Fundamentals of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika - An Introduction through the Works of JC Chatterjee and Chittaranjan Naik - Part 4

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philosophy

15 March, 2025

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Dr. Pingali Gopal

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This article is the fourth and final installment in a series on Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. Read the preceding parts here:

Here, we will explore a few inputs from the works of Śrī Chittaranjan Naik.

Ontology and Perception of Reality in Indian Philosophies

The Nyāya theory of perception is based on the principle of contact between the subject and object in which there is no chance of the reality of the world becoming ‘naïve.’ Nor does the Nyāya theory allow for the world to transform into something other than what is observed. Therefore, the application of the term ‘Naïve Realism’ to Nyāya betrays a lack of knowledge of Nyāya.

There is a distinct mark of the prameya, or object, in traditional Indian philosophies that is missing in science and Western philosophy. This mark is the mark of ‘being seen’ or the mark of ‘knowableness.’ This point is so vital that failing to recognise it is likely to lead us to a position where we would not be speaking Indian philosophy at all. The mark of ‘being seen’ is a mark of prakṛti.

This feature of objects being ‘the seen’ finds expression in the philosophical tenet that there is a contact between the seer and the seen object — sannikṛṣṇa. The form that the (reflected) consciousness of the seer assumes in seeing the object is ‘vṛtti.’ Thus, the entire world, directly seen ‘as it is,’ has no extraneous mediating factor between the seer and the seen.

What is the ‘nature of the world’ as it appears through the theories of science? First of all, there is no distinct thing in science called ‘the seer.’. Secondly, science postulates an elaborate mechanism by which perceptions of objects occur. So, signals from the object reach the body’s sensory organs. These signals are changed into electro-neural signals, which are sent to the brain through different sensory channels. The brain then processes these signals to produce outputs in the form of images of the objects in the world. Thus, by the very nature of this postulated mechanism, the things seen are images and not the objects themselves.

We have no means by which we may verify that these images actually possess the same forms as the forms of objects in the world. In other words, every attempt to see them brings to us images rather than the object as it is. Therefore, those who hold on to such a belief, i.e., the belief that what we see is the real world, are Naïve Realists. And the philosophy that holds the perceived world to be the real despite the transformation of real world into images by the brain is ‘Naïve Realism.’

Then there are those philosophers who conclude that these images are nothing more than productions of the mind, mere ideas, or ideations of the mind. The crux of their arguments is that there can be no means to know whether there are real objects in the world, given that the things we experience arise in our minds and are contained in the mind. This is a philosophical position termed ‘idealism.’.

Traditional Indian philosophies say that the thing one knows is not just a representation of something else that might be the real thing (like in science), nor is it something less than what it seems to be (like an idea in your mind). An object is that which stands to consciousness in the cognitive act of perception. The world in Indian philosophy is not the world of Naïve Realism nor is it the ideated world of Idealism. If we must find a name for it, it may be the world of Direct Realism – a world as it presents itself directly to Consciousness.

In Indian tradition, the attributes perceived of objects, such as color and taste, are not subjective qualities, but are objective qualities inhering in the objects themselves.

This is in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of contemporary Western tradition, wherein they are subjective phenomenal qualities. In the Indian theory of perception, there is no transformation of the object in the process of presentation. The mind and sense organs contact the object and assume the form of the object by forming a vṛtti. There is thus a conjunction of the mind, the sense organ, and the object at the very location of the object. Nothing would stand between the self and the object to prevent the self’s conscious luminosity from revealing the true form of the object.

The contingency of the mind and sense organs as distorting filters arises only when they have a defect hindering them from assuming the form of the object. In the absence of sense organ or mind defects, there is nothing between the self and the object to prevent perception from revealing the object clearly. The perception of an object is based on its actual spatial location.

For touch, taste, and smell, the (subtle) organs stay inside the body, so the perception happens where the physical sense organs are when the object touches the physical sense organs of the gross body. For hearing and seeing, on the other hand, the indriyas leave the body to contact the object in space outside of the body.

