History, time, and knowledge in ancient India

History and Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 307-321

  Perrett, Roy W ^a  

^a MASSEY UNIVERSITY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 1642313827     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00094     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Alberuni's India, ed. Edward C. Sachau (Delhi, 1964), 11
2. James Mill, The History of British India, abridged ed. [1817] (Chicago, 1975), 198-199
3. On Mill's influence and intentions see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959) and Javed Majid, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India (Oxford, 1992)
4. Romila Thapar's "Interpretations of Ancient Indian History," History and Theory 7 (1968), 318-335 helps set Mill's work in historiographic perspective
5. On Hegel's attitudes to India see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, 1988), chapter 6
6. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), 161-162
7. Max Weber, The Religion of India [1916-1917] (New York, 1958), 161
8. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples 11948-1949] (Honolulu, 1964), 145- 146
9. See also his "Time in Indian and Japanese Thought," in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York, 1966), 77-91
10. Gerald James Larson, "Karma as a 'Sociology of Knowledge' or 'Social Psychology' of Process/Praxis," in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (Berkeley, 1980), 305
11. See R. C. Majumdar, "Ideas of History in Sanskrit Literature," in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C. H. Philips (London, 1961), 13-28
12. On Kalhana's contribution to Indian history see A. Berriedaie Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (London, 1920), 158-172; A. L. Basham, "The Kashmir Chronicle" in Philips, ed., 57-65
13. L. S. Perera, "The Pali Chronicle of Ceylon," in Philips, ed., 29-56
14. R. C. Majumdar, "Indian History, Its Nature, Scope and Method," in The Vedic Age, ed. R. C. Majumdar (London, 1951), 41
15. See also Keith: "In view of the antiquity and the developed character of Indian civilization it would be ridiculous to expect to find India destitute of historical sense, but what is really essential is that, despite the abundance of its literature, history is so miserably represented ⋯ " (144)
16. For fuller glosses of the Sanskrit philosophical terms used here and below see John Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sankrit Terms Defined in English, rev. ed. (Albany, 1996)
17. Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (London, 1971), 292-293
18. Cf. Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: "| A] more fundamental cause [for the lack of historical works in India] should be traced to the peculiarity of the Indian way of thinking along eternalistic rather than temporal lines" (129)
19. For some of the critical points that follow I am indebted to the terse but trenchant remarks in Jitendra Nath Mohanty, "Between Tndology and Indian Philosophy," in Beyond Orientalism, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz (Amsterdam, 1997), 166-168
20. On the misrepresentation of the Indian view of time as "cyclic" see Anindita Niyogi Balslev, A Study of Time in Indian Philosophy (Wiesbaden, 1983) and "Time and the Hindu Experience," in Religion and Time, ed. Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden, 1993), 163-181. On the historiographical significance of this misrepresentation see Romila Thapar, "Linear Time in Historical Texts of Early India," in India and Beyond, ed. Dick van der Meij (London, 1997), 562-573
21. For an important corrective to the common view that the Greek historians espoused a cyclical view of time see Amaldo Momigliano, "Time in Ancient Historiography," History and Theory, Beiheft 6(1966), 1-23
22. Cf. Stephen J. Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).20. On the variety of Indian philosophical views about time see Balslev, A Study of Time
23. Sheldon Pollock, "Mīmāmsā and the Problem of History in Traditional India," Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989), 603-610
24. For a review of Hindu treatments of revelation, with special reference to Advaita Vedānta, see K. Satchitananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedānta (Delhi, 1974)
25. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (Oxford, 1992), 190-192
26. See also the essay "Philosophy of History and its Presuppositions," in Mohanty's Essays on Indian Philosophy, Traditional and Modern (Delhi, 1993), 303-312
27. Mohanty, "Philosophy of History," 310
28. Śrībhāsya, I.1.1
29. Mohanty, Reason and Tradition, 191
30. Though Yogācāra did admit the existence of nondualistic consciousness, i.e. consciousness without any structural opposition between subject and object: see Paul J. Griffiths, "Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism," in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. Robert K. C. Forman (New York, 1990), 71-97
31. On this point see Buddha Prakash, "The Hindu Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955), 494-505
32. See Roy W. Perrett, Hindu Ethics: A Philosophical Study (Honolulu, 1998), chapter 3
33. On the pramāna theory see further Bimal Krishna Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford, 1986), chapter 1
34. For useful reviews of the Indian debates on this matter see: D. M. Datta, The Six Ways of Knowing, 2nd rev. ed. (Calcutta, 1960), 22-27
35. Satischandra Chatterjee, The Nyāya Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Calcutta, 1950), 22-28, 371-376
36. Nyāyabhāsya, 1.1.7
37. See Annambhatta's Tarkasamgraha, 68 and the Dīpīka thereon
38. For more on this see Matilal, Perception, chapter 4
39. In the writing of this essay I have benefited from the helpful suggestions of Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, Richard Vann, an anonymous referee for History and Theory, and (most especially) Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. The shortcomings that remain are due to my own obduracy