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, and finally, the genesis of idealism.
There is also an appendix significantly entitled “Material Basis of Idealism”,
extracted from an earlier and longer article by the author.1 It is
in connection with the section on the Buddha (Book III. Chapter 7, “Sangha and
Niyati: Studies in Illusion and Reality”, 404ff) that Chattopadhyaya discusses
the Pali Sāmañña-phala-sutta (SPS), a
major text in the Dīghanikāya, and analyzes the teachings
of the Buddha vis-à-vis those of the five heretics, more particularly Ajita
Kesakambala, Makkhali Gosāla, Sañjaya Belaṭṭhaputta, Pakudha
Kaccāyana and Pῡraṇa Kassapa, leaving Nigaṇṭha Nāthaputta out of
discussion. The reason for this exclusion, Chattopadhyaya says, is “we do not
have the scope here to discuss Jainism” (507). However, Gosāla is discussed in
detail, for “his failure in life and teachings formed the most dramatic
contrast to the success of the Buddha” (507).
Afew words about the Pali SPS first.
It has long been regarded as the main
source of our knowledge about the six chief heretics at the Buddha’s time.2
The same text has been found in several Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan versions.
Although differing in some details, particularly as to which doctrine is to be
attributed to which teacher, an overall view of the heretical doctrines current
in the sixth/fifth century BCE is now available both in the original languages
and in translations. In spite of Vogel’s criticism of Basham’s neglect of the
Chinese and Tibetan sources, it is now more or less established that the Pali
version with all its textual problems is the oldest of them all.3
get back to our point: one of the many questions that Chattopadhyaya raised in Lokāyata is: Why did the teachings of the Buddha’s
contemporaries, especially the major five of the sixty-two heretics, recorded
in the Pali SPS, fail to survive
while the teachings of the Buddha
succeeded? Chattopadhyaya’s answer was: The Buddha had provided the right
illusion to replace reality which his contemporaries could not (506-07).4
Sen(gupta), an ideologue of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), in
his otherwise appreciative review of Lokāyata
, objected to this formulation of Buddhism as a fitting illusion. He said:
This is a negative
approach which fails to explain the social progress of the epoch under the flag
of Buddhism. Mere “illusion” cannot act as an incentive to a popular upsurge
through material and cultural development. In so far as there was lack of
science, illusion it was. But it must have possessed a positive content. Perhaps
their positive aspects consisted in the doctrine of Karuna and the principle of
order which had given stability to benevolent despotism. (11. Emphasis in the
original).
analysis of the SPS has been
considered significant. It has been referred to by Graeme Macqueen.
Chattopadhyaya, he notes, rightly pointed out:
question [asked by Ajātaśatru] was simple enough. The teachers must have
understood it. Evidently there was no real answer from their points of view:
none of them could think of any real advantage in the life of a recluse.
the above passage from Lokāyata
(509), Macqueen comments:
This
point is so basic one might also miss it. But it is very important. According
to the doctrines of all the heretical teachers except Mahāvīra, who clearly
does not fit in this group, there was no benefit to be gained by abandoning
home and becoming a śramaṇa, and no point to śramaṇa’s exertions. By contrast,
in the Buddha’s system there was
positive value and reward to these things, as is amply shown in his discourse (270
n121).
also asks his readers to see p. 486 of Lokāyata (where, after stating his view of the
Buddha and the five heretics, Chattopadhyaya mentions Mahāvīra and grants him
some “success, though not as great as that of the Buddha” in evolving “a proper illusion of the epoch”).
is interesting to observe that Chattopadhyaya in later years revisited the
problem again and again and modified his stand. This is evident from his long
essay, “Some Problems of Early Buddhism” (1970) and his two book-length
studies, What is Living and What is Dead
in Indian Philosophy (1974) and Science
and Society in Ancient India (1977). However, they are concerned with the
Buddha’s teachings only, not those of the heretics.
