The Vice-President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, recently stated that “the characteristic of Indian thought is that it has paid greater attention to the inner world of man than to the outer world.” Indeed, the course of Indian thought, as told in standard accounts, might well be described as “Variations on an Idealistic Theme”.
Was there then no tradition of materialist thought in ancient India? The question is not quite so remote and academic as it may appear at first sight. For it has been the claim of anti-Marxists, both in India and elsewhere, that Marxist materialism is fundamentally alien to Indian categories of thought and experience: it is a foreign ideology. To this two answers were possible. First, of course, that the argument that Marxism is alien to such and such a nation or people or continent has been produced with respect to every continent, nation and people since the rise of Marxism. It was alien to Russia for many of the intelligentsia before 1917; it was alien to China; it is alien to Britain and her traditions. It is, apparently, alien everywhere.
But, secondly, we have known for a long time that there has been in India a body of thought which stood significantly apart from the mainstream of Indian philosophic idealism. The Cārvākas of ancient India appear to have arrived at a position as near materialism (we thought) as the dominating context of idealist thought would permit. The only difficulty in describing this body of thought as “materialism” (implying at least a moderately coherent and systematic account of the world) has been the simple and shattering problem of ignorance: we don’t know at first hand what these people actually thought.
This is a curious but not wholly unfamiliar situation in the history of human thought, especially of radical thought. Our knowledge of the second-century Christian gnostics, for example, derives almost entirely from the “refutations” of their thought by the Church fathers. So with the Lokāyata philosophy of ancient India. What survives of this school of thought amounts to scarcely more than grotesque parodies of their position by their opponents.
It has thus been left to Indian Marxists to piece together such evidence as we have, and to reconstruct the story of Indian materialist thought, its social roots, and the story of its survival in many forms to the present day. Not unnaturally, orthodox historians of Indian philosophy have been content in the main to accept the distorted accounts as adequate, or even to argue that since no one could have held such patently absurd views, such views were not held. Recently, however, there appeared a pioneering work in the field of Indian philosophy by D. P. Chattopadhyaya which makes it impossible to maintain that the Lokāyata philosophy did not exist.1 It is there, triumphantly alive in his pages.
Before we turn to him, it would be useful to summarise what was previously known to the generality of scholars. As he himself acknowledges, the bulk of the extant material relating to the Lokāyata view is to be found in the pages of Professor S. N. Dasgupta’s monumental A History of Indian Philosophy (1922–55), a work of erudition and scholarship for which no praise is too high. But Dasgupta merely presented the evidence – he did not (perhaps could not) draw the necessary conclusions which that evidence suggested.
To begin with, the meaning of the word Lokāyata is important, for in Indian philosophy etymology is an essential adjunct to philosophy proper. Lokāyata is a compound word which can mean one of two things. Loka can be used in the sense of “this world”, as opposed to the next, or in the sense of “the people”; āyata can mean either “based on” or “prevalent among”. So Lokāyata may be translated as a philosophy which is based on the material phenomenal universe, or, equally, a philosophy which is prevalent among the people.
This philosophy of the material world, which was also a popular philosophy, was reckoned to be on the one hand extremely ancient (Dasgupta wanted to put it down as an ideological import from the Sumerian civilisation) and at the same time quite recent – witness the running polemic conducted by idealist philosophers down to the fourteenth century A.D. There are, as we have said, no extant Lokāyata texts, but that there was an authoritative text with at least two commentaries on it, is beyond question. The earlier of the two commentaries has been dated by some scholars to before 300 B.C.
The Lokāyata Philosophy
What did the Lokāyata philosophy consist of? The most generally accepted view of the ancients is that expressed, for instance, by the Buddhists: Follow not the Lokāyata which does not strive towards an accumulation of virtue. “The Lokāyata leads to mischievous things and cannot lead to the path of Heaven or that of release2 and is only a tricky disputation which does not increase true wisdom,” wrote one Buddhist commentator. A Jaina writer said, “They are given to pleasures, amusements and sensual lust; they are greedy, fettered, passionate, covetous, the slaves of love and hate.”
