History, Time, and Knowledge in Ancient India

Wesleyan University

History, Time, and Knowledge in Ancient IndiaAuthor(s): Roy W. PerrettSource: History and Theory, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Oct., 1999), pp. 307-321Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678086 .Accessed: 25/08/2011 07:06

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HISTORY, TIME, AND KNOWLEDGE IN ANCIENT INDIA

ROY W. PERRETT

ABSTRACT

The lack of interest in history in ancient India has often been noted and contrasted with the situation in China and the West. Notwithstanding the vast body of Indian literature in other fields, there is a remarkable dearth of historical writing in the period before the Muslim conquest and an associated indifference to historiography. Various explanations have been offered for this curious phenomenon, some of which appeal to the supposed currency of certain Indian philosophical theories. This essay critically examines such philosophical explanations."

I argue that it is not true that there was no history in ancient India, and it is not surprising that there was no developed historiography or scientific history. It is both true and surprising that there was no real importance attached to history in ancient India. An adequate philosophical explanation for this historical phenomenon, however, is not to be found in appeals to the influence of indigenous metaphysical theories about time and the self. A much more plausible philosophical explanation appeals instead to certain features of classical Indian epistemology.

The lack of interest in history in ancient India has often been noted and contrasted with the situation in China and the West. Notwithstanding the vast body of Indian literature in other fields, there is a remarkable dearth of historical writing in the period before the Muslim conquest and an associated indifference to historiography. Various explanations have been offered for this curious phenomenon, some of which appeal to the supposed currency of certain Indian philosophical theories. This essay critically examines such explanations, which I shall call "philosophical explanations."

I take this task to be of particular interest to three overlapping classes of read- ers. First, those of us with a special interest in Indian philosophy cannot help but be intrigued by the suggestion that the prestige of certain indigenous philosophical theories was sufficient to preempt the development of history in ancient India. Second, those who are not specialists in Indian philosophy but who do have a more general interest in ancient Indian culture will also be concerned to evaluate these philosophical explanations of the absence of history in India. Third, even those who have no particular interest in Indian philosophy or culture may nevertheless be intrigued by attempts to explain the absence of history in

308 ROY W. PERRETT

India, for such attempts may enable us to isolate certain necessary conditions that must be present if a culture is to develop a concern with history.

The general logical structure of my argument is of a form long familiar to both historians and philosophers: a historical phenomenon exists that needs to be accounted for (what philosophers call the explanandum) and certain supposed explanatory facts (what philosophers call the explanans) are proffered in virtue of which it is argued that the phenomenon to be explained is just what is to be expected. As already mentioned, in this case not all the proffered explanans appeal to the influence of indigenous philosophical theories. Various other fac- tors are often mentioned, including the relatively late usage of written language; the harsh climate, which made the preservation of manuscripts difficult; the lack of a culture of political freedom; and the brahmanical hegemony over written literature. But the explanations I shall be concerned with in this essay are those that appeal in some way or other to the presence of certain Indian philosophical theories, without necessarily thereby being committed to the claim that only such philosophical theories are of explanatory relevance. Before proceeding to the evaluation of these philosophical explanations, however, we need to consider first a logically prior question, "Is there really an explanandum here in need of explanation?" That is, is it really true that there was no history in ancient India?

II

It is certainly true that many have claimed that there was no history in ancient India, and it is also true that people have been saying this for quite some time. (It is notable too that some of the most influential of these persons are philosophers convinced of the truth of some kind of philosophical explanation for the phenomenon.) One of the earliest written sources for the claim is the work of the great Muslim traveller Alburuni (Muhammad al-Bfruni). Reporting on his visit to India in about 1020 CE, he noted: "Unfortunately the Hindus do not pay much attention to the historical order of things, they are very careless in relating the chronological succession of their kings, and when they are pressed for information and are at a loss, not knowing what to say, they invariably take to tale- telling."'

A much later, but far more influential, source is James Mill's The History of British India. Unlike Alburuni, Mill never visited India; moreover he was entirely ignorant of any Indian languages. Indeed Mill boasts of both of these facts as special qualifications for the task of writing a history of India, for his is a "critical history" and his total lack of Orientalist credentials is supposed to guarantee his impartiality. Unhampered by the "fond credulity" such firsthand knowledge might otherwise have inspired, Mill argued for the gross inferiority of Indian (particularly Hindu) civilization to that of the West, hence justifying British rule. The absence of history among the Hindus is offered as evidence of their cultural inferiority:

1. Alberuni's India, ed. Edward C. Sachau (Delhi, 1964), 11.

HISTORY, TIME, AND KNOWLEDGE IN ANCIENT INDIA 309

As soon as reason begins to have considerable influence in the direction of human affairs, no use of letters is deemed more important than that of preserving an accurate record of those events and actions by which the interests of the nation have been promoted or impaired. But the human mind must have a certain degree of culture, before such a memo- rial is perceived.... All rude nations, even those to whom the use of letters has long been familiar, neglect history, and are gratified with the production of the mythologists and the poets.

