Shankarāchārya’s life is full of amazing incidents, but there is one incident that I find particularly interesting. It is the story of how Shankarāchārya debated the husband-wife couple— Maṇḍana Miśra and Ubhaya Bhārati—on the primacy of Mimānsa vs. Vedānta. Aside from the significant philosophical shift that Shankarāchārya’s victory in this debate resulted in, the debate is also a watershed moment because Shankarāchārya...
In an earlier post, I discussed how the Sāńkhya notion of manifest and unmanifest matter addresses some fundamental problems related to perception and realism. In a later post, I discussed how the unmanifest becomes manifest through several stages—para, pasyanti, madhyama, and vaikhari. We also talked about how the agency to cause this manifestation is prāna, which acts as the “force” of nature,...
The modern atomic theory describes perception as a change both to reality and to our perception. For instance, when we see the redness of an apple, light impinges on the apple, is absorbed by the atoms in the apple, and then emitted. The color perceived by the eyes is due to the light that is emitted. This model of perception requires...
Even a casual look at Sāńkhya reveals an apparent asymmetry in its ontology, namely that there are five sense-objects called Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether, corresponding to the five senses of knowledge Nose, Tongue, Eyes, Skin, and Ears respectively, but there aren’t corresponding sense-objects for the five senses of action, namely, Hands, Legs, Anus, Genitals, and Speech. Why do senses...
It is not hard to find debates today between “flat” and “round” Earths. Many of these debates are founded on conspiracy theories, but discussing those conspiracy theories isn’t the intent of this post. This post discusses a completely different notion of flat Earth which is found in Vedic cosmology texts, where space itself is viewed differently than in modern science. How...
