Ancient Wisdom, Modern Minds: Indian and Western Perspectives on Knowledge

Abstract

Purpose: The question of how human beings come to know — what counts as knowledge, how beliefs are validated, which cognitive processes are trustworthy, and what the ultimate purpose of knowing is — lies at the heart of philosophy across every civilisation. Western epistemology and the epistemological traditions of India represent two of the most richly developed responses to these questions in the history of human thought. This research paper undertakes a rigorous, multi-dimensional comparative examination of these two great philosophical streams, tracing their foundational commitments, their methodologies of knowledge validation, their divergent attitudes toward perception, testimony, authority, and direct experience, and the different visions of human flourishing that animate their respective epistemic programmes.

Methodology: In this paper, the exploratory qualitative research method is used. The relevant information is collected using keyword-based search in Google search engine, Google Scholar search engine, and AI-driven GPTs. This information is analysed and interpreted as per the objectives of the paper.

Analysis/Results: The Western tradition, anchored in the foundational inquiries of Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, has developed epistemology principally around the twin axes of empirical observation and rational deduction. Its crowning institutional achievement — the scientific method — has produced extraordinary advances in understanding the natural world. Yet it has also generated profound questions about the limits of sense experience, the possibility of certainty, the status of consciousness, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and the full range of human experience. The Indian tradition, represented by the six orthodox philosophical schools (ṣaḍ-darśana), the heterodox systems of Buddhism and Jainism, and the contemplative wisdom traditions encoded in the Upanishads and Yoga texts, has approached knowledge through the sophisticated framework of pramāṇa theory — a systematic account of knowledge-generating processes that encompasses not only perception and inference but testimony, comparison, presumption, and direct spiritual experience within a single unified philosophical architecture.

Originality/Values: Drawing upon primary philosophical texts and leading contemporary scholarship, this paper argues that the two traditions are not simply alternatives but complementary architectures of knowing, each with distinctive strengths and characteristic limitations. Western epistemology excels at generating verifiable, communicable, and reproducible knowledge of the external world; Indian epistemology provides a richer account of the sources of knowing, integrates the knowing subject into the fabric of knowledge itself, and preserves space for dimensions of experience — contemplative, testimonial, and transrational — that the Western tradition has tended to marginalise. The paper concludes by charting the contours of a possible synthesis, drawing upon the best resources of both traditions, that is adequate to the complexity of human knowing and to the demands of contemporary intellectual life.

Type of Paper: Exploratory Research.