But there are more specific indications about Lokāyata beliefs than these vague and sweeping indictments. Roughly, the Lokāyatikas (i.e. those who held Lokāyata views) may be credited with three distinctive positions: they have a theory of knowledge, they have a theory of being, and they have their own characteristic scheme of values.
To take these in order: the Lokāyatikas, it is said, deny inference based on inductive generalisation, and hence also deny causality. This derives from their theory of knowledge. For them, all knowledge is derived from direct sense-perception. They do not, like Bishop Berkeley, assert that “to be is to be perceived,” but they do say that not to be perceived is not to exist. This may be taken as a denial of occult or metaphysical entities whose existence cannot be verified by sense-perception. Their rejection of causality follows from this. Traditional philosophers have taken particular directly perceived facts, say, fire, and others, say, smoke. In between these direct perceptibles they have interposed a non-perceptible, a “cause”. To assert as they do, that fire is the cause of smoke is to go beyond what is given in experience. Experience gives us the antecedent (fire) and the consequent (smoke), but it nowhere gives us a “cause”. (In technical language, a “cause” would have to be a universal, and universals cannot be perceived.)
This is, of course, remarkably like Hume, and just as Hume was driven to admit after his denial of causality that in actual practice the ordinary business of life proceeds pretty smoothly on the assumption that causal relations do exist, so the Lokāyatikas admitted the usefulness of inductive generalisations and the postulation of causes. The terms in which this admission is couched are important, in that they give us a clue as to the real point of their argument against inference and causality. Purandara, a seventh-century materialist, “admits the usefulness of inference in determining the nature of all worldly things where perceptual experience is available; but inference cannot be employed for establishing any dogma regarding the transcendental world, or life after death . . . which cannot be available to ordinary perceptual experience” [emphasis added]. Their argument then is not sceptical but materialist: they object to inference as a logical technique only when it is used to demonstrate the existence of suprasensible states or transcendental beings. This, they say, would be bad logic.
Consistent with this approach, the Lokāyatikas reject verbal authority as a criterion of truth. That is to say, they reject the sacred texts as a court of appeal in matters relating to knowing about and living in the world. In any case, they argued, the sacred texts contradict one another at so many points that no consistent doctrine can possibly be erected on them.
Theory of Being
Then there is their theory of being. The Upaniṣads3 assert that the world is constituted of five elements: earth, water, air, fire and space. The Lokāyatikas reject “space” (on the ground that it is not present in perception) and accept only four elements, all of them physical. There are two aspects of their theory of being:
(1) In the natural world, they believe that these constituent elements and their motion sufficiently explain everything that happens, without reference to divine or transcendental explanations. “Fire is hot; water, cold; and the air is temperate to the touch. Who could have brought these distinctions into being if they were not of the very nature of these objects?” reads an aphorism attributed to them. They were, in short, naturalistic philosophers who wanted to explain phenomena by reference solely to the nature of the constituent elements of matter.
(2) Consonant with this rejection of the divine in the sphere of natural phenomena, they reject, in the human sphere, the existence of the soul. There is a reference in one of the Upaniṣads to certain heretics (identified by Jayanta, a later commentator, as the Lokāyatikas) who believe that “consciousness arises from the elements of matter and vanishes with them and there is no consciousness after death”. A Jaina text refers to heretics (again identified by a later commentator, Śīlāṅka, as the Lokāyatikas) who are reported to have said:
“So long as there is the body there is the soul, and there is no soul apart from this body, so the soul is identical with the body; when the body is dead there is no soul. When the body is burnt no soul is seen and all that is seen are but the white bones. . . . There is no separate soul which suffers pain and enjoys pleasures and migrates to the other world after the death of the body, for even if the body is cut into pieces no soul can be perceived . . .”
It is clear from these quotations that there is no place in Lokāyata ontology for the suprasensuous or the transcendental. The connection between this and their scheme of values is obvious; the last quotation goes on to say that, because of the essentially materialistic character of Lokāyata thought, they are also moral nihilists:
“The Lokāyatikas thus think that there is no fault in killing living beings, since striking a living body with a weapon is like striking the ground. These Lokāyatikas, therefore, cannot make any distinction between good and bad deeds as they do not know of any principle on which such a distinction can be made, and there is thus no morality according to them.”
