Eudaimonia and the Indian distinction between Shreyas and Preyas

In much of modern Western thought, ethics has increasingly come to be identified with morality. It is approached primarily as a domain of rules, obligations, and judgments concerning right and wrong. Even where ethics is treated as practical philosophy, action is often understood as derived from beliefs, values, or moral principles. By contrast, in the older Aristotelian understanding, ethics concerns the question of how to live well. Oriented toward eudaimonia—often translated as human flourishing—it belongs…

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Why Moksha is Not “Salvation”?

One of the central problems within Indian tradition that scholars grapple with is moksha, often translated as “spiritual liberation” or “salvation”. Yet to translate moksha as “salvation” is a category mistake: it imports an alien conceptual framework and ultimately results in the loss of understanding of a distinct tradition with its own knowledge quest. Why is translating moksha as salvation a category mistake? Let us probe more into this question by looking at the concept…

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On the Ethical Domain and Bhakti

It has been noted that unlike the Greek culture which spearheaded thinking about the domain of ethics, there is an absence of terminology in India which is meant to encourage reflection on ethics. This has raised the question: How is it possible to reflect on and reason about the domain of ethics when there is an absence of words to talk to about the domain? I would like to argue that words like bhakti, atman,…

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