Atheism in Indian philosophy

(Dr. Koenraad Elsts paper for the conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, Cork,
Ireland, September 2013)

abstract
Some Hindus boast that one can call oneself a Hindu and be other things besides, even an
atheist. This is mostly bygone glory: todays Hindus use atheist as a swearword to designate
the enemy or to make the difference between themselves and godless Buddhism. Yet,
Hinduism has a powerful premodern tradition of atheism. On the one hand Lokyata,
worldliness, a sceptical yet ascetic sect, popular among modern Marxists but despised by
rivalling philosophers. On the other two respected philosophies: one Vedic, the Mms,
hermeneutics, the interpretation of Vedic ritual, which says that the gods invoked are but
labels of components of the ritual, existing only by the mental effort of their worshippers; and
one which also ended up classified as orthodox but is in fact non-Vedic, viz. Skhya,
enumeration (of the substances that make up the cosmos).
In this paper, we will focus on Skhya, now existent only in theory. Buddhism describes
Skhya as its own source. Patajalis Yoga, now reckoned as a separate philosophy, was
anciently (and rightly) considered an application-oriented school of Skhya. The monistic
Vedanta philosophy, which won the day in Hinduism and is espoused by most sects in its
theistic form (bhakti, devotion), criticizes Skhya for not basing itself on the Vedas, i.e.
for being really a philosophy. However, Vedic texts refer to some typical concepts of
Skhya, which has its sources much earlier. Its dualism of consciousness vs. nature
(reminiscent of thinking vs. extension) is in fact an elaboration of the common-sense view,
contrasting with the mystical attractiveness of the heady Vedanta view.
Friedrich Nietzsche would have approved of Skhyas atheism. The great Skhya classic,
the Skhya-Krik (2
nd
century?) does not even mention a supreme being. In the Yoga
Stra, some concessions are made to believers, but yoga is defined purely technically, as a
state of consciousness, not as a union with God. The late Skhya-Sutra (14
th
century?),
operating in a religious landscape that had become completely theistic, argues elaborately
against the existence of God, and in favour ot the eternality of the universe. Yet its relative
pessimism, radicalized in Buddhism (all is suffering), is un-Nietzschean.
A detail worth analyzing is how the age-old Skhya cosmological scheme of Trigua, three
qualities, authentically explains the famous parable of Camel-Lion-Child.

(Full text)
Friedrich Nietzsche was not familiar with Indian philosophy (much less even with
Chinese philosophy), though he was in a position to be fairly well-informed about Indian
thought. This was a cornerstone of the Indo-European philology then animating German
intellectuals and progressing fast under the hands of the Orientalists. G.W.F. Hegel already
wrote a philosophical discussion of the Bhagavad Gt in 1829. Even earlier, J.W. Goethe and
Franz Schubert praised Klidss play akuntal. Arthur Schopenhauer practically built his
philosophy on the precedent of the Upaniads, the confidential teachings of the Veda
(knowledge) collections of hymns, and on Buddhism. So, through his knowledge of
German philosophy, Nietzsche must have been exposed to some conclusions of Indian
thought. But for his direct knowledge about it, he learned little from the discipline of
Orientalism, then very much flourishing in the German speech community and certainly
accessible to a professor of Classical Philology. Instead he relied on the theories of colourful
amateurs like Louis Jacolliot. Nietzsche therefore didnt know, or at any rate didnt let on,
that the godless philosophy which he tried to found, already existed in India. He also didnt
know that, centuries ago, this Indian atheism had ended up largely losing the battle against a
revitalized theism. His Christian critics must take heart from this development, showing how
history proves that religion is anchored in mans nature: if you chase it away, it returns with a
vengeance. This paper deals with what he missed, and how the Indian atheist schools of
thought reflect several typical Nietzschean themes.
