in this course, we will find that Heraclitus and other philosophers criticize both Homer and Hesiod for presenting the gods as bloodthirsty and irrational beings, arguing that the gods must be far better than humans and would not get involved in partisan conflicts.

Hesiod’s Theogony gives an account of the origin of the world and the gods, bringing together various myths and versions to create an orthodox account.  The text has eastern influences from earlier Babylonian and Assyrian mythology and cosmology.  As Hesiod explains, gods are born but they do not die, or if they die they are reborn and live inspite of death.  The gods can take many forms, such as animals or particular human individuals, but have a true form which is anthropomorphic.  While we use the world ‘epiphany’ to mean any sort of revelation today, it originally signified a god revealing himself or herself to a mortal in their true anthropomorphic form.

Hesiod’s cosmology sets a standard picture of the world followed by the first Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes), but Hesiod concentrates on the pantheon of gods while the philosophers concentrate on the order of the elements such as fire, air and water.  Hesiod’s account of creation unfolds in stages, likely inspired by a series of empires conquering and reconquering the same land.  First, Chaos gives birth to Darkness and Night, and from these come Aether (bright upper air, supposed to be a separate element by the ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Isaac Newton) and Day.

Ouranos (also Uranus), god of the sky, gets it on with Gaia, mother goddess of the earth, producing the Titans.  The head titan, Kronos, god of time, castrates Ouranos and assumes his place as king father god.  On new years day, European cultures present the ending year as an old man in a toga with a scythe, a caricature of Kronos and his snippy personality.  Kronos then has children with the titan Rhea, but eats them as soon as they are born, all except Zeus who escapes with the help of Rhea and Gaia.  Zeus produces the other Olympic gods as his children in a multitude of ways.  Athena, goddess of wisdom, spontaneously bursts from Zeus’ forehead after a headache.  The Olympic gods defeat the Titans and assume control of the cosmos with Zeus as their king(power, wisdom, and justice personified) on the advice of their compassionate grandmother, Gaia.

Poetry was not only publicly performed epic.  At symposiums, meetings of all men or all women would gather to hear poetry sung over the stringed lyre.  Lyric could be sung solo or by a choir, just like the chorus of tragedies.  Choral performances of poetry featured various instruments and choreographed dance.  Songs were not just for entertainment, but for tying groups together through celebrations of heroic feats and tragic defeats.  Loyal heroes and friends were praised, enemies and traitors mocked.  In one archaic poem of Archilochos, a friend who betrayed the poet is cursed: hope of shipwreck, washes up naked on enemy shore and be condemned to slavery.

Archilochos is the first major archaic poet, but the most famous is the Lesbian Sappho.  First, some wisdom quotes from Archilochos which sound very similar to quotes from Egyptian wisdom we study in other classes, as well as to the fragments of Heraclitus we will study soon::

Don’t exalt openly in victory, nor in defeat collapse at home and weep, but do not rejoice in joys or be sore at evils much.  Recognize what rhythm holds men.  

Attribute all to the gods.  Often they raise up out of evils men who lie on the dark earth, but often they knock flat on their backs those who walk tall.

The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing.

(This is similar to the Daoist parable of the frog in the well, illustrating that our reality is that with which we are most familiar.)

Pain strikes one, then another.  Now it turns to us and we groan over a bloody wound.  Next it will turn to someone else.  So now endure, driving back womanly grief.  

This last line shows us how remarkable it is that Sappho of Lesbos succeeded in becoming the most famous of the nine preserved archaic Greek poets.  Unlike other poets, Sappho did not write passively, but actively as an ‘I’, putting herself in the picture.  Sappho’s poetry was preserved along with the other eight archaic poets at Alexandria, Egypt, where they were copied by scholars onto papyrus.  Her poems are said to have been burned in pre-Renaissance Europe for their subversive nature, but this is in dispute.

