Passions and emotions in the Indian philosophical-religious traditions

Anyone enquiring into the status of passions and emotions in traditional India is surprised to find that the subcontinent, so avid for analysis in every field of knowledge, has never produced any science similar to western psychology. It is in fact in philosophical texts, and perhaps even more in the treatises on aesthetics and rhetoric that we should look for a thesaurus of human passions and emotions. But if we wish to discover how they are assessed in the Indian world, things become even more complicated. Two main alternatives are possible: to accentuate the integrated and unitary aspect of the body-senses-psyche-intellect complex, or to concentrate on the otherness of the knower principle, the ‘spirit’. Brahmanic philosophy – and, mutatis mutandis, Jaina and Buddhist philosophy, decidedly take the second alternative, the option that we might, somewhat roughly, term ‘ascetic’. It is against this background that we should read the revolutionary response given by Indian Tantrism.