A practical matter: since this is a survey covering a lot of ground and addressing a
non-Indologist audience, a few background facts have to be explained at the outset. Writing
appeared in India ca. 300 BCE, after which a flood of writings come to our attention. It is a
common mistake to date the ideas expressed therein to the last centuries BC. Some of them
may be far older, but have appeared in writing only when that medium became available. A
fact of Indian intellectual life is the towering position of the Veda (knowledge), four
collections of hymns dating to beyond 1000 BC, and their ancillary literature. According to a
now-common opinion, gradually developed as the memory of their composition receded, the
Veda-s were divinely revealed at the beginning of time. In reality, the names of their
composers are known, elements of their genealogy, historical facts such as battles and
celestial configurations, and geographical data such as the names of mountains and rivers.
They take the form of man addressing the gods the reverse of the Ten Commandments or
the Quran, where God addresses man. Either way, the Vedas dominate the intellectual
landscape. The orally transmitted stories about human and divine history are collected in the
Purna-s (antiquities), a very large body of literature written down in the 1
st
millennium CE
or even later. Though lip-service is paid to the Vedas, the Pura stories have far more
influence on the life of the masses, together with the two epics, Rmyaa and Mahbhrata,
written down around the time of Christ but their core narratives much older. However, these
stories have little relevance for our history of philosophical atheism.

Free death
A lot of Hindus boast that one can call oneself a Hindu and be other things besides,
even an atheist. Thus, Vinyak Dmodar Svarkar in his epoch-making book Hindutva
(Hinduness, 1923), the manifesto of Hindu nationalism, writes that even an agnostic or an
atheist can be a Hindu. And the current internet paper Centre Right India argues: The Vedas
in Hinduism are not absolute, and have been criticized by people who did not subscribe to
their view, since time immemorial. This did not make the critics any less Hindu. Indeed,
Hinduism is not alien to atheism, or agnostic schools of thought. (Pulakesh Upadhyaya:
Atheism and Hindutva Carvaka to Savarkar, 3 July 2012) However, this view of matters
only covers exceptions. The typical modern Hindu, of Nietzsches day as well as of our own,
will use atheist as a swearword. His main religious practice consists in offering worship
through a devotional ritual (pj) to a chosen deity (ia devat).
A theme pioneeringly dealt with in Nietzsches Zarathustra is free death, taking
ones own life. Svarkar himself was an atheist, he refused religious funeral rites, but in 1966
he chose to die by sallekhn, i.e. fasting unto death, as is fairly common since time
immemorial among Jain and other monks. Nietzsche probably didnt realize that the free
death he advocated was common not just among the pre-Christian Romans (advocated by
Seneca) but was still alive as an ideal among Hindus, or at least among their religious
personnel. Another committer of fasting unto death was Gandhian activist Vinob Bhve. On
his deathbed in 1982, under popular applause, he received a visit from the Prime Minister
Indr Gndh. But at the same time, secularists in the media were fulminating that he should
be imprisoned and force-fed as he was trespassing against the law of the land. Strictly
speaking this was true, as the British colonizers had enacted a law against suicide and
euthanasia in the 19
th
century, which was still on the statute books. This law was inspired by
the purely Christian principle that man is not the master of his own life and death, only God
is. But the positive reaction of the people to Bhves self-choice of his death showed the
native sensibilities accurately: they were convinced that if certain conditions are met (for this
should of course not be done lightly, e.g. out of youthful lovesickness), a free death is
acceptable and even the best course of action.

Atheism: heterodox
Meanwhile, Hindu atheism is mostly bygone glory. Todays Hindus use atheist as
a swearword to designate the enemy or to make the difference between themselves and
godless Buddhism. Yet, Hinduism has a powerful premodern tradition of atheism. It has
been superseded by theist philosophies at least from the 9
th
century CE, and by 1500 it was
not even a memory, as we shall explain.
