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…
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,…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Both D. D. Kosambi (1907-66) and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (1918-93), two leading Marxist thinkers in India, discussed at length the teachings of the six heretics and of the Buddha during the sixth/fifth century BCE in their seminal works, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) and Lokāyata (1959) respectively. It will be…
MN Roy The dynamic view of nature attained a high degree of clarity with the Jains. The dialectic logic developed by the Jain philosophers was later on condemned by Sankaracharya as “an unsettling style of reasoning”. It was, indeed, unsettling for the rigid orthodox logic which set up an imaginary absolute standard. Once the absoluteness…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s Lokāyata (1959) is a much misunderstood work, although the subtitle of the book makes it clear that it is not meant to be a study in the Cārvāka/Lokāyata alone but ancient Indian materialism as a whole. Hence the book covers a wide range of issues involving archaeology, anthropology, Tantrism, Buddhism, Sāṃkhya,…
M N Roy As the composite outcome of all the positive elements in the whole previous history of Indian thought, Buddhism shook the very foundation of the hoary edifice of Brahmanical orthodoxy. It disputed the authority of the Scriptures; vigorously condemned the sacrificial rites and rituals of the Vedic Natural Religion; it denied the existence…