Yoga Philosophy

Pure consciousness is ever effulgent and never changing.

Author Robert Pirsig, widely acclaimed for his bestselling books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Lila (1991), passed away in his home on April 24, 2017. A well-rounded intellectual equally at home in the sciences and the humanities, Pirsig made the case that scientific inquiry, art, and religious experience were all particular forms of knowledge arising out of a broader form of knowledge about the Good or what Pirsig called “Quality.” Yet, although Pirsig’s books were bestsellers, contemporary debates about science and religion are oddly neglectful of Pirsig’s work. So what did Pirsig claim about the common roots of human knowledge, and how do his arguments provide a basis for reconciling science and religion?

The paradox of the Zen kōan resists in a significantly different way what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the totalizing “way of the same.” Zen Buddhism provides a critical insight into faciality that goes beyond Levinas’s fundamentally anthropocentric view and undercuts his refusal of “paganism,” thereby providing the ground for a deeper realization of the ethical relationship between humans and animals. The question at hand is whether there exists a fundamental experience of the “original face” of the animal, which is possible only by way of a direct face-to-face encounter.

One of the great unanswered questions in the history and philosophy of science is why science arose in the West and not in the East. Scholars point to the early technological developments from China such as gunpowder and rockets and wonder how China failed to capitalize on these and other developments to establish a theoretical basis for science, as did western culture. But in these speculations, and they are no more than idle and prejudicial speculations, there is at least an inaccurate presumption if not a dangerous assumption that Chinese and other Eastern philosophies are somehow unscientific, a view which mistakenly places eastern ideas in an inferior position relative to western science.

Those who advocate metaphysical realism maintain that (1) the real world consists of mind-independent objects, (2) there is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is, and (3) truth involves some sort of correspondence between an independently existent world and our descriptions of it.

The category of Agni related items includes everything of a hot, fiery, dry, or parching type,
while Soma-related items are moist, nourishing, soothing, and cooling. Items so classified range from medicinal herbs to mountain ranges to the seasons of the year.

Many students of yoga, especially those undergoing yoga teacher training, are introduced to the Yoga Sutras. It is commonly believed that this text, composed by Patanjali between 200 BCE and 200 AD, represent the culmination of the ancient yoga tradition’s spiritual quest. These so-called Classical Yoga teachings, most scholars believe, are the confluence of a long and complex development that emerged from yoga’s archaic beginnings in the Vedas about 3000 years earlier.

World philosophies are gradually gaining in recognition. Today, philosophers in Southeast Asia can freely construct their regional philosophies without philosophical tyranny of the West. However, this situation has not come so easily. Many Asian and African philosophies have experienced a struggle for acceptance. And even this recognition is limited by selectivity and philosophical fashion centered in Western academia and perpetuated by Western educated eastern intellectuals. This paper attempts to show how regional philosophy in general and Southeast Asian philosophy in particular can be constructed and accepted.