Eastern philosophy and idealism

Abstract

The category ‘Eastern philosophy’ is somewhat problematic, covering as it does the history of philosophy in both China and India, and it is difficult to make general statements across such expansive histories, but nevertheless debate between what people might call idealism and realism did develop in both regions, and philosophical categories emerged that have equivalents in Western philosophy. The historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta wrote a book on Indian idealism, regarding it as a major trajectory from the earliest sources, and P. T. Raju similarly regarded the history of idealistic thought as progressive, culminating in ‘the final and absolute identity of the universal and the particular, law and thing, norm and existence, reality and value, and the ideal and the actual’. Abhinavagupta’s philosophy was philosophical idealism within a tradition of thought that itself was the intellectual articulation of wider, more popular kinds of religion based on a revelation of texts called Tantras.