It is allowed on all hands that no historical composition existed in the literature of the Hindus; they had not reached that point of intellectual maturity, at which the value of a record of the past for the guidance of the future begins to be understood. .2

In this respect, Mill argues, even Mughal civilization is higher up the "scale of civilizations": As all our knowledge is built upon experience, the recordation of the past for the guidance of the future is one of the effects in which the utility of the art of writing principally con- sists. Of this most important branch of literature the Hindus were totally destitute. Among the Mahomedans of India the art of composing history has been carried out to greater per- fection than in any other part of Asia.3

Mill's History became the standard work on India and remained so for decades.4 It was used for many years as a textbook at the East India Company's college at Haileybury and thus served to shape the attitudes towards Indian civilization of generations of Indian civil servants. It was admired by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the architect of the introduction of a system of English edu- cation in India from 1835. It also heavily influenced the attitudes towards India of a number of European writers who otherwise had no personal stake in justifying the existence of the British Raj. One of the more important of these was Hegel.

Hegel's interest in India was partly a reaction to the Romantic exoticism about Indian thought propounded by Herder and the Schlegels, of whom he was sharply critical.5 Hegel's own complicated philosophy of history implies that the development of Western thought reveals the unfolding of the world spirit (Weltgeist) through the world-historical process. Compared to Europe, the Orient is "static," lacking in the dynamics of progress that characterizes European history. Hegel claimed to find support for his thesis in the descriptive writings of contemporary Orientalists. Since Hegel was not himself an Indologist and he read no Indian languages, he very much relied on British sources-including James Mill-for his information about India. Thus it is not too surprising to find him espousing opinions like the following in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1831):

2. James Mill, The History of British India, abridged ed. [1817] (Chicago, 1975), 198-199. 3. Ibid., 329. 4. On Mill's influence and intentions see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford,

1959) and Javed Majid, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India (Oxford, 1992). Romila Thapar's "Interpretations of Ancient Indian History," History and Theory 7 (1968), 318-335 helps set Mill's work in historiographic perspective.

5. On Hegel's attitudes to India see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Under- standing (Albany, 1988), chapter 6.

310 ROY W. PERRETT

The Chinese possess a most minute history of their country.... The contrary is the case in India. Though the recent discoveries of the treasures of Indian Literature, have shown us what a reputation the Hindoos have acquired in Geometry, Astronomy, and Algebra- that they have made great advances in Philosophy, and that among them Grammar has been so far cultivated that no language can be regarded as more fully developed than the Sanscrit-we find the department of History altogether neglected, or rather non-existent. For History requires Understanding-the power of looking at an object in an independent objective light, and comprehending it in its rational connection with other objects. Those peoples therefore are alone capable of History, and of prose generally, who have arrived at that period of development (and can make that their starting point) at which individu- als comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness....

This makes [the Hindoos] incapable of writing History. All that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams. What we call historical truth and veracity-intelli- gent, thoughtful comprehension of events, and fidelity in representing them-nothing of this sort can be looked for among the Hindoos.6

The blatantly racist rhetoric of the nineteenth-century authors gradually ceas- es to be publicly acceptable in twentieth-century intellectual discourse, but the influence of Mill and Hegel nevertheless lives on. An interesting fusion of the these two influences is apparent in the work of Max Weber. In the writing of his seminal The Religion of India Weber principally utilized British sources for his information about India, but methodologically he was also the heir of the German Geisteswissenschaften tradition that has its roots in Hegel. Unsur- prisingly, then, we can hear echoes of both Mill and Hegel in some of Weber's claims about the intellectual achievements of the ancient Indians:

The sense for the empirical, plain, and sober fact was stifled through essentially rhetori- cal habituation to the search for significance in phantasy beyond the realm of facts. Yet, Indian scientific literature made excellent contributions in the fields of algebra, grammar (including declamation and drama and to a lesser extent metric and rhetoric). There are noteworthy contributions to anatomy, medicine, (excepting surgery, but including veteri- nary science) and music (tosolafa!). Historical science, however, . . . was altogether lacking.7

Increasingly the theme of Indian ahistoricity, originally invoked in the service of Western imperialism and cultural self-aggrandizement, becomes a common- place of modern Indological studies, even when these are pursued by non- Westerners. Thus the noted Japanese scholar Hajime Nakamura, in his compara- tive study Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, reaffirms the familiar senti- ments:

All Indian books of history, of which there are very few, are tinged with a fantastic and legendary color. They are not products of historical science but rather works of art.... They ignore precise figures, the sequences of events, and other prosaic details relating to the time and place where the events took place.... [They] are far from reality, but are rather the products of fantasy.... In all the Indian documents of the past, little significance has been attached to the books of history....8

6. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), 161-162. 7. Max Weber, The Religion of India [1916-1917] (New York, 1958), 161. 8. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples [1948-1949] (Honolulu, 1964), 145-

146. See also his "Time in Indian and Japanese Thought," in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York, 1966), 77-91.


