Devasura

  ''What is the meaning of the Human Will?" Oh? Such a deep thinker once walked this land 2000 years ago? Can you answer his question?...if you understand it. To me this is one of the earliest applications of catuṣkoṭi (Four valued Indian logic or Tetralemma) by an Indian philosopher, even though it was formally published only a couple of centuries after Ashvagosha. He is not obsessing over 'God exists' or 'God does not exist' - like an Aristotlean logician might. He is transcending and going beyond the question. 1600 years later, a version of the same question tormented Issac Newton's mind. He spent an inordinate amount of effort reading and writing to try and answer the problem of Will and Space from a Christian Theist perspective. And even he could not provide a valid answer. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient, that is, he endures from eternity to eternity, and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he ...

  The scariest prediction of Indian philosophy The first thinkers to realize this great and disruptive truth was Indian idealists- almost 2000 years ago. The earliest example I have located is found in a Mahayana text- " Space is devoid of numbers and the characteristics of numbers. It is only due to projection that we speak of 'one space'. The Skandhas are devoid of numbers and their characteristics. The wise do not speak of it in such terms " -Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra To summarize- ''T he Laws and characteristics of the universe are NOT encoded in the fabric of Reality. They are projections/Representations/Superimpositions on consciousness/Neural tissue of creatures on Earth. Reality has no quality of its own. The true nature of Reality is unknowable and NIRGUNA/SUNYA '' -Buddha, Adi Shankara and Asanga, Indian Idealists To explain it in simpler terms- ''The version of the world *as you know it*-Colors, ...

  Game theory: A new tool to decode Indian history? The meme above and its import is well known. India is the only surviving original cradle of civilization that has existed as a continuous culture and polity through all eras of history- Bronze age, Iron age, Ancient, Classical age, Medieval and modern times. But what unique characteristics of Indian people and culture made this miracle possible? People usually give supernatural or overtly emotional explanations. But what if there are truly objective reasons for the Indian miracle? Game theory offers some answers. Game theory is a new and applied branch of mathematics that has found enormous significance in economics, evolutionary biology, politics, geopolitics and even behavioral sciences. It asks a very unique and fundamental question that is relevant to humanity: What is the best survival strategy? How do you survive and thrive in a world where so many selfish enemies and competitors abound? What strategy must an individual, a s...

When I first read the following passage, I had to double-check to make sure I wasn't mistakenly reading a book of Deconstructionism [starting with Nietzsche], Post-Modernism, Structuralism or Semiotics. No! This was written in ancient India. Over 1700 years ago. It is one of the lost tomes of Nalanda which no Indian could read for 800 years. Legend has it that it was this book that inspired the foundation of Zen school of philosophy at Shaolin Monastery- a minor branch of that great banyan which continued to thrive even after the "Doom of Nalanda". Can you name the book? Magnifique!! We need to ask a further question- Are the aforementioned schools of western text criticism plagiarized [which meand published without any acknowledgement] from the Philosophy generated in Nalanda university ? The books may have been lost in India, but were easily available in Japan, China etc where Jesuit missionaries had strong presence and undertook voracious manuscript collecting activ...

The kind and quality of books being generated by western philosophers of science is awe inspiring. But as a well wisher of Indian philosophy, it also evokes an old sorrow. This is sad because proto-Idealism and Idealism were both Indian inventions. And it was exported to Greece, China, Japan and Renaissance Europe in multiple waves, triggering great intellectual movements there. This fact is admitted by foreign scholars themselves (Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus, Voltaire, Schopenhauer etc) Question to Indian Idealist Thinkers- (O ye Cittamātravādins my fellows!!) Why are you not even trying to incorporate Evolutionary biology into the now ossified and adamantly stagnant Indian systems of thought? When will we see an Indian work with the title- "Universal biology after Aitareya, Kapila, Buddha and Shankara"? Oh the agony of waiting! Question to Indian 'Realists' (Dvaita, Jaina, Samkhyas, Navya-Nyaya etc whom I place under class 'Sarvāstivāda'--"All exist...

  Time for some philosophy What is TIME? Is it something REAL? Some ‘thing’ external to us “out there”, outside the human brain, an absolute category inherent in the World of Being which is controlling and guiding the World of Becoming? Human cognition is designed to perceive time as a Real entity. Therefore most literature of philosophy and Science ever written-east or west- assume time is real. In fact we cannot even ‘think’ without assuming the validity of ‘Simultaneity and Succession’ of phenomenon we observe with our sense organs. Which simply means things happening together and things happening one after the other- can things happen any other way? Much of modern science also requires Time to be a real external factor. The thousands of equations of classical physics and QM wont work without ‘T’=time being somewhat real. All this falls under the REALIST view of reality and the universe. "Lokānām antakṛt kālaḥ kalonyaḥ kalanātmakaḥ " "The time which destroys is the...

  A very important diagram- How the Jesuit scholar-missionaries in the 16th century imported and transmitted Indian Mahāyāna manuscripts throughout Europe. Virtually every 17th-19th century western thinker was exposed to the high philosophy contained in these texts. These advanced texts were lost in India for centuries after the burning of Nalanda university in 1193 CE. This proves that the Jesuit scholar-missionaries were actively engaged in gathering knowledge from the world over, digesting it into Latin, erasing the pagan sources and diffusing it all over Europe. A similar map should be made for the transmission of Calculus manuscripts from Kerala beginning with Matteo Ricci(1580s). If they could extract so much from China and Japan where they had zero power, imagine what they could have done in the kingdom of Kochi which was under Portuguese colonial control from 1500–1663. Sadly, the Kerala school of Mathematics was located in Kochi and, some of its scholars like Sankara Varie...