On the one hand we have a number of schools deemed heterodox, i.e. not in awe of the
Veda-s. Buddhism, famous for its doctrine that all is suffering caused by desire, and that the
way out of this vale of tears is meditation upto the point of liberation, doesnt altogether deny
the existence of the Vedic gods. These are narratively used in the Buddhist canon to ask the
Buddha, who has just reached Liberation, to teach his way to others. The Buddha advised
both his monks and lay politicians that a community functions best if its religious traditions
are upheld, e.g. its festivals and pilgrimages associated with the Vedic gods. His monks would
later take the Vedic gods all the way to Japan and build temples for them there. However, the
gods play no role whatsoever in the Buddhas analysis of the human condition and method of
remedy, neither in its moral nor in its meditative aspects. You as an individual have earned
your merits and demerits and you yourself have to work them off and earn your liberation; no
god or other being can do it in your stead. In 2005 there was a textbook controversy in
Thailand, where the Buddhist clergy objected to the mentioning of God in schoolbooks, as
this illusion had no place in Buddhism and had allegedly been smuggled in by the Christian
missionaries.
However, from its early centuries there developed a devotional Buddhism in which
prayers are said to the Buddha or a related entity in order to take away your demerits and your
sorrows. Indian Buddhism was finished off ca. 1194 by the Islamic invaders, so it could not
degenerate all the way, but in East Asia, varieties of the devotional Pure Land Buddhism
attract the loyalty of most lay Buddhists.
Lokyata, worldliness, a sceptical yet ascetic sect, is popular among modern
Marxists but despised by rivalling contemporaneous philosophers. This school was radically
anti-religious and rejected the concepts of supernatural beings, eternal soul, life after death
and reincarnation. Makkhali Gola, who preached contemporaneously with the Buddha,
compared life, considered a source of endless suffering by the Buddhists, to a fish: alas, it has
fishbones, but these can be discarded, and then we can enjoy the fishs flesh. Similarly, life
contains suffering, but this can be minimized and reasonably dealt with, and the rest can be a
great source of joy. This outlook can be likened to Epicureanism.
Jainism is an ascetic tradition that upholds the extremism in ascetic practices which
the Buddha as a moderate ended up rejecting. It has remained confined to India until the
modern age, and to a few million adherents in the business class. The lay Jains chose this line
of work because it does not entail any form of violence, the gravest sin in Jainism. This is a
fully atheistic religion. It doesnt believe in God (singular or plural) in any form. However,
they do practice religion and worship in temples, but these are dedicated to human beings who
have achieved the state of liberation.

Atheism: orthodox
On the other hand we have several philosophies deemed orthodox, which once were
atheist in outlook. Later they disappeared or conformed to the rising wave of theism. The
Vedic school of philosophy par excellence, the Mmns, hermeneutics, focused on the
interpretation of Vedic ritual. Though working in a context which was religious par
excellence, it said that the gods invoked are but labels of components of the ritual, existing
only by the mental effort of their worshippers. This school is regularly credited with being the
first articulately atheist school in the world, certainly the first one which takes the human fact
of religion into account but gives it a non-theistic explanation. After a high tide, it was
eclipsed in the early second millennium.
The Smkhya (enumeration, viz. of the 25 substances which make up the cosmos)
school ended up classified as orthodox but is in fact non-Vedic. The well-known
philosopher akara, really more of a Veda theologian than an autonomous thinker, criticized
it for never referring to the Vedas. It must have been in existence for a long time, and Vedic
literature also borrows from it. Well-known is the Skhya simile from the vetvatara
Upaniad (300 BCE?) that an unborn and three-coloured (black, red and white) woman waves
goodbye to an unborn man who has had his pleasure with her but has had enough, and
receives another unborn man who has his pleasure with her. The woman represents nature,
wherein three qualities can be discerned, represented by the colours (more on these below).
The men represent the different units of consciousness, or persons. Some persons have
enjoyed nature long enough, lose their interest and seek liberation; other persons are still busy
enjoying all that nature has to offer. The one nature and the many consciousness units form
the two poles that make up the universe. The liberation of consciousness amounts to its
separation from nature. Note that God plays no role whatsoever in this system. However, it
lost its steam in the first millennium CE, and after a blip of revival in ca. 1400, it ceased being
a living school.