While there are minor variations between the darśanas about the technicalities of perception, all the darśanas hold that perception takes place due to the contact of the (subtle) sense organs with the object. There is uniformity regarding perception being direct and revealing the object in its actual form through the contact of the consciousness with the object through the instrumentality of the sense organs and mind. Such contact is instantaneous since the consciousness that appears within the body is the same Consciousness that exists without the limiting adjuncts of the body, and which is in conjunction with all objects. Hence, perception is nothing more than the removal of the covering of maya over the individual consciousness to reveal the conjunction that already exists with the object.

The Lost Ark of The Categories

Nyāya studies philosophy under sixteen categories (padārthas), which includes objects for knowledge (prameyas), the means for knowledge (pramāṇas), and the purpose of such knowledge. Thus, the Nyāya system studies:

the Self
the body
the senses
the objects of the senses
the mind, knowledge, and activity
mental imperfections
rebirth
pleasure and suffering
freedom from suffering
substance (dravya)
quality (guṇa)
motions (karma)
universals (sāmānya)
particulars (viśeṣa)
inherence (samavaya)
non-existence (abhava)

According to Nyāya Shastra, the prameyas, or objects of knowledge, are of last seven of the above: dravya (substance), guṇa (quality), karma (action), sāmānya (universal), viśeṣa (particular), samavaya (inherence), and abhava (non-existence). Scholastic philosophy included a study of such objects. But today, both in the East and in the West, there is an effacement of such ideas. Vedānta accepts the categories of Nyāya except for the category called ‘inherence’.

Vaiśeṣika has a central tenet of particulars (vaiśeṣas) constituting all of existence, out of which some are atomic, and some are non-atomic. Vaiśeṣika, as a philosophy for ontology (explanation of universe), is pluralistic realism. Pluralism, because it holds the universe consisting of a combination of a variety and diversity of irreducible elements. Realism, because it holds reality as independent of our perceptions. Vaiśeṣika recognizes seven padārthas or categories (included in the sixteen of Nyāya) to comprehend the objects making up the world.

Scientists have discarded the idea of ‘substance’ after looking for it for many decades. However, one cannot find ‘substance’ even after looking for it for a million years, says Chittaranjan Naik. It appears in the original moment of cognition by an apperception that recognizes substance as the grounding factor of the objects we perceive in the world. Apperception is the process whereby perceived qualities of an object are related to past experience. (Example: “There’s X” is a perception, but “X is my friend” becomes an apperception). Substance, in its capacity as pure substance, is never naked without attributes. That ‘something’ which the attributes describe (as the nature of the existing thing) is substance. The intrinsic characteristic of a substance is ‘existence’. And because a substance is an existing thing with various attributes, it is a unity that binds these various attributes into one single unitary existing thing.

The case with universals is similar. One cannot find universals by looking for them. Anything one can look at, think of, or conceive is a ‘particular’. Universals do not exist in the world. They do not exist in thought. They are not spatio-temporal things. Universals are meanings that exist in the Self, and which form the basis of sākṣī-pramāṇa in the act of recognition (pratyabhijñā). In the West, there has been a two-thousand-year war between the Realists (Platonists) and the Nominalists over the question of the existence of universals. Theaetetus of Plato answers it – universals are ‘stamps of truth in Being’. The ‘ideal red’ or the ‘ideal circle’ of Plato is not something found by itself in the world. The world in Plato is a world of shadows, and the ideal world is elsewhere – it is the stamp of truth in the Numinous Ground of Being.

These symbols – substance, attributes, universals, particulars, etc. – were used to evoke meanings in the minds of the people of Europe until the end of the medieval era. The Ark of the Categories passed on from generation to generation by the traditions of scholastic philosophy, but it disappeared in the post-Descartian period when Science and British Empiricism brought about a new age.

Padārthas: Words and Objects

A soul that looks at the world through virginal eyes, unclothed by the webs of extraneous theories, sees the categories. Socrates had said that a thing is red in color for no other reason except for the participation of ‘ideal redness’ in the thing. This is the fundamental ground on which logic stands – that a thing is what it is due to itself and not on account of another. The categories are the fundamental stuff – the ancient and timeless Logos – which makes the universe. Everything that we see around us is nāma rūpa (name and form).

