Introduction to Indic Knowledge Systems

As human beings march in their journey towards progress, through newer developments, they need to be guided by a core set of ideals and principle of living. In today’s context, these paradigms of living are stemming from recent ideas originating from the western world. While we have been making progress there is also a wide-spread understanding that for every new solution and idea that we discover, we introduce more and more challenges and problems arising out of them. This potentially raises the need to look for alternative paradigms for the emerging world order.  Indic Knowledge Systems (IKS) can potentially offer ideas for developing new paradigms for the world order. A knowledge of IKS is the first step in this process. Chinmaya University addresses this requirement through a two-part foundational course. 

IKS constitute a vast majority of literature spanning across multiple perspectives. This includes ideas on fundamental premises related to one’s living as laid out in the Vedas, components of knowledge that help us develop a correct understanding of the Vedic literature, Purāṇas, Darśaṇas, Smṛtis, Upa Vedas and many more. This is typically referred to as Caturdaśa-vidyāsthānam. This course outline covers one part of this knowledge tradition and the rest is covered in the second course.

The course design seeks to address the following issues:

  • Students will have an understanding of IKS capable of  organizing, interpreting and stating main ideas from the discipline.

  • Students will be able to appraise the role and importance of Veda, Vedāṅgas, Upa Vedas and Purāṇas.

  • The students would have surveyed the multi-dimensional nature of IKS and analyse their importance in the contemporary society.

  • The students would be motivated to take up a detailed study of some of these topics and explore their application potential. 

Pre-requisites  

There are no pre-requisites for this course as it is introductory in nature. Some rudimentary understanding of Sanskrit and familiarity with Devanagari script will be useful.

Readings

There is no textbook for this course. However, a set of readings have been identified under each module of the course. Students will be required to access these reading materials from the library repository and assemble a set of readings for their personal use.