Tag Archives: Vaisheshika

Covert Lokayata IV: Social and Physical Sciences

(Click to go back to Part I: Doctrines)

(Click to go back to Part II: Proto-Materialism in Vedic and Tantric Traditions)

(Click to go back to Part III: Orthodox Darshanas)

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Political theory

The word Lokayata occurs only once in the Arthashastra (PDF here), but it is a very significant mention. The treatise opens with the line “Om, salutations to Sukra and Brihaspati” the two progenitors of materialism and deha-vada (doctrine of the body as soul) in Vedic mythology. There are also numerous mentions of the “school of Brihaspati” later on in the text; though it is ambiguous which school Kautilya is referring to. Kautilya’s mention of Lokayata is as follows:

“Anvikshaki comprises the Philosophy of Sankhya, Yoga, and Lokayata… Righteous and unrighteous acts (Dharmadharmau) are learnt from the triple Vedas; wealth and non-wealth from Varta; the expedient and the inexpedient (Nayanayau), as well as potency and impotency (Balabale) from the science of government.

When seen in the light of these sciences, the science of Anvikshaki is most beneficial to the world, keeps the mind steady and firm in weal and woe alike, and bestows excellence of foresight, speech and action.” (1)

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Shukra. One of the teachers of the Asura in Vedic mythology, along with Brihaspati. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Covert Lokayata III: Orthodox Darshanas

(Click to go back to Part I: Doctrines)

(Click to go back to Part II: Proto-Materialism in Vedic and Tantric Traditions)

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Orthodox Hindu Schools

As anyone familiar with the orthodox Hindu darshanas knows, a belief in God is not a central feature of all orthodox schools of thought. Two of the orthodox Darshanas in particular seem distinctly rooted in materialism: Samkhya and Vaisheshika. Those are discussed below.

Early Samkhya:

Chattopadhyaya goes so far as to claim that:

“If the Sankhya philosophy were in the earlier times an explicit philosophical re-statement of the fundamental theoretical position implicit in Tantrism, and, if further, as we have aready tried to argue, the term Lokayata originally stood for the beliefs and practices broadly referred to as Tantrism, then original Sankhya may be viewed as the most important developmet of the Lokayata tradition in Indian philosophy. Silamka, the Jaina commentator, was justified in denying any basic difference between Sankhya and Lokayata. Sankara, too, made the Sankhya philosophers quote the authority of the Lokayatikas”[1]

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Hegel on India and Hinduism

I was reading Hegel a while back and I thought my dear readers might want to see some of his content. At the end of this introductory bit I have just excerpted in total “Section II: India” and “Section II: (Continued) India Buddhism”  from “Part 1: The Oriental World” of G.W.F Hegel’s The Philosophy of History. So if you’d like to skip my blather, go down to the section “On India” right below the winged Zoroastrian symbol.

Introduction and preliminary analysis: 

Everyone seems to dislike that Hegel is overly obtuse and abstract, but when he discusses history he is actually taking in very concrete terms most of the time. This is not exactly a reliable source for specific information about Indian history or philosophy. In some ways it is a better study of how Europeans see India than it is a study of India. It suffers from a caricatured view of India as a land of contradiction, chaos, and conflict. For the most part his characterizations of India aren’t totally baseless though, as stereotypes often have a basis in reality. They are just stereotypical exaggerations or generalizations which lack any sort of nuance or qualification. He also seems to uncritically accept very early orientalist insights in Sanskritic culture as fact, and as reflective of the Indian society of the 1800s. To some degree this is excusable because Sanskrit translations and real detailed historical knowledge of India were still undergoing development in Europe. He had to have been over reliant on early translations of the Vedas, the Dharmashastras (particularly Manu), the Pali canon perhaps, and the writings of some few high-philosophers. Given his time period, his knowledge of Indian philosophy is actually impressive. He writes some rather detailed information here about the Samkhya, Nyaya, and Vaisheshika schools, so he at least knew that much. Yet perhaps I am being too generous to Hegel here. It is somewhat baffling to me how he derives an extreme idealist worldview from these three schools, Vaisheshika in particular. It was reading those philosophical schools which persuaded me that India has a sublimated tradition of naturalism. I feel that if he was also familiar with them it should have occurred to him that Hindu idealism is at least alloyed with a rationalistic form of naturalism.

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Covert Lokayata I: Doctrines

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This chart doesn’t represent every possible influence between the subject categories, just those relating to Lokayata’s influence. Each post will start with this chart, darkened to signify which relationships will be explored in that post.

This will be the first in a series of posts exploring the hidden role of Lokayata, and closely related forms of materialism, in Indian history and philosophy.

Reconstructing the influence of a dead school of philosophy is a difficult task, made all the more difficult in the case of Lokayata, where none of the original source material has survived. We are left to rely on the few fragmentary quotations, which pass on to us exclusively from critics of the school. The following posts rely heavily on the work of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Dale Riepe, and Rasik Vihari Joshi, both in their analytical capacities, and in the collections of primary source fragments they’ve published.

In future posts I will examine the proto-materialist origins of Lokayata, Tantra, and Vedic religion, the impact of Lokayata on the orthodox darsanas, the impact on social and physical sciences,  the impact on culture and art, and the 20th century revival of interest in Lokayata. But this first post will simply be an overview of the remarkable characteristics of Lokayata.

Core Features of Lokayata

Though Lokayata (also known as Carvaka, or Brihaspati Darsana) changed over time the main features were as follows:

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