India: Where Science Meets Samkhya

Charles Darwin, an acharya of Samkhya.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. Charles Darwin wasn’t literally an acharya of Samkhya. In fact, he probably didn't even know what Samkhya was.

Nevertheless, in a deeper, more fundamental sense, Darwin and the Samkhya acharyas had a lot in common.

And this fundamental similarity was their mindset, their approach to understanding the world. When you have the same mindset, an honest approach to the world will lead you to very similar conclusions.

Now, Darwin wasn’t just another, run-of-the-mill old man who came up with a science theory. Even a cursory survey of the intellectual history of the last 300 years would note that the Darwinian theory of evolution was the most significant intellectual event of the period. Darwin didn’t just come up with a fancy idea of how animals lived and died; he redefined humanity’s perception of itself.

Or, at least, he redefined European civilisation’s perception of humanity.

An unfortunate consequence of Indians’ fluency in English, and the current cultural dominance of the West, is that a significant chunk of our elite is no longer capable of grasping that India has its own unique civilisational worldviews. If you have friends among the “modern” young crowd, you’ll know plenty of Indians who are convinced that a Richard Dawkins-style showdown between religion and evolution is inevitable in India (a marker of this type is that they share a lot of Facebook posts from the “I F***ing Love Science” page).

To be fair, those who claim to speak for Indic civilisation have also played a role in shaping this perception. It wasn't too long ago that some influential figures were claiming that descent from monkeys is incompatible with Hinduism.

Only someone ignorant of Samkhya would say that.

Now, most Indians actually are ignorant of Samkhya. I was, too, until a few years ago. So, let me explain.

Samkhya is one of the darshanas of Indic philosophy. Darshana, as you may know from the way it is commonly used in Hindi and Sanskrit, means a “view”. In other words, Indic philosophers realised that every understanding of reality was ultimately dependent upon the person’s viewpoint. And any person’s viewpoint would be determined by many factors, including genetics, the structure of one’s brain, as well as social conditioning.

Figure 1: The six “Astika”. One commonly used classification groups the six “Astika” schools into three groups, based on similarities between them. However, this is far from the only classification. Madhava, a fourteenth-century Sankaracharya of Sringeri, in his Sarvadarshanasamgraha, described 16 different darshanas, which he arranged in a spectrum – the materialist charvaka at one end, his own Advaita Vedanta at the other. Each of the schools produced such lists, with all the other philosophies arranged in a hierarchy, leading to their own philosophy at the top.

Samkhya might be the oldest of the Indic philosophies. It is the underlying philosophy of the Yoga sutras of Patanjali, as well as of the Bhagavad Gita. Samkhyan concepts such as the three gunas permeate all of Indian culture today, and, through Buddhism, have exerted an influence throughout Asia.

Broadly, Samkhya views the universe as composed of nature, or matter, known as prakriti, and consciousness, known as purusha. From this primordial duo arises everything else in the universe – not suddenly, but in a step-wise process.

Figure 2: The Samkhya philosophers’ conceptualisation of the step-wise manifestation of various aspects of the universe from the primordial consciousness, purusha, and primordial matter, prakriti.

Samkhya’s similarities to Darwinian evolution come from this understanding of the universe as arising in several stages. It is comfortable with the idea of gradual change, with a steady alteration from one kind to another. Our former president, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, noted as much in his encyclopedic work, Indian Philosophy, about Samkhya:

In other words, Samkhya was an atheist philosophy. Step-wise evolutionary change was a cornerstone of its understanding of the cosmos. Granted, it didn’t have a conception of natural selection, but, barring that, it is strikingly similar to the Darwinian mindset.

Of course, this is not the only parallel that can be drawn between the Indian darshanas and the various schools of thought that undergird the modern scientific worldview.

Like many English-educated Indians, I was an avid reader of the works of P G Wodehouse, especially those featuring Jeeves, the super-intelligent valet who would solve all sorts of problems through his shrewdness.

Jeeves’ favourite author, as portrayed in the novels, is one Spinoza. This isn’t a name that’s familiar to most of us today. But go back a couple of hundred years, and he was quite the rage in Europe.

Figure 3: Philosopher Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was born in a Portuguese-Jewish family in 1677, and lived in what is now the Netherlands. He was an interesting character, making a living grinding glass lenses while writing on the side. His big idea was that there was no difference between mind and body, that everything in the universe was part of a single underlying substance, which he considered synonymous with god. Substance – literally, that which underlies everything: sub = below, stance = stands.

