Eastern Philosophy

A short, sceptical map of the whole terrain, written by a scholar who refuses to flatten the traditions into a single spiritual outlook.

Sen's case that public reasoning and dissent are an old Indian habit rather than a colonial import. The first three essays are the ones that matter here.

The Katha, Isha and Chandogya are the ones to read first. Easwaran's version is plain enough to follow without a commentary at your elbow.

Doniger's selection includes the Nasadiya hymn, which ends by doubting whether even the gods know how the world began.

A soldier refuses to fight and is argued out of it. Read it as a problem in ethics rather than as scripture and the argument becomes genuinely difficult.

A verse retelling that keeps the moral ambiguity intact. Nobody in this poem is simply right, which is the point of it.

Narayan's prose condensation of Kamban's Tamil version, which is a useful reminder that there has never been only one Ramayana.

The compact verse summary of the Buddha's ethics. Short enough to read in an evening and worth returning to for years.

A Sri Lankan monk and scholar setting out the four noble truths without mysticism. Still the clearest single introduction in English.

Read this for the split into Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, which is where most confusion about Buddhism begins.

The standard scholarly account of a tradition whose theory that every claim is true only from a standpoint deserves far more attention than it gets.

Read the Carvaka and Lokayata section. Indian materialism survives mostly in the words of the people attacking it, which is itself worth noticing.

The Indian volume of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps series. It treats Nyaya logic and Samkhya metaphysics with the seriousness usually reserved for Aristotle.

The text underneath the modern yoga industry, and almost entirely concerned with the mind rather than the body.

The most accessible statement of Advaita, that the self and the absolute are not two. The attribution to Shankara himself is traditional and disputed by scholars.

A weaver who mocked Brahmins and mullahs with equal energy. Mehrotra's translations are deliberately modern and keep the rudeness intact.

The vachanas of the Kannada Virashaiva poets, Akka Mahadevi among them. Ramanujan's introduction is itself a short course in Bhakti.

A Rajput princess who walked out of her marriage for Krishna and wrote about it. The most widely sung woman poet in India.

Written in ten days on a ship in 1909, and far stranger than its reputation. Gandhi rejects not only British rule but railways, lawyers and modern medicine.

The speech he was never allowed to deliver, and the most direct challenge in Indian thought to the tradition the rest of this section reads. Gandhi replied in print; Ambedkar's answer is printed with it.

Three lectures from 1917 arguing that the nation is a machine and that India should not want one. Written by a patriot, which is what makes it uncomfortable.

The third volume of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, covering eight centuries of thought that most Western surveys skip in a paragraph.

Known as the Second Master after Aristotle. His ideal city takes Plato's Republic and asks what it would mean under revealed religion.

A legal judgement arguing that philosophy is not merely permitted by Islamic law but required of those capable of it.

Twenty arguments against the philosophers, including a demolition of causation that anticipates Hume by six hundred years.

Averroes quotes Al-Ghazali line by line and answers each one. The title is not subtle and neither is the book.

An intellectual autobiography. Al-Ghazali doubts everything, has a breakdown, leaves his professorship and comes back through Sufism.

Twenty-five thousand verses of stories, jokes and theology. Read a proper translation rather than the loose English versions that circulate online.

Thirty birds cross seven valleys to find their king and discover what they find. The best single allegory the tradition produced.

Ibn Arabi's own writing is close to impossible cold. Chittick, the leading scholar in English, is the way in.

Written in 1377, and arguably the first work of sociology. Ibn Khaldun explains political change through group solidarity rather than the deeds of kings.

A child raised alone on an island reasons his way to metaphysics without language or teachers. A philosophical thought experiment written as a novel five centuries before Robinson Crusoe.

Fragments of conversation collected by students. There is no system here, which is why it has been read for two and a half thousand years.

Eighty-one short chapters on the value of not acting. The most translated book in the world after the Bible, which should make you careful about which version you read.

Jokes, paradoxes and a man who cannot tell whether he dreamt he was a butterfly. The funniest book in ancient philosophy and one of the most serious.

Human nature tends towards good the way water tends downhill. Mencius argues it from the case of anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well.

Assume everyone acts from self-interest and design the laws accordingly. Legalism is the tradition Confucians defined themselves against, and it won politically.

An eighth-century Indian monk's guide to acting for others, and the text most quoted by the Dalai Lama. The chapter on patience is the one people return to.

The founding text of Chan, later Zen. An illiterate kitchen worker outargues the senior monk and inherits the tradition, which is the point being made.

Dogen argues that practice is not a means to enlightenment but is enlightenment. Difficult, beautiful, and best read in selections.

Talks given to Americans in the 1960s by a Japanese teacher who assumed nothing. The most widely read Zen book in English and deservedly so.

An essay on lacquerware, toilets and electric light that turns into a complete aesthetic philosophy. Under a hundred pages.

The anthology Zhu Xi compiled to define what a Confucian should read. It set the Chinese examination syllabus for six hundred years.

Wang argues against Zhu Xi that moral knowledge is innate and that knowing something without acting on it means you do not know it.

The first original work of Japanese philosophy in the Western sense, published 1911. Nishida starts from pure experience prior to the split between subject and object.