This is a common cry against materialists, obviously untrue as we shall see. Another witness said of them that “with them a pigeon today is better than a peacock tomorrow [and it is] better to have a sure penny today than an uncertain guinea tomorrow”. On such grounds as these, others, including the famous idealist philosopher, Śaṃkarācārya, tried to account for the popular appeal of Lokāyata views: the stupid mob are easily attracted by this kind of “good digestion and no conscience” philosophy. Not all commentators, however, were disposed to take this view. Kauṭilya, the fourth-century B.C. author of the Arthaśāstra (“manual of policy”), reckoned Lokāyata, along with Sāṃkhya and Yoga [to be discussed later], as logical sciences, and there are numerous references in older texts which show that Lokāyata views were embraced by a considerable number of influential and respected people who could scarcely be lumped together with the mindless rabble.
It is not easy to decide from this whether the Lokāyatikas were academic, if heterodox, materialists, or sophistical demagogues preaching (and practising) a doctrine of wine, women and song. And Buddhaghoṣa, a fifth-century A.D. follower of Buddha, did not resolve the problem when he described Lokāyata philosophy as a vitaṇḍā-vāda-sattham, i.e. the science of vitaṇḍā-vāda. Now vitaṇḍā means a sophistical argument playing on logical fallacies with no positive thesis to offer of its own; the sole intention is to confuse one’s opponent. Vāda, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: it is a discussion involving the presentation of a positive thesis which is debated in a fair and scrupulously logical manner. Lokāyata was, apparently, both these things at once!
Contradiction could hardly go further, and the picture one gets (even when tidied up, as here) is so confused that it is not surprising that some historians have despaired of finding any Lokāyata school at all. “We are not convinced,” wrote Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, “that a materialistic ‘school’, a ‘system’, in the exact sense of the word existed.” What, then, does Mr. Chattopadhyaya make of it all?
Reinterpreting Ancient Texts
It is difficult to summarise a book of six-hundred-odd pages marked by a boldness of interpretation, solid learning, and breadth of outlook such as we have here. From an amusing account of the confusion in the ranks of scholars faced with the problem of Lokāyata, he moves to a brilliant exercise in reinterpretation of some misunderstood ancient texts which are shown to be relevant to the problem of reconstructing Lokāyata thought. A long excursion into the historical background sketches in the social matrix of tribal matriarchal communities in which the materialistic outlook flourished, which gave birth also to Tantrism.4 The “proto-materialism” of Lokāyata is then shown to develop into the philosophic materialism of Sāṃkhya (one of the oldest of the “six systems” of Indian philosophy). The birth of idealist thought (for it is Mr. Chattopadhyaya’s contention that the materialistic outlook antedates idealism) closes the account.
He begins by showing that the central text on which scholars have relied for their understanding of Lokāyata, the Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha (“encyclopaedia of all the systems”) of the fourteenth-century A.D. writer Mādhava, is thoroughly misleading. A time-gap of some 2,000 years separates him from the thinkers he is criticising. He himself was so diametrically opposed to the Lokāyata outlook, that his attempt to state their position by explaining how he would defend them (this is his method of exposition) is at best hopelessly one-sided. And because later historians have started from the assumption that Mādhava was the central witness on the Lokāyata school and have taken the authenticity of his account for granted, it meant necessarily that they were more or less incapable of making coherent sense of the other evidence about Lokāyata before them. The Lokāyata School is thus reduced to a knot of fractious sceptics, without any positive views of their own, indulging on the one hand in sophistical destruction of the religious beliefs of people, and on the other in a crude and callous hedonism.
Chattopadhyaya will have none of this. The essential down-to-earth nature of Lokāyata logic and epistemology is undeniable, but it is not modern empiricism in disguise. It would be unhistorical to regard their this-worldliness as though it were equivalent to a modern secular outlook. The Lokāyata School denied the existence of the Brahmanic gods, the reality of the after-life, the efficacy of the Brahmanic ritual sacrifices. But they were able (and concerned) to do this because they had an alternative to offer in place of the Brahmanic tradition. They had an outlook of their own, and this was bound up no less with a specific set of ritual practices and beliefs. The clash between the Brahmanic and Lokāyata traditions is not a conflict between the orthodox-religious and the secular-sceptical-empiricist.