Indeed nowadays some version of the ahistoricity thesis has come to seem so platitudinous to many contemporary Indologists that in a 1980 publication the American scholar Gerald Larson simply asserts it without even a gesture towards supplying any evidence for its truth: ["History" is] a category which has no demonstrable place within any South Asian "indigenous conceptual system" (at least prior to the middle of the nineteenth century). Quite apart from the merit or lack of merit of an historical interpretation, it appears that South Asians themselves seldom if ever used such an explanation.... In a South Asian envi- ronment, historical interpretation is no interpretation. It is a zero category.9

But are these claims all true? The fact that the authors often seem to be just quoting their predecessors, usually without acknowledgment, should perhaps encourage us to take a closer look at the evidence. Moreover, in the quotations above a number of distinct ahistoricity theses are in danger of being conflated, including at least the following:

(TI) There was no history in ancient India. (T2) There was no historiography or scientific history in ancient India. (T3) There was no significant value attached to history in ancient India.

Now even if it is true, (T2) is hardly an interesting thesis, since it offers us no real historical contrast between India and the West that requires explaining. Although the ancient Greeks and Romans wrote histories, our modem Western conceptions of historiography and scientific history only developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That the ancient Indians, like the ancient Greeks and Romans (and Chinese), lacked them is no surprise. The interesting ahistoricity theses, then, are (TI) and (T3).

III

Is thesis (TI) true: that is, is it true that the ancient Indians had no history? The short answer is "No."1O Of course, evaluating thesis (TI) is complicated by the way it threatens to run together two rather different issues: (i) whether the ancient Indians had a sense of the past; and (ii) whether they had a sense of the past that they wrote of in what we would call a historical manner. It would be wildly implausible to suggest the Indians had no sense of the past, given the vast body of Sanskrit literature retailing stories of kings and heroes, gods and demons, all linked by complex intergenerational and sequential connections. However, it has to be conceded that most of that literature lacks anything like our modem distinction between real and mythical history. Was there anything in ancient India that we can recognize as corresponding to something like our literary genre of history?

9. Gerald James Larson, "Karma as a 'Sociology of Knowledge' or 'Social Psychology' of Process/Praxis," in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (Berkeley, 1980), 305.

10. See R. C. Majumdar, "Ideas of History in Sanskrit Literature," in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C. H. Philips (London, 1961), 13-28.

312 ROY W. PERRETT

Indeed there was. At the courts of the ancient Indian kings careful records were kept of events important to the realm, even if these are now lost to us. The ancient texts also allude respectfully to a class of literature called "itihdsa," a term with a rather wider scope than "history" but nevertheless overlapping with it. In the twelfth century CE the poet Kalhana composed the RdjatarahganT, a history of his native Kashmir.1I The earliest parts of the Mahivamsa, the Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka which relates the history of Buddhism on the island, date from the sixth century CE. 12 To be sure, these latter writings are not fully works of critical history in the modern sense, but (as already noted) this is unsurprising since similar shortcomings are to be found in the works of the Greek and Roman historians. Moreover, whatever the limits of his own historical work, Kalhana explicitly requires that the historian cultivate personal detachment and consult at first hand the relevant archival and epigraphic records. It is not strictly correct, then, to assert that there was no history in ancient India, nor that the ancient Hindus lacked all historical sense.

What is more surprising, however, is the relative paucity of historical literature, given the enormousness of Indian literature on other subjects. As R. C. Majumdar reminds us: [F]or the longest period of Indian history, viz., from the earliest time down to the Muslim conquest in the thirteenth century AD, a period of about four thousand years, we possess no historical text of any kind, much less a detailed narrative as we possess in the case of Greece, Rome and China.... [This is notwithstanding the fact that ancient] India has bequeathed us a vast treasury of texts which represent the intellectual and literary activi- ties of more than two thousand years and cover a wide field.13

Of course, it is possible that there once existed a large body of Indian historical literature, now lost to us. But the very few references to lost historical works that we do find in the enormous ancient Indian literature that still survives give us little reason to suppose that there was ever a relatively large number of historical writings.

An obvious and plausible explanation for this apparent paucity of historical writings is not that the ancient Indians lacked a sense of history, for we have seen that this is false, but that they did not particularly value history: in other words, that thesis (T3) is true. (An interesting piece of corroboratory evidence here is the fact that classical Indian philosophy did not recognize either history or memory as independent sources of knowledge.)

Of course, this in turn raises the question of why the Indians did not value history, thus locating at last a genuine explanandum for which various features of Indian philosophy might be supposed to provide the explanans. For one set of

11. On Kalhana's contribution to Indian history see A. Berriedale Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (London, 1920), 158-172; A. L. Basham, "The Kashmir Chronicle" in Philips, ed., 57-65.

