In last post we learned the meaning of culture and the importance of culture. The most important component in the making of culture is religion and religion is nothing but the philosophy of life, for example one of the most important cultural Indian value is ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’, this value has been adopted from one of the Upanishads and the philosophy behind this idea is that each of us is part of supreme personality that is god and all the humans must be treated with the same respect as god, without this meaning the idea of Atithi Devo Bhava cannot be achieved, hence philosophy plays a very important role in the acceptance of the ideas. Now the question arises, what is philosophy? And what is the importance of philosophy in culture and religion?
Philosophy means an idea or way of thinking about the things around us. If a person has a different opinion on the existence of life then this opinion or idea can be termed as philosophy of that person on life, but this opinion must be based on questioning and argument. Though modern era associates philosophy with topics like knowledge, values, behavior, life etc, but philosophy is not limited to the topics related to life and knowledge only it includes topics from everything around us. The earliest topic of philosophy was nature, which included astronomy, physics, medicine and religion. At a later stage all these topics emerged as full-fledged subjects and philosophy remained limited only to the topics related to life and reality.
Culture and religion both are incomplete without philosophy because both the terms depends on ideas and practices based on the theories that are mentioned in the religious texts of the respective religion. These theories are nothing but the philosophy of life based on the supreme personality which we know as god. It is these philosophies that help in the propagation and readily acceptance of both culture and religion as these philosophies are based on questioning, reasoning, discussion and arguments it makes the understanding of religion easier. If we talk about Indian culture it is based on the Indian philosophy which is again a collection of ideas in form of Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads and Puranas. The Vedas forms the core of Indian philosophy and all other Hindu sculptures either explains the ideas mentioned in the Vedas or completes it, this also includes the philosophy of both Buddhism and Jainism as the ideas of both the religion are believed to be taken from the Vedas
Indian philosophy is divided into two parts i.e Astik and Nastik based on their belief in the Vedas, each part is sub divided into 6 parts. Astik belong to that branch of thinkers that believes that the knowledge in the Vedas is beyond questioning, their ideas are based on the conclusions drawn from the study of Vedas. Nastik is that branch in which the thinkers don’t believe in the ideas of Vedas and has proposed their philosophies based on their knowledge and experience, Nastik branch mostly includes the philosophies related to Jainism and Buddhism.