Logic and language in Indian religions

• Indian philosophy was profoundly shaped by the implicit belief that language and reality are deeply intertwined, a different “mental equipment” (outillage mental) from that of modern philosophers.
• Brahmanical thinkers believed Sanskrit was the only correct language, naturally linked to reality. The Veda, being authorless and eternal, contained sacred formulas (mantras) that could directly affect the world. This led to arguments that something must exist simply because a word for it exists in Sanskrit.
• Buddhist thinkers came to believe that the world of our experience is largely a construct of language. They held that only ultimate, momentary constituents (dharmas) were real, and that common-sense objects (like houses or chariots) were unreal concepts created by words.
• Both traditions, despite different starting points, accepted that our common-sense world is created by language. This shared belief influenced their arguments.
• A key implicit belief, the correspondence principle, held that a statement refers to a situation made up of the things designated by its words.
• This principle created a paradox for statements about production, such as “the potter makes a pot.” For the statement to be true, a pot must be part of the situation, but the pot does not yet exist.
• The Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna used this paradox to argue that the phenomenal world is self-contradictory and therefore does not truly exist.
• The Brahmanical Sāṃkhya school resolved the paradox by proposing that the effect pre-exists in the cause (sat-kārya-vāda), meaning the pot must already exist in the clay.
• Other Brahmanical thinkers, like Gauḍapāda, used the paradox to argue that nothing ever truly comes into being and that phenomenal reality is an illusion.
• Jaina thinkers addressed the problem with their doctrine of manifold reality (an-ekānta-vāda), arguing that from different perspectives, a thing can be said to be both existing (as its material cause) and non-existing (as its new form) simultaneously.