12. L. S. Perera, "The Pali Chronicle of Ceylon," in Philips, ed., 29-56. 13. R. C. Majumdar, "Indian History, Its Nature, Scope and Method," in The Vedic Age, ed. R. C.

Majumdar (London, 1951), 41. See also Keith: "In view of the antiquity and the developed character of Indian civilization it would be ridiculous to expect to find India destitute of historical sense, but what is really essential is that, despite the abundance of its literature, history is so miserably repre- sented . . ." (144).


answers to the question of why the ancient Indians did not value history seeks to locate the explanation in the influence of various indigenous philosophical theories. Precisely which philosophical theories are supposed to be responsible is controversial, but candidates for the job include particularly theories about time and the self. I shall call these general sorts of explanations "philosophical explanans" and I now intend to examine more closely a few of the proffered examples.

Before proceeding to this task, however, it might be as well to make explicit and distinguish two methodological principles:

(P1) Any plausible philosophical explanans must be compatible with the major Indian philosophical texts. (P2) Any plausible philosophical explanans must be supported by the major Indian philosophical texts.

Two quick comments on these principles. First, what I mean by "the major Indian philosophical texts" here is predictable enough. Following well-estab- lished precedent, I include within the intended scope of this phrase the principal texts of the "six schools" of Hindu philosophy (the sad darsana)-Smrkhya- Yoga, Nyaya-Vaisesika, Mimdmsa, Veddnta-plus the major Buddhist and Jaina philosophical texts.14

Second, the second principle is obviously stronger than the first. (P1) only requires that the explanans should not be inconsistent with the major Indian philosophical texts, whereas (P2) goes further, ruling out arguments from historical silence. Although perhaps an ideal philosophical explanans should satisfy both of these principles, it is worth noting that most of my criticisms of candi- date philosophical explanans only require the truth of the weaker principle (P1).

IV

One popular type of philosophical explanans for the fact that the ancient Indians did not attach much importance to history appeals to their very different ideas about the philosophy of time. Consider, for example, this instance of the general explanation type: This is why the concepts of meaya and cyclical time are so important in understanding the Indian attitude towards history.... Contrary to the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian traditions, history has no metaphysical significance for either Hinduism or Buddhism.... The highest human ideal is the ftvanmukta-one who is liberated from Time.... The durabil- ity of the cyclical-time concept at the most advanced levels of Hindu metaphysical thought makes this indifference to what we would call history one of the distinguishing marks of the Indian cultural tradition.... There is no room in this scheme for the modern idea that man is the subject and agent of history ....15

14. For fuller glosses of the Sanskrit philosophical terms used here and below see John Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sankrit Terms Defined in English, rev. ed. (Albany, 1996).

15. Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (London, 1971), 292-293. Cf. Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: "[A] more fundamental cause [for the lack of historical works in India] should be traced to the peculiarity of the Indian way of thinking along eternalistic rather than temporal lines" (129).

314 ROY W. PERRETT

Once again, several distinct theses are unhelpfully conflated here. Is the explanation for Indian ahistoricity supposed to be the Indian belief in cyclical time, or their belief that time is illusory (mny:), or their belief that the ideal human type is outside of time? Let us consider each of these possibilities in turn.16

We cannot successfully explain Indian ahistoricity by reference to a generally accepted indigenous theory of cyclic time. 17 First, the Indians did not believe in "cyclic time," if by that is meant an endless and beginningless recurrence of events. It is true that the narratives recounted in the Puranas allude to vast cosmic cycles of repeated creation and dissolution (the kalpas), but these are cycles of change within linear time. Moreover, this notion of cosmic cycles did not directly shape the details of the different theories of time propounded by the major philosophical schools.

Second, even if it were true that the Indian philosophers believed in cyclic time, it is unclear how that would explain Indian ahistoricity. After all, many of the Greek philosophers believed in cyclic time and yet the Greeks developed history.18 Moreover the whole subsequent history of Western attitudes to time exhibits a vacillation between the metaphors of the arrow and the cycle which proved entirely compatible with the development of history. 19

Nor will it do to appeal to the notion that the Indians believed time to be illusory (mgya). In fact only the philosophical school of Advaita Veddnta held time- together with the rest of the empirical order-to be (ultimately) unreal; most Indian philosophers denied that time was unreal.20 Anyway, the case of early Christianity shows us that a belief in the unreality of time is compatible with an intense concern with history, for Augustine and other theologians under the influence of neo-Platonism typically both excluded time from the highest level of Being and accepted the soteriological significance of time as a psychological reality.

A different but not unrelated suggestion is that Indian ahistoricity is better explained by certain philosophical conceptions of the timeless authority of the Vedic revelation.21 According to the Mlmarnsa philosophers, the authority of the Vedas requires that these texts must be both authorless and timeless. They are authorless because otherwise they might be fallible, like other authored texts

16. For some of the critical points that follow I am indebted to the terse but trenchant remarks in Jitendra Nath Mohanty,- "Between Indology and Indian Philosophy," in Beyond Orientalism, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz (Amsterdam, 1997), 166-168.

