Rethinking Classical Dialectical Traditions

“Re-interpreting Tradition (Critical Essays on 20th Century Indian Thought)”, Ed. by Anirban Mukherjee & Ngaleknao Ramthing, Pub. N. B.U. Studies in Philosophy-23,, 2023

This article fulfils twofold function: first, it offers an obituary to Prof. Daya Krishna, and second, by following the methodology suggested by his counter perspective, it presents a critique of the same. His two works, viz. “Indian philosophy: A Counter Perspective” and “New Perspectives in Indian philosophy” have been reviewed for this article. The attempt was made to bring out the general and distinctive features of Dayaji’s analysis of Indian philosophy rather than doing article-wise review. The method adopted was analytical rather than hermeneutical. In this endeavour, it was found that logical analysis was the main tool used by Dayaji in countering the established but unscrutinized ideas, notions and dogmas in Indian philosophical tradition. He expected from the reader, both the scholar and the novice, use of the tool while discussing Indian philosophy. The reason behind this insistence was the concern for the growth of Indian philosophy and removing the misconceptions regarding the same. He tried to establish that because of these misconceptions, the rational, intellectual ad thought provoking nature of Indian philosophy was hidden and it was presented otherwise to the entire world. By presenting a counter perspective, Dayaji marched one step ahead in the direction of the goal he set for us. By taking the counter perspective seriously, the academicians have to march towards that goal. This article is a humble attempt in that direction.

Daya Krishna’s contribution to South Asian studies and his influence on South Asian scholars cannot be overestimated. He wrote on Philosophy, Economics, Social and Political Studies, etc., always generously bestowing his many ideas to the public and to all those who had the chance of being closer to him. His ideas have been and hopefully will still be a constant inspiration for many students and scholars throughout the world, who may have at times disagreed with Daya Krishna and may have criticised him for not investigating closely (e.g., by means of critical editions) all the innumerable texts he knew and referred to, but have nonetheless been kept alert in their study of Indian philosophy by his innovative approach to India. In fact, as one of his main contributions, he demonstrated how many self-assumed conceptions of India are indeed groundless. He kept inviting scholars to take seriously Indian philosophical past, which he often linked to themes dealt with in contemporary philosophy. In this sense his interest for Indian classical philosophy was never purely antiquarian; he instead dealt with stalwarts of the past such as Śaṅkara with the same approach he adopted for contemporary scholars such as J.N. Mohanty, that is, constantly engaging with them a philosophical dialogue. The pitfalls of considering Indian classical philosophy just as a spiritual quest are exposed, Daya Krishna argued, by the fact that today even Indian philosophers tend to neglect their heritage and consequently deprive both their reflections and the philosophical debate of its stimuli.

This chapter explores some of the challenges of interpreting Indian philosophy by examining three exemplary puzzles: the manner in which philosophical authors employed the idea of the Cārvāka system, a school of thought said to be at once skeptical, hedonistic, and materialist; the meaning of “freedom” in classical India; and the limits of reason as suggested in the work of the notable Vedānta philosopher Śaṅkara. The essay seeks to demonstrate that even in areas such as these, which are assumed to be relatively well known, matters may be not quite so clear as people are wont to believe. The field remains open to, and in need of, revised and improved interpretation of the familiar no less than of topics that seem more obscure.

Philosophy East and West, 1992

Indian philosophy, like Indian culture, seems peculiarly prone to arouse either violent antipathy or fervent enthusiasm. Rarely does it engender an attitude which tries to present and assess it coolly and calmly, without positive or negative emotion. Nothing perhaps stands more in the way of such an attitude than the universally accepted ideas which I wish to explore in this essay. These three ideas are treated as indubitable facts about Indian philosophy. They seem so self-evident to enthusiasts and detractors alike, that to question them is to question the very concept of Indian philosophy as it has been traditionally conceived and presented by almost every writer on the subject. Yet, it seems to me that the time has come to question the traditional picture itself, to raise doubts about the indubitable, to investigate the sacrosanct and the self-evident. Myths have always masqueraded as facts and many a time the emperor's nudity has only been discovered by a child's disingenuity. The self-evident claims about Indian philosophy are legion. First and foremost is the claim to spirituality. Who does not know that Indian philosophy is spiritual? Who has not been told that this is what specifically distinguishes it from western philosophy, and makes it something unique and apart from all the other philosophical traditions of the world? The claim, of course, is never put to the test. In fact, it seems so self-evident as to require no argument or evidence on its behalf. Nobody, neither the serious nor the casual student of the subject, deems it worth questioning. Yet, the moment we begin to doubt the claim