his “popularizer”, The Beginnings
(1990)5 Chattopadhyaya seems to have revised his whole attitude. There
are some new features in this slim book which appear in a more developed form
in his History of Science and Technology
in Ancient India (HSTAI), Vol. 2
(1991). One cannot fail to notice a gradual and significant change in his
attitude towards the six heretics and the Buddha from disapproval to growing
admiration (Bhowani Sen’s criticism may have played some part in this
transition) . Snide remarks about Ajita Kesakambala and others as philosophers
of the graveyard6 are silently dropped. A new merit is found in
their rejection of Brahminical ideas, for, instead of submitting to such ideas,
they promoted doubt. The Buddha is now called “the first social scientist”
((1991), 109); he is placed against the backdrop of the second urbanization,
and what Chattopadhyaya had already said in his 1970 essay is reiterated. Since
the essay may not be known to all, I extract below the relevant passage which
forms the conclusion of the study:
Strangely
enough, …the Buddha had even a closer similarity with another great social
reformer…. He was Robert Owen. For Robert Owen, too, was building his sanghas,
the communist colonies, as the Buddha, in the heart of a class divided society.
Further, like the Buddha, Owen thought the change of heart would bring in such
a miracle (36).
could such similarities occur in spite of all spatio-temporal difference? Chattopadhyaya
provides a neat answer:
Such
similarity may appear to be very strange; however, on a deeper understanding of
the historical development we can see there is nothing mysterious about it.
Both of them saw the tyranny of the class divided society and because the
Buddha stood very near its beginning while Owen near its end, the vision of a
classless society could inspire both (36).
The Beginnings Theodore Stcherbatsky was
brought to stress the significance of the Buddha’s rejection of private
property as also of the existence of the (permanent) soul (126). Stcherbatsky in
an address (24 August 1919) said:
Where
there is personality there is property belonging to it; where there is “I”,
there also is “my”; and where there is personal property, there necessarily
emerges a love for it in one form or the other. This attachment to personal
property is the root of all evil, the root of every personal action as well as
of all social injustice. Thus, by negating the existence of the soul, Buddhism
gives us a very profound philosophical basis for the negation of the right of
personal property. What personal property can be possible where even the
personality itself is not there? (26)
concluded the passage with the following observation:
In
the history of world religions, of Christianity and of Islam, we frequently
find doctrines which negate personal property and advise that this be
renounced. But Buddhism gives the most radical treatment of this question. (26)
The Beginnings Chattopadhyaya dealt at length with causality
and dialectics, mostly following Rhys Davids and ended with the concept of nirvāṇa, quoting at length from
Oldenberg (132-36).
All
this, let us note, not only modifies Chattopadhyaya’s earlier position somewhat
radically but supplements much that is new. Even in The Beginnings he was
critical of the Buddha’s plan of the Saṃgha. “The begging bowl”,
he regrets, “became the symbol of a Buddhist monk and private property took its
revenge as it were on the Buddha for having been so critical of it” (136). In HSTAI, he revisits the whole issue and,
what is significant, goes back to the six heretics, quoting again their views in full from the SPS (this time from a new translation).
He now follows Dharmananda Kosambi (not only his illustrious son, D.D. Kosambi
whom Chattopadhyaya quoted several times in 1959)7 and proposes to
relate Sañjaya’s doctrine of vikṣepavāda/vikkhepavāda (the doctrine of equivocation) to the syādavāda doctrine of the Jains.
Chattopadhyaya did not fail to note the fundamental difference between the two:
while Sañjaya negated all alternative possibilities, the Jains affirmed the validity of all the ways of looking at
things (86).
the omission of Jain philosophy – a serious lacuna in Lokāyata – was filled in HSTAI. Pluralism (anekāntavāda) received its due place of honour in what
Chattopadhyaya described as the “intellectual turmoil” in India of the
sixth/fifth century BCE. His study of the “new intellectual climate” is rounded
up with the overview of the Upaniṣads on the one hand and
Buddhist and Jain texts on the other. A fuller picture emerges from his analysis
in his last work.
made Chattopadhyaya change his view so radically about the Buddha and the six
heretics? The answer is not to be sought subjectively. That Chattoapdhyaya was
an ever dynamic thinker and an indefatigable researcher is obvious from his
works and needs no reiteration. What is
to be noticed is the veritable shift in his approach. From the philosophical-doctrinal position he had
adopted in Lokāyata he gradually
moved in his later works, culminating in HSTAI,
to a more concrete historical-critical
study of all philosophical systems. The ideological
foundation of Lokāyata was a very broad historical-materialist one.