17. On the misrepresentation of the Indian view of time as "cyclic" see Anindita Niyogi Balslev, A Study of Time in Indian Philosophy (Wiesbaden, 1983) and "Time and the Hindu Experience," in Religion and Time, ed. Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden, 1993), 163-181. On the historiographical significance of this misrepresentation see Romila Thapar, "Linear Time in Historical Texts of Early India," in India and Beyond, ed. Dick van der Meij (London, 1997), 562-573.

18. For an important corrective to the common view that the Greek historians espoused a cyclical view of time see Arnaldo Momigliano, "Time in Ancient Historiography," History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966), 1-23.

19. Cf. Stephen J. Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 20. On the variety of Indian philosophical views about time see Balslev, A Study of Time. 21. Sheldon Pollock, "Mimamsd and the Problem of History in Traditional India," Journal of the

American Oriental Society 109 (1989), 603-610.


familiar to us. They are timeless because they have no origin and do not refer to historical persons. Sheldon Pollock proposes that the conjunction of this philosophical conception of the timelessness of the Vedas with the general orthodox brahmanical commitment to Vedic authority displaced any branch of learning that could not claim for its texts a "quasi-vedic" status. The "history" of the great epics is counted as itihasa, the authority of which is derived from the Vedas, but secular history has no such authority and hence gets displaced from the cultural agenda.

The theory is unconvincing. First, it fails to explain why the Buddhists and Jainas, who denied the authority of the Vedas, also attached no great importance to history. Second, it exaggerates the influence of the Mlmdmsa account of revelation, which is but one of several orthodox Hindu views of the matter.22 Nyaya, for example, holds that the Vedas were authored by an omniscient and trustworthy God: that is what guarantees their reliability. Moreover Nyaya claims that the Veda is not eternal, for God recreates it anew in each world cycle. Yoga also attributes the authorship of the Vedas to God. Samkhya holds the Vedas to be unauthored but thereby, like other natural products, non-eternal. The Vedantins believe that the Veda is unauthored but not ultimately real and eternal, for only Brahman is that. There was, then, no general consensus among the Hindu philosophers that the Veda is beginningless, eternal, and timeless.

What about the appeal to the Indian belief that the ideal human type is outside of time? The contemporary Indian philosopher Jitendra Nath Mohanty offers a particularly lucid version of this kind of philosophical explanans: What is needed for a sense of history is a recognition of the historicity of consciousness. Now, in general, for Hindu thought, consciousness is above change.... [Accepting] a theory of [the temporality of] consciousness would also entail a rejection of that conception of self or atman which is almost a pervasive feature of Hindu thought.... An essential temporality of atman is a necessary presupposition of a serious philosophical concern for history.23

Elsewhere Mohanty elaborates on this notion of temporal consciousness thus: "The consciousness which is temporal and so historical is the intentional consciousness. In fact, its temporality and its intentionality are but two aspects of the same phenomenon. The consciousness which is supra-historical is the transpar- ent, self-illuminating consciousness."24

The idea that liberation (moksa) in some sense involves the recovery of one's true self ordtman is common to all the Hindu philosophical schools, whatever their differences about the nature of that self. Moreover, many-though by no means all-Hindu philosophers associate the dtman with pure, nonintentional consciousness, a consciousness without a content. (One notable exception is

22. For a review of Hindu treatments of revelation, with special reference to Advaita Vedanta, see K. Satchitananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedinta (Delhi, 1974).

23. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (Oxford, 1992), 190-192. See also the essay "Philosophy of History and its Presuppositions," in Mohanty's Essays on Indian Philosophy, Traditional and Modern (Delhi, 1993), 303-312.

24. Mohanty, "Philosophy of History," 310.

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Ramanuja, who vigorously insists upon the irreducible intentionality of consciousness.25) Thus, broadly speaking, it is true that many Hindu philosophers deny both the essential intentionality of consciousness and the temporality of the self. But there remain a couple of major difficulties with this theory as a general explanation for ancient Indian ahistoricity.

In the first place it does not seem to fit Indian Buddhism, which famously denies the existence of the atman but which is also just as ahistorical as Hinduism. Unsurprisingly, Mohanty anticipates this objection and attempts a reply:

Where, as in Buddhism, the concept of process is extended to consciousness, this process is conceived as a series of instantaneous moments; with Nirvana this flow is arrested and transcended. Nirvana is beyond history just as much as moksa is, and cannot be conceived of as an achievement of history within history.26

This transcendentalist interpretation of the Buddhist nirvana, however, seems exegetically dubious, at least for the Mahayana. Certainly it is difficult to square with Nagarjuna's famous identification of nirvana and samsdra: "The limits of nirvana are the limits of samsira. Between the two there is not the slightest difference whatsoever" (Milamadhyamakakiriki, 25:20). Moreover, the Indian Buddhist philosophers arguably did not admit the existence of nonintentional consciousness, that is, pure, contentless mental events.27 Hence, on Mohanty's theory, the Buddhists-unlike the Hindu philosophers-had no reason not to develop "a serious philosophical concern with history," but inexplicably they failed to do so.

