ISBN 9781913260484 (paperback), 266 pages
A cultural and intellectual history of Ancient India that brings together its major philosophical traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain—into a single, accessible narrative.
Winner Best Indie Book Award
Never before has the history and substance of Indian thought been laid out as clearly as in Burton’s book. —Prof Nicolas Martin, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zürich
At sixteen, reading the Bhagavad Gita opened a door in my thinking that never closed. Over the next three decades, I searched for a single book that could bring together the vast world of Indian thought—clearly, coherently, and without sacrificing depth.
In the end, I wrote the book I couldn’t find.
Spanning philosophy, religion, history, and culture, this book explores the central ideas that shaped Ancient India and continue to influence the modern world. Rather than treating Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as separate subjects, it shows how they emerged from a shared intellectual world and developed through dialogue, debate, and mutual influence.
Drawing on Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, it connects ideas that are often studied in isolation and reveals the larger intellectual tradition that unites them.
Along the way, you’ll discover:
- Why the Kama Sutra is far more than a manual of sexual technique
- What yoga originally meant in its philosophical context
- What the Buddha taught about the end of suffering
- The elusive concept of the self that philosophers and even the gods grappled with
- How Vedic deities relate to their Greek and Roman counterparts
- How the swastika was reinterpreted and misappropriated in the 20th century
- The philosophical roots of Gandhi’s non-violence
- Different paths to enlightenment in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions
- How the Gupta Golden Age contributed to developments such as zero, chess, and early surgical techniques
- And much more
This is not a textbook, but a guided journey through one of the richest intellectual traditions in human history. Written for curious readers rather than specialists, it combines the clarity of an introduction with the depth of a serious intellectual history.
About the author
Dr Neel Burton is a philosopher and psychiatrist who lives and teaches in Oxford, England. His other books include The Meaning of Myth; The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; and Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. He has written for publications including Aeon and Psychology Today.
Editorial reviews
Impeccably crafted… a monumental achievement. —Rich Follett for Readers’ Favorite (5/5 stars)
The parallels between Indian and Greek philosophy amazed me… This book will hold your interest until the last page. —Courtnee Turner Hoyle for Readers’ Favorite (5/5 stars)
Burton shines a fascinating light on one of the world’s most ancient, and still thriving, cultures. —The US Review of Books (Recommended)
Insightful and thorough … Having practised yoga for years, learning about its background and significance offered me a new perspective. —The International Review of Books
Discover the ideas, stories, and philosophies that shaped one of the world’s oldest and most influential civilizations.
From the author
When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest. —Chandogya Upanishad
Sitting down with the Bhagavad Gita at the age of sixteen opened many new channels in my mind. Ever since, for the past thirty years, I have been searching for a book on Indian thought that ties it all up, completely and succinctly. Write the book you want to read, they say—and this, here, is it.
Indian thought is complex and contradictory, making it hard to research and write about. There is a staggering amount of material to sift through. There are not one but four Vedas, each with four layers, and, within each layer, several commentaries written over several centuries. The Mahabharata, the longest poem in the world, has six times as many lines as the Bible. And then there are the Vedangas, the Shastras, the Puranas, the Tantras, and the extensive literature of the philosophical schools… Almost every position, including materialism and hedonism, has been defended by someone at some time.
Indian philosophy, unlike its Greek counterpart, is usually pursued within a religious context, with no clear divide between philosophy and theology. The central problem is the nature of the Self, or Atman, and its relation to the Absolute, or Brahman. On this basis, Indian philosophy is divided into schools, or darshanas (‘visions’), rather than into branches such as epistemology and metaphysics. That said, Hinduism is a lot looser than the Abrahamic religions, with no founding prophet, no single scripture, no central authority, no core doctrine or code of conduct, and no clear concept of God. Hindus might coherently think of themselves as monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, deists, agnostics, or anything in between. India is a world unto itself: as a religion, Hinduism developed more as a negative concept of contradistinction, and it might be said that Hindus are only Hindus insofar as they are not anything else.
The Buddha explicitly rejected a creator God, yet Buddhism is counted as the fourth largest world religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—suggesting that the hallmark of religion is not a belief in a creator God, or any god, but a belief in the conservation of values, that is, in something like karma, about which the Indian religions, especially Jainism, have a great deal to say. Karma is the greatest constant in Indian thought, lending a family resemblance to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi, for one, regarded Buddhism and Jainism as traditions of Hinduism, which has adaptively assimilated the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, after Rama and Krishna. In Hindu thought, the universe has a moral order that is independent of the gods, who are less than omnipotent. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra, the king of the gods, is made to wait 101 years before being told the secret to the self—not a bad deal, considering. Towards the end of the Mahabharata, Krishna is killed by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer.
Hindu cosmology is on a colossal scale. The universe contains not one world but thousands of millions. According to the Puranas, Vishnu’s ten avatars span a cyclic age, or maha yuga, which is 4.32 million years long. A thousand such cycles amount to a single day of Brahma, or kalpa, which is 4.32 billion years long. At the dawn of each kalpa, Brahma re-emerges from a lotus that has stemmed from the navel of Vishnu. A god lives for an entire kalpa but does not survive its dissolution.
Hinduism has been called Sanatana Dharma, ‘Eternal Order’, without beginning or end. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it arose out of a long process of evolution that began in pre-literate mythical-ritualistic-sacrificial times. From the first Upanishads (c. 800-600 BCE), the Vedic religion became much more introspective-speculative-philosophical, with a monkish, but still elitist, emphasis on renunciation and liberation that, not coincidentally, matched with Buddhism and Jainism. In the Bhagavad Gita, composed several centuries later, Krishna makes a strong case for devotional theism, which is the form assumed by modern, popular Hinduism—epitomized in the West by the Hare Krishnas.
Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels, and eager to point them out. One is tempted to ask: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?
For all the similarities, the Indian way is another way of doing philosophy and arriving at the same insoluble problems, like the problem of evil and the problem of free will. The Indian way is another way of being human, another way of being alive, and a great complement to the Greek or Western way.
I say: elephants as well as horses for the armoury of the mind.
A fascinating, in-depth history … Burton draws from a variety of resources to craft a rich, multi-layered picture of India. —The BookLife Prize
About the book cover
The Sanskrit ligature on the book cover stands for the sacred sound Om, which may be chanted before a mantra or during meditation. It is often found at the beginning and end of sacred Hindu texts, and has many names, including the pranava [‘fore-sound’] and udgitha [‘chant’, ‘cosmic song’].
In Indian thought, from the earliest times, there is this notion that the word abstracts from the object, and that Brahman or God, being the ultimate abstraction, abstracts from the word. Language is, therefore, the link between man and God.
Like the Egyptians, the people of the Vedas believed that the word had a magical power which complemented its meaning—a view of language that we still retain when we speak of ‘spelling’ a word. Even away from the sacrificial fire, at work or at home, or in love, words have no effect (or some other effect) if they are not the right ones.
If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
All day, every day, we are casting spells without even knowing it, abusing the word and weighing down our souls.
By the time of the earliest Upanishads, Om had become the quintessential word: a cosmic sound and mantra that invoked consciousness, reality, and Brahman or Oneness.
In the Mundaka Upanishad, Om is compared to an archer’s bow, by which Atman (the Self) is able to reach its target of Brahman. Only by the focused mind or undistracted person is Brahman to be penetrated.
Some of the ideas in this book are explored in the following articles:
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