No 1 (2014)

The construction of the ecological civilization is a task which could be solved by the contribution on behalf of the peoples representing different cultures. Plurality of axiological orientation makes culture multidimensional, dialogical, allows the latter to transform itself, moving to the periphery that was yesterday dominant in the culture and putting forward that what responds to the needs and demands of the new times. Any utopia, as inversion of an existing society transformed by the author's imagination, not only foretells but also diagnoses the need for the correction of a social order. It opens up new possibilities, offers options for changes. The construction of ecological civilization could be compared with the scheme of growing the ‘Rose of the World’ dreamed by Daniel Andreev.

Truth is one of the key values in Western culture, and in the History of Western Philosophy it had different images. The position of truth in the History of Indian Philosophy was similar. But sometimes in India it is very difficult to retrace the way from the word ‘truth’ to the philosophical category. In this article are traced main lines of discussions about the truth and principal senses of Indian terms (satya, j¤аna, Dharma, prаmахya). Buddhists were the firsts who introduced the concept of truth, originally in a form of the Four noble truths doctrine then as Mahayana concept of the two truths (conventional and absolute). In Indian tradition, as well as in Western philosophy, truth was considered differently in existential, moral, ontological, soteriological, epistemological and logical perspectives. Indians also distinguished between inferential and semantic concepts of truth. From Western point of view their aspiration to build a theory of the World, which will explain the existence of its different natural and supernatural levels, which are cognizable by rational and super-rational means, brought Indians to paradoxical, contradictory results. Typical example of such contradictory theory of truth can be found in Jaina relative truth doctrine about impermanent and pluralistic reality (syаdvаda or anekаntavаda).

The paper is devoted to the collection of canonical, apocryphic and post-canonical texts known under the brief title Gzungs bsdus which was first printed at the Rtag brtan monastery founded by the famous figure of Tibetan Buddhism Tāranātha in 1619 as a monastic center of Jonangpa school later converted to Dge lugs pa and renamed to Dga’ ldan phun tshogs gling after Jonangpa was crushed by the government of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the mid of the 17th century. The paper is based on an unique collection of various editions of Gzungs bsdus kept at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author discovered some editions which had never been introduced to the academic work, including the possibly oldest one printed in Mongolia and most close to the original edition (non-available) and two early Beijing editions, one of which is also close to the Rtag brtan edition while the other one was probably made right before the first official edition made in 1674 in Beijing for Kangxi, the Manchu Emperor of China. Some other sources, primarily later Tibetan editions of Gzungs bsdus available at the TBRC e-library, were also used. On the basis of comparison of all the editions found, from the earliest ones to the last Lhasa edition made in 1947, the author could present the first rather valid, from textological point of view, picture of development of this colelction of texts with two major lines clearly ascertained — the Original Tibetan one and the Imperial Beijing one.

Understanding of the philosophic content of the A.P. Chekhov’s oeuvre, which is based on the writer’s idea of the original religious and philosophic world view and at the same time of him as a thinker of an existential type, who had a significant impact on the development of Russian philosophy of the XX-th century is presented and exposed in the article.

The issue of the spiritual liberation in Hindu Tantrism is closely linked with an idea of the primeval source of everything, or of that supreme, absolute Reality, God. Only such a free divine Being who has never known any bondages, can provide the release for the poor samsaric souls. The participation of the Godhead in life of suffering beings looks like a manifestation of a compassion. The divine grace is expressed in sending down of the blessed power (anugraha). Tantric deities paradoxically combine in themselves truly incompatible things, for example, knowledge and illusion. However, the duality of the tantric Deity is rather apparent than real. It is a consequence of the distorted focus of perception and of the unenlightened level of a person. The great soteriological gift bestowed by God, is rarely obtained by an adept without any effort or intent on his (adept’s) part. The spiritual path unfolds as from below, i.e. from a position of the subject, and from above, i.e. from the ultimate Reality.

The existence of semantic relation was postulated in Katyayana’s Varttika (3 B.C.E.), which served a key-stone for the further development of Indian language philosophy. However in different Sanskrit texts (Tantras, the Nirukta, works on ritual and poetics) the existence of semantic relation had been denied explicitly. This paper considers specific characteristics of extralinguistic kinds of activities that stipulated the genesis of these texts and elicits the reasons why their authors rejected to use ordinary language, for the sake of establishing new semantic relations.

The paper deals with the concept of Brahman in the early Vishishta-Advaita-Vedanta School, particularly in Yamunacarya’s treatise “Ishvarasiddhi”, the main passages of which are lost.

In the article the particularities of lingual representation of the SELF / OTHER binary in the Persian lingua-cultural area on the basis of the Persian phraseological fund are researched and interpreted within the terms of cultural codes.