The West went through what we now call the 'Dark Ages', for reasons I have described before. Indian thought continued uninterrupted and got well ahead of the West for much of history (it was tied more rigorously to scripture, but with freer interpretation of scripture - the word could not be changed but the meaning could). Because it is so wrapped up in religion - religion is really the spirit of old India - Indian philosophy seems 'weird' and fantastical to many modern westerners. However, some of it is quite simply the best humankind has produced.

HINDUISM taught (teaches) that we each have/are a soul - atman - and that in truth atman is not different from Atman (Brahman), the one soul of the universe. When we die it is atman that is reincarnated in a new body. When we are finally liberated from all bodies (the Hindu word for 'salvation' is 'moksha', which means literally 'liberation') we realise our union with Brahman, which we were, unknowingly, all along. There are many schools of Hindu thought with various emphases on the ONE or the MANY, but all relate something like the above. Hinduism is about self-knowledge - literally, knowledge of the self. In the famous Chandogya Upanishad, Svetaketu is told by his father to break open a seed. What does he see? Nothing. He is told, 'tat tvam asi', which means, 'that thou art'. The invisible, subtle essence, the flavour of salt in water - that is what we are. Hermann Hesse took the words 'tat tvam asi' and slipped them without explanation into his book, The Steppenwolf. Read the book and find out why…

BUDDHISM (which evolved out of Hinduism) denied the existence of a soul at all. The three characteristics of all [conditioned] existence are:

     · duhkha - suffering
     · anitya - impermanence
     · anatman - no self

But even by the third or fourth century AD a major school of Buddhism emerged (one of the two major schools) which could not live without self in some form! This was the YOGACARA. It developed a philosophy called 'mind-only', believing that ultimately only mind was real and all the contents of mind derived not from without but from within. They were (are) internal modifications of mind - there is no external world of objects, in truth.

The other major (and better, says GP) school of Buddhist thought continued to teach anatman in its true sense - this was the Madhyamika school, with its chief spokesman the great philosopher, Nagarjuna.

The West did not come up with a coherent 'mind-only' philosophy until the eighteenth century, when Bishop Berkeley (also a religious man) produced a superficially very similar system!

He started, as did the Buddha, from pure empiricism - that is, he only took as data for his theories what he actually saw, not what he imagined. David Hume had already pointed out that he could not see his self - only objects represented in his consciousness. Berkeley went further. The objects seen (or heard &c.) were never more than their surfaces (or aural equivalent). We never perceive unperceived objects, as they are in themselves. Indeed, it could be doubted whether there were such things at all - experience only delivers perceived objects. The realm of perception - mind, or consciousness - is all we know and there is no need to presume something beyond this.

Unlike the Yogacaras, Berkeley did not actually say that we create objects - rather, that they have no substance beyond our perception of them. In his system it is God who guarantees the commonality of our experiences and 'puts' the objects there. All ideas, ultimately, are God's ideas. The Yogacaras believed that our mind is ultimately one with the absolute mind - Berkeley believed in separate minds for each of us.

Both Buddhism and Berkeley raise the thorny question - what evidence, if any, is there that the external world does exist? Descartes' account of a God who would not deceive us is flawed -

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