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The book explores one of the most important problems in Indian philosophical thought: the subject in its particular relation to the world. In what sense does the subject exist? How does it constitute the world? The analysis hinges on Sanskrit sources, mainly the Upanis. ads. However, it goes beyond the question of the subject. The book discusses the concept of how the subject establishes the world, which – in this cognitive perspective – becomes simultaneously recognised and deformed. Overcoming these deformations becomes a specific soteriological path.

Abstract
This paper considers the matter of representation in Vedānta by examining key claims in the Ṛgveda and the Upaniṣads, which are some of its principal texts. Specifically, we consider the logic behind the paradoxical verses on creation and the conception of consciousness as the ground on which the physical universe exists. This also is the template that explains the logical structure underlying the principal affirmations of the Upaniṣads. The five elements and consciousness are taken to pervade each other, which explains how gross matter is taken to consist of all the four different kinds of atoms that get manifested in different states of the substance. The verses on creation are an example of the use of catuṣkoṭi in Indian philosophy prior to the use of it by Nāgārjuna in the Madhyamaka tradition. It also contrasts central ideas of Vedānta with the corresponding contemporary scientific ideas on consciousness.

The main aim of this article lies in the comparison of ancient cosmico-natural elements from the Vedic period with their counterparts in the Presocratics, with a focus on food, air, water and fire. By way of an introduction to the ancient elemental world, we first present the concept of food (anna) as an idiosyncratic Vedic teaching of the ancient elements. This is followed by our first comparison—of Raikva's natural philosophy of Vāyu/prāṇa with Anaximenes's pneûma/aér teaching in the broader context of both the Vedic and Presocratic teachings on the role of air/breath. Secondly, water as brought to us in pañcāgnividyā teaching from Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and Chāndogya Upaniṣad is compared to the teaching of the Greek natural philosopher Thales. Finally, the teaching on fire as heat being present in all beings (agni vaiśvānara) and in relation to cosmic teachings on fire in the ancient Vedic world are compared to Heraclitus' philosophy of fire as an element. Additionally, this article also presents a survey and analysis of some of the key representatives of comparative and intercultural philosophy dealing with the elemental and natural philosophy of ancient India and Greece.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of contributors -- Series introduction -- Introduction -- 1 Ancient Israel -- 2 The Book of Job -- 3 Early Christian thought -- 4 Saint Paul -- 5 Early Zoroastrian thought -- 6 Manichaeism -- 7 The Gnostics -- 8 The Presocratics -- 9 Socrates and Plato -- 10 Aristotle -- 11 Epicureanism -- 12 The Stoics -- 13 Scepticism -- 14 Neoplatonism -- 15 Philo of Alexandria -- 16 Evil in Graeco-Roman religion and literature -- 17 Vedas and Upaniṣads -- 18 Buddhism -- 19 Ancient China -- 20 Representations of evil -- Index

Abstract
Vedānta is one of the oldest philosophical systems. While there are many detailed commentaries on Vedānta, there are very few mathematical descriptions of the different concepts developed there. This article shows how ideas from theoretical computer science can be used to explain Vedānta. The standard ideas of transition systems and modal logic are used to develop a formal description for the different ideas in Vedānta. The generality of the formalism is illustrated via a number of examples including saṃsāra, Patañjali's Yogasūtras, karma, the three avasthās from the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and the key difference between advaita and dvaita in relation to mokṣa.

The puruṣa—the "person" addressed throughout Indic texts—is not a microcosmic replication of the macrocosmos; he is the phenomenal world itself. This dissertation provides a textual and historical examination of the puruṣa concept in the Vedic Saṃhitās, Brāhmaṇas, Upaniṣads, Pali Nikāyas, pre-classical Saṃhitās of early Āyurveda, and the Mahābhārata. I argue that, contrary to the dominant scholarly position, the cosmos is only 'in' the person insofar as the person expands to be the same measure as the cosmos. In the political and religious poetry of the Vedas, the person is modeled after Indra, who creates the world by swelling to its limits in the guise of the Sun. In the Brāhmaṇas, the sacrificer toils to become like Indra, to discover the puruṣa in the Sun, and thereby attain the immortal expansiveness of svarga-loka. In the Upaniṣads, the person is the recursively reproducing, blissfully autophagous eater of the world, who transcends space and time by "yoking" up to ever greater expanses through yoga. In the early teachings of the Buddhist Pāli canon, the person is non-different from the "empty" elementality of the world, and the bhikkhu meditates on this fact to extinguish his belief in self, person, or world. These earlier views of the person are synthesized and given paradigmatic expression in the pre-classical Saṃhitās of Āyurveda and the Mahābhārata, where the logics of Yoga and early Sāṃkhya dictate that person and world are "identical" and "the same measure." In the words of the foundational Caraka Saṃhitā, the pre-classical person who is fully realized, "bears the yoke" of the world as the sovereign master of its materiality, harmoniously conjoined to the phenomenal totality that is named puruṣa.

