CHAPTER 5
£External and Internal Politics
of the Intellectual World: India
With India we round out the world’s three great indigenous intellectual tradi-
tions. For all the differences in atmosphere, there is no need to transpose our
theory into a different key than for Greece and China. In India the dynamics
of conflict, both inside and outside the intellectual world, stand out with ar-
chitectonic clarity. Social conflicts affected the fluctuating strengths of Vedic,
Buddhist, Brahmanical, and devotional religions; inside the intellectual net-
works, conflicts among the subfactions of these religions shaped the pattern of
philosophical creativity. India is a particularly good place to observe the
two-step causality which governs intellectual life: external politics favors one
or another organizational base within which intellectuals build their networks;
inside the dominant base factions divide to take up the lion’s share of the space
available under the intellectual law of small numbers, while factions on the
weakening side ally into syncretisms. The philosophical schools of India devel-
oped against one another, and the background for their struggles was set by
the sociopolitical dynamics behind the rise and fall of religions.
An India driven by conflicts goes counter to the image prevalent not only
among Westerners but among Indian thinkers themselves. We have been taught
to think of India as essentially static, even “timeless,” under a perennial
otherworldly mysticism. The image had to be created. It came about through
a series of events: the destruction of medieval Buddhism, which had anchored
the first great round of debates; the tactic of archaizing one’s own tradition to
elevate its prestige over that of factional rivals; and the predominance, in the
centuries since 1500, of popular devotional cults of an anti-intellectual bent at
just the time when Hindu scholars were in a syncretizing and scholasticizing
mode in defense against alien conquerors. The result has been that the acute
and extremely varied intellectual developments of the Indian Middle Ages were
obscured, along with the dynamics which produced them. Among Western
scholars, Indian philosophy is one of the great undiscovered histories of ideas,
as technically sophisticated as European philosophies through quite recent
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