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The exploration of the psychological terrain of the Indian inner world begins by looking at the cluster of ideas, historically derived, selected, and refined, through which Hindu culture has traditionally structured the beliefs and behaviour of its members. This chapter deals with Hindu philosophy in prescriptive configuration of ideal purposes, values and beliefs which percolate down into the everyday life of the ordinary people and give it form and meaning. It tackles the theme of fusion—moksha; life task and life cycle—dharma; and ideas of time and destiny. As posited by Hindu culture, the ultimate aim of existence, the chief purushartha (man’s meaning), is moksha or mukti. In the Hindu philosophical tradition, dharma is the central concept of Mimamsa, the intensely activist philosophy of the first two parts of the Vedas. The third essential idea in the Hindu world image is karma.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is generally recognized as one of the major popularizers of Eastern philosophy in the West, yet not much detailed work on her specific use and knowledge of Hindu philosophy exists. This chapter explores the way the notion of the “six schools of Hindu philosophy” was used and received in Blavatsky’s early work, such as Isis Unveiled (1877) and during her time in India before the publication of The Secret Doctrine (1888). It shows how Blavatsky’s work was a part of the Oriental Renaissance in the sense that the East, here the notion of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, clearly became a part of her esoteric tradition, but also that Hindu philosophy ultimately became just one aspect to be integrated into the syncretistic project of Theosophy, which in many respects framed the continued Oriental Renaissance in the West.

One of the clearest enunciations of the Hindu concept of God is found in the Taittirīya Upanishad II.1: Satyam jñānam anantam brahma. It is commonplace in the discussion of Hindu philosophy to maintain that Brahman may be taken to mean either saguna or nirguna Brahman. However, the two are not clearly mutually exclusive but represent two standpoints of viewing the same reality. This chapter demonstrates how this description of the self-same Brahman is understood in a dual sense. That the description of the Taittirīya Upanishad applies to Brahman alone is clearly stated in the Brahmasūtra.

This chapter begins with a consideration of tree worship as a worldwide phenomenon, exploring the sentience of trees in such practices as the worship of oak trees in Europe. The specific worldview that informs much tree worship and makes it so widespread in India is taken up next. The extensive history of Indian thought expresses a major tenet of Hindu religious philosophy: the interconnectedness and sacred nature of all life. The whole world in its myriad of forms springs from and participates in a unified reality, often called Brahman in the Upanishads and Puranas. Importantly, the great variety of embodied forms of divinity include trees. This chapter concludes with an examination of the long history of tree worship (puja) in India. Virtually all sacred trees in India have been considered a kalpa-vriksha, the famous mythological “Wishing-Tree” that yields many kinds of favorable results, both material and spiritual.

This chapter presents Hegel’s On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gita in a complete English translation. The episode of the epic of Mahabharata when Krishna enunciates the Bhagavad-Gita serves as one of the foundations of the Hindu religion, cosmogony, theogony, mythology and philosophy. Hegel sets this into relief by an examination of the maxim that all claims to the fruits or results of actions must be given up; action is ever for its own sake. Hegel analyses what this kind of disinterested action might be in the context of a deep moral dilemma, also seeking to show whether the pantheism attributed to the world-view of Gita is in fact appropriate, and to what extent, if at all, this thought can be termed speculative.