Buddhist and Hindu Reductionism in Understanding the Universe

From the origin of the Indian philosophy up to the present development, the philosophical discussion of the nature of cosmology has been playing a crucial role in understanding the universe. Both Hindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions unanimously agree upon the vastness of the universe, hence using different methodologies to know the universe had been introduced by them concerning the limit of human experiential knowledge. On one hand the human life span seems insufficient to gain the complete knowledge of the universe. On the other, the universe seems endless through the empirical knowledge and they were frustrated by the fact of the eternality of the universe. However, this fact laid for more search on the universe due to the curiosity to know the world. Eternality became a philosophical issue both in time and space dimensions. If the cosmos is eternal in the time, the implication arrived by them was the beginningless and endless of it. If the cosmos is treated as eternal in terms of space, what was implied was the beginningless and endless in both directions. Even though there had been a number of efforts to understand the universe, due to above difficulties it was impossible to have a complete knowledge of it. To alleviate them, Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions implemented the reduction method as a strategy. For instance, the universe had been depicted through the macrocosm, yet it can be perceived by microcosm of the individuality. The Buddha also had shown the futility of searching the universe, yet affirmed that it can be known by an analogy of the individual. Here, the term reductionism is being using for the method of analogies in understanding the universe. This research paper expects to elucidate comparatively this unique methodology used by the both traditions.

Analogy, Macro, Micro, Reductionism,

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