Name and form are synonymous with word and object, and the term ‘padārtha’ derives from the two words – pada (word) and artha (object). Padārthas are the building blocks that go into the foundational structure of the universe, made of name and form. The padārthas are to be known by turning our attention to the acts of cognition of the objects rather than by the construction of theories built on the unexamined structure of the elements that lie in the acts of cognition. These padārthas are constituents of the vṛtti when the mind and senses conform to the form of the object; one cannot find them by looking for them outside after the vṛtti forms. The act of looking makes the senses and mind conform to different kinds of objects through different kinds of vṛttis. And this brings us to a fundamental difference between science and Indian Traditional Philosophy.

Indian traditional philosophy strives to reveal the nature of objects. Science seeks to construct theories to explain the nature of objects. The former grounds in revealing; the latter in theory construction. The difference between the two stems from a fundamental difference in their attitudes toward knowledge. In Indian traditional philosophies, one seeks knowledge from within. In science, one seeks knowledge from outside. There exists an almost unbridgeable gulf between contemporary science and traditional Indian philosophies.

Logic

Modern logic is accurate only within the confines of mathematics. In A=B, A and B are variables that, in formal logical systems, apply to numerous objects in the world without regard to their type or nature. Modern logic does not acknowledge that the name ‘logic’ derives from the Greek ‘logos,’ which means ‘word,’ and that the intrinsic relationships between word-objects must determine logic’s operations. Analytical philosophy (or modern symbolic logic) sought but failed to do so. Vaidika metaphysics and epistemology provide a more pure and pristine form of logic.

According to the Vedas, this world is nāma-rūpa (name-form). Name is pada or word. Form is artha or object. Therefore nāma-rūpa, the nature of the world, is pada-artha, or word-objects. The study of padārtha is Nyāya shastra or logic. Nyāya is an upāṅga or or Vedāṅga, a subsidiary arm of the Vedas. Nyāya, unlike modern logic, does not accept a pure logic abstracted from the applied things. All rules of logic are the structural schemata of the objects themselves. And because the world is nāma-rūpa, or word-object, grammar, the relational structure of words, mirrors the relational structure of the objects in the world. There is thus no difference between the structural schema of the world and the structural schema of language because they are not two disparate things, but two aspects of one structure mirroring each other. Wittgenstein was one of the rare Western philosophers who had a glimpse of this truth.

Sameness and Difference

Differences in attributes do not necessarily make things different. An apple may be red or green, sweet, or tasteless, large, or small, but they are all apples. It is important to discern in what sense “sameness” exists amidst the variety and differences. “He is that same Devadatta,” asserts the sameness of the person, Devadatta, at different times and different places. Despite everything in the river water changing the next day, one says “it is the same river.”

Sameness and difference of things in Indian logic is in the light of the natures of sāmānya and viśeṣa (universal and particular); and dravya and guṇa (substance and attribute). Sameness is by sāmānya (universal) where the fundamental truth of a thing is that it is same with itself by virtue of its nature. A red thing is red not because of some other thing, but because of its redness. Thus, when sameness is in two different things, it is not due to any other reason than that the sāmānya of the attribute is present in both.

However, when we speak of the sameness of a single entity (such as a person or a river at different times), we are referring to the unitary existence of a thing’s multiple attributes- the substance (dravya). What we see as an existent entity is a substance, which has a variety of qualities in a single unitary existence. Now, the identity of a thing (substance) is derived not from the individual traits that characterise it, nor from the combination of these attributes, but from the sāmānya (universal) that identifies it. That is, an apple does not derive its identity as an apple by the redness, or the roundness, or the sweet taste, that describes it, nor by a combination of these attributes, but by the sāmānya that identifies it, namely “appleness.” Therefore, when we speak of substantial things, the sāmānya of the thing comprises a multitude of attributes within it without detriment to its unity.

