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The Trouble with Ancient Indian History


That photo, by the way, has nothing to do with this content. I put it up when this post was going to have a very different subject. I'll keep it there out of inertia. It does not harm. 

I have decided to use this post to preserve a fascinating brief passage from THE RULE OF LAWS by Fernanda Pirie. 

"Frustratingly for historians, in the climate of tropic India manuscripts written on cloth or palm leaves, or even on copper plates, deteriorate quickly. Only the most popular, those that were recopies and re-written over the centuries, survive. But from the eighth and ninth centuries, scholars began to produce commentaries on earlier texts and digests of what they considered the most important of these writings, which helped to preserve the tradition and its learning." So, although what contemporary scholars are trying to piece together is a very ancient tradition, one which was old when Alexander the Great showed up at its northwestern extreme, it is one we can understand now only by virtue of quotes of quotes of quotes, and survivorship bias. 

I am reminded that I have often wondered in a parallel way, about efforts to understand ancient Indian philosophy. We are told, for example, that there was a form of dualism in India, dualism in a roughly Platonic sense, known as Samkhya. It postulated that Jiva ('a living being') is that state in which purusha is bonded to prakriti. Very roughly, mind with body. This as a distinctive school of thought, is said to have had a short life 

But the philosophical quadrant in the generation of commentators that Pirie talks about in the above passage, those of the 8th and 9th centuries, are already talking about Samkhya in the past tense. It had died out. So it was being written about only by people who see themselves as the intellectual heirs of those who were its opponents, the monists to those dualists. What we have of the Samkhya point of view is only what THOSE commentators chose to quote.

That's my thought for the day.


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