800×600 Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 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 Upaniṣads on the one hand, and the Buddhist and Jain canonical works on the other, the fragments offer only a glimpse of materialist thought.…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 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…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya ABSTRACT ‘The Duologue of King/Governor Pāyāsi’ (“Long Discourses”) has long been recognised as a source for the proto-materialism current at the time of the Buddha. What needs to be stressed is the significance of the text as a pointer to the development of Logic in India. Perception (observation and experiment employing the joint…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The Jayarāśi Question The Lion Assailing the Verities (Tattvopaplavasiṃha), written by Jayarāśi probably in the ninth century, 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…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 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…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Besides the Upaniṣads, the origins of materialism in India can be traced to tales found in both Buddhist and Jaina works. One such tale, the conversation between King Pāyāsi (Paesi) and a Buddhist or a Jaina monk, has been cited as an instance of materialism[i]. The story, found both in Buddhist and Jain…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The word “materialism,” as the name of a distinct approach to nature, including human nature, in the context of philosophy is found only relatively recently. The first recorded occurrence of the term in English, presumably borrowed from French, dates from the mid-eighteenth century. “Idealism,” the contrary of “materialism,” is not found in English…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Astrologers in India and abroad claim that their ancient discipline of study is to be recognized as a branch of science. The issue was resolved in Europe long ago. As early as the fourteenth century, a clear distinction had been drawn between astronomy and astrology, the first regarded as a science, the second…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya This is Part II of the essay “From Proto-materialism to Materialism: The Indian Scenario”. Part I can be accessed here. 6. Inventory of Sources for Studying Materialism in India What are the sources for studying the course of development from proto-materialism to materialism proper? A philosophical system in India implies…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 1. Introduction The course of philosophy all over the world did not follow a single pattern. Yet it is interesting to note how the sixth/fifth century BCE threw up several socio-political ideas and philosophical doctrines, both materialist and idealist, in faraway places, unrelated and almost unbeknown to one another. D.D.Kosambi, the mathematician-turned-Indologist, once…