Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most concise and precise book on Indian Philosophy, September 25, 2002
By A Customer
1) The best feature of this book is: it has the actual texts of so many great works like Vedas, Upanishads, Gita etc. For this one reason itself, it is a must have book, where else will you get such a concise and precise translations of all the major Indian texts all in one place.
2) It deals extensively not only with Upanishads and other six Darshanas but also includes Arth Shastra by Kautilya(Chanakya), the famous Indian economist/politician (contemporary to Alexander). It also included Bhagvat Gita and the famous Karma Yoga, as one would expect in any Indian philosophy book!
3) It summarizes the key-features of all the seemingly different Indian philosophies Buddhism/Jainism/Charvaka/Hinduism very succintly in the first chapter. I particularly liked the seven key similarities of Indian thought on page xxiii from the general introduction.
4) Another interesting part is on page xxx where the authors argue why one should undertake the study of Indian philosophy and how should it be taken. It takes historical, political and philosophical stand-points. Again, a must read!
4) One flaw of the book is that they have kind of assumed whole-heartedly with the Aryan Invasion Theory stating that Aryans came from outside India and settled in India around 2000 bc. However, this theory is seriously debated by many contemporary scholars like Prof Edwin Bryant (PhD from Columbia, now teaching at Rutgers), Prof Klaus Klostermaier (author of many Hinduism books, one of which was assigned reading in this class too, retired from Univ of Manitoba, Canada, now teaching at Oxford, UK), Prof Subhash Kak etc. Some of these scholars maintain that Aryans were native inhabitants of India who went to other parts of the world, starting from India. But, it is still a big controvery until solid evidences are found.
5) Other problem is: on page xxix, it is mentioned that the people from the varna, Shudra (sudra), are not religiously initiated Hindus and they dont have to undergo the four Aashrams (stages) of the human-life. This is also not agreeable statement as the same Manu-Smriti which has stated this has also stated elsewhere, that one becomes Dvija(twice born) of the first there varnas, ONLY by character and not just by birth alone. It prescribes the mobility between different varnas.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
easily the best of its kind, August 5, 2004
the book is invaluable for the student of indian philosophy. but please note that it is not an exposition of indian philosophy by the authors. it is a "source book" ie the book presents original translated tracts and abstracts from various original works.
radhakrishnan was a true philosopher par excellence and knew his subject. so whatever is philosophically crucial and important in the set of literature he surveyed he has presented relevant passages and abstracts and excerpts from these texts. from the vedas to the upanishads to the dharma shaastra (manu) to the arthashastra to the various schools of philosophy - lokayata (book includes an excerpt from the rare jayarashi bhatta's tattvopaplavasimha), jainism (syaadvaadamanjari etc), buddhism (several of the suttas, chapters from milinda and visuddhimagga, last two chapters of the mulamaadhyamika kaarika, the whole of vaasubandhu's vijnaaptimaatrataasiddhi etc) and the so called orthodox schools (important verses from ishvara krishna's samkya karika with gaudapada's commentary, patanjala yoga sutra with vyaasa's commentary, nyaya and vaiseshika sutras with their commentaries including some chapters from udhayana's kusumanjali, mimamsa sutra with kumarilla's shloka/tantra vaarika, shankara's, ramanuja's and madhva's commentary on on the brahma sutras etc) important verses/passages are presented.
finally there are even chapters on modern philosophers like sri aurbindo.
notable omissions are sphotavaada and saiva siddhaanta.
only thing to fault with radhakrishnan is that he uncritically accepted the so called invasion theory which today is heavily disputed and discredited as a tool of colonial imperialism and slowly being negated. but that does take away from the professor the penetration of his intellect or his respect and knowledge for the subject.
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23 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ian Myles Slater on: A Classic Anthology, October 24, 2003
Originally published in 1957, and reissued in paperback in the 1960s, this is basically a textbook (or supplementary reading source) for the serious study of the philosophical schools of India -- very much including the religious traditions.
Radhakrishnan and Moore assembled and edited an impressive body of material, most of it in selections, with useful introductions and helpful notes. It begins with philosophical passages in early Sanskrit religious texts, and proceeds through their orthodox interpreters, through heterodox approaches (materialist, Jaina, and Buddhist), and the medieval synthesizers, and concludes with a chapter each on two modern Indian philosophers, Sri Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan himself.
