Eastern philosophy

• 1. Introduction

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  Eastern philosophy is a category that, according to the British philosopher Victoria S. Harrison, did not exist in East Asia or India at all. It was invented by 19th-century Western scholarship to name something that had no single root. In Asia there was never one unified tradition. There were many autonomous traditions that drifted into contact over centuries. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is reported to have said that only Greek and German languages are suitable for philosophizing. Western universities still commonly teach only Western philosophy and ignore Asian thought entirely. So what exactly are we naming when we say Eastern philosophy? Where did these traditions begin, who argued with whom, and why did a Japanese scholar in 1873 have to coin a brand-new word just to translate the Western idea of philosophy itself? The answers stretch from the Indus Valley to the courts of imperial China, from atheists who mocked the Vedas to a state ideology built around self-reliance.

• 2. The Orthodox Six

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  Six major schools form the classical enumeration of orthodox Hindu philosophy: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta. A school counts as orthodox, or astika, by one of three tests: whether it treats the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge, whether it accepts Brahman and Atman, and whether it believes in afterlife and Devas. Each school produced extensive epistemological literature called Pramana-sastras. The Gupta period, the so-called golden age of Hinduism, is when the distinction of these six schools was current. Their fortunes did not hold. Vaisheshika and Mimamsa faded, and by the later Middle Ages the six-school scheme became obsolete. Samkhya is a dualist tradition based on the Samkhyakarika, dated to roughly 320 to 540 CE, arguing the universe consists of two realities: purusa, consciousness, and prakrti, matter. Yoga was a closely related tradition emphasizing meditation and liberation, with the Yoga sutras of about 400 CE as its major text. One difference set them apart. Yoga allowed for the existence of a God, while most Samkhya thinkers criticized that idea. Vaisheshika took a different path entirely, a naturalist school of atomism holding that the universe reduces to paramanu, atoms that are indestructible, indivisible, and possess a special dimension called small. Not every counting agreed on six. Vidyaranya identified sixteen schools of Hindu philosophy, adding traditions belonging to the Saiva and Rasesvara lineages.

• 3. Knowledge And Its Sources

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  The Nyaya school held that human suffering arises out of ignorance and that liberation arises through correct knowledge. So it set out to investigate the sources of correct knowledge itself. Nyaya traditionally accepts four pramanas as reliable means: pratyaksa, perception; anumana, inference; upamana, comparison and analogy; and sabda, the testimony of past or present reliable experts. The Nyaya Sutras, dated between roughly the 6th century BCE and the 2nd century CE, became a foundational text for classical Indian epistemological debate. It includes the classic Hindu rejoinders against Buddhist not-self arguments and famously argues against a creator God, Ishvara. Mimamsa took an even harder line on its texts. It is a school of ritual orthopraxy, devoted to the hermeneutical study and interpretation of the Vedas. Its scholars held the Vedas to be eternal, authorless, and infallible. The school is mainly atheistic, holding that evidence for the existence of God is insufficient and that the gods named in the Vedas have no existence apart from their names and mantras. Its focus on text drove it to develop theories of philology and philosophy of language that influenced other schools. Vedanta means end of the Vedas, and it focused on the Prasthanatrayi, the three sources: the Principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita. Its central concern was the relationship between Brahman, Atman, and Prakriti. Because of the popularity of the bhakti movement, Vedanta became the dominant current of Hinduism in the post-medieval period.

• 4. The Sramanic Dissent

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  The nastika or heterodox schools grew from the non-Vedic Sramanic traditions, which existed in India since before the 6th century BCE. The Sramana movement produced ideas ranging across materialism, atheism, agnosticism, fatalism, extreme asceticism, strict non-violence, and vegetarianism. Jain philosophy continued an ancient tradition that coexisted with the Vedic one. It denies a creative and omnipotent God, holds the universe to be eternal and uncreated, and insists that truth is relative and multifaceted. For its willingness to accommodate all possible viewpoints of rival philosophies, it has been called a model of philosophical liberalism. Carvaka, also called Lokayata, took the opposite temperament, an atheistic philosophy of scepticism and materialism that rejected the Vedas outright. Its philosophers deemed the Vedas tainted by three faults: untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology. They called them incoherent rhapsodies invented by humans, useful only for providing priests a livelihood. They mocked liberation and reincarnation, branding the relinquishing of pleasure to avoid pain the reasoning of fools. Ajivika, founded by Makkhali Gosala, is known for its Niyati doctrine of absolute determinism, the premise that everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen is entirely preordained. Ajnana was a school of radical skepticism whose adherents were seen as sophists specializing in refutation without offering any positive doctrine of their own. Jayarasi Bhatta, active around 800, wrote their skeptical work Tattvopaplavasimha, translated as The Lion that Devours All Categories.