Second, Mohanty's explanans does not do full justice to the ethical import of the Hindu theory of the cycles of cosmic history.28 According to this theory the vast cycles of the world historical process are divided into four recurring ages or yugas. In the first age (the krta-yuga) virtue (dharma) reigns. In the succeeding ages (the treti- and dvapara-yugas) it progressively declines until in the fourth age (the kali-yuga) it disappears. Then the world is destroyed and the cosmic cycle begins again. (The Buddhists accept a similar four-ages cosmology and the Jainas accept a reduced two-ages version.) This cyclical succession of world ages, however, is not purely mechanical; it also has an ethical significance. It reflects the rise and fall of the moral order (dharma) due to the actions of human agents. The precise duration of the ages depends upon the actions and character of the people, on how well they perform their dharma.

Save for the short-lived school of Carvaka materialists, the classical Indian philosophers all agreed liberation (moksa) to be the supreme value. But the ortho-

25. Srfbhdsya, 1. 1. 1. 26. Mohanty, Reason and Tradition, 191. 27. Though Yogacara did admit the existence of nondualistic consciousness, i.e. consciousness

without any structural opposition between subject and object: see Paul J. Griffiths, "Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism," in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. Robert K. C. Forman (New York, 1990), 71-97.

28. On this point see Buddha Prakash, "The Hindu Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955), 494-505.


dox Hindu philosophers were also all committed to the recognition of the value of dharma. However, since dharma with its concern with right action is so obviously a temporal value and moksa is apparently an atemporal ideal, there seems at least a prima facie tension between them. In fact the Hindu philosophers espouse a variety of positions on this issue of the relation of dharma to moksa.29 The oldest tradition (present in the Dharmasastra and the Epics) claims an essential continuity between dharma and moksa: selfless performance of one's dharma leads ineluctably to moksa. A different tradition (particularly associated with Samkara and other Veddntins) insists on a sharp opposition between dharma and moksa. But even then the cultivation of dharma is considered a prerequisite for the moral development of the adhikarin, the qualified aspirant to moksa. Thus the timeless ideal of moksa cannot be so easily separated from the temporal ideal of dharma, and the latter concept is very much part of the Hindu theory of cosmic cycles. In this sense the Hindu philosophers, through their commitment to this background theory of cosmic history, effectively do temporalize consciousness rather more than Mohanty admits. Thus it is unclear that the contrast his philosophical explanans requires really exists.

It seems, then, that an adequate philosophical explanans of the ahistoricity phenomenon is not to be found in indigenous philosophical theories of time or the timeless self. My own positive suggestion is that such a philosophical explanans is instead better located in the details of classical Indian epistemology, rather than Indian metaphysics. In other words, it is the Indian philosophers' rather different conception of knowledge that leads them to attach no importance to history, to deny history and memory the status of knowledge. To see this, however, we need to understand something of the background of Indian philosophical thinking about the nature of knowledge, that is, that part of their philosophical tradition the Indians call pramanavdda.

V

Classical Indian philosophical theory of knowledge was centered around pramnna theory. In Indian epistemology the pramanas are the means of knowledge, providing knowledge through modes like perception, inference, and testimony.30 The prameyas are the knowables, cognizable entities which constitute the world. Apramd is a knowledge-episode and the relation between such a cognitive episode and its object (prameya) is structured by the pramanas. Apramdna provides both an authoritative source for making a knowledge claim and a means for (or way of) knowledge. In other words, a pramana has a dual character: both evidential and causal. It provides evidence or justification for regarding a cognitive episode as a knowledge-episode. But it is also supposed to be the most effec- tive causal route to such an episode. Thus the theory of pramanas becomes both

29. See Roy W. Perrett, Hindu Ethics: A Philosophical Study (Honolulu, 1998), chapter 3. 30. On the pramana theory see further Bimal Krishna Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical

Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford, 1986), chapter 1.

318 ROY W. PERRETT

a theory of epistemic justification and a metaphysical theory of the causal requirements necessary for the validity of such justification. The pramanas are not simply justification procedures, but also those methods that match the causal chains with the justification chains so as to validate knowledge claims.

All schools of Indian philosophy agreed that truth is a differentiating charac- teristic of knowledge-episodes (pram7). Some schools add extra conditions, including novelty. Save for the Carvaka, everyone admitted at least perception and inference as pramunas. Almost all the Hindu philosophers (save for the early Vaisesikas) were willing to add testimony to the list. But no one was willing to admit memory as a means of knowing. Since this omission is plausibly related to their attitude to history, it is worth considering the arguments the Indian philosophers used to justify their stand on the matter.