“The full picture that we have . . . is not that of certain isolated sophists indulging in useless disputations; it is rather the picture of a clash of two cultures. The exponents of one were preaching God, heaven and immortality and, as a means to attain these, the efficacy of the Vedic sacrifices. The other represented the standpoint of the people and was trying to defend their material interests” (36) [emphasis added].
What was this “culture,” “deeply rooted in the masses of the people,” which furnished the source of such a strong opposition to the Vedic religion? Many ancient Indian texts refer to certain opinions as the asura view.5 These were known to be prevalent in India long before the Aryan invasion from the north took place. Two important views are found to be attributed to the asuras: that the self is identical with the body (as opposed to the non-material soul), and that the origin of the universe is the result of a process similar to that of sexual reproduction. The first point obviously connects the asura view to the Lokāyata position; the second is related quite clearly to those ritual practices known as Tantrism, which were based on the belief (1) that the deha, i.e. the human body, is a microcosm of the universe, so that action in the one produces effects in the other, and (2) that creation or production of any kind is fundamentally sexual in type. So the creation of the universe, according to the Tāntrikas, is sexual in character; moreover, they believed, the production of the means of subsistence, agriculture for instance, could be enhanced by a preceding sexual union. (For this reason they are accused down the centuries of practising sexual orgies, of being incurably promiscuous, morally depraved, and so on!) It is clear then that we have here a complex of beliefs and practices tied up with a primitive stage of social development, and that this complex is consistently associated with the asuras.
The Asuras
They are the natives of India whom the Aryan invaders of the second millennium B.C. encountered in their course. The asuras, it is said, have fortifications, they are dark-complexioned, flat-nosed and of “unintelligible speech”. Indra, the leading God of the Indian pantheon, the Hindu Jupiter, is known as “the destroyer of fortresses” as well as “the scourge of the asuras”. The excavations of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and others have uncovered in the remains of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa of the Indus civilization traces of extensive fortifications, which enable us to date with some plausibility the final destruction of these cities and connect it with the Aryan invasion c. 1500 B.C.6 The Indus civilisation, however, embraced in its orbit more than just these two highly developed “city-states,” and it seems clear that asuras for these early writers were not only those who used fortresses. It referred to all those people “who were considered by the inheritors of the Vedic tradition to be aliens [who] enjoyed a culture basically different from the Brahmanic one” (42).
That these people were organised in tribal communities is evident from the references of the early Vedic texts as well as the descriptions left by Greek travellers of later times; and it is in the organisation and subsequent history of these tribal communities that the roots of Lokāyata beliefs and practices are to be found. These indigenous communities were matriarchal in organisation and subsisted principally on agriculture. At this early stage of social development, when manual and mental labour had not been separated from their unity in the processes of production, it was possible for an outlook to arise which is here characterized as “primitive proto-materialism”, an instinctive attribution of primacy to material existence. (Readers of Professor George Thomson’s work, whose inspiration the author acknowledges, will be familiar with the argument.) In the matriarchal organisation of these communities is to be found the explanation of the overwhelming importance attached to the female principle in both Tantrism and Sāṃkhya, as well as the assertion of the equality of men and women which is found in Tantrism, so fundamentally at variance with the theory and practice of traditional Indian society.
In the clash between the Vedic Aryans and these tribal communities, the latter were broken up and what might be described as a wholesale social reconstruction was effected. By the time of the Buddha (who died c. 483 B.C.), this had become clear-cut policy. Kauṭilya, the Machiavelli of India, characteristically put it all down in cold blood in the Arthaśāstra. The tribal communities, whose military prowess and group solidarity had been commented on by the Buddha and others, were broken up into small and self-contained agricultural villages. Mother-right was equally violently suppressed. Here was an artificial and externally induced change in the social structure,
“for it was not a case of the natural disintegration of the tribal societies consequent upon the advancement of productive technique. . . . The whole process led to a peculiar social set-up which may be roughly characterised as despotism above with incompletely destroyed tribal society in the villages below. The cumulative effect . . . is that the Indian masses have retained in their lives strong elements that are traceable to the tribal society” (179).
