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Philosophy Around the World

Philosophy as Teaching & Therapy in Sankara

In a talk to Philosophy For All in London, Trevor Leggett explained the ideas of Sankara, one of the greatest commentators on the Upanishads and a major figure in the history of Indian philosophy.

This is not intended to be an academic lecture. I shall try to say a few things that might be useful, though I shall call attention to points that I think haven’t been noticed by some scholars, perhaps because of unspoken assumptions. Someone can be a great scholar of a foreign language without knowing much about the culture or being in sympathy with it. A man might be a firstrate scholar of German but he might not be competent to translate Einstein if he didn’t know something about relativity. In the same way there are translations from Sanskrit religious or yoga texts made by scholars who are entirely sceptical of the whole enterprise of the work they are translating, and those translations may not necessarily give a proper picture of it.

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