Basically memory (smrti) is ruled out as a pramunia for three reasons (though not everyone accepted all three of these arguments).31 First, memory does not give us new knowledge, but only revives old knowledge. Genuine knowledge has to be both true (pram&) and novel (anadhigata). Second, a genuine knowledge-episode is true in virtue of corresponding to its object, but the objects of memory no longer exist. The object as remembered is not the object as originally presented, but a representation of what was once presented. Third, a pramcna must be capable of making its objects known independently, but memory reveals its objects only through the traces of past experience. These three conditions of novelty, correspondence, and independence, it is argued, jointly and severally preclude memory being a means of knowledge. All three conditions appeal in various ways to those features of memory which entail that a memory experience is not a presentative (anubhava) cognition. Genuine knowledge, it is assumed, is presentative, not representative.

But even if the Hindu philosophers denied memory the status of a pramana, most of them admitted testimony (sabda) as one. Why was this concession not thought to validate historical knowledge? Briefly, because the scope of testimony was so restricted by the novelty, immediacy, and independence conditions on knowledge that historical knowledge was largely unacceptable as a genuine form of testimony.

For the orthodox Hindu philosophers testimony or sabda-pramnna had special connotations because it was taken to be the means for justifying the scriptural authority of the Vedas. Indeed for some philosophical schools (like Mimdmsa and Advaita Veddnta) testimony primarily means scriptural authority. But for those schools sabda's sphere of authority is then taken to be confined to nonempirical (alaukika) matters. Hence scriptural authority cannot contradict common experience in ordinary matters and such testimony, provided it is internally consistent, easily meets one necessary condition on knowledge: it is free from contradiction (abadhita). It is also obvious that testimony so understood readily satisfies both

31. For useful reviews of the Indian debates on this matter see: D. M. Datta, The Six Ways of Knowing, 2nd rev. ed. (Calcutta, 1960), 22-27; Satischandra Chatterjee, The Nydya Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Calcutta, 1950), 22-28, 371-376; Mohanty, Reason and Tradition, 241-243.


the novelty and independence conditions on knowledge. It is even more obvious that history could not qualify as testimony on such a conception of s'abda.

This is not, however, the only Hindu view of testimony. Nyaya accepted testimony as a means of knowledge, but argued that it merely means the verbal knowledge one gets from a trustworthy expert (apta). Testimony is of two kinds: that dealing with perceptible objects and that dealing with imperceptible objects. The Vedas are concerned only with the second sort of objects and their authority derives from their being authored by a trustworthy expert: a sage, or in the developed Nyaya tradition, God (Isvara). Ordinary testimony, however, can be authoritative within its own sphere of perceptible objects if it is the word of a trustworthy human expert. Indeed old Nyaya is very permissive about this: Vatsyayana says such an authority need not be a sage, and could even be a bar- barian (mleccha)!32

But this general Nyaya position increasingly comes under attack from other Hindu philosophers who feel that it fails to guarantee properly the authority of the Vedas. On the one hand, the Naiyayikas are hard pressed by the Advaitins to define in a noncircular fashion precisely what an apta is such that his or her testimony is a source of knowledge. On the other hand, they are constrained by their acceptance of at least the independence and immediacy conditions on knowledge. The later Naiyayikas respond by distinguishing between two kinds of verbal statements: Vedic (vaidika) and secular (laukika).33 Vedic statements are all authoritative because they are made by God. Secular statements are only authoritative if they are made by a trustworthy person (an apta). This distinction enables Nyaya to guarantee the authority of the Veda noncircularly provided that they can independently prove the existence of God-which they endeavor to do with a battery of causal and cosmological arguments. But having admitted that not all secular statements are authoritative, we now need a criterion for distinguishing trustworthy from nontrustworthy speakers. This is not at all easy to do in a fashion that both satisfies the correspondence and independence conditions for knowledge and does not just reduce secular testimony to the supposedly distinct praminas of perception or inference. Certainly it is almost impossible if we know nothing about the speaker, for how can the testimony of an unknown speaker by itself have the justificatory authority of a pramana. Thus it is that Nyaya rejects the proposal that tradition (aitihiya), defined as "a statement whose original speaker is not known," should count as a distinctive pram&na.34 But this rejection is tantamount to the rejection of history as an independent mode of knowledge.

Underpinning all this argumentation is a fundamental Indian assumption about the nature of knowledge: that it is presentative (anubhava), not representative. Note that the Sanskrit term I am translating here as "knowledge" is pram&. A pram&, however, is really a knowledge-episode, a "knowing."35 Although

32. Nydyabhasya, 1.1.7. 33. See Annambhatta's Tarkasamgraha, 68 and the DTpika thereon. 34. Ibid. See also Nyqyabhasya, 11.2.1. 35. For more on this see Matilal, Perception, chapter 4.