Sāmānya presents itself to cognition as a particular instance of its manifestation. The manifestation of the universal (sāmānya) is therefore always a particular (viśeṣa). A specific is never existentially distinct from the sāmānya. Thus, there arises the hierarchy of genera and species as particulars of the universal and from which they are never different. All flowers are flowers due to the “flowerness” in them, even though a rose and a lotus are different from each other as particular kinds of flowers. In the act of perception, the natures of grasping “substances” and “universals” are in the stillness of perception. That stillness is the disassociation of the witness from the things he witnesses. Nyāya is a cleansing of the intellect so that it may sink back into its source, the heart, from which it sees the truth. In the philosophy of Nyāya, this is niḥśreyasa.

Now, two things may have the same attribute even though they may be essentially different, i.e., an apple and a table may both be red, but they are entirely different. When two things are the same essentially (in substance), then it is the sameness of essence even though there may be differences in the attributes that inhere in them, i.e., two tables are the same essentially even though one may be red and the other white.

Indian Logic And Contemporary Logic In The Understanding Of Reality

Aristotle enumerated the categories- the most general kinds, into which entities in the world divide. The following are the highest ten categories of things that exist ‘without any combination.’

Substance (e.g., man, horse)
Quantity (e.g., four-foot, five-foot)
Quality (e.g., white, grammatical)
Relation (e.g., double, half)
Place (e.g., in the marketplace)
Date (e.g., yesterday, last year)
Posture (e.g., is lying, is sitting)
State (e.g., has shoes on, has armour on)
Action (e.g., cutting, burning)
Passion (e.g., being cut, being burned)

There are two sorts of substance: a primary substance is, for example, an individual man or horse; the secondary substances are the species (and genera) of these individuals (e.g., man, animal). While all the ten categories are all equally highest kinds, primary substances have a priority since without them the others do not exist.

Aristotle apparently arrived at his list by distinguishing “different questions which may be asked about something” and noting “that only a limited range of answers can be appropriately given to any particular question”. A categorial realist approach provides the most general sort of answer to questions of the form “What is this?” and providing for narrower definitions and distinguishing from other things in the same category. Scholastic philosophy too used the categories in its arguments of logic. Categories defined the legitimate ways in which we may speak about objects.

In the Post-Cartesian period, however, when the very existence of external objects became doubtful by an Indirect Realism, categories as descriptions of the world objects lost their legitimacy. Contemporary philosophers have done away with the categories, the basic constitutive elements of objects. With the development of modern science and philosophy, scientists and philosophers sacked and destroyed the categories of the logoi, which had once been the stable ground for philosophy. Science had no use for the categories. Philosophy, following the scientific paradigms, rejected the categories. Berkeley, Hume, and Nietzsche completely buried the categories in their writings.

Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, did restore some of the respect accorded to the categories but scientists were not much concerned with his ideas because what mattered to scientists was that the theories they constructed worked rather than that the philosophical justifications that made the principles they used possible. Naik jī asks, “What was the ground on which the categories became mere products of the fertile imagination? Was the inability to perceive an entity by itself an enough ground for its denial? This is a crucial point, but one which may not be obvious to a philosopher from the Western tradition because Western philosophy has never treated non-existence as an independent category.”

But Indian logic has; and it has also provided the epistemic means to ascertain the non-existence of an object. In Indian logic, the mere absence of perception of an object is, by itself, an insufficient ground for denying the existence of the object. It needs another condition called the pratiyogin – its amenability to perception under the given condition. To declare that an object is non-existent on the ground of it being unperceived, it must have a prior possibility of perception if it were to exist.

A chair in front of me has the possibility of perception if it were to exist. The non-perception of a chair in front of me is a justifiable reason for me to claim that it is non-existent. But I cannot justifiably claim that a chair in the next room is non-existent on the ground that I do not perceive it because even if the chair were to be existent in the next room, the wall of the room would prevent me from perceiving it. Thus, to repeat, the claim of the non-existence of an object should therefore be based on the prior possibility of perception if it were to be existent. The capacity of perception if it were to exist is ‘pratiyogin’. And the means of obtaining knowledge of non-existence based on non-perception is ‘anupalabdi’. In western traditions, the non-perception of the soul simply translates into non-existence.

