G Ramakrishna Indian Philosophy, especially the school of Vedanta with its source in the Upanishads, has been the subject of endless panegyric on the part of writers on the subject. Here are a few choice examples of their exuberance: “The Upanishads contain a scientific search for the substratum underlying the phenomenal forces of nature”. “In…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 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,…
Published in 1965, ‘Carvaka Darsana ki Sastriya Samiksa‘ (A Critical Study of Carvaka Philosophy) gives an overview of Carvaka philosophy. Though the author, Dr Sarvananda Pathak (who was a lecturer in Sanskrit, Nava Nalanda Mahavihara, Nalanda, when the book was written) is critical of Carvaka philosophy (the title of the sixth chapter, in fact, is…
Th. Stcherbatsky Amidst the diverse philosophical systems which we find in India, ancient as well as modern, it is quite natural that there must have been some materialistic system too. Their main approach lies in reducing all the psychic processses to physical ones, negating the independent existence of soul, and affirming that the so-called soul…
Normal 0 T.A.P Aryaratne When we speak of Buddhism we mean the doctrine set forth in a certain collection of compositions, chiefly discourses, orally transmitted over a period of some five centuries before the Christian era began, and committed to writing towards the close of that period. From this fact we cannot justly conclude that…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya In ‘The British Rule in India,’ one of his contributions to the New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853, Marx waxed both passionate and indignant: ‘We must not forget that these little [village] communities [in Hindostan] were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead…
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…
G. Ramakrishna While laying the foundation-stone for a planetarium in Bangalore recentlyi the President of India explained how the Vedic lore is replete with astronomical knowledge. He almost felt that the Vedic people seemed to know more astronomy than we do. Shortly after the president’s revelation about Vedic astronomy came Maj. Ahluwalia’s analysis about the…
G Ramakrishna Karl Marx pointed out that truly human liberation is to be achieved only by breaking every kind of bondage that mankind has been subjected to in the course of the evolution of society through different social formations. Emancipation has its philosophers even as oppression has its agents and defenders. Marx as the most…
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…