Short Bibliography

Professor Frits Staal studied philosophy, logic and mathematics at Amsterdam, then went to India and took up Sanskrit. He went to teach at the London SOAS, where he met Soumyen Mukherjee, back to Amsterdam for comparative philosophy, on to MIT for linguistics and to Berkeley where he stayed until he retired in Thailand. Staal has always been interested in the interfaces between these all too numerous fields of study, refusing to distinguish between sciences and humanities and convinced that we cannot understand ourselves without understanding our species and at least some of the others from which our genetic make-up hardly differs.

Secret Behind Walls

The origins of Indic philosophies lie before philosophy in the Upani?ads but behind them stands the ritual enclosure of the Sadas. Both terms are derived from the verbal root sad- which means “sit” and relates not to chairs but to mother earth. It is a posture of which the peoples of South Asia seem to have always been inordinately fond.

Inside the Sadas, reciters and chanters from opposite backgrounds sit back to back and sip Soma. The way was paved by the Rigveda which discussed four levels of language, including mantras and paving the way for the artificial language of linguistics.