Maya In Radhakrishnan S Thought

It is the thought of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan that is most often presented in the West as “Hinduism.” He was a remarkable man. In addition to having been President of India while Nehru was Prime Minister, and the Indian Ambassador to the Soviet Union, he held the Spaulding Chair of Comparative Religion and Ethics at Oxford University. And he continues to be a culture hero of India. Radhakrishnan’s thought developed in the context of his full life. Robert Minor places his thought in that context. His book traces the influences on him and the growth of his thought from his birth in Tirutani to his retirement to Madras. The book contains a complete bibliography of Radhakrishnan’s writings and of the secondary literature.

‘The spiritual homelessness of modern man cannot last long,’ thus believed Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975), a prominent philosopher, educationalist, and one of the makers of modern India. His solution to the problems of humanity is a return to the religion of spirit, to be achieved through the right kind of education. Radhakrishnan advocated a sound educational philosophy aimed at harmonious development of the human personality, with utmost emphasis on moral and spiritual education. This book effectively presents Radhakrishnan’s thoughts, highlighting their relevance to the present day. The author has at length discussed Indian philosophy in comparison with the Western thought and successfully established that the East-West synthesis as propagated by Radhakrishnan is the need of the hour to arrest the self-destructive tendency of the world and ensure development and peace. Readers will also get an account of Radhakrishnan’s life story in the backdrop of the political history of pre and post-Independent India.

In this text, leading scholars from around the world take stock of two centuries of international intellectual investment in Hinduism. Since the early 19th century, when the scholarly investigation of Hinduism began to take shape as a modern academic discipline, Hindu studies has evolved from its concentration on description and analysis to an emphasis on understanding Hindu traditions in the context of the religion's own values, concepts and history. Offering an assessment of the current state of Hindu studies, the contributors to this volume identify past achievements and chart the course for what remains to be accomplished in the field.

Thinker, Thought and Knowledge critically and analytically reasons that some of the philosophical expositions like “thought has created the thinker” and “higher-order thoughts are themselves conscious” hinder us from explaining our sense of unity of consciousness. This book presents and elucidates some observations – thought cannot create thinker; along with thinker and thought, thinking too is quintessential for individual experience to take place; thinker, thinking and thought are fundamentally one in self-consciousness; thought becomes the object of self-consciousness; and the modern science attempts to undermine the principle of causation – from the East–West perspective, and registers its disproval with the philosophical views of scholars like J. Krishnamurti and a few other modern philosophers. Coming to the knowledge aspect, the volume delineates the relative existence and knowledge dealing with the absolute reality, and discusses it on the basis of Adavaita VedÀnta and the YogÀcÀra VijðÀnavÀda of the Buddhist philosophy along with Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge. The researcher’s approach employed in this volume should help the students of philosophy and other discerning readers take an analytical and critical positioning towards many a philosophical problem that they come across.

This constitues the first volume of the series. It indicates the scope of the project and provides a list of sources which will be surveyed in the sebsequent volumes, as well as provide a guide to secondary literature for further study of Indian Philosophy. It lists in relative chronological order, Sanskrit and Tamil works. All known editions and translations into European languages are cited; where puplished versions of the text are not known a guide to the location of manuscripts of the work is provided.

We find here a translation for the first time of the sanskrit philosophical work entitled Pancaprakriya which belongs to the relatively early Advaita Vedanta thinker Sarvajnatman and a thematic analysis of the contents of that work. The Pancaprakriya is a menual of Advaita Vedanta philosophy of language which for Sarcajnatman is reduced to the discernment of the proper meaning of certain great Upanisadic statements or mahavakyss such as Iam Brahman and That thou art. Through the approprition of such a proper understanding which resorts to the secondary of implied usafe of language the qualifies striver after enlghtenment obtains release from bondage int he world.