Jain Journal 2004 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 25

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JAIN JOURNAL: VOL-XXXVIII, NO. 3 JAN. 2004
and the dove - coloured bones that remain. These are also mentioned in Ajita's exposition of this doctrine in the SphSu.
The SphSu represents Ajita as a bhutacatustavavādin whereas in the SKS the first school of materialists is said to be bhūtapancakavādin. Jacobi points out that ākāśa “is not reckoned as a fifth element in the Buddhist literature but it is so in that of the Jainas...."'13 He, however, summarily dismisses this discrepancy as "a verbal, rather than a material difference.”
The difference, I would humbly submit, is material, not merely verbal. There are reasons to believe that before the seventh century CE there did exist two distinct materialist schools in India. We may cite a few instances from both Buddhist and Brahmanical sources in support of this view.
Manimekalai, the only extant Tamil Buddhist poem (written between the third and seventh centuries CE) mentions bhūtavāda as a philosophical system distinct from the Lokāyata. It says:
Passing on to the Sāṁkhya and Vaišeșika pandits, at last she (sc. Manimekalai) came to a Bhūta-Vādi. The Bhūta-Vādis held that the world is formed out of the five elements alone, without any divine intervention. We agree with the Lokāyata, the sage said, and believe that when the elements combine together, a material body and a spirit come into existence. That is all. We believe that perception alone is our means of knowledge and nothing else. We recognise only one birth, and we know that our joys and pains end on earth with
one life.14
The basic philosophical position of the bhūtavādin-s and the Lokāyatikas indeed does not seem to differ in any major respect. Echoes are heard of some well-known Cärvāka aphorisms, e.g., consciousness arises out of matter as does the intoxicating power of wine from non-toxic objects; it is all a matter of combination of a particular kind; perception is the instrument of knowledge; and, there is no rebirth.is
That there was a school of materialist thinkers called bhūtacintaka (he who thinks in terms of the elements), who recognized