All battles of ideas function under rules of engagement that must be followed. To say the rules are wrong and one person’s opinion is right will not work.
The options are either to change the rules, again by critiquing their evolution, contexts and possibly the power asymmetry, or to establish new ones. The complexity in the world of ideas increases as we get closer to them. It is psychologically arrogant and logically impossible for a scholar to believe that one idea is totally right or completely false—that is dogma. To be able to glean the logic of one, the counter logic of another to arrive at a new theory or based on empirical evidence new knowledge is the way forward. If nothing, use the thesis-antithesis,-synthesis triad, a strongly Left-leaning image, to work with ideas.
The Indian tradition of debate is firmly rooted in logic and reason. The paradigm of vadavidya, for instance, offers three kinds of debate, wrote Bimal Krishna Matilal in The Character of Logic in India—vada (where truth is the goal and logical arguments backed by evidence create a thesis), jalpa (where winning is the goal, by means fair or foul and where wit or intelligence is the tool, the final arbitrator being reason) and vitanda (where demolishing the opponent is the goal, again through logic). These tools work well in the realm of the material, policy and administration.
But when we enter abstract domains, particularly social structures like religion or higher domains of spirituality, this logic falls apart. The difference here between the Western and Indian thought is the window from which they view these ideas. For the West, man is a congregation of matter, feelings and thoughts. For India, man is an agglomeration of physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual, fused into an integral reality, as articulated by Sri Aurobindo.
As a result, the Western study of Hinduism, or to use the correct term, Sanatan Dharma, would be in a material context, coloured by geography, society, and language. And so, the clash of Sanatan Dharma with Abrahamic religions may not be a conspiracy, but a conflict between two universes, each with different assumptions and ends but bridged together by the power to organise society.
So, the West absorbs and critiques Indian spirituality as tangible and boxes it into an Abrahamic mode. The East has not found a language to counter it.
When we examine Sanatan Dharma through the lens of science, we face the wall of repititive proof of soul and spirit. The subjectivity embedded into Sanatan Dharma allows each being to express herself in each lifetime and grow. To comprehend, leave alone capture, this continuum is impossible for science.
To be fair, the Western modes of knowledge do explore various dimensions of consciousness through psychology and neuroscience. But Indian thought has done very little to reach out, engage, research and present a cogent argument to express this knowledge. The spirit is an assumption.
For the West to understand Sanatan Dharma, it will have to accept the soul as the starting point in man. It will need to address that evolution is not merely a physical idea, but a spiritual idea. Likewise, Indian thought needs to be more steeped in empirical evidence, howsoever sparse it is, than dogmas. Psychology is a field ripe for this transformation.
The Indian tradition is rich with reason. Don’t demean it with rants.
The author is the New Media Director at Reliance Industries Ltd, and author of Tunnel of Varanavat. Views are entirely personal. This is part 2 of a two-part series.