Now, these weren’t standard things to say back in those days. So, he made himself a lot of enemies and got himself excommunicated from the Jewish community. They issued a writ against poor 23-year-old Spinoza, called a “herem”, which went on like this:

“Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in…

“We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.”

His reputation for “dangerous ideas” followed him wherever he went, and his works were placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

While the authorities of the day may not have been kindly disposed to his ideas, Spinoza was held in tremendous regard by many of his philosopher-successors. Hegel, the great German, was noted to have said, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.” Gilles Deleuze, a twentieth-century French postmodernist, called Spinoza the “prince of philosophers”.

It wasn’t merely philosophers who were enamoured by Spinoza’s ideas, though. Albert Einstein was one of his most famous fans. When asked about his belief in god, Einstein’s response often fell along these lines:

“We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers...”

So, we’ve established that Spinoza was a great thinker, someone who was admired and respected by a bunch of important people. Now, we get to the more pressing question – how does that concern us, as Indians?

Well, here is what a German Sanskrit scholar of the nineteenth century, Theodor Goldstucker, thought of Spinoza:

“... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus, did his biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza...

“…comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy.”

Similar opinions were expressed by another German, the better-known Max Muller:

“The Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'.”

Helena Blavatsky, of Theosophical Society fame, wrote in an unfinished work: “As to Spinoza's Deity .... it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple.”

We’ll be back

In many ways, the scientific revolution in the West can be understood as the re-emergence of long-quiescent pagan modes of thinking.

It was the awakening, after centuries of hibernation, of the mindsets of Plato and Aristotle.

Of wonder at the world around us, from the movement of the planets to the cycles of birth, death, and renewal in all living forms. A burning urge to find out why things were the way they were, combined with an unwillingness to settle for just-so stories. And most importantly, a resistance to the idea that individuals with “dangerous” ideas must be suppressed in order to benefit the collective.

Figure 4: The School of Athens, a painting from the 1500s by the artist Raphael. In the centre of the figure are Plato and Aristotle. The European Renaissance and the subsequent scientific revolution were built upon the rediscovery of pagan Graeco-Roman philosophy.

These mindsets, foundational to the scientific project, were not unique to Europe. They represent something fundamental in the human brain – ways of engaging with the world that have existed in many other cultures, at many different points in time.

What makes India special, though, is that we have had the good fortune of never having had one single ideology establish itself as the sole determinant of truth. Different Indic philosophers approached reality through different prisms, and that left us with a composite civilisational worldview, which shares a lot with that provided by modern science.

And that is why it is so painful to see young, bright Indians heap scorn on their native philosophical traditions as “superstitious”, “backward”, and “irrational”. So harsh when dealing with their own people, but so gullible when sold the bogus narrative of one solitary “scientific” tradition running in a straight line from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe to Cambridge and Harvard.

The Razor’s Edge

क्षुरस्यधारानिशितादुरत्यया
दुर्गंपथस्तत्कवयोवदन्ति॥

Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say,

Is the path, difficult to traverse.

Kathopanishad

There is a small but growing contingent of people who envision a future for India which conserves its identity while simultaneously incorporating the best of modern science and technology. The temptation we must guard against is viewing Indic thought as somehow “better” than Western ideas – and not fall for self-aggrandising statements like “we are more holistic”, “we care about sustainability”, “we integrate spirituality”, or whatever else is currently fashionable.

Science is just shorthand for “stuff that works”. A society that removes the scientific method from the centre stage is one that is setting itself up to be enslaved by its rivals.

There is a sobering story from Japan that tells us what happens when a society values ideas merely for being traditional, and not for being effective. When the Tokugawa Shogunate took over power in Japan in the 1600s, they decided to shut their country off from all foreign influences. Some of their early rivals had been supported by outsiders, especially from Europe, and the Shoguns decided to just cut themselves off from everyone else to protect their power.

This closed system worked pretty well for a while. However, in 1853, America decided it was fed up with Japanese markets being off limits to its products. A few warships under Commodore Matthew Perry showed up at the Japanese doorstep. And you can guess what happened when the Japanese, stuck in the 1600s, found themselves face to face with a force from two centuries in the future.

Figure 5: In 1853, American Commodore Matthew Perry shocked and awed the isolationist Japanese with his society’s superior technology. This is a story which has repeated itself throughout history – when a society denies science, it sets itself up to be enslaved.

Those of us who wish to see a scientific yet traditional future for India, a Prabuddh Bharat, if you will, have a delicate balancing act to pull off, accepting the best of the world’s learning while synthesising it with the best of our own. It won’t be easy, but we’ll definitely be living in interesting times!