Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 209

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Krishna S. Arjunwadkar
Makaranda
Navabhārata magazine)—all the three by A. H. Salunkhe; and
(4) Cārvāka-samikṣā (Ed. G. U. Thite, 1978).
(5) Cārvākavāda va Advaitvāda (Pradeep Gokhale, 1989).
Of these, No. 1 is a doctoral thesis, later revised and enlarged into No. 2. No. 3 is a detailed refutation (221 pages in Royal size) of the review of No. 1 by Shriniwas Dikshit published in the Navabhārata, Nov.-Dec. 1992. This game of polemic exchanges was going on in the Navabhārata even at the time I was writing this article; and I, too, have made my own contribution to it as noted below. No. 4 is a collection of papers read at a seminar on Cārvāka in Pune in 1975. All these four books, along with the one by Athavale, are in Marathi. In a Marathi article entitled "Cārvākāce Punarujjīvan' (1 and 2), I have discussed points arising from the Marathi books, particularly those by Salunkhe. (The Navabhārata, April and May, 1998). The present article is, therefore, focused on DPC's Lokāyata, with occasional references to other works. In writing this article, my intention is not so much as to review Lokāyata in detail as to discuss inherent weaknesses in DPC's methodology and arguments.
Lokāyata : an outline
DPC's Lokāyata, extending over about 700 pages and eight chapters, is divided into four books': I. The Problem and the Method (ch. 1-2); II. The Social Background (ch. 3-4); III. Materialism (ch. 5-7); IV. Idealism (ch. 8). He has discussed the nature of the contents of the book, chapter by chapter, in his ‘Introduction'. DPC's span of ancient Indian materialism covers a wide range of cults, concepts, practices and philosophical schools spreading over a long period beginning with the Vedic times and reaching as far as our own, and detecting materialistic core even in apparently orthodox traditions. The tradition of materialism is traced by DPC to the Asuras (identified by some with Assyrians) of Vedic times who are associated with Deha-vāda, the view that the material body itself is the soul, and is shown by him, through his interpretative skills, to cover the cults of the so-called orthodox deities like Ganapati and Gaurī, Tantric cults and even the Sāṁkhya-Yoga schools of philosophy and sections of Buddhism. He devotes the last two chapters to the discussion of the contrasting idealistic outlook, also having its roots in