Philosophy East and West, 2008

Exploring Daya Krishna's life is a journey into the enormous possibilities of a life of the mind and the fullest development of the senses. It is a life that signals the fabric of intellectual life in postcolonial India and the non-West. But it was not just as a philosopher that he touched and radiated the lives of so many. No, not as a guruan institution he disdained-for ultimately what is important, he once told me, is to discover the guru within oneself. Of being-in-life creatively, lovingly, and joyfully, but always critically! And by approaching death without fear-indeed, reveling in its potentiality for complete freedom. Daya Krishna lived a beautiful life and left this world in a particularly beautiful way-serving sweets and water to a visiting student-a gesture that a philosopher from Jaipur interpreted as symbolizing his hospitality to the ideas of others, particularly younger people. It was an iccha-mrtyu (a willed death), as Srivatsa Goswami reminded me. He had time and again expressed his feeling that this, his eighty-third, was his last birthday and that people were living too long; and had ensured that his unpublished manuscripts, The Jaipur Edition of the Rgveda and his last book on Kant / Comparative Philosophy, Towards a Critique of Transcendental and Structural Illusions, were entrusted to me. What October 5 signaled to me was the conclusion of a yuga-the passing of an entire generation of the children of anticolonial Civil Disobedience who had come to maturity with independence and partition. Through Daya I watched them going one by one, memorable people each one of them, even if I did not agree with their positions and their politics. Raj Krishna, Sita Ram Goel, Ram Svarup, Laxman Shastri Joshi, M. P. Rege.. .. Only a few remain, like Kapila Vatsyayana and L. C. Jain. The quest of some of them had been what K. C. Bhattacharya called ''Svaraja in ideas'' or what the philosophical journal Unmilan refers to as mansika svaraja or svaraja of the mind. The Midnight's Children are also aging-witnessing the birth of a New India/n whose adulthood is being signaled by the politics of the Ramjanmabhumi, the new nodes of finance capital, technologies of communication and information, the new markets.. .. He was not my biological father, but Daya, as I called him, was around from the time I began to remember. Is it my memory or my mother's, I don't know, but I would comb his thick, curly black shoulder-length hair, saying ''Don't cry, I won't hurt you!'' Daya had joined Sagar University as lecturer in philosophy in 1957 and lived with his guide and mentor, Dr. R. K. Saxena, in the other part of our old, rambling, partitioned cantonment house with its compound of spectacular tall, shady trees. Sagar University had been recently established by an endowment of Hari Singh Gaur and achieved an early peak performance with some fine scholars.

Religious Inquiries , 2015

This article discusses the function of dialectic in religious history, focusing on the works of two major sixth century Indian intellectuals and doxographers Bhāviveka and Haribhadra Sūri, who belonged to the competing Madhyamaka Buddhist and Jaina traditions respectively. The article studies how these two figures used medical metaphors for their dialectic purposes.

Reflecting upon Hindu-Buddhist relations in his book Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, the German theologian Perry Schmidt-Leukel observed that: “A dialogue between Hinduism and Buddhism has not yet really developed, although there are some initial efforts: My brief survey of Buddhist-Hindu relations hopefully showed that such a dialogue is more than desirable. But what would have to go onto its agenda?” Looked at from the field of Indology, where scholars have grown accustomed to a dialectical tradition of debate stretching over the centuries where philosophers of various denominations have competed to present an ever more refine epistemology, coherent within their worldview and legitimizing their religious practices, while at the same time polemically assessing the soteriological claims of others, either in writing or in public debates, one is left wondering what are the presuppositions behind such a quaint statement. How is one to decide what constitutes ‘dialogue’, what is its purpose and method, without falling into a patronizing and potentially biased attitude? Taking example from the work of the sixth century CE Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Bhāviveka, this paper will both challenge the opinion of Schmidt-Leukel and suggest that, not only did dialogical communication between Hindus and Buddhists proponents reach a high level of philosophical sophistication, but that modern proponents of interreligious dialogue could find insight in the dialectical methodology of the Buddhist dialectician.

Explorations in Indian Philosophy, 2020

Abstract The period of British colonial rule in India is typically regarded as philosophically sterile. Indian philosophy written in English during the British colonial period is often ignored in histories of Indian philosophy, or, when considered explicitly, dismissed either as uncreative or as inauthentic. The late Daya Krishna thought hard about this at the end of his life, and we have been thinking about this in conversation with him.