Vaieika (distinction-making, focused on particulars) taught that the universe
consists of a finite and unchangeable number of smallest particles, and these are eternal. The
universe has never been created: either it is eternal or it has been created, but if so, it was
created by an eternal uncreated being, which only shifts the burden of eternality to a purely
supposed rather than an actual being. So we might as well assume the eternality of the
universe. However, later this school united with the theistic Nyya (judgment, logic) school
and became theistic.
Uttara-Mms (later hermeneutics), better known as Vednta (final part of the
Veda), forms a deliberate continuation of the Upaniad-s (confidential teaching), the
philosophical closing texts of the Veda-s. Unlike the Vedic hymns and the ancillary
Brhmaa-s (priestly books), concerned with ritual, the Upaniad-s deal with knowledge,
i.e. knowledge of the Self (tman), i.e. pure, unconditioned, impersonal consciousness. Their
central doctrine is that the Self is fully the same as the Absolute (Brahman), like the drop is
made of the same substance as the ocean. It follows that the unchanging and undying
Absolute is nothing but consciousness. The different subschools of Vednta will try to define
the exact relationship between the Self and the Absolute. The best-known worldwide, and the
most popular in the modern West, is Advait Vednta (non-dualistic Vednta), thought up
by akara in ca. 800 CE. This teaches the uncompromising unity of the Self and the
Absolute. For Westerners tired of Christian dualism, this is welcomed as a relief. However, in
real life, akara also worshipped the gods, just as the Stoic philosopher Emperor Marcus
Aurelius religiously observed his daily sacrifice routine after his philosophical meditations.
akara is venerated in India for his debating skills and for the institutions he founded, but his
non-dualistic viewpoint has largely been forgotten. It is at any rate much less representative
for Indian thought than his Western fans assume.
His simple and radical scheme was soon sidelined by the far more important dualistic
(or nominally qualified non-dualistic and difference-yet-no-difference) schools of
Vednta. These schools, which elbowed out the remaining non-Vednta viewpoints,
effectively became the framework of the religious wave at the mass level, Bhakti (devotion).
Among the gods of Hinduism, one was chosen, extolled and worshipped. In most Hindu
temples, five gods are worshipped of whom one is central: Viu (the all-pervader), iva
(the benefactor, actually an apotropaic euphemism for the storm-god Rudra, the
red/furious one), Dev (the goddess), Gaea (lord of groups) and Srya (the sun). By
contrast, Brahma (increase) as the personification of the Absolute is practically not
worshipped. In devotional Hinduism, as theorized by the dualistic Vednta philosophers, the
situation is like in Christian mysticism: the supreme being is mostly conceived as a person
and one can ascend to God but never unite with Him. One can contemplate Him but never be
His equal.
This way, we have gotten modern Hinduism: a landscape studded with temples and
idols, a shrine or separate room in the houses for devotional rituals (pj), and but very rarely
an odd intellectual who stands aloof from the belief in a supernatural being. Atheism has been
in the ascendant for some centuries, but that was two thousand years ago.

Skhya
Buddhism describes Skhya as its own source, founded by the sage Kapila who gave
the Buddhas wandering ancestors a domain where they could build the settlement
Kapilavastu (Kapilas habitation), in which the future Buddha was to grow up. Patajalis
Yoga (discipline, control), now reckoned as a separate philosophy, was anciently (and
rightly) considered an application-oriented subschool of Skhya. Like Buddhism, it vaguely
recognizes the existence of the gods (unless our understanding of the Sanskrit words is
anachronistic) but gives them no place whatsoever in its analysis of the human problem nor in
its proposed way out. Only in the modern age have theistic Hindus magnified the religious
element in it and renamed it as Sevara Skhya, i.e. Skhya-with-God. Even then, the
relative absence of God contrasts conspicuously with the really theistic systems.
