(B00)- Let us talk big

[Quick links]

Several years ago, I was part of a large institution. This institution used to organize frequent lectures by eminent scholars in various fields. 

The Head of this institution used to invite me to attend to all these lectures. The funny thing was that the topics of most of these talks were not directly connected with my field of expertise nor something that was of my interest. That used to puzzle me.

Once I asked this Head, why he invites me to such talks since he knew my interests very well. His reply was quite interesting. He said “Because you ask lot of questions!”. Before I could get offended by his reply, he hastened to explain what he meant. He said that when someone in the audience asks good questions, it encourages the speaker to give out more of what he knows. It also forces the speaker to ponder over his own way of thinking. At the same time, other audience get to know of a different aspect of the same subject. So, it not only benefits the person who asks the question, but also the speaker as well as the audience in general.

So, asking good questions always helps us to grow. Remember your childhood days when you used to ask too many questions? That is how a child starts learning. But as you grow up, you stop asking questions and that is when you stop growing 😉

Asking questions may be meant to know more. That is what a child does. But as we build our own views and opinions, we ask questions to punch holes in the opponent’s views. That is when the questioning takes the form of a debate.

You must be wondering why am I talking about debate, questioning etc. Yes, probably you guessed it right. From today, I am going to start a new series of talks on the art of debating – asking questions to bring down the opponent or to assert one’s point of view. I plan to give you a glimpse of how the debates were conducted in ancient India and how structured they were. What was debated may not be of much interest to us. But the way these debates were conducted is quite fascinating.


Looking back for a moment…

I just concluded a long series of talks on Mind, Yoga and Meditation. (Those of you who joined late, can go back and look for “MindTalk” in my blog that ran for 70 episodes). Yoga asks you to quieten your mind. But debate agitates your mind. In that case why debate? Why ask questions?

This is the confusion even some of our modern Gurus have. They bar you from asking questions. They say that to move on the spiritual path, one should stop asking questions but accept what is told by the Guru. Well, that is how they build a large clientele 😉

But everything has its place in life. Accepting blindly whatever a Guru says might have been Ok when we had ideal Gurus. Unfortunately, we rarely find such Gurus these days. So, we need to question before accepting. Otherwise, we will be taken for a ride 😉

Let us get back to the topic.

The topic of my next series of talks will be around one of the well-known ancient Indian compositions namely Brahma Sutra. We discussed about Yoga Sutra in the last series of talks. Yoga Sutra was about Yoga. Brahma Sutra is about Brahma – the ancient Indian word for God. But this God is not a personified God that you find in religious texts. It is an abstract concept.

Literally, Brahma means something very big. Bigger than the biggest. That is why I have tagged this series as BigTalk. My intention is definitely not to go into the nitty-gritties of this phenomenal work that has baffled even the most seasoned philosophers. I would not like to drown you into deeply philosophical issues. My intention is to show you how ancient Indians developed a very systematic debating process through which they thrashed out their differences.

As we see in the world around, religious wars were and are often fought at the point of sword or sometimes by deceit. But in ancient India, most of these wars were fought through debates. The condition was that whoever lost the debate would accept the winner’s path. There was hardly any bloodshed and the defeated person accepted the opponent’s views without resistance. Along with the defeated, his entire band of followers moved to their new ideologue.

Coming back, Brahma Sutra is a short composition by ancient saint Badarayana who lived long ago in the Himalayas. His name indicates that he lived in Badari – a small forest filled with Indian jujube fruit trees. Many believe that he was the same person as Vyasa who wrote the great Indian epic namely Mahabharata. Though early philosophers like Sankara don’t explicitly say that Badarayana was same as Vyasa, later Indian philosophers took that for granted.

This composition is in Sutra style – very brief exposition of ideas often extremely terse and difficult to interpret. There are all together 555 sutras spread over 4 chapters. The main topic is Brahma or God. That is why it is called Brahma Sutra.

Brahma Sutra is considered to be one of the three most important philosophic texts of ancient Vedic Indians. The other two being Upanishads and Bhagavad Geetha. Together, these three texts are supposed to conclusively define Brahma and other related ideas concerning Vedic thought process.

Upanishads which are called Shruti, are believed to be revealed texts which are authorities by themselves. Bhagavad Geetha is categorized as Smrti, something that is based on Upanishads. Brahma Sutra is supposed to use Shruti to logically arrive at conclusions about Brahma and other realities of this world around us.

Any new ideologue who comes up with his new viewpoint was expected to show that his views are consistent with these three – Upanishads, Bhagavad Geetha and Brahma Sutra. These philosophers often fought among each other through debates.

The Advaita Philosopher Sankara is well known for his commentary on this Brahma Sutra. Apparently, his commentary is supposed to have over 100 thousand verses. Through his commentary, Sankara tries to justify his own philosophy namely Advaita. In my talks I will mostly hold on to Sankara’s viewpoints and how he explains them in the context of Brahma Sutra. Where possible I will also show how his opponents both from Vedic school as well as outside Vedic school argue their point.

So, take this as an intellectual treat and an exercise in debating. The debating, that should take place in thrashing out opposing views rather than resort to bloodshed or covert onslaughts of religious perversion and persecution.

Please join me in the next episode. Thank you.

Start                      Next

A series on ancient Indian composition Brahma Sutra. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2020-21