One of the most illuminating sections of this book, incidentally, traces the origin of the caste system, that most confused of Indian historical problems, to this process of “incomplete detribalisation”.
It will be clear from this why Lokāyata, the philosophy of this world, was also the philosophy of the people. In its origins it was not, strictly speaking, a “philosophy” as we understand that word. Lokāyata, writes Chattopadhyaya,
“was possibly a broad word used to refer to the popular ‘cults’, which, though opposed to the Brahmanical rituals, were nevertheless characterised by rituals of a this-worldly character. The followers of the Brahmanical culture called Lokāyata the asura-view” (46).
But out of this background there emerged Tantrism and Sāṃkhya, whose significance for the development of Indian thought cannot be overestimated.
We have seen that sexual immorality was frequently attributed to the Lokāyatikas. The exact nature of these practices, so shocking to the Brahmanical writers (who, incidentally, overlooked traces of just such practices in the early Vedic texts themselves), reveals that the Lokāyata tradition had a definite connection with Tantrism, both of which Chattopadhyaya shows as rooted in the practice of agricultural magic. The Vedic people, by contrast to the surrounding tribal societies, were predominantly pastoral and patriarchal. To the Vedic writers, therefore, the dominant position of women among the asuras was evidence of their degenerate character. So too those fertility ritual practices which are common to all primitive agricultural communities. It is here that the real nature of Tantrism is to be sought.
Tantrism
For Tantrism, like Lokāyata, is both extremely ancient (traces of it are to be found in the Indus civilisation remains) and also contemporary: it has survived among lower-caste sects to the present day, in the process acquiring accretions of Hindu, Buddhist and other systems, with their concepts of “virtue”, “liberation” and the like, which have no logical connection with the essentially materialist and physicalist outlook of Tantrism proper.
Tantra means “propagation” and as we have seen the fundamental characteristic of Tantrism, which remains constant in all its later developments, is its conception of nature and natural processes on the model of the human body (dehavāda). The character of production is sexual, and this involves two interacting principles, the male and the female. In Tāntrika alchemical literature these principles are identified with the familiar alchemical substances, mica and mercury. Indian alchemy, however, in contrast with European, conceived the female principle (śakti) to be dominant. Now Chattopadhyaya’s account of Tāntrika origins makes this difference of outlook intelligible.
The importance of Tantrism lies in its inbuilt orientation towards the material world and mastery over it, even though such mastery is sought by means of magic rather than a scientific understanding of natural laws. This orientation is so strong that even when later Tantra had grafted on to it idealist concepts like “liberation” and “immortality”, these were invariably understood in a physicalist sense: immortality is to be sought in the culture of the body (hence yoga). However, the distinction between magic and science at this stage of human development is much too sharp. As Joseph Needham has argued in connection with Taoism in China (which, as he has shown, has many connections with Indian Tantrism), “science and magic are in their earliest stages indistinguishable. . . . Magic and science were originally united in a single undifferentiated complex of manual operations.” This practical and manipulative relation with nature accounts for the materialist approach of Tantrism, its concern with physical and physiological processes. It also explains why Tantrism was the bearer of scientific thought in India, for if the Lokāyatikas can claim to be the first logicians of India, the Tāntrikas must be reckoned among the first scientists. They discovered, for instance, that the brain and not the heart is the seat of consciousness, advancing from Aristotle to Galen. But the most remarkable feature of the Tāntrikas is their outlook. India is known to be par excellence the land of tradition and custom, where philosophy typically takes the form of commentaries on texts transmitted down the generations. How astonishing it is then to come across in Tāntrika literature statements like the following:
“I have performed the aforementioned experiments with my own hands and have seen them with my own eyes. They are not recorded from mere hearsay or from the dictation of a teacher. These are being promulgated for the benefit of mankind.”
“I shall give publicity only to such processes as I have been able to verify by my own experiments.”
“Those mercurial operations alone have found a place in my book, which I have been able to put to tests. Those who teach without being able to perform experiments labour in vain.”