The monistic Vednta philosophy, which won the day in Hinduism and is espoused by
most sects in its theistic form (Bhakti, devotion), criticizes Skhya for not basing itself on
the Veda-s, i.e. for being a real philosophy rather than a scripture-quoting theology. However,
Vedic texts refer to some typical concepts of Skhya, which has its sources much earlier. Its
dualism of consciousness vs. nature (reminiscent of thinking vs. extension, res cogitans vs.
res extensa) is in fact an elaboration of the common-sense view, contrasting with the mystical
attractiveness of the heady Vednta view. In the latter, everything is the Absolute, so all is one
-- gee, thats cosmic! In Skhya, by contrast, the irreducible separateness of the different
persons or units of consciousness is taken for granted. Your memories make you unique and
separate from me with my memories, we are distinct persons, and there is no reason to
remedy this condition.
Had Nietzsche known it sufficiently, he could have approved of Skhyas atheism. It
is reminiscent of his beloved pre-Socratic philosophies. The great Skhya classic, the
Skhya-Krik (2
nd
century?) does not even mention a supreme being. In Patajalis Yoga
Stra (aphorisms on control), some concessions are made to believers, but Yoga is defined
purely technically as the silencing of the mind, not as a union with God. The late Skhya-
Sutra (14
th
century), operating in a religious landscape that had become completely theistic,
argues elaborately against the existence of God, and in favour of the eternality of the universe.
But perhaps its relative pessimism about the worlds inherent suffering, radicalized in
Buddhism (all is suffering), can be reckoned as un-Nietzschean.

Karma: beyond good and evil
A very prominent doctrine in Indian thought is that of reincarnation and karma. In the
Vedic hymns (pre-1000 BC), the word karma still had its etymological meaning "do, make",
whence "action, ritual". Therefrom, it came to connote action at a distance, viz. between the
ritual and its intended fruits, e.g. restoration of health, victory on the battlefield, a woman
saying yes etc. Even the Mms philosophers, sceptical of the involvement of any divine
persons in the ritual, believed in the magical action at a distance of the Vedic rituals.
In the Bhagavad-Gt (200 BC?), the word karma-mrga, the way of ritual action,
still has this meaning (and not doing your duty, ethical living the yoga of action in the
daily life, as is often said since Swami Vivekananda gave it this meaning in ca. 1895): it
refers to Vedic ritual. There, it contrast with jna-mrga, the way of knowledge,
developed in the Upaniads after and in reaction against the emphasis on ritual action in the
Vedic period; and with bhakti-mrga, the way of devotion, chiefly devotion to the deified
hero Ka, the proper and innovative message of the book, hugely influential in popular
Hinduism. The way of knowledge is chiefly concerned with meditation, as the path to
knowledge of the Self, i.e. pure consciousness, the object of most philosophies and the goal of
most Hindu monks. The way of devotion means the religious practice maintained by the vast
majority of Hindus, viz. worship of the gods, mainly ones own chosen deity.
Meanwhile, without letting it give a new meaning to the term karma, the Gt
introduces the notion of reincarnation. It attaches no moral sense to rebirth yet, just like the
reincarnation beliefs attested elsewhere, e.g. among the Levantine Druze and many
Amerindians, but affirms that dying is like undressing before going to sleep and getting
dressed again tomorrow. It is part of Kas exhortation to the hesitant hero Arjuna, that it is
alright to do battle: you need not be afraid to die, nor have scruples to kill, because if you die
or if your enemy dies, it is only a temporary phase while moving on to a next life. No specific
link, moral or otherwise, between this life and the next is posited here. It is the naked theory
of reincarnation that we find here, without the moralistic interpretative apparatus which later
Hinduism and Buddhism have attached to it.
We should be careful not to amalgamate this doctrine too easily with Nietzsches
eternal return. The reason for this eternal return is that the number of possible causes is
finite while time is infinite, so that the chain of causes effecting the present state of affairs
will necessarily repeat itself. Reincarnation is distantly akin, it may stem from a similar
intuition, but any non-superficial comparison will find them different.
Then, action at a distance is reinterpreted and applied to the successive incarnations.
The moralistic version, popular among the masses east of the Indus, including the East-Asian
countries where Buddhism has spread it, views the contents of the next life as a reward or
punishment for ones acts in a previous life. Good and evil get a very prominent place here.
