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The Humanism of Haribhadra
It is, in short, as if the modern apostles of sociology and psychology etc. have succeeded in reducing the four traditional puruşärthas to two, namely artha and kāma, leaving out dharma and mokṣa. They have thus failed to realize that the rejection of dharma and mokṣa reduces man's pursuit of artha and kāma to that of a mere beast. (On the four kinds of life there is a good discussion by Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics (1095b), to which I invite the Aryan reader's attention.)
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What the world needs today is a new aristocracy of virtue and talent (Jefferson). If the study of the writings of Haribhadra may serve as one of the many means to that end, then no further apology is needed for bringing out his nice little book on the causes and effect of dharma, of which even a small drop can provide the student who is bhavya with some nourishment.
Chapters (prakarana) 17 and 18 of the Astaka were translated into French by W.B. Bollée as "Le Végétarisme défendu par Haribhadrasūri contre un bouddhiste et un brahmana", in N. K. Wagle and F. Watanabe (Eds.), studies on Buddhism in Honour of Professor A. K. Warder, Toronto 1993, pp.22-28. I am not aware of any other modern translations. The text used was published in Ahmedabad samvat 1968 (1911), with the commentary of Jinesvara/Abhayadeva. An edition of the text from 1941, with a translation into Gujarātī, was also consulted. Minor misprints and errors, all obvious, were tactically made.
A translation of the Lokatattvanirnaya is also appended. It, too, will provide the reader with an arsenal of arguments against some obvious modern articles of superstition. I could here use the text published (with an Italian translation) by Luigi Suali in 1905, in the Giornale della Societa Asiatica Italiana, vol. 18, pp. 263-319. The text seems first to have been published in Bhavnagar 1902. I could also consult the reprint from 1921, with a Gujarāti translation. A brief discussion is found in Kapadia, op. cit, II, pp. xxxiv-xxxv. See also Karl H. Potter (Ed.), Bibliography of Indian Philosophies, Delhi 1970, pp. 130-132.
Finally, I wish to thank Dr. Olle Qvarnström (Lund), Professors Nalini Balbir (Paris), Klaus Bruhn (Berlin), and W. B. Bollée (Heidelberg) for providing me with (copies of) various rare publications by Haribhadra and others. A special debt of gratitude I own to our guru Muni Jambūvijaya,
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