Sappho is history’s most famous lesbian, and because her poetry speaks erotically of other women, it is due to her that, while the men of Lesbos were as much Lesbians as Sappho was, the female homosexual community bears this as its name.  While Sappho’s poetry and others seems homoerotic, attraction is expressed but not overt sexuality.  Men praising men as desirable and women praising women as desirable was an acceptable genre as a toast at a wedding.  Modern scholars argue whether or not Sappho and other Greek poets are simply giving “my friend is a real catch” wedding toasts or whether they are using the accepted genre as a barely concealed cover.

Sappho seems to have a treasured circle of young women as her admirers and aspiring disciples, some of whom she laments she has lost to other attractive poets, her competition.  Lesbian relationships are thought to have been common among women of Lesbos and Sparta.  

While young men were presumed to have erotic relationships with older men in a mentor relationship, adult men were not supposed to have sexual relationships with each other.  Thus, the mentorship is mediated by sex just as the history is mediated by poetry and song.

Sappho’s most famous passage reads:

Some say an army of horsemen, others say foot-soldiers, still others, a fleet, is the fairest thing on the dark earth.  I say it is whatever one loves...

I would rather see her lovely step and the radiant sparkle of her face than all the war-chariots in Lydia and soldiers battling in shiny bronze.

Notice that Sappho is appealing to a culture of mercenaries and warriors.  Her perspectivism, the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder, will be paralleled by Xenophanes, Heraclitus and others.  In other poems, Sappho uses Helen of Troy as an example of desire eclipsing all else.

Now that we have covered Sappho, we have thereby fulfilled the dictates of Fox News: You are now properly indoctrinated in Berkeley, and are all lesbian communists.

Tragedy and Paradox

Tragedy allows the audience to remove themselves from while simultaneously identify with the paradoxes and contradictions of life.  Like the polytheistic gods themselves, who do not behave ideally but as powerful yet fallible individuals, tragedies show the audience the most powerful and famous in the worst of downfalls, much like tabloid journalism today.

One of the themes of Greek tragedy is hamartia, the fatal flaw.  Paradoxically, the greatest strength of the protagonist that allows them to rise is also their greatest fault which brings about their downfall.  One primary example is from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which retells the story of Agamemnon found in Homer’s Iliad.  Agamemnon is proud and strong, which is what allows him to be successful as a military commander but causes him to fall because he is too proud to compromise, a necessary skill for political leadership along with courage.  

Another example is Antigone from the Sophocles play by the same name.  Antigone has two brothers who fight over the title of King of Thebes.  After both slay each other, Creon takes the throne and declares that one brother is to be honored as a hero but the other is to be refused burial and left to decay on the battlefield.  Antigone, drawn between obeying the dictates of the state and the honor of her family, defies the new king and tries to bury her brother and is condemned to death in court.  Antigone is loyal, but she must make a choice: Which is the greater loyalty, family or state?  Either way, loyalty to someone is disloyalty to someone else, just as freedom for someone is limitation for someone else.

Asian Philosophy: Indian Thought, Hinduism & the Vedas

Since this is the first lecture of the course, and because we are studying Eastern philosophy rather than Western, it is important to introduce philosophy and why the West does not have a monopoly on it.

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.  In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad.  Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid.  We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum.  Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe.  In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy.  Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative).  Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve.  The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely.  While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.

What is philosophy? Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom? The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.

Introducing Indian Thought

‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years).  Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians.  As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable.  First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition.  Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma.  Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One.  Locals practicing devotional worship often operate on the first level, priests who study the Vedas often operate on the second level, while philosophers and unorthodox Indian schools that do not accept the authority of the Vedas such as Jains, Buddhists and the materialist Charvakas operate on the third.

As Hinduism was brought together as a tradition that brought together many separate people with separate traditions, first the Vedas spoke largely though not entirely on the first level, then particular passages of the Vedas and the later Upanishads spoke on the second level, and then many schools went beyond the Upanishads and understood a simple, neither theistic nor atheistic One to be the real underlying truth of the first and second levels.  Vedanta, literally “Veda’s End”, debated back and forth between the second and third levels in the tradition of the Upanishads.