With their emphasis on experiment and verification, their rejection of authority and their refusal to take opinions on trust, not to mention the concern “for the benefit of mankind”, these remarks might have come out of the era of the birth of modern science in seventeenth-century Europe.
Matter or Consciousness
Perhaps the most exciting chapter of Chattopadhyaya’s story is his demonstration that the Lokāyata and Tāntrika tradition found its theoretical formulation in what is regarded as one of the most important schools of Indian philosophy, Sāṃkhya. The resemblance between Sāṃkhya and the heretical Lokāyata school was in fact noticed by earlier writers. Original Sāṃkhya was definitely atheistic, and Śīlāṅka, for instance, acutely observed that the Sāṃkhya doctrine was virtually indistinguishable from Lokāyata in its rejection of the soul.
The Sāṃkhya system (certainly pre-Buddhistic in origin) was known as pradhāna-kāraṇa-vāda, i.e. a doctrine of the first cause or ultimate reality, as opposed to the Vedānta7 philosophy, which was called brahma-kāraṇa-vāda, i.e. the doctrine of the Brahman, the principle of consciousness, as the ultimate reality and first cause. The opposition was between those who held, with the Vedāntins, that consciousness is the ultimate ground of whatever exists (cetana-kāraṇa-vāda), and those who held, like the Sāṃkhya and Lokāyata schools, that matter, unconsciousness, is the ultimate reality (acetana-kāraṇa-vāda). The pradhāna of Sāṃkhya is prakṛti, which may be roughly translated as non-sentient and non-evolved matter. Here, then, we have the conflict between idealism and materialism on the philosophical level.
The distinctive features of Sāṃkhya philosophy are: a theory of matter, a theory of causality, a theory of evolution and a theory of mind. All these are, of course, linked together in original Sāṃkhya (which, too, like Lokāyata, has to be largely reconstructed) into a consistent materialist philosophy.
We may start from the Sāṃkhya view of causality. This was known as the doctrine of sat-kārya-vāda, which I propose to translate as the theory of “the latent effect”. (It has often been rendered as the theory of “the pre-existent effect” which is certainly not what the Sāṃkhya philosophers meant.) In any causal sequence, Sāṃkhya held, the effect is already latent in the cause. The classic analogy of the acorn and the oak is apt here: the oak (effect) is latent in the acorn (cause). It represents a development of the acorn and to that extent is different from it. But it is latent in the acorn in the sense that the development of the acorn by the laws of its nature alone, without reference to external agency, produces the oak.
The point of this theory of causality is that it is (or at any rate attempts to be) a materialist theory. To say that the effect is different from the cause tout court is to say that something is created out of nothing. “What exists not, can by no operation of cause be brought into effect.” The Sāṃkhya theorists, rejecting the entire notion of the creation of being out of nothing, argued back from effect to cause on the principle that like produces like. That is to say, starting from the indubitable reality of the material world and the causal relations to be perceived in it, they worked back to the first cause or primary state of the universe. Their theory of causality ensured that this primary state was not dissolved into an act of creation out of nothingness.
Evolution of Matter
Sāṃkhya held that the ultimate reality of the universe was prakṛti, undifferentiated and non-sentient matter, out of which the differentiated world as we know it has evolved. (Prakṛti, it may be noted, is feminine in character.) Sāṃkhya cosmology considered this primeval unitary state of being as constituted of the harmonious equilibrium of three elements (guṇas): the sattva, the rajas, and the tamas. Tamas is the principle which lies behind the solidity of objects; it is mass, or the inertia of Newtonian mechanics, the resistance offered by bodies to an impressed force. Rajas is the principle that lies behind action, and may properly be translated as energy. Finally, sattva is the principle exemplified, for instance, by the flame: it is light, pure and it illuminates. (It is possible that the concept of sattva is an attempt of these materialist thinkers to find an adequate, i.e. non-reductive, description of consciousness as a phenomenon.) The state of equilibrium of these three elements is described as the avyakta or “unexpressed” phase. From this stage, however, primeval matter passes into the vyakta, the “expressed” phase, it begins to differentiate itself as the initial state of equilibrium breaks down.