As shown in ‘Natural Realism and Contact Theory of Perception’, in a veridical perception, the perception of the world and its objects are direct and transparent. Indian logic, which accepts perception as the first of the means of right knowledge (pramāṇa), does not have the problems faced by the western traditions. In the latter, its locutions of the world divide into locutions of subjective phenomenal features of objects and locutions of external objects that cannot be known (noumenon) by first-hand experience. In Indian logic, there is no such division, and one may legitimately speak about the perceived world as the real world.

There is thus no legitimate reason in Indian logic to dispense with the categories; rather, they form the bedrock of logic. The categories or padārthas as they are known in the Indian tradition are the irreducible word-objects that logically constitute the individual objects of the world, and they are held to be seven in number as seen before. The predominant form of contemporary logic is formal logic in which it is the syntactical form (the proper construction) of the argument that determines validity rather than the semantic content (the meaning) of the argument (as in Indian logic).

In contemporary formal Logic, the goal is not truth; it is the preservation of truth-values from the parts to the whole. The goal of Indian Logic, on the other hand, is towards the right cognition of objects (yathārtha-jñāna) that linguistic expressions purport to speak about. Contemporary logic, standing on the topic-neutrality of logic, keeps itself free from ontology (the reality). Nyāya, or Indian Logic, rejects this hypothesis and holds that reasoning is impossible in the absence of knowledge of the padārthas or word-objects.

The padārthas are the generality (equivalent to the categories of Aristotle) present in the objects themselves in the form of the basic irreducible elements that linguistic expressions point to. The explicit knowledge of the padārthas- padārtha-tattva-jnana (the knowledge of the categories as principles) is mandatory to prevent fallacious reasoning. Nyāya, or Indian logic, based on the padārthas - the most fundamental set of word-objects, thus obtains a sweeping universality lending to it the power to conduct discourses on every topic of human interest that language can express.

Pramāṇas - The Means of Obtaining Right Knowledge

Any knowledge must have certain ‘means’ of acquiring it. Pramāṇa (proof or a valid ‘means of true knowledge’) plays an important role in Indian philosophical traditions. Ancient texts identify six pramāṇas whose variable acceptance and rejection form a basis for classifying the thought systems. These are:

Perception or direct sensory experience (pratyakṣa)
Inference (anumāna)
Testimony of reliable authorities (śabda)
Comparison and analogy (upamāna)
Postulation and derivation from circumstances (arthāpatti)
Non-perceptive negative proof (anupalabdhi).

In its classical form, Nyāya accepted four sources of valid knowledge (perception, inference, comparison, and testimony); the Vaiśeṣika, only two (perception and inference).

Materialism (Lokāyata or Cārvāka) holds only perception as a valid pramāṇa; Buddhism: perception and inference; and Jainism: perception, inference, and testimony. Mīmāṃsa and Advaita Vedānta hold all six as useful means to knowledge.

There are three primary pramāṇas or means of obtaining knowledge in the Indian tradition. They are perception (pratyakṣa), inferential reasoning (anumāna) and verbal testimony (śabda). These three are common to all the traditional schools of philosophy but individual schools have slight variations. Advaita Vedānta has six which also includes presumption (arthāpatti), comparison (upamāna) and non-apprehension (anupalabdi) as valid means of obtaining knowledge.

Pratyakṣa (Perception)

It is the Jyeṣṭha pramāṇa, the eldest as well the foremost. If we do not allow perception as the most fundamental means of obtaining knowledge, what is one left with to confirm the object in the world. Western philosophy has rejected perception as a valid means of knowledge, and this has played havoc with their understanding of the world. If whatever one sees or perceives is a reconstruction in the brain, what is the actual reality of the world and what is the true status of the objects uncolored by the brain?

