Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

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THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY peculiar to the Vedic lines; 23 nevertheless they demand of any. one who would approach their mystcrics such an utter surrender to the authority of the spiritual teacher that any return to the former field of life is rendered impossible. Before a student of one of these non-Aryan Indian disciplines can enter the inner temple and really attain the goal of the doctrine, he must put off entirely his inherited family, with all of its ways of life, and become reborn as a member of the order.
23 Editor's note: Like Buddhism (cf. supra, p. 18, Editor's note), Jainism, Sankhya, and Yoga do not accept the authority of the Vedas, and are therefore reckoned as heterodox, i.c., doctrines outside of the orthodox Brāhman tradition of the Vedas, Upanisads, and Vedānta. It was Dr. Zimmer's contention that these heterodox systems represent the thinking of the non-āryan pcoples of India, who were overcoine and despised by the Brahmans, but nevertheless could boast of extremely subtle traditions of their own.
Dr. Zimmer regarded Jainism as the oldest of the non-Aryan group, in contrast to most Occidental authorities, who consider Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha, to have been its founder instead of, as the Jainas themselves (and Dr. Zimmer) claim, only the last of a long line of Jaina teachers. Dr. Zimmer believed that there is truth in the Jaina idea that their religion goes back to a remote antiquity, the antiquity in question being that of the pre-Aryan, so-called Dravidian period, which has recently been dramatically illuminated by the discovery of a scries of great Late Stone Age cities in the Indus Valley, dating from the third and perhaps even fourth millennium B.C. (cf. Ernest Mackay, The Indus Civilization, London, 1935; also Zimmer, Alyths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, pp. 93ff.).
Sankhya and Yoga represented a later, psychological sophistication of the principles preserved in Jainism, and prepared the ground for the forceful, anti-Brāhman statement of the Buddha. Sankhya and Yoga belong together, as the theory and the practice of a single philosophy. Kapila, thc reputed founder of Sānkhya (cf. infra, pp. 2811), may have been a contemporary of the Upanisādic thinkers, and seems to have given his name to the city in which the Buddha was born, Kapilavastu.
In general, the non-Aryan. heterodox philosophics are not exclusive in the same sense that the Brāhman philosophies are; for they are not reserved to members of the three upper castes.
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