Dharma Philosophy and Ethics

Catalog description

Taught by GTU. Philosophy of Religion in the West has focused on proving the existence of God and accounting for the persistence of "evil" in the world. This tension arises from claims based on faith and scripture over the judgment of reason, logic and science. However, negligible attention has been paid to living religions in the Indic civilizations, encompassing doctrines, theologies, and symbolic patterns that inscribe ultimate concerns in differential light. Some Asian traditions could be non-theistic. The course redresses this imbalance by engaging the Dharma theologies of India - Hindu, Jaina and Buddhist - on the "Big Questions." We examine certain categories from both ancient and contemporary Indic texts, read through hermeneutical lens with a view to resolving questions in philosophical theology from the Dharma perspective. Of concern will be the conundrums of existence and non-existence, self and no-self, karma versus evil and determinism, meaning of living, morality, and life-cycles, rites over rights, the spiritual vis-a-vis secular social arrangements, soteriology or liberation, as well as the optimal paths toward these ends. In short, there will be reconstructive reading of "atman = Brahman" as the universal self, dharma as duty, du?kha as suffering, karma as the guiding moral principle, prayascitta as retributive sacrifice, and values or virtues such as compassion, moral care, non-injury, intellectual excellence, and the aesthetics of grief and joy, etc., challenged by developments in the Indian philosophy, cosmology and cross-cultural life-worlds.