Dear Jeyamohan,
In a recent discourse, you stated that you are teaching Indian philosophy through the lens of Western philosophy. My friend, who is a traditional Sanskrit scholar, said it is a wrong way, and it is degrading Indian philosophy and tradition.
Vishnuram
Dear Vishnuram,
If you are approaching tradition as a traditionalist and pinning on rituals and beliefs, you need not learn Indian philosophy through western thought. It will confuse you. In fact, learning philosophy itself can be confusing for a traditionalist, as he lacks questions and instead relies on strong answers, which he attempts to believe in and incorporate into his life through practice.
But if you have your own questions and are trying to understand Indian tradition, you have to learn it. Our modern educational system is based on western thought, so you are already in western thought. But you are having fragmented ideas only. Your technical terms and logic are based on Western philosophy, but you don’t know them properly. We are just trying to extend it and complete it.
Learning Indian philosophy through western philosophy is the natural way for a modern man. He actually has no other options. So Nataraja Guru taught Advaita through Western philosophy, and he formed a tradition of wisdom and knowledge. We are following it.
In fact, westerners reinvented the Indian philosophical tradition and established it. The intellectual movement known as Indology discovered original texts of Indian tradition and made them available for publication. They conducted thorough research and authored comprehensive studies and commentaries. They created a proper dictionary of the ancient Vedic language and compiled detailed indexes for our texts. They translated them into European languages and made them popular throughout the world.
During the translation process, scholars from various fields studied our ancient texts, and through their combined research, we began to understand them ourselves. Today every Indian scholar, traditionalist or otherwise, can read and understand Indian original texts only through western Indologists. Once Swami Vivekananda also said this. So, the talk about totally avoiding Western intellectual support is just a silly dream of a person who doesn’t know the history and content of Indian philosophy.
I will say this: if a person wants to bury them back in the ancient rituals and redundant ways of worship, he is actually trying to demean and degrade the magnificent Indian philosophical tradition.
Jeyamohan
