Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

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

Page 225

214
Krishna S. Arjunwadkar
Makaranda
by quoting from his work an isolated reference to Lokāyata. No honest researcher would degrade himself into playing such tricks.
It is on the authority of Samkara that DPC equates Sāṁkhya with Tantra and further with Lokāyata, setting aside Samkara's evaluation of Sāṁkhya as a system closest to the Vedic philosophy (vaidikasya darśanasya pratyāsannatvāt)—a compliment DPC omits while citing a passage in Brahmasūtra-bhāsya (2-1-12) in which Samkara praises the Samkhya, however grudgingly' (p. 364). This is another example of DPC playing tricks with evidence. (The other one being that of the term “Tantra