In some passages of the Ṛgveda, the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata and the Pali canon there are references to a casteless millennium of equality, plenty and piety which was supposed to have existed in some remote unrecorded antiquity. It was the golden age of kṛta or satyayuga when there was only one caste of deva (gods) or Brāhmaṇa, when people called no goods their own nor women their chattels, when crops were produced without toil and all were pious and happy. The legendary Uttarakurus of the far north were a model of this Arcadian society of godly men who lived in their natural virtue, rich in physical and moral wealth without any disabilities of sex and distinctions of property and, consequently, who received the blessings of God in the form of timely rain and juicy harvest (Mbh. VI. 6. 13; Dīghanikāya, xxxii. 7).

During the height of Muslim power in South Asia, Muslim nobles of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) patronized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language, including the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and numerous other works. In Translating Wisdom, Shankar Nair reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations, traversing an exceptional linguistic scope including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian materials. Using the 1597 Persian rendition of the Sanskrit Yoga Vāsiṣṭha as a case study, Nair traces the intellectual exchanges by which teams of Muslim and Hindu translators, working collaboratively and drawing upon their respective religio-philosophical traditions, crafted a novel lexicon with which to express Hindu philosophical wisdom in an Islamic Persian idiom. How did these translators find a vocabulary through which to convey Hindu, Sanskrit articulations of God, conceptions of salvation and the afterlife, Hindu ritual notions, etc., in Islamic Persian terms? How did these two communities of scholars devise a shared language with which to communicate and to render one another's religious and philosophical views mutually comprehensible? Translating Wisdom illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars found the words and the means to put their traditions into conversation with one another, achieving a nuanced inter-religious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia's past, but also its present.

International audience ; Many Hindu deities as known from classical sources (i.e., from the epics, Purāṇas, and later religious literature and iconography) have a very slender profile in the Vedic texts, appearing in only a few passages and often represented in ways that seem peripheral to their full, classical personae. Ritualists and devotees steeped in that older literature took pains to connect those deities to Vedic mantras and rites, in order to validate them with the prestige of venerable orthodoxy as well as to provide a basis for Brahmin priestly roles in their worship. The case of the goddess Durgā is particularly striking in this respect, since her Vedic "footprint" is so small. This study provides a close textual analysis of the "Panca Durgāḥ" also known as the "Durgā Sūkta" (Taittirīya Āraṇyaka 10.1.16 ~ Mahānārāyaṇa Upaniṣad 164-177 ~ Ṛgveda Khila 4.2 supplementing the "Rātri Sūkta," Ṛgveda 10.127), and its application in the durgākalpa rite according to the Baudhāyana Gṛhya Śeṣasūtra 3.3, to show how Taittirīya and Ṛgveda Brahmins went about supplying a Vedic liturgy for Durgā worship and invoking her protection. This account complements the one recently proposed to show how Atharvan priests in the service of rulers drew on Atharvavedic traditions to present Durgā as a patron goddess of arms and military strength.

What is the source of the power of speech and eloquence and fulfillment in life? Though communication and rhetoric departments in most Indian universities have been focusing their teaching and research agendas on Western models, a growing body of scholarship is developing communication theory that approaches the big questions from an Indian perspective, drawing on traditional sources (Adhikary, 2014), which claim Veda as their ultimate source. This paper explores the Vedic worldview on speech and communication proclaimed in the Ṛicho Akśare verse of the Ṛig Veda, and others, drawing on sage Bhartṛhari (c. 450-500 CE), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1975; 1971), and Sanskrit scholars of the philosophy of language, who reference these hymns. They describe a Vedic cosmology of speech that bears striking resemblance to the universe according to string theory of quantum physics. The science serves to corroborate the premise of Vedic levels-of-speech theory that the universe is structured and governed by laws of nature/language of nature from within an unmanifest unified field of all the laws of nature, which Ṛig Veda 1.164 calls Parā and identifies as consciousness. This inquiry helps to illuminate how speech is Brahman, the source and goal of understanding, eloquence, and fulfillment. The Vedic texts enjoin the sanātana dharma of yoga, opening awareness to the transcendental source of speech. I conclude that Vedic communication theory embedded in the hymns is integral to practical Vedanta. As Muktitkā Upaniṣad 1.9 proclaims: "As oil is present in a sesame seed, so Vedānta is present in the Veda."