"Being is no longer the essential matter to be thought." Martin Heidegger Western thought clings to the notion that consciousness is essentially both 'intentional' (awareness of something) and the private property of an egoic 'subject'. It has no concept of a Universal Awareness or 'Absolute Subjectivity' of the sort that Indian thought has long understood as the source of all individualised consciousness. Yet in the language of Martin Heidegger we find words such as 'The Open' or 'The Illuminating Clearing', which suggest a primordial 'space' or 'light' of awareness - one that is the condition for any consciousness of things, and is not the private property of any being, body, brain or 'ego'. Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought explores in an original way the proximity of this language to those schools of Indian thought which recognise a pure, universal and 'non-intentional' dimension of consciousness - an Awareness (Chit) prior to and transcending 'Being' itself (Sat).

This book shows the close relation between the phenomenology of the West and the phenomenological approach taken by Indian thinkers, both classical and modern. It illustrates that the underlying spirit of phenomenology and hermeneutics has been consciously followed by Indian philosophers for centuries and is not peculiar to Western thinkers. It also shows that Edmund Husserl and K. C. Bhattacharyya were aware of these parallel trends of thought. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy addresses not only the basic theme of phenomenology, but its aesthetic, social, psychological, scientific, and technological aspects as well.

In these essays, J.L. Mehta, Indian philosopher in whose life and work East and West met profoundly, reflects on the origins and potency of modern hermeneutics and phenomenology, and applies the principles of interpretation to Hindu traditions. These farseeing essays show a hopeful way for non-Western cultures to gain insight into the basic presuppositions of the Western world, and to reclaim their own origins and ways of thinking, and to participate in an emerging planetary thinking.

Being and Meaning is a comparative study of the concepts of Being and Language in Bhartrhari and Martin Heidegger, emphasising the universality of their thinking. Language in Bhartrhari's vision is the medium of the self-expression for the Ultimate Reality (Sabdatattva). In Heidegger's thinking language is the Original Utterance (Sage) which Being speaks to man. Being expresses itself in language, and phenomena in the world occur simultaneously with the occurrence of language. Bhartrhari and Heidegger lead one to the belonging togetherness of Being and being beyond all conceptualizing, transcending the bounds of Orient and Occident.

The text of Martin Heidegger's 1930-1931 lecture course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit contains some of Heidegger's most crucial statements about temporality, ontological difference and dialectic, and being and time in Hegel. Within the context of Heidegger's project of reinterpreting Western thought through its central figures, Heidegger takes up a fundamental concern of Being and Time, "a dismantling of the history of ontology with the problematic of temporality as a clue." He shows that temporality is centrally involved in the movement of thinking called phenomenology of spirit.