• 5. The Buddhist Spread

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  Buddhist philosophy begins with Gautama Buddha, who flourished between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, and spread throughout Asia along the Silk Road. Its main concern is soteriological, defined as freedom from dukkha, unease. Because ignorance of the true nature of things counts as a root of suffering, Buddhist thinkers turned to epistemology and the use of reason. Key concepts include the Four Noble Truths, Anatta or not-self, and Anicca, the transience of all things. Later traditions developed complex phenomenological psychologies termed Abhidharma. Mahayana philosophers such as Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu developed the theories of Shunyata, the emptiness of all phenomena, and Vijnapti-matra, appearance only. The Dignaga school of Pramana, dated to about 480 to 540, drove what has been called an epistemological turn in Indian philosophy, and through the work of Dharmakirti this Buddhist logic became the major epistemological system in Tibetan debate. After Buddhism disappeared from India, the traditions kept growing elsewhere. In Tibet, thinkers like Sakya Pandita, Tsongkhapa, and Ju Mipham carried the Indian tradition forward. In East Asia, new sinitic schools arose: Tiantai, founded by Zhiyi; Huayan, defended by figures like Fazang; and Zen, which included philosophers like Guifeng Zongmi. The modern period brought Buddhist modernism, shaped by Western influences. Its exponents include Anagarika Dharmapala, who lived from 1864 to 1933, the Chinese modernists Taixu and Yin Shun, and the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. In the 1950s the Indian Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar founded a Neo-Buddhist movement emphasizing social and political reform.

• 6. The Hundred Schools

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  Chinese philosophy begins during the Western Zhou dynasty, and in the periods after its fall the Hundred Schools of Thought flourished from the 6th century to 221 BCE. Confucianism developed around the teachings of Confucius, Master Kong, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE and saw himself as transmitting the values of the ancestors before him. It focuses on familial and social harmony, filial piety, Ren or benevolence, and Li, a system of ritual norms. Two later Confucians, Mencius and Xun Kuang, famously disagreed on whether humans are innately moral. Legalism took the cold view, focusing on laws, realpolitik, and bureaucratic management while largely ignoring morality. Its statesman Shang Yang, who lived from 390 to 338 BCE, transformed the Qin state into the power that conquered the rest of China in 221 BCE, and Han Fei synthesized the school in his text the Han Feizi. Mohism, founded by Mozi around 470 to 391 BCE, is best known for jian ai, impartial care, the idea that persons should care equally for all individuals regardless of relationship. Mozi opposed Confucian ritualism and advocated meritocracy based on talent, not blood. Taoism emphasizes harmony with the Tao, the Way, prizing wu wei or effortless action, ziran or naturalness, and pu or simplicity. The Dao De Jing is traditionally attributed to Laozi, and the first organized form, the Celestial Masters school, arose in the 2nd century CE. Confucianism became a major ideology under the Han dynasty and revived as Neo-Confucianism led by thinkers such as Zhu Xi, who lived from 1130 to 1200, and Wang Yangming. Beginning in the Song dynasty, Confucian classics were the basis of the imperial exams and the core philosophy of the scholar-official class.

• 7. Meetings And Mistranslations

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  Arthur Schopenhauer built a philosophy that was essentially a synthesis of Hinduism with Western thought. He anticipated that the Upanishads would have far greater influence in the West than they ever did. But he was working with heavily flawed early translations, sometimes second-degree translations, and many feel he may not have accurately grasped the Eastern philosophies that interested him. The traffic ran both ways and was just as imperfect. Martin Heidegger spent time attempting to translate the Tao Te Ching into German, working with his Chinese student Paul Hsaio. It has been claimed that his later philosophy, particularly the sacredness of Being, bears a distinct similarity to Taoist ideas, though this remains only an interpretation. The Kyoto School combined the phenomenology of Husserl with the insights of Zen Buddhism, and Watsuji Tetsuro attempted to combine Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger with Eastern philosophies. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was deeply influenced by the I Ching, a Chinese text dating back to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty, roughly 1700 to 1050 BCE. His idea of synchronicity moves toward an Oriental view of causality, which he described in the foreword to Richard Wilhelm's translation. Political thought crossed over too. Yan Fu, who lived from 1853 to 1921, translated Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Mill's On Liberty into Chinese. Hu Shih studied under John Dewey at Columbia University and promoted a form of pragmatism. And the influence of Marxism on modern Chinese thought is vast, above all through Mao Zedong, whose Maoism rejected the urban proletariat in favor of a revolution supported by the peasantry.

• 8. A Word Coined In 1873

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  Zhexue is the Chinese word for philosophy, and it began as a Japanese neologism. Nishi Amane coined it, originally as tetsugaku, in 1873 to describe Western philosophy as opposed to traditional Asian thought. That single fact sharpens the whole debate. Some Eurocentric thinkers claim that philosophy as such is only characteristic of Western cultures. Carine Defoort, herself a specialist in Chinese thought, has supported a family view of philosophy, while Rein Raud argued against it and offered a more flexible definition that would include both Western and Asian thought on equal terms. Ouyang Min answered that philosophy proper is a Western cultural practice, essentially different from zhexue, which is what the Chinese actually have. The traditions themselves did not wait for the West to validate them. Juche, usually translated as self-reliance, is the official political ideology of North Korea, described by the regime as Kim Il-Sung's original, brilliant, and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought. Its core idea is that an individual is the master of his destiny. Whatever one calls these systems, a phrase coined to translate someone else's category or a tradition that needs no outside name, the I Ching still places Yin and Yang into hexagrams for divination, a practice older than the word philosophy in any language.