World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 270

AHAM BRAHMASMI : ITS LOGICAL FOUNDATION AND VALUE IMPLICATION
- Ganesh Prasad Das I have chosen for deliberation here a topic that many profound scholars before have done so. I do not know what new grounds remains to be struck in this regard. Still then I hope to create an ambience of novelty and clarity in what follows. I remember Mahatma Gandhi's words, "Whatever you do would be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." I also remember the adage of Jayanta Bhatta, the author of Nyaya Manjari in this connection:
kuto va nutanam vastu vayam utpreksitum ksamah/ vacovinyasavaicitramatram atra vicaryatam//
He means to say that we, the philosophical investigators, cannot discover a new thing or truth, but we can do something new by rephrasing in modern terminology the old truths propounded by the ancients. In our time, P.F. Strawson, a leading British philosopher, asserts, "If there are no new truths to be discovered, there are old truths to be rediscovered." He goes further to assert, "No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms." One would be regarded as anachronistic if one asserts in the technotronic global village today, "East is East, West is West and the twain shall never meet." There is meeting and participation in one another's material and intellectual products and joint ventures are there everyday in the field of culture, the upshots of which are too many like the much talked of 'Colonial Cousins'. It pays only to enrich and benefit both the Western and the Indian if we attempt to understand one another's tradition of philosophy that constitutes an important dimension of culture. Accordingly, I have set myself the task of assembling some of my thoughts that I articulated concerning the 16th century Advaita Vedantic text Vedantaparibhasa of Dharmarajadhvarindra in the idiom of Anglo-American philosophy of logico-linguistic analysis following the lead of Professor Ganeswar Misra. The views of Misra, and quite naturally the views of those, who more or less followed his line like me, were judged to be contra-tradition and vehemently criticised. I wish to say this much at present that the views that emerge out of such exercise are critico-constructive and quite in keeping with the tradition. I do not wish to affirm here what Professor Misra meant to say by making a survey of the whole philosophy of Advaita. I have instead chosen to limit myself to the import of the mahavakya (great logia) "Aham Brahmasmi" that constitutes the quintessence of Advaita. I shall first speak on the logical foundation of the mahavakya "Aham Brahmasmi" and then speak about its value implications.
"Aham Brahmasmi" is one of the four/five mahavakyas enshrined in
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