It was based on the division of all human societies into three stages:
pre-class, class, and classless. Particular details of Indian history were not
fully taken into consideration. In HSTAI,
on the other hand, he locates the Buddha and the six heretics against the
backdrop of the Second Urbanization, following the discovery and use of iron in
eastern India,
and then to the transition from tribe
to state. V. Gordon Childe seems to have exerted greater influence in this new
approach. Chattopadhyaya appears to have discovered the reason why “all history
must be studied afresh”. In a letter to Conrad Schmidt (1890), Engels cautioned
long ago:
[O]ur conception of history
is above all a guide to study not a lever
for construction after the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied
afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be individually examined before the attempt is made to deduce from them
the political, civil-legal, esthetic, philosophic, religious, etc. notions
corresponding to them. (Selsam and others (eds.), 71. Emphasis added)
too in a letter to the editor of a Russian journal (end of 1877) declared the
same even earlier:
[E]vents
strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to
totally different results. By studying each of
these forms of evolution separately and
then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one
will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historic-philosophical theory, the supreme value of which
consists in being super-historical. (Selsam and others (eds.), 71. Emphasis
added)
proved himself to be a truly creative Marxist by choosing the route suggested
by the founders of historical materialism. Instead of following an
over-generalized super-historical theory, he studied the Buddha and the six
heretics individually, separately in the context of their own place and time
and arrived at his conclusions. He did
not hesitate to modify his earlier views in course of his research and
presented his new findings boldly and emphatically. This should and certainly
would guide future researchers in this field.
Probal Kumar Sen drew my attention to Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇvārttika, I. 201, 217, 18 and his auto-commentary on I. 222 which relate ātman,
aham, and mama. Professor Sen observed that these and similar other sources
might have suggested the idea to Stcherbatsky or he might have worked out the
idea of his own.
accepted as c. 486 BCE but recently on the basis of archaeological evidence the
date has been brought down to c. 400 BCE. See Norman, 50-51.
Thomson (An Essay on Religion, 1950) are only too apparent in
this phraseology. Although Chattopadhyaya did not mention Caudwell in the
bibliography of Lokāyata (as he did Thomson), it is evident that the
concept of illusion and reality as found in Lokāyata is not derived from F.H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 1893) but from
Caudwell. It may also be remembered that
Thomson wrote the preface to Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality (signed “G.T.”) and took part in “The Caudwell
Discussion” in The Modern Quarterly (Spring, 1951).
Sankrityayan’s critical evaluation of the Buddha in Darśan Digdarśan (1944) (mentioned in the Lokāyata bibliography), too, might have influenced Chattoapdhyaya
to some extent.
study of philosophy, being the first volume of an eight-volume series, Global Philosophy for Everyman, edited
by Chattopadhyaya himself.
to the title of Roger Garaudy’s booklet, Literature
of the Graveyard (New York, 1948).
Garaudy was then a leading member of the French Communist Party.
views of D.D. Kosambi and Chattopadhyaya concerning the Buddha and the six
heretics in their seminal works, An
Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) and Lokāyata (1959) respectively (Kosambi added some new observations
in The Culture and Civilisation of
Ancient India in Historical Outline (1965) and the second edition of 1956).
But we must defer this discussion lest the digression would lead us away from the
point we are now concerned with. I propose to stop here only by pointing out
how two leading Indian Marxists approached the question from the same angle and
ultimately arrived more or less at
the same conclusion. However, it should not be overlooked that, in spite of
their basic similarity of approach, they had reached almost opposite conclusions in the 1950s. The
starting point even then was the same: transition from the pre-class society
(tribe) to the class-divided society (state). Yet Chattopadhyaya harped on the
illusory nature of the Buddha’s teachings and the element of despair and
frustration common to the five of the chief heretics. Kosambi, on the contrary,
had found many positive elements in their teachings and suggested a continuity
found in later developments of Indian philosophy (Ajita Kesakambala and the
Lokāyata, Pakudha Kaccāyana and the later Vaiśeṣikas, for instance).
Chattopadhyaya, as has been shown above, too came to the same conclusion much
later, specially when he studied the philosophical systems of India in
relation to history of science and technology.
in Psyche and Society (8:2, December 2010, 12-21), the organ of Pavlov
Institute, 98, Mahatma Gandhi Road,
Kolkota – 700007
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