Indian knowledge system in the early period of India got organized into six distinct branches of inquiry. There is no orderly hierarchical division between these six nor there is any proven chronology. Each is powerful and elegant in its construction. To maintain schools of thought for analytic inquiry into the human conditions and to speculate on the man's association to the universe has been a mark of pure scholarly conduct. Such conduct nurtured tolerance and acceptance. Other schools of thought connected with religions ran parallel and the average student was left to think for himself or herself to expand on a given thought or to synthesize more. It is estimated that a large number of scholarly texts are lost. Many are in the custody of local temples and monasteries where the research was mostly conducted.
Such systems dealing with the cosmology of man and creating speculations interest me. Unlike physical cosmology as we do in the west, Indian cosmology integrates life itself into the theory to create an animation. The animation brings "life" to an action, it creates thoughts; it converts thoughts to words, it adds quality to the activity and it generates love in heart. It is an unseen force acting on the side all the time. Asserting such animation and mapping it is the inquiry in philosophy. Though present everywhere it has no conceivable form or feature. It is the reality, it is the doer. Our own effort is an extremely small and trivial part of the process. Connecting our effort to the result becomes the local religious belief. Human beings create rules for their belief, but they have little access to the universal machination. The universe has no boundaries, does not distinguish groups, operates with the only goal of sustaining itself. Every activity has a cause, partly visible; mostly hidden and unknowable.
Schools of Nyaya, Vaishesika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta operate in various old education centers in India. Lively discussions on the literature continue to be held. The new scholars however are not proficient on all the systems. Training and proficiency on the entire system was a requirement for graduation in the olden days. Good poets and writers made efforts to understand the nuances of the theories. They analyzed human situation as they created their literature. Based on the foundations of the cosmology, analytic treatises called "shastra"s were developed to deal with music, drama, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, economics, health, and human conduct. These included a complete treatise on sex and conjugal relationship which has been very popular in the west though not much learning in conjugal harmony is achieved.
The western interest in Sanskrit developed through a chance discovery in late eighteenth century by a British jurist William Jones in Calcutta that the words in German, Latin, English and Persian appeared to have similarities. This triggered the desire in Europe to find a "homeland" and to settle the old "superiority competition" by considering antiquity. The Germans took a quick lead and schools for Sanskrit learning proliferated. The colonial British helped transport manuscripts from India and German libraries became repositories of old Indian texts. While some translations developed through the industrious work by the German scholars, the key philosophical point of a cosmic presence in every day activity was not in their line of thinking. The translations are textual in order to compare with the texts in the west. Philosophy was dumped as religion through ignorance. All translations in western languages fall into this flaw, the beauty of open inquiry of Indian scholarship is not understood. While Indians should be grateful for wider access to the literature, the thrust and interpretation have little to do with the original text.
Prominent universities in the west got into the scene and schools of linguistics and languages were opened. Much of the critical ideas were borrowed from India without due acknowledgement. Little knowledge in Sanskrit paid high dividends. India was occupied and Indian scholars themselves were deployed in this knowledge transfer process. Various techniques were developed to measure the time evolution of phonemes through accent or migration. An unfortunate self-serving "conclusion" was asserted that the Europeans battled their way into India in the pre-Vedic era. Seemingly bright individuals signed off on documents supporting an administrative view. Most Indian history needs much extra research to find the truth.
Liberal degree students and scholars from the western universities form a good fraction of the delegates at the Conference. Many of them unfortunately are skilled with the writings of one author or a few texts. The quality of the training is only mechanical. The oral nature of the language and stress on the pronunciation and diction are not popular in the west. It is possibly because of too much emphasis on textual analysis. In Indian context, capturing the writer's thought is more important than the analysis of the word deployed. Words have no life, the voice has. I hope the western universities would devote more resources to the authentic interpretation of the Sanskrit literature than religion-based analysis that distorts the thought.
Plucking material through shallow scholarship to create sensational literature has been the industry of another set of apparently well-funded individuals. They create a phrase called "Hindu Studies" and dump various garbage in selective fashion. The motive initially possibly was to create hate in order to convert people, but now they operate through the cover of "free speech" taking advantage of the diversity in Indian population. Though a substantial group and fairly spread out, they make their own Conferences where only like-minded people can visit. None of this group appeared at the Bangkok Conference.
