Philosophy as we know is the ideas or view about a particular subject, topic or area of study, if we talk about Indian philosophy it deals with the idea of life that is prevalent in India. The first and the most important condition for the growth of ideas is the easily availability of food and other resources so that people have enough time to think about other part of life other than survival and in case of India both the things were available in plenty and helped the people to go in search of knowledge and purpose of life as survival was never a challenge for Indian society. Other important role is of forests, most of the area in India is covered by the tropical deciduous, these forests receive most of their rain fall only during monsoon season and because of this reason there is little space between trees, this makes the dwelling of forest easy and we know that a lot of our Rishi and Munis like Gautam Buddha lived in forests in search of knowledge. The third factor that helped in the growth of Indian philosophy was the natural barriers like Himalayas and oceans that protected India from foreign invasions and allowed the growth of Indian philosophy in isolation, Indian philosophy is independent in its idea and vision.
The Indian philosophy is spiritual in nature and is human centric. Spirituality in Indian philosophy does not mean that the idea of life in India is dominated by religious activities and gods, rather it takes into account the relation between individual and the universe. Even it would not be wrong to say that philosophy forms the core of spiritual system in India, there has been continuous growth of philosophical idea and these ideas in turn guided the Indian religion, this is one of the reason that Hinduism never remained confined to one idea a number of philosophical gurus in form of Rishi and muni’s contributed to the making of Hinduism unlike other religion that are guided by one prophet. The spiritual nature of Indian philosophy does not mean that other scientific developments were not part of the it. Ancient Indians were the first in the world to develop the system of astronomical calculation to predict the future position of planets moon and sun, even today these calculations are used to calculate solar and lunar eclipse with atmost accuracy. Ancient Indian also developed ways to measure land and gave the most accurate values of distance between the sun and the Earth. One of the first advancement in the field of natural science were made in India that later gave birth to subjects like medicine, astronomy, mathematics, physics, grammar etc.
Indian philosophy like ancient time is based on the idea that everything that is connected to human is a part of philosophy. It is impossible to understand and answer questions like why humans were born and why are we here but Indian philosophy has provided the best possible answers to the questions what is life? What is afterlife? And what is the purpose of life?
Pingback: The Vedic Philosophy - ANEPIC