This came together over many periods in the history of Indian thought.  About 2000 BCE, India was invaded by a fire worshiping people who likely came from modern day Iran.  This was a big influence on the Vedas and Indian culture, however today scholars are critical of just how influential as it was said only recently that the Aryans civilized India and brought the Vedas with them, but now archaeologists have uncovered past civilizations who had incredible bathrooms with complex plumbing and while the Vedas may have been strongly influenced by the Aryans, it is debatable how much is composed of earlier native Indian pre-Aryan traditions.  The Nazis, following earlier German historians, believed that the Aryans were Germanic tribes who civilized not only India but Egypt, Greece, and Persia.  The swastika, and Indian name for a symbol that can be found in much of the world, including tribal German lands, was thought to be the sun symbol of the Aryans, and so it was used by the Nazis.  Unfortunately for this Germanic theory of history, we know that the Aryans were indeed from modern day Iran, what became Persia very soon after the Aryan conquests in India.

Next, in the Vedic period, 1500-800 BCE, the four Vedas were composed as oral traditions that eventually were written down in texts, including the foremost Rg Veda of which there are selections in your reader.  The golden age of Indian thought followed from 800-200 BCE, the time when the Upanishads distilled the Vedic hymns to the gods into inner philosophical/psychological teachings, the six orthodox schools that follow the Vedas (Vedanta, Yoga, Mimamsa, Samkhya, Nyaya and Vaisheshika) as well as the unorthodox schools (Charvaka, Jainism and Buddhism) flourished, and the great Hindu epics (the Mahabharata and Ramayana) were written.  After this, from 200 BCE – 500 CE is a period when the schools and traditions of the golden age were systematized into sutras or central texts.  Finally, after 500 CE and up to the present time, is the period of commentaries written on the earlier systems and their sutras.  This persisted through the period of conquest by Muslims of North India in the 1500s and then by the British in the 1800s.

There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.  First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice).  In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens.  It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits.  The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna.  Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god.  Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali.  Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.

Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight.  Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques.  

Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing.  This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world.  All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.

There are two ultimate goals to this process.  First, there is hope for a better next life.  Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation.  This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions.  This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit.  Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence.  If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.

Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth.  This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place.  Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture).  This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.

While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total.  In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material well-being or comfort, ‘artha’.  Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).

Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology.  They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today.  The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world.  In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today.  They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot).  All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus.  Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition.  Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations.  It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.

In spite of all of these developments, Indian thought is typically anti-materialistic and concerned with spirituality or psychology depending on one’s vocabulary.  Knowing the mind/spirit is knowing the essence of the whole as self-knowledge, or ‘atmavidya’.  Hindus believe that one has an eternal self/soul/mind, the ‘atma’, as opposed to Jains and Buddhists who believe in ‘anatma’, or no-self (permanent, anyway).

It used to be the opinion not only of most Hindus but also European scholarship until very recently, that Jainism and Buddhism took parts of Hinduism and broke away to form their own traditions.  Recently, new studies have shown that Jainism and Buddhism were forming at the same time as Hinduism was becoming an official tradition.  The Hindus accepted the Vedas and Upanishads while the Jains and Buddhists broke from the Vedas to follow more Upanishad-like understandings, but Hinduism as a centralized tradition was, in part, a reaction to the development of the Jain and Buddhist traditions.  Thus, similar doctrines of reincarnation and psychological skepticism/idealism may have developed at the same time or been borrowed by Hinduism in its fully developed form rather than borrowed from Hinduism as it was previously thought.  Even so, there is some truth to the common Hindu understanding that “Buddhism is Hinduism for export”, as Buddhists took the ideas in the Upanishads and Indian tradition, removed the dietary restrictions, caste system and other traditional purity laws, and became possibly the world’s largest system of thought in history, although it is debatable whether Christianity or Buddhism has that title.

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.