Philosophy
Daya Krishna challenges inherited classifications that present Indian philosophy as a closed and timeless system.
When a supposedly revealed text repeats large passages, both inside itself and across related texts, its composers were evidently borrowing from and reworking one another. That human relation between authors is hard to square with a text being revealed, authorless, or carrying fixed authority.
A tradition's character depends on which moment you sample. Take one century and every major school is non-theistic; take a much later century and theism dominates while whole schools have vanished. Any single summary of 'what the tradition believes' hides this change over time.
Schools that all name the same final aim, such as liberation, rarely argue about that aim or how to reach it. Their real quarrels are over metaphysics and knowledge: how many basic building blocks the world has, and what authority sacred texts carry. Labelling a whole tradition by its stated goal misses where the actual philosophy happens.
Describing a whole philosophical tradition as essentially spiritual and centred on liberation is a common assumption, not an established finding. Testing it against what the schools actually argue about shows that much of their work is technical argument about reality and knowledge.
The people who first composed a sacred text did not handle it the way later generations do. Its early authors reworked, repeated and branched it into many versions with a freedom that later reverence would call sacrilege. So the claim that a text is unauthored and untouchable may be a later attitude, not the original one.
Many texts treated as standalone works are in fact selections cut from an earlier, larger text. Reading them as independent original statements gives a false picture of how ideas were produced and passed on.