The Doctrine of Satkāryavāda If you put your hand in the fire, it will be burnt. Science will say: Fire is energy; when you bring your hand in contact with fire, then energy is transferred to your hand, and that causes the burn. Likewise, if you jump off a cliff, […]
Linguistics / Philosophy
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The Mīmāṃsā Doctrine of Arthavāda
All over Vedic texts, the world is described as “sound” or “text”. The source of this world is stated to be the original meaning, called “knowledge”. This original meaning then expands to create various other types of meanings, which are all partial knowledge. The Mīmāṃsā system of philosophy gives this […]
Philosophy / Religion
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Creation as Conscious Creativity
Beginning with my first book, “Six Causes“, I have been describing a paradigm of creation that stems from conscious creativity. In this paradigm, the self goes missing in the self, and when this “absence” is created, then creativity occurs to overcome this absence by expanding the self into works of […]
Medicine
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How Vaiśeṣika Explains the Immune System
Cognition and Adaptation in Disease The world is today gripped by the CoVID pandemic. Every few days new vaccines and virus variants are talked about. The governments are pressured into vaccination, the doctors have no time (and limited ability) to test if a person is already immune to CoVID before […]
Philosophy
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One, Oneness, and Separateness
The following is an excerpt from the Vaiśeṣika Sutras, that describes the three principles of One, Oneness, and Separateness, which create two paradoxes—unity in diversity and diversity in unity. Many things emerge out of the One, therefore, they must have existed in the One previously; this is the paradox of […]
Logic / Philosophy
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The Nyāya Philosophy of Presence and Absence
The Nyāya system of philosophy describes a category called abhāva or ‘absence’ and then explains how bhāva or ‘presence’ manifests from the absence. This is a very long discussion in Nyāya Sutra (which I’m translating presently) and has many nuances. It is hard to capture all these details here, but […]
Logic / Philosophy
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The Nyāya Conception of a Scientific Theory
Below is the translation and commentary on some of the Nyāya Sutras, which describe the nature of a scientific theory as comprised of four aspects. The first aspect represents the purpose of the system; the second, the functional parts that execute this purpose; the third, a mechanism of control that […]