The Peacock's Egg: Bhartrhari on Language and Reality

Abstract

Anyone who has ever opened a book on Indian philosophy will have been struck by the sometimes strange doctrines that were held by the different schools, and may have wondered to what extent it is possible really to understand Indian philosophy. And what do we mean when we say that we understand this or that Indian thinker, or Indian philosophy in general? Indeed, to what extent did individual philosophers themselves understand the philosophies they wrote about? The Samkhya philosophy, to take an example, proclaims the existence of twenty-five factors (which they call tattvas) that somehow evolve out of each other so as to create the phenomenal world. Did individual Samkhya thinkers know why exactly these twenty-five factors had to be accepted and not any others? Did they perhaps accept these factors simply because they had been sanctioned by their particular tradition, and because early exposure lent them a degree of plausibility that they are unlikely to acquire in the case of those who do not become acquainted with them until later in life? If this is so, how much understanding can we modern scholars ever hope to attain? Are we condemned merely to record what the Indian thinkers thought, perhaps adding a historical dimension by investigating how some of these ideas succeed more or less similar earlier ones? Or a social dimension by pointing out that this or that position served the interests of this or that particular philosopher and those of his group? Such investigations, which put Indian philosophy in its historical and social contexts, are, to be sure, possible and extremely important. Historical continuities have been studied and more will no doubt be discovered. But is this as far as we can go? If so, our understanding of Indian philosophy will not be very different from that of mythology: a number of just-so stories that we can study in their historical and social contexts.