When I was a student, the term "Indian philosophy: was usually regarded as self-contradictory, a contradictio in adjecto, comparable to such an absurdity as "wooden steel." "Indian philosophy" was something that simply did not exist.
The whole edifice of Indian civilization is imbued with spiritual meaning.
We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason, why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy and yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom.