A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy (Set of 2 Volumes)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The history of the Vedanta school is well- known since the time of Sankara but its prehistory before Sankara is quite obscure. However, there is a period of a thousand years between the compilation of the major Uapanisads to Sankara without loss of the tradition of the Upanisads; there appeared many philosophers and dogmaticians, although their thoughts are not clearly known.

In A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy. The author made clear the details of the pre-Sankara Vedanta philosophy, utilizing not only Sanskrit materials, but also Pali, Prakrit as well as Tibetan and Chinese sources. In this respect, this epoch-making work was awarded the Imperial Prize by the Japan Academy.

Nearly 60 years have already passed since its publication in Japanese. Meanwhile, new research has been reported in such fields as Bharthari and the like.Nevertheless, none can take the place of the author's achievement in the field of pre-Sankara Vedanta.

This Part Two is a complete English translation of Vols. III and IV of the Japanese version, with many additions and revisions done by the author himself.

Parts One and Two will be important literature indispensable not only to those, who are specialists in the study of Vedanta but also to those engaged in the study of Indian thought in general.

PROF HAJIME NAKAMURA, DLitt. (University of Tokyo), Honorary DLitt. (Government of India and Nehru University), was a distinguished scholar of international repute. He was a member of the Japan Academy and was decorated with the highest Japanese awards such as the Medal of Culture and the First Order of the Sacred Treasure. Conferred further honorary degrees of Vidyavacaspati by the President of the Republic of India, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the honorary doctorate by the University of Delhi, Kuppu-Swami Research Institute, Chennai, he was also Visiting Professor at Harvard and Stanford universities. Founder-Director of the Eastern Institute and President of the Eastern Academy, Prof. Nakamura was a versatile and striking genius. He undertook research that was novel, original, and pioneering, and the number of his publications is astonishingly large. It is, however, regrettable that his works are mostly in Japanese.

Among his many scholastic achievements, the first to be mentioned is A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy, here translated into English. Other important works are: The Selected Works of Hajime Nakamura in 40 volumes; The Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, A Grand Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, in 3 volumes; The Illustrated Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, Parallel Developments, A Comparative History of Ideas, The Structure of Logic, in two volumes, and many others.

The purpose of the present work is to trace the development of early Vedanta philosophy before Sankara, Fairly well known to the academic world is the Vedanta philosophy of Sankara and his successors, but pre Skara Vedanta has been little explored and this work aims at filling the gap.

The Japanese original of this work was my doctorate thesis submitted to the University of Tokyo in 1942. From 1936 to the end of 1941 1 was engaged in post graduate research at the University under the guidance of the late De Hakuju Ui, finally submitting a thesis, entitled "A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy." on pre-Sańkara Vedanta philosophy, which was accepted by the University in 1943. Just after World War II it was difficult to arrange publication, but it finally appeared in four volumes, published respectively in the years 1950, 1951, 1955 and 1956.

After that I made some piecemeal English translations of certain sections, some of which appeared in foreign journals, but there seemed not much possibility of completing the task. However Professor Daniel H. H. Ingalls urged me to make a complete translation into English, and was kind enough to recommend the project to Harvard-Yenching Institute, whose director Professor John Pelzel generously interested himself in the matter. In 1967 and 1968 the Institute offered a grant towards the work of translating.

I count myself fortunate that with the help of many scholars I shall be able to bring the task to completion before long, though it has been an exacting one, almost amounting to a new work, with some chapters being re-written in English.

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to those who have kindly given me their collaboration in various points. This all too brief acknowledgement must suffice to express a deep appreciation of their generosity with time and trouble.

**Contents and Sample Pages**