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episodic notions of knowledge are not wholly unfamiliar to Western epistemolo- gists, they have tended to favor instead a dispositional theory of knowledge according to which knowledge is a capacity, rather than an episode or occurrence of that capacity. In Indian epistemology not only are perceptions and inferences episodic in character, but a knowing episode is an awareness or experience that is the culmination or end-product of a perceptual or inferential process. More- over, not every cognitive episode amounts to a knowledge-episode; only such cognitive episodes as yield truth are knowledge-episodes. For the Indian episte- mologists, then, knowledge is a special kind of momentary mental episode: a true cognition revealing the nature of reality as it is, via a reliable causal route. Given this conception of knowledge, we can easily see one reason why both memory and history are excluded as sources of knowledge: they do not have the requisite episodic immediacy.

Understanding the Indian conception of knowledge, then, enables us to offer a more plausible philosophical explanans for the phenomenon of ancient Indian ahistoricity: namely that the particular theory of knowledge articulated in classical Indian epistemology implies history is not a genuine kind of knowledge, and the influence of this philosophical theory explains the lack of importance the Indians attached to history.

But even if this proposed explanation is true, it obviously leaves us with a further question. Suppose Indian ahistoricity was due to the influence of this philosophical conception of knowledge, a conception which excludes history as knowledge. Why, however, were the Indians so impressed by the theory? Why did they not just redefine "knowledge" to include history? I can only conjecture a reply to this question. This reply seems to me rather plausible, but I do not claim that it is an explanation that satisfies both of the methodological principles I invoked earlier as constraints on an ideally adequate philosophical explanans. More specifically, although my conjecture is compatible with the major philosophical texts, I cannot point to any texts that explicitly support it.

My conjecture appeals to the enormously important Indian background belief that liberation (mokya) is the supreme value. All the Indian philosophical schools start from the assumption that worldly life is radically unsatisfactory and that liberation from suffering is both desired and possible. The possibility of such release is guaranteed by the fact that the presence of ignorance (avidyd) is a necessary factor in the causal chain which leads to bondage. Hence knowledge (the absence of ignorance) can effect liberation from our bondage. Whatever their differences about the details, almost all Indian philosophers agreed on at least this. But these assumptions in turn imply a certain conception of knowledge: the knowledge that effects liberation must be presentational, rather than representa- tional, for otherwise we would already know and hence already be liberated. (Even those schools like Sanikhya and Advaita that claim we are, in a sense, already liberated do not deny that we have yet to come to know this.) Such a lib- eratory knowledge then becomes the Indian paradigm of knowledge. Given the value placed on the ideal of moksa, any other kind of "knowledge" (like histori-


cal knowledge) is just not important enough to count as genuine knowledge because it does not promote the supreme value of moksa in the way real knowledge should. This, I submit, is why the Indian philosophers were so wedded to a conception of knowledge that implies history is too unimportant to count as a mode of knowledge.

VI

It is not true that there was no history in ancient India, and it is not surprising that there was no developed historiography or scientific history. It is both true and surprising that there was no real importance attached to history in ancient India. An adequate philosophical explanation for this historical phenomenon, however, is not to be found in appeals to the influence of indigenous metaphysical theories about time and the self. A much more plausible philosophical explanation appeals instead to certain features of classical Indian epistemology.36

Massey University New Zealand

36. In the writing of this essay I have benefited from the helpful suggestions of Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, Richard Vann, an anonymous referee for History and Theory, and (most especially) Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. The shortcomings that remain are due to my own obduracy.

Article Contentsp. [307]p. 308p. 309p. 310p. 311p. 312p. 313p. 314p. 315p. 316p. 317p. 318p. 319p. 320p. 321

Issue Table of ContentsHistory and Theory, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Oct., 1999), pp. 281-411Volume InformationFront MatterForum on Structure and Agency in Historical CausationCausality, Chaos Theory, and the End of the Weimar Republic: A Commentary on Henry Turner's Hitler's Thirty Days to Power [pp. 281 - 299]Human Agency and Impersonal Determinants in Historical Causation: A Response to David Lindenfeld [pp. 300 - 306]

History, Time, and Knowledge in Ancient India [pp. 307 - 321]The "Metaphor of Life": Herder's Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments in Late Eighteenth-Century Natural Sciences [pp. 322 - 347]Review EssaysSalvaging Truth and Ethical Obligation from the Historicist Tide: Thomas Haskell's Moderate Historicism [pp. 348 - 364]History and Other Times [pp. 365 - 377]Capital Punishment for Murderous Theorists? [pp. 378 - 388]Same Difference in India and Europe [pp. 389 - 407]

Books in Summaryuntitled [p. 408]untitled [pp. 408 - 409]untitled [p. 409]untitled [pp. 409 - 410]untitled [pp. 410 - 411]untitled [p. 411]Correction: Danto and His Critics: Art History, Historiography and after the End of Art [p. 411]

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