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SPREAD OF EASTERN PHILOSOPHY TO WEST:

 The  arrival of  british east india company and other European powers in Indian sub continent led to a positive interaction between the east and wet especially Europe.


The Royal Asiatic society was established by the Europeans at Calcutta in 1750s.  This forum aimed at understanding Indian arts, science and philosophy. Many of the works were translated and sent to Europe. Earliest works were translated to German language and made significant impact to the German idealism.
In fact Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism was not unknown to eastern schools.

 Hegel made significant observations about Hinduism and noted the deeper connotations in Hindu symbols, images and arts. He felt the gods in Hinduism are representations of unconscious processes. Schopennehauer   was an  important philosopher who had admired Upanishads and Vedas.

The subsequent raise of phenomenology and existentialism with Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche  and Karl Jasper …etc followed this thread. Freud and his psycho-analysis were substantially influenced by this thread from Kant. While phenomenology aimed at describing the mental contents the psycho-analysis strived to find explanations to the mental functions.

The presence of existentialism, phenomenology and psycho-analysis in Hindu thoughts are well known and they were here for 3000 years in Buddhist, Jain and Hindu works.  The psycho-analytic contents are so much pronounced  in  siddhantham. The similarities with Freudian terminologies are so striking and sometimes the symbolisms are almost same in both schools.

Even though many Europeans studied agama works there are no convincing proof so far to say siddhantham  was directly translated to European languages before19th  century. Hence it is not fit to say saiva siddhantha related texts  directly reached the western scholars before 1900.
Though the findings in saiva siddhantham shows significant similarity with western psychoanalytic tradition there is hardly any evidence to prove direct physical connection between them until now!

Shall write you more
Affectionately
gandhibabu



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