Anumāna (Inferential Reasoning)

Inferential reasoning is the means to perceive an obstructed thing which has been previously perceived. Inferential reasoning is based on the invariable concomitance established from prior perceptions and it cannot be used to infer the presence of non-sensorial objects. Hence, inferential reasoning, by itself, cannot therefore be used to obtain knowledge of the higher truths of philosophy.

Inferential reasoning lies at the heart of debate in accordance with human reason. In the science of Indian Logic, that is, Nyāya Śāstra, discourse is tarka and the science of logic as Tarka Śāstra. The discourse has to be guided by the pramāṇas, the legitimate means of obtaining knowledge. In the Indian tradition, there is no divorce between logic and epistemology; they are parts of one integral science of discourse. This is unlike western traditions where logic is connected more with the logical progress of arguments from the premises to the conclusions unconnected to the knowledge generated regarding the objects of the world. Inferential reasoning is ordinarily restricted to reasoning about objects that belong to the domain of the senses. However, it is an indispensable tool for knowledge of higher truths as an auxiliary to the primary pramāṇa, śabda.

Śabda (Verbal Testimony)

The third of the three primary means of obtaining knowledge is śabda, verbal testimony. Śabda is the last and the highest of the three primary pramāṇas regarding the higher truths of reality beyond the senses. The characteristic mark of verbal testimony is trustworthiness. The source of trustworthy verbal testimony is called an apta. Śabda can be pauruṣeya or apauruṣeya, of human or non-human origins. Verbal testimony can refer to knowledge obtained regarding objects of the world, but it specially refers to knowledge of things beyond the senses (indriyas).

The notion of a verbal testimony that does not originate in a person is entirely alien to the tradition of Western philosophy. The Vedas are considered to be Apauruṣeyatva. This does not mean that the human author is not known. This term implies that the Vedas have no human author, as Śrī Chittaranjan Naik discusses in his essay, “Apaurusheyatva of the Vedas.” But the idea of apauruṣeyatva is not as strange as it may at first seem. The idea that a linguistic expression can exist only when it has a human author is based on the unexamined idea that the human bodily apparatus is a necessary ground for words to reside in or to become manifest in the form of speech. It is only when the human body is enlivened with consciousness that the human being can think or speak. Indian philosophies argue that it is the presence of the consciousness in the human body which serves as the substratum for words to reside in as well as to provide the sentient motive force for words to be articulated as speech. The identity of language and consciousness is a recurrent theme in the philosophy of the Grammarians of India, the most notable among them being Bhartṛhari.

The repository of words in a human being is not the body but is the consciousness that inhabits the body. But since the consciousness that inhabits the body is that very same Consciousness that eternally exists as the Ground of the universe, the repository of words would never be absent even if all mortal beings should be absent. Words reside and arise in the form of speech in the Universal Consciousness which is eternally existent.

Mīmāṃsa philosophers show that śabda is eternal and uncreated. The musical note exists in the string of the veena as the struck note when it is sounding and as the unstruck note when it is not sounding. Words are similar to this in nature – they remain unstruck when they are not spoken, and they manifest as audible speech when they are struck. And when they are not manifest, they remain in identity with Consciousness, the Ground of the Universe. The unstruck sound is called ‘anāhata’. In the Indian tradition, the Vedas are held to be apauruṣeya. The Vaidika sentences are therefore regarded as the trustworthy sources of knowledge about reality. Being unauthored by human beings, they are free from the kinds of defects that human compositions are afflicted with. In the philosophy of Vedānta, the Vaidika word is the Word through which the universe is created; that is, it is the semantics of the Vaidika sentences that have become manifest as the universe.

They therefore serve as the reliable sources of knowledge not only of the philosophies but of all the fundamental disciplines of knowledge. The four Vedas together indeed constitute the one source from which all the traditional philosophies and sciences and arts of India have originated. If therefore one does not get to appreciate this nature of the Vedas and the place they hold in Indian culture, it would be a futile task to attempt to gain an understanding of either Indian philosophies or Indian culture. Indeed, in Indian culture, the terms theist and atheist are not applied to philosophies depending on their acceptance or non-acceptance of God but on their acceptance or non-acceptance of the Vedas as the Supreme Verbal Authority.

