Classical Indian Philosophy: A Reader.

• Author: Nicholson, Andrew J.
• Position: Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy - Book review

The arrival of a new anthology is welcome news to instructors of undergraduate courses in Indian philosophy. For over a half-century we have had to rely on S. Radhakrishnan and C. Moore's Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, which many feel has become outdated. With the steady growth in the study of Indian philosophy and in the number of available translations since the Sourcebook was compiled in 1954, the time is certainly ripe for a replacement. In this review, I will compare Deepak Sarma's Classical Indian Philosophy: A Reader and the earlier reader, with a special emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of each for use in the undergraduate classroom.

In the introduction Sarma labels his new book a "doxography." likening it to Haribhadra's Saddarsana-samuccaya (Compendium of the Six Systems, 8th c. CE,) and Madhava's Sarva-dariana-samgraha (Summary of All the Systems, 14th c. CE). Sarma acknowledges that his new anthology differs from those pre-modem texts in allowing those schools to speak in their own words, rather than summarizing the views of the competing schools. The main connection of these two pre-modern texts to Sarma's book, he writes, is that "I too have arranged my doxography hierarchically, culminating with Vedanta," specifically with the school of Dvaita Vedanta, the school that Sarma himself advocates. One obvious question for any doxographer is how many schools to include. Haribhadra's work enumerates six (although he acknowledges that a seventh, the Carvaka school of materialism, might also be included). Madhava's work lists sixteen. Sarma's anthology includes nine: the now-standard "six schools" of the affumers (astikas), Nyaya, Vaisika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta, plus three of the so-called denier (nastika) schools, Carvaka, Buddhism, and Jainism. The Vedanta section is further divided into three sub-sections, on Advaita, Visistadvaita, and Dvaita Vedanta.

It may be mere coincidence that the nine schools treated by Sarma are the same nine included in the Radhalcrishnan and Moore Sourcebook, in almost the same order (only the Buddhism and Jainism chapters are reversed). To my mind this is a missed opportunity. One of the best things to happen to the study of Indian philosophy in the past forty years has been the increasing acknowledgement of astika schools beyond the standard six cited in most introductory textbooks. In particular, the explosion of interest in the schools of Kashmir aivism and Caitanya's...