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A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s1: 1. The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy

A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s1

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English

1. The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy

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THE religious and philosophical spirit of India which appears already in marked development in the *Ṛgveda* found its most brilliant literary exposition in the Upaniṣads, but with them we are still distinctly before the time of formal systematization. On the other hand, we find at an unknown date Indian philosophy, so far as it is orthodox, framed in a number of Sūtras for which great antiquity is asserted by the schools, while the Jains and Buddhists alike assert the same of their texts, and even the materialists ascribe their doctrines to a mythical Bṛhaspati. These claims to antiquity we may justly dismiss, and assume that after the period of the Upaniṣads dates the time when ideas of earlier thinkers were gradually taken up and made into a definite system, Darçana,¹ taught in a philosophic school in the sense of a series of teachers who developed or at least expounded one definite body of doctrine. After this development had been in existence for some time, there ultimately came the desire to fix in definitive form the doctrines of the school, and this led to the composition of the Sūtras. These texts are based on the principle of short catchwords which must from the first have been accompanied by verbal expositions. These are naturally lost, and it appears clear that it was only in each case at some considerable distance after the Sūtra had been produced that the need of writing down a comment was devised. Our oldest surviving commentaries contain abundant signs that they do not represent an unbroken tradition, sure of itself, from the first teacher. Later we find independent works of the several schools, but these recognize the authority of the Sūtras, and make it clear that it was held that in them lay the essential doctrines of the school, which might be expanded and expounded but were not to be contradicted.

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¹ The term occurs in *Vaiçeṣika Sūtra*, ix. 2. 13 and the late epic.

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The Sūtras themselves were redacted at a time when the schools had been in contact, and for that reason we have no real chance of determining their dates even relatively, for it seems as if those of the Pūrvamīmāṅsā, the Vedānta, the Nyāya, and Vaiçeṣika cannot have been composed as they stand at any very great distance of time from one another. The investigations of Jacobi¹ resulted in the belief that the *Nyāya* and *Brahma Sūtras* were composed after the nihilistic school of Buddhism but before the appearance of the Vijñānavādin idealism, say between A. D. 200 and 450, while the *Pūrvamīmāṅsā* and *Vaiçeṣika* might be a little older. The *Yoga Sūtra*, on the other hand, he assigned to the period after the Vijñānavāda school and the *Sāṁkhya* to a late date. The last result is clearly sound, but the Vijñānavāda is dated too late, and must fall in the fourth century at latest, while the nihilistic school is also probably postdated by a century. Jacobi² also deduces from the mention in the *Arthaçāstra* under the style of Ānvīkṣikī of Lokāyata, Sāṁkhya and Yoga only, that these three branches of philosophy had definitely developed by 300 B. C., but not the others. This view, however, must be wrong, since the *Arthaçāstra*, as we have seen, is much later than the period proposed, and its groupings of philosophy must be explained by the tenets of that school. We must content ourselves with the belief that between the dates of the chief Upaniṣads and the third or fourth century A. D. there proceeded an active stream of investigation which we have only in its final form.

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¹ JAOS. xxxi. 1 ff.; DLZ. 1922, p. 270. Dasgupta (*Indian Phil.* i. 370, 418 f., 280) puts the dates far too high, as does V. G. Paranjpe, *Le Vârtika du Kâtyâyana*, pp. 76 ff., who argues on the basis of styles, which involves the assumption that style in grammatical and philosophic texts is strictly comparable. The dates of the early forms of the Sūtras is another question which is unanswerable.

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² SBA. 1911, pp. 732 ff.

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