Concluding Remarks

The phenomenal beauty of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika thought in explaining the reality of the world around us remains hidden from all educational curriculums. The first principles of ontology and epistemology has far more explanatory power than Western traditions, which seem stuck at a certain point. The Indirect Realism of scientific materialism makes the original “noumenon” forever beyond the comprehension of our consciousness. Similarly, the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge ends up having many deficiencies which the Gettier examples demonstrate. The core of all our texts and shastras, and the crux around which our scientific achievements stand is Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. Vedānta is for the highest seekers, and it is Nyāya, the queen of the darśanas with its clear ideas on logic, reasoning, and debate, to form the basis of the world appearing to us in a direct manner.

But Advaita Says, “Nothing is Real” and critics project a world denying philosophy of India. Chittaranjan Naik jī points that the locution of jagan-mithyā that arises in Advaita Vedānta is always in coordination with the locution of brahma-satya so that the complete expression is brahma-satya, jagan mithyā. Advaita Vedānta is Parā Vidyā; its subject matter is Brahman and not the world. In Advaita therefore jagan-mithyā is not an isolated proposition but always in coordination with brahma-satya.

But when the world has a discussion within a specific context that excludes Brahman, then, in such a context, the world is satya. This is because the world is no other than Brahman and to deny the satya of the world when the context of the discussion has excluded Brahman reduces to a kind of Nihilism. It is for this reason alone that when Shankaracharya goes about refuting Vijñānavāda and other Idealist schools of Buddhism that deny the existence of Brahman, he takes the position that the world is real. This is a vital point often overlooked by both critics of Indian philosophy and the modern proponents of Advaita Vedānta.

Science is going deeper and deeper into matter to understand the world. The quantum world seems to be the ultimate building matter presently. Still deeper are the theorized “strings” but the latter are beyond the scope of any experimental proof. They exist as mathematical identities explaining away many problems of quantum theory. Indian darśanas have the Self as the first principle starting from the other end. It is an inside-to-outside explanation while western traditions take an outside-to-inside perspective in understanding matter, life, mind, and consciousness.

However, as Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar wonderfully demonstrates in his recent book, quantum physics collapses into the regular physical world where all the ordinary classical laws of physics apply through a mechanism called decoherence. Also, the phenomenon of entanglement and the role of observer in collapsing the quantum world into a physical world has close similarities to the interconnectedness and the single Consciousness postulated in Indian traditions. Fritzof Capra had similarly discussed the close parallels between Eastern and Western thoughts in classic book, The Tao of Physics. Mazumdar shows how the two extremes meet when concepts of the quantum world merge into metaphysical concepts of the Indian traditions. Swami Vivekananda was prescient when he declared in the last decade of the 19^th century that science in its distant future must one day meet Vedānta, the principles of which have stood rock like without change and without needing to adapt to any modern understandings for at least two thousand years.

The important thing is to realize that though the first principles appear to emerge from two opposite ends of the spectrum, they both converge on the ordinary physical world and assess the world of matter and forces acting on them in a similar manner. Hence, Vaiśeṣika can talk about gravity, planetary motions, laws of motion many centuries before Newton himself. Similarly, a different principle of ontology and epistemology did not prevent ancient Indians from having a huge output in mathematics, astronomy, architecture, geometry, agriculture, metallurgy, civil engineering, sanitation, biological sciences, vaccination, surgery, and so on apart from its rich literature. The performative ability and the ability to do science and technology remained at high levels in ancient India.

A colonial consciousness today accepts the story of primitive India before the colonials came and also believe that teaching the rich Indian philosophy in schools would go against the principles of secularism. The apparent pushing of Indian darśanas to the field of religion has been the greatest intellectual suicide of modern India. This is a major reason for the widespread deracination and derooting we are seeing in India today especially amongst the urban elite, exclusive products of an English language education. This series hopes to stimulate the readers to delve into the rich cultural and intellectual traditions of India. We need a sense of pride in our wonderful culture based on genuine knowledge for the sake of our future.