Although the work is careful and solid, it represents a half-century-old point of view, and especially bibliographically is in places quite out of date. So far as I am aware, however, there is no recent, but equally comprehensive and well-documented collection, available in English (specific topics are another matter). The translations are in places not only old but unappealing. It can be misleading, and at the very least it does not deal with fifty-odd years of controversy over the absolute and relative datings of various key texts. With this in mind, however, it is certainly worth reading.
This should be the whole content of my review; the remainder, is I fear, currently necessary, for reasons external to the book in question.
The age of the book has left it open to attacks which are less reasonable, from certain Indian nationalists and their more naive supporters, including reviewers here. The editors took for granted the conventional view (since the later nineteenth century) that the recorded history of Indian thought begins with the ancient literature in Sanskrit, itself a very early example of the Indo-European languages (see below). Anything earlier is either irretrievably lost, or inextricably interwoven with the Sanskrit and Prakrit (medieval vernacular) heritage, including that in the Dravidian languages of south Asia, notably Tamil.
This conflicts with traditional Hindu (and Jaina and Buddhist) views about the eternal nature of Indian civilization, and from a religious point of view is simply wrong; but Indian concepts of time are one of the subjects covered in this book (if not entirely adequately), and have little to do with Western empirical studies. (A Christian Fundamentalist or ultra-Orthodox Jew would have equivalent, if opposite, objections.)
In the absence of extended texts (instead of clusters of undeciphered glyphs) from the Indus Valley civilization, this is still the basic working assumption, despite attempts to recognize Shiva, for example, in ancient art. The dates are, within limits, open to debate, and the relationship of the arrival of the "Aryas" to the fall of the Indus Valley civilization is no longer taken as obvious. Still, the Sanskrit language is regarded as having entered India with invading tribes from the north, which occupied the inviting plains of northern India (including modern Pakistan). Their ("Vedic") language and culture, if not the tribes themselves, very slowly spread over the northern part of the subcontinent, and eventually beyond. (This has historical parallels, including the Persians, Alexander's Macedonians, and a variety of later, more permanent, invaders, most recently Muslims from Central Asia.) The ancient oral literature of the "Aryas" (Noble Ones), encapsulated in the Vedas and Brahmanas, is the foundation of later developments, including the Upanishads, the Epics, and the Puranas.
Some reviewers, perhaps accepting well-publicized recent "discoveries" (of an often dubious nature), seem to find this objectionable. They are either implicitly denying the well-known relationship of Sanskrit to Old Persian, and of both to Greek, Latin, and the Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic (and several other) languages, or they are arguing that the whole Indo-European (or, especially for German scholars, "Indo-Germanic") language group originated in India.
This latter approach was a view entertained in the nineteenth-century infancy of comparative linguistics; it has had a revival in India, where it has an understandable appeal. (Starting their history with an unrecorded invasion is an annoying idea -- although it leaves India in the same "humiliating" position as most of Europe.) Radhakrishnan and Moore were certainly familiar with some earlier versions of this position (including a variant which expressed open sympathy with the "Aryans" of Nazi Germany), and ignored them.
The "out of India" choice requires accepting that the ancient Indo-European speakers (in modern thought, a linguistic, not a genetic, grouping), instead of spreading throughout Eurasia in unrelated migrations and episodes of cultural influence, marched north from India, over the Himalayas, across some of the world's most rugged terrain, and spread out, presumably conquering as they went, imposing their language on the subjugated peoples, who learned to speak it as best they could.
This is possible to imagine, if militarily (and otherwise) highly unlikely. It presents India as the original colonial super-power, however. This view is actually endorsed, if not widely publicized in the West, by a variety of nationalist groups in India, whose "anti-imperialism" is apparently limited to recent, and European or Muslim, empires.
Those who want to present India in a positive light should perhaps complain less about what is, on the whole an admiring look at the sub-continents' more peaceful (if occasionally startlingly pragmatic / Machiavellian) contributions to history, in volumes like the present one. Radhakrishnan and Moore made a serious effort to explain the intellectual heritage of India. I wish I didn't feel it was necessary to defend them.
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