Unlike Immanuel Kants notion of doing the good for its own sake, and virtue being its own
reward, good and evil acts here get the power to determine ones apparent fate in the next
life. A secular view of life posits no link between ones fate and the moral quality of ones
acts: even a saint can get robbed or killed. Here, by contrast, morality controls the universe,
which is inherently moral.
However, there exists a more subtle version of the karma doctrine. When we die, the
motive force that spurs us on to return to this world in a new body is desire. Our deeds and
experiences have shaped a pattern of non-satisfaction due to preference and aversion, and this
leads to seeking new experiences to satisfy these. Therefore, if the desire is quelled, and
neutrality takes the place of preferences and aversion, there is no motive force anymore that
drives you to a new birth. That is how desire leads to rebirth, while the cessation of desire
leads to liberation or nirva (blowing out). But outside the circle of ascetics, this more
subtle version of the karma doctrine is little known. Note that this version is beyond good
and evil.
Few people realize (and many Hindus will be startled if not angry to hear us assert it)
that the karma doctrine is inherently linked with atheism, even in its vulgar moralistic version.
Because the world is deemed inherently just, with a certain type of deeds automatically
leading to a certain type of experiences, there is no need for a Father in heaven to dispense
justice. In history, the most atheistic schools, especially Jainism, have had the most radical
and uncompromising conception of karma. You are deemed stuck with your own karmic
record, you have to work it off yourself and bear all the consequences yourself for any karma
you incur further. No other being, whether human or divine, can relieve you of even the
smallest quantity of karma. By contrast, in theistic Hinduism, lip-service is paid to the notion
of karma, but in fact it is very watered down. People pray to a divine being for the diminution
of karma, somewhat like Catholics can buy indulgences to be freed from so many years of
purgatory.

The parable of the three stages
A detail worth analyzing is how the age-old Skhya cosmological scheme of trigua,
three qualities, authentically fits the famous parable of Camel-Lion-Child. Like we have a
yin/yang bipolarity in Chinese thought, we have a tripolarity in Indian thought. Every society
of gods or men was deemed to be divided in three parts, having to do with order, action and
sustenance: (1) sattva, beingness, truth, goodness, the pole of calm, clarity and order,
symbolized by the daylight, the white colour and the majestic heavens; (2) rajas, turbulence,
the pole of dynamism and passion, symbolized by the twilight, the red colour and the stormy
atmosphere; (3) tamas, darkness, the pole of inertia, materiality, quantity and sustenance,
symbolized by the night, the dark colours and the all-bearing earth. (To complicate matters and
take the equivocity of symbolism into account, the twilight with its moderate temperature and
sacral mood can also count as sattva, the daytime with its heat can also count as rajas.)
In society, the three poles correspond to three social functions and the classes performing
them: (1) order and legitimacy are the province of judges, poets, priests and of the king in his
sacral role as embodiment of a nations sovereignty; (2) action is the province of administrators
and soldiers, and of the king in his role as commander-in-chief; (3) sustenance is the province of
the farmers, craftsmen and other producing classes, of healthcare providers and entertainers, and
of all members of society in so far as they partake in the process of fertility and multiplication.
The scheme corresponds as follows with the Puranic divine trinity (trimrti): the creator Brahma
corresponds to the dawn, or rajas; the sustainer and solar deity Viu to the daylight, or sattva;
the leveller and moon-god iva to the night, tamas.
In Nietzsches Zarathustra, in the protagonists first sermon, he discusses the three
transformations, the three phases of growth. Firstly, the human mind becomes a camel, slow and
eager for heavy loads, obedient but strong, labouring and blindly following. This is evidently the
pole tamas. Secondly, it becomes a lion, full of fury and passion, not obeying the you should
commandment, but asserting his I will volition and his freedom. This is visibly the pole rajas.
Finally, it becomes a child, light and innocent. This is the stage of transparency, of the third
pole, sattva. This way, Nietzsches newfound simile actually corresponds to an age-old
thought model, best articulated in Skhya.