Buddhism was an important ingredient in the philosophical melange of the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium. From an inconspicuous beginning a few centuries before Christ, Buddhist scholasticism ...
Hindu philosophy is the longest surviving philosophical tradition in India. We can recognize several historical stages. The earliest, from around 700 bc, was the proto-philosophical period, when ...
The people of South Asia have been grappling with philosophical issues, and writing down their thoughts, for at least as long as the Europeans and the Chinese. When ...
The issues in Jaina philosophy developed concurrently with those that emerged in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. The period from the second century bc to about the tenth ...
Tibetan philosophy – if we can make a rough separation between what is predominantly argument-oriented and analytical and what is more a question of ritual, devotion or vision ...
Apoha, a Sanskrit term meaning exclusion, was used by the late fifth- to early sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignāga as a keystone in his theory of denotation. According to ...
The Arya Samaj (ārya-samāj, ‘The Association of Nobles’) is a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83). Based on the supposition that the true ...
Classical Indian schools all stake out positions on awareness, its intrinsic nature, its place in the causal processes crucial to human accomplishment, its relations to objects in the ...
The Sanskrit word brahman (neuter) emerged in late Vedic literature and Upaniṣads (900–300 bc) as the name (never pluralized) of the divine reality pervading the universe, ...
The Brahmo (or Brahma) Samaj (‘Society of Brahma’) is the name of a theistic society founded by Raja Rammohun Roy in Calcutta in 1828. It advocated reform, and ...
During the first centuries after the Buddha, with the development of a settled life of scholarly study and religious practice, distinct schools began to emerge within the Buddhist ...
Madhyamaka (‘the Middle Doctrine’) Buddhism was one of two Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, the other being Yogācāra, that developed in India between the first and fourth centuries ad. ...
Yogācāra is one of the two schools of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its founding is ascribed to two brothers, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, but its basic tenets and doctrines were ...
‘Emptiness’ or ‘voidness’ is an expression used in Buddhist thought primarily to mark a distinction between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are, ...
Buddhist philosophers have investigated the techniques and methodologies of debate and argumentation which are important aspects of Buddhist intellectual life. This was particularly the case in India, where ...
Buddhist political theory is normative thinking about politics from a Buddhist perspective. In other words, it is Buddhist ideas about what government should do and why [see Political ...
Causation was acknowledged as one of the central problems in Indian philosophy. The classical Indian philosophers’ concern with the problem basically arose from two sources: first, the cosmogonic ...
Theories of the origin of the universe have been told as stories, riddles and instruction in India since early times. The three prominent religious movements, Hinduism, Buddhism and ...
Definitions in Indian philosophy are conceived very differently from definitions in Western philosophy. In Western philosophy and logic, it is usual to define a term or a linguistic ...
Two principal strains of ethical thought are evident in Indian religious and philosophical literature: one, central to Hinduism, emphasizes adherence to the established norms of ancient Indian culture, ...
Each classical Indian philosophical school classifies and defines itself with reference to a foundational text or figure, through elaboration of inherited positions, and by disputing the views of ...
From the earliest Indian speculation, illusion has been key in the exposition of Indian mysticism. In classical philosophy proper, all schools take positions concerning illusion (sometimes called error) ...
Indian speculation about the vicissitudes of human life has a long and complex history. Life in the early Vedic period was considered to be largely hostage to the ...
The philosophical school encompassing the Bengali devotees of the god Viṣṇu is traditionally known as the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school. Caitanya is considered to be the founder of this ...
In the Ṛg Veda, the oldest text in India, many gods and goddesses are mentioned by name; most of them appear to be deifications of natural powers, such ...