What starts the process? Sāṃkhya is silent on the point, and later adherents, anxious to bring the system in line with the Vedānta school, ascribed the initiating role in evolution to the puruṣa, the male principle, conceived as the principle of awareness or sentience. Now this element (while it did exist in original Sāṃkhya) when credited with an active role in the evolutionary process raises, as we should expect, acute contradictions in a consistently materialist scheme, contradictions which were brilliantly exploited by the eighth-century philosopher Śaṃkara. There is no reason, however, why Sāṃkhya, which was so squarely based on the concept of the self-development of matter, needed to call in an external agency such as awareness to start off the evolutionary process. Chattopadhyaya is almost certainly right in saying that this is a later development (distortion would probably be the correct term).
Evolution in Sāṃkhya is periodic or cyclical. There is a first ascending stage in which the process consists (to quote Seal) “in the development of the differentiated within the undifferentiated, of the determinate within the indeterminate, of the coherent within the incoherent”. This development proceeds on the basis of the uneven distribution of the three elements, which means that even determinate objects are in a constant state of flux. There is then the descending stage, in which the process turns into its opposite, as it were, and differentiation and development give place to dissolution, until the whole system returns to its original latent state of indeterminate prakṛti. This is not, however, the dead universe of Jeans’ and Eddington’s fancy, for nature, even in dissolution, retains the inherent principle of movement, its spontaneous activity. One cycle succeeds another.
Two points are to be noted in the Sāṃkhya account of nature and evolution. Change, in Sāṃkhya, is conceived as real change. The doctrine of the latent effect does not mean that cause and effect, pre-evolved (avyakta) and evolved (vyakta) phases, are at bottom the same. The evolutionary theory of Sāṃkhya is called pariṇāma-vāda, roughly, the doctrine that change consists in a real transformation, the acquisition of a new form. The point will be clearer if we contrast this view with the view of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school, for instance, which saw change as change of place only, mere mechanical motion. Where Sāṃkhya conceives matter to be spontaneously active, self-moving, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika attributed change and motion to an agency external to the body moved. Sāṃkhya was an evolutionary doctrine where Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika was a mechanistic one, if these terms are not anachronistic in the context of ancient Indian philosophy.
Theory of Mind
The uneven distribution of the three elements mentioned above needs to be looked at because it furnishes us with the Sāṃkhya theory of mind. In the material world we may distinguish between bodies at rest, bodies in motion, and (let us say) human activity. Bodies at rest will exhibit a predominance of the inertial principle, energy will be latent and sattva will be sub-latent. Bodies in motion will exhibit a predominance of energy, inertia being latent and sattva sub-latent. In human movements, energy and sattva (the principle of consciousness) predominate, inertia being latent. Finally, in states of consciousness as such (e.g. thinking) sattva predominates, while energy and inertia remain latent and sub-latent.
How does this involve a theory of mind? What the Sāṃkhya view implies, according to Chattopadhyaya, is that “even in states of consciousness, the characteristics of crude matter must be latently present. It is tempting to comment here that if we agree to integrate later scientific knowledge with this standpoint, we have to restate it as the view that thought or consciousness is not without a latent cerebral process. It will be the fundamental premise of a materialistic theory of knowledge. Though the early Sāṃkhya philosophers were yet to be acquainted with the connection of consciousness with the cerebral process, there is no doubt that they were trying to understand intelligence, self-consciousness, mind and the sense-organs as essentially products of matter” (455–6).
This, in rough outline, is the Sāṃkhya philosophy as it originally stood. It did not remain in this consistent form, and by the time that the first extant Sāṃkhya texts were written (about the fifth century A.D.), idealist accretions had already gathered round its central tenets, grossly impairing its internal consistency as a system. The “Achilles’ heel” of Sāṃkhya, as Chattopadhyaya aptly comments, proved to be the concept of the puruṣa, the male, representing that which is passive and conscious, as distinct from prakṛti, female, active and insentient. In original Sāṃkhya the puruṣa-consciousness had no role to play at all, as it logically could not, being udāsīna, i.e. indifferent, the uninvolved spectator watching the spontaneous unfolding of the cosmic process. When later writers, attempting to bring Sāṃkhya in line with the Vedānta doctrine of the primacy of consciousness, tried to foist the primary role on to the puruṣa, the system became self-contradictory: a purely passive entity was endowed with the supremely active role of initiating and guiding the process of evolution. One may reflect here that in the process of formulating the instinctive materialism of Lokāyata in conceptual terms in Sāṃkhya, the way was opened for the emergence of idealism within materialist thought. Such a conclusion, implying that the very act of philosophising is, as it were, tainted at the source, would however be too sweeping. A more historical view might suggest that a fully consistent materialist philosophy (which is no less philosophical for being materialist) would have to await the development of men’s understanding of nature and of themselves beyond the point at which Sāṃkhya arose.
It is not possible here to trace in detail the fascinating story of the emergence of idealism in Indian philosophy, the orthodox Vedic tradition, which itself arose on the ruins of a primitive proto-materialism, nor the final collapse of materialist philosophy into a fatalistic determinism while the Buddha’s teaching of withdrawal and release from the world swept through the country. It is there to be read in Chattopadhyaya’s book.
It is not out of place to say here, though, that the distinguishing feature of this book is the systematic and convincing way in which the history of philosophy is reconstructed and linked to social structure and social change. Anyone concerned, for instance, with the anomalous position of the puruṣa, the male principle, in Sāṃkhya thought, will find his comments on the role of the male in matriarchal society both provoking and suggestive. The analysis of the rise of Buddhism against the background of the stupendous social transformation of the India of the time is simply brilliant.
Marxism, wrote Engels, “is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction. All history must be studied afresh. . . .” If the Marxist method needed any vindication, this book amply provides it, for out of a chaotic mass of material, each part meaningless in isolation, it has produced a systematic, coherent and fruitful synthesis. Fruitful, because it raises a host of questions, of fact and interpretation, which must be pursued in detail. It is to be hoped that Indian Marxists will follow up Chattopadhyaya’s pathbreaking work with the hard thinking and research that it calls for. In any case, the problems he has raised will not, one suspects, be answered until scholars have at least come to grips with the Marxist method.
What, finally, is the importance of the Lokāyata tradition for Marxists today? The concluding word, the moral of the book so to speak, may be left to the author himself. Lokāyata, he writes, “was crude, naive and primitive, and has little to compare with the self-conscious materialistic philosophy of original Sāṃkhya, not to speak of the scientific materialism of today. Nevertheless, the recognition of this proto-materialism has its importance for the modern materialist and this importance can be compared to that of the recognition of primitive communism by the scientific socialist. He lays stress on it not because he dreams of returning to it; his purpose is rather to show that human relations based on private ownership and class-exploitation are not without a beginning and end. . . . Thus also is spiritualism and idealism, so often claimed as inherent in Indian thought: we will do without these in the future as we did in the past.”
Notes
- Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism. People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1959. Rs. 27.50. ↩
- mokṣa = release, liberation from the bondage of the material world, held to be the ultimate goal of human life. ↩
- Upaniṣad = literally, “secret knowledge” (as contrasted with Veda = “knowledge” with no strings). These are religious treatises of the Vedic school, of about 600–500 B.C. ↩
- Tantrism was a system of quasi-magical practices, related in later forms to alchemy, and involving physical culture and rites, by means of which various desirable ends (material wealth, immortality, etc.) were to be achieved. ↩
- asura = literally, demon. The Bhagavadgītā, the Bible of Hinduism, has this to say about asuras in Chapter 16, entitled “Divine and Demonic Tendencies”: “In this world there are two kinds of beings: those whose nature tends towards the Divine, and those who have demonic tendencies. Asuras . . . maintain that the scriptures are a lie, and that the universe is not based upon a moral law, but godless, conceived in lust and created by copulation, without any other cause. . . . They offer sacrifice to God in name only, for outward show, without following the sacred rituals.” The asuras thus have a non-Vedic cosmology and practise non-Vedic rituals. ↩
- A good account of this may be read in Stuart Piggott’s Prehistoric India (Pelican, 1952), Chs. 6 and 7. ↩
- Vedānta = literally, the end of the Veda. The name given to the later systematisation of Vedic thought, so that it was seen as the culmination of the philosophy of the Vedas. ↩
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