Carvaka/Lokayata
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Cārvāka Miscellany – Part II
Materialism in India, very much like materialism in Greece, has to be reconstructed on the basis of fragments. Although the materialist tradition can be traced back to the early Upaniṣads on the one hand, and the Buddhist and Jain canonical works on the other, the fragments offer only a glimpse of materialist thought. The same…
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Specimens of Philosophico-Religious Literature in Tamil: The Maṇimēkalai and the Nīlakēci
North-South Divide The story of Agastya, a north Indian sage, crossing the Vindhya hills and visiting south India (never to return), is well known. It has given rise to a proverb, Agstya-yātrā in Bangla and maybe in other north Indian languages. Like all legends it is without date. So, it has been interpreted as an…
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Cārvāka The Base Text and Its Commentators from the Eighth Century
Cārvāka: The Base Text and Its Commentators from the Eighth Century We now come to the formation of the philosophical systems, each having a set of aphorisms or sūtras with commentaries and sub-commentaries. Broadly speaking, the brahmanical position was unsparing in denouncing all the three of its non-Vedic adversaries, while the materialists had to put…
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The Cārvākas against Caste and Gender Discrimination
[This is Part II of “Facets of Materialism in India: A Historical Outline”. Part I is here] The Carvakas against Caste Discrimination Let us now see what these two arch-opponents of materialism say regarding the materialists’ (or, to be more specific, of the new materialists,’ i.e., the Cārvākas’) views on caste and women. In Kṛṣṇamiśra’s (eleventh…
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Tattvopaplavavāda of Jayarāśi and its Alleged Relation to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata
The Lion of Upsetting of all Principles (Tattvopaplava-siṃha) by Jayarāśibhaṭṭa has been claimed by some scholars to be the only surviving Cārvāka work. Others have challenged this view.i Since there is no external evidence to settle the question, the debate continues solely on the basis of internal evidence and intrinsic probability. No near-unanimous (total unanimity…
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Lectures on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata Philosophy: Some Common Misrepresentations concerning the Cārvāka/Lokāyata Examined
a. Did the Carvakas Refuse to Admit Inference? In the Indian philosophical context, besides the issues of rebirth, after-life and other-world, the instruments of cognition (pramana) are considered to be of seminal importance. The Carvaka/Lokayata is generally branded as a philosophical school which accepted perception as the only means of knowledge. But there…
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Lectures on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata Philosophy: An Overview of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata Materialism
What is Materialism? It is necessary to understand what, in the philosophical context, materialism stands for. George Stack has recently defined materialism as follows: Materialism is a set of theories which holds that all entities and processes are composed of or are reducible to – matter, matterial forces or physical processes. All events and…
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The Cārvākas and The Jains: An Overview
A The Cārvākas, the Buddhists and the Jains share a common platform in the Indian philosophical scene in as much as they all refused to accept the Vedas as an instrument of cognition on a par with perception and inference. Hence the Brahminical philosophical schools call all of them nastika, that is, negativists, on believers…