If you’ve ever been curious about Indian thought, yet can’t seem to keep straight the difference between Veda and Vedanta, Upanishad and Atman, Shiva and Sutra, this post is for you. A roadmap to help first time explorers navigate the baffling complexity of Indian thought. Of course, what follows will be a radical oversimplification. But it may help first timers out there get a sense of the terrain of Indic thought, and not be overwhelmed not even knowing where to start. The last few posts I’ve been exploring Buddhism, and in particular, Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism. There are strong similarities to the worldview described by Tibetan Buddhism and the networkological perspective. Tibetan Buddhism views the stuff of the world as fractal, relational, relative, perspectival, practically infinite in spacetime, with practically infinite potential in its aspects, with reification as the primary source of problems, and with everything seen as a refraction of the whole, including ourselves. All of these notions are shared, in one form or another, by the networkological worldview. Studying Buddhism, however, inevitably leads to Hinduism, and if in my last post I tried to differentiate some of the vehicles of Buddhism from each other, this post will attempt to provide a basic roadmap to help folks orient in the baffling proliferation of worldviews that is the Hindu Tradition. As will become clear, many of the ideas within Buddhism are shared by various Hinduisms, and that both traditions evolved over time, and often in relation to each other. Learning the Pitfalls of Trying to Study Indic Thought For this reason it’s probably best to refer to the nexus of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and other schools which originated within, or drew primary inspiration from India ie: Chinese and Japanese Buddhisms as “Indic” philosophies, as some scholars have suggested. For in truth, these various approaches to the world have more in common than not, and it’s difficult to understand any of them in isolation from each other, just as much as it’s often difficult to understand changes in these traditions over time without mentioning how these various schools responded to each other. One problem that is often encountered in studying all of these traditions is one mentioned by Kim Knott, NAMEly, that different texts on these approaches have different biases. Western scholarly approaches to the study of these traditions are often radically different from western or Indic ”devotional” sources, which aim to recruit converts, or help practitioners master a spiritual discipline. Often devotional sources will pull as much from oral transmission and personal experience, much as Indic sources have for millennia, as much as from scholarly forms of DOCUMENTation, evidence, etc. And very often, there are simply different criteria as to what counts as worthwhile in these approaches. For example, in traditions that believe in reincarnation, attributing a work to a particular author might be inherently problematic, because the author of the physical text might be seen as a reincarnation of an earlier sage who “really” wrote the text. For example, either you believe that the philosopher Nagarjuna lived over six hundred years, or that he was several different people telescoped into one. Likewise, criterion for dating texts might be radically different in sacred/devotional texts and western scholarly ones. It seems to me there’s benefits to taking all of these varied sources. The very fact that the authorship and dating of texts might be different in sacred/devotional and western scholarly contexts is itself worth learning, and there’s much that can be learned from the living oral tradition, still alive today. For in fact, many of the written texts in these traditions are only bare-bones guidelines, which were understood as needing explication. In fact, the sutra thread genre, one of the most famous in Indic literatures, makes use of short aphorisms which condense large amounts of knowledge. This makes them easier to memorize. The teacher then needs to explain and fill in the context. A great example is that I mentioned in an earlier post, Robert Thurman’s excellent Jewel Tree text, in which he spends several hundred pages expanding on the meanings of a 10 page poetic text. It’s also worth noting that when texts are prepared by those from various devotional traditions, they might be biased against certain other traditions. Hindu texts on Indian philosophy might present Buddhism as a strange aberration which has since died out in India. And so those who read texts on ‘Indian philosophy’ might find that the text covers the “six schools,” all of which are Hindu. Buddhist oriented sources, however, often view Hinduism as a mere precursor to the flowering of Buddhism. It’s essential to have an understanding of where any given text is coming from, and in regard to the Indic tradition, there are so many options.

via A Brief Map of Indic Thought: Knowing Tantra from Krishna and Vedanta and Beyond « Networkologies.