It's a small world after all...

The terms astika and nastika from Sanskrit are wrongly translated as "theist" and "atheist". This post tries to explain their meaning. There is no notion of theism in dharmic thought. Sure, Hindus have several deities, but it is not the same as theism. A deity is used as a handle to focus one's thoughts and hermeneutics around what it represents, as a means of spiritual inquiry. This is characteristic of the bhakti marga mode of inquiry. The terms asti and nasti respectively represents something that is or is not . The video above, explains these terms. The fundamental debate in dharmic thought is whether there is a reality that is beyond our perception and cognition, or what we can perceive and think of is all there is. As in a much later era, the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, once said, "What we observe, is not the universe itself, but the universe exposed to our method of inquiry." A core debate in dharmic thought is as fol...