G. Ramakrishna A significant enunciation, with copious evidences, by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya was that the Lokayata-s were not always looked down upon by the elitist sections of society in ancient India. Denunciation of the Lokayata-s based on their alleged hedonistic approach to life is philosophically and historically quite medieval in thinking. It is one of the…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Jayantabhaṭṭa, a luminary of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school (ninth century C.E.) was a domicile in Kashmir although he was a Gauḍa brāhamaṇa by origin. His exegetical work Nyāyamañjarī (NM) contains stringent attacks against the Cārvākas. Speaking of the instruments of cognition, Jayanta at one place says: “the Cārvākas say that there is only one…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya I apologize to learned readers for this disproportionately long proem. They certainly know all this from their own experience. Like them I too had to pay a price — a very heavy one at that — for placing absolute trust on the words of the base texts on some occasions as well as…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharyya ABSTRACT The base texts of most of the philosophical systems of ancient India are in the form of a collection of aphorisms (sūtra-s). The aphorisms are so brief and tersely worded that their significance can seldom be understood without the help of a commentary or commentaries. Sometimes, the literal meaning of an aphorism…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The existence of more than one materialist school before the Cārvāka (eighth century) has been admitted by modern scholars.[1] They have used different nomenclatures to denote the pre-Cārvāka and Cārvāka materialist systems. I prefer to use simpler names, «old materialism» and «new materialism».[2] Unlike them, however, I do not propose to confine…
Chandogya Upanisad (viii. 7-9) As one of the principal Upaniṣads, the text is usually viewed as pre-Buddha, and hence, might have belonged to c. seventh century BC. Since in the extract quoted here we have the earliest reference to a view identifying the body with the self, which is reminiscent of one of the typical…
Subhendu Sarkar The Carvaka/Lokayata has a special place in the history of Indian philosophy. Contending against the pro-Vedic Brahminical and the non-Vedic Buddhist and Jain schools, the Carvaka flouted the belief in after-life and afterworld and advocated an uncompromising materialist philosophy in ancient India. But as the most of the material relating to the Carvaka…
Krishna Del Toso Studies on the Carvaka/Lokayata (hereafter S-C/L) is a collection of 23 articles on various aspects of Carvaka/Lokayata (hereafter C/L) philosophy, written and published in several journals, mostly Indian, by Ramkrishna Bhattacharya during the last 15 years. This book not only represents the philosophical and cultural heritage received from Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s and Mrinal…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya If one sets upon oneself the task of translating the Sad-dharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra (SDPS), a first-century CE Sanskrit Mahāyānī Buddhist text, into a modern Indian language, one will face no problem with the word lokāyata. It is current in all and can be retained in translation without bothering to explain what lokāyata means.[1] But translating…
Surama Dasgupta In the different cross-currents of thought in the Mahabharata we have traced a positive trend of ideas commingled with the traditional, which has taken a more definite form and a different line in the Ayurveda. Both of these steer a middle course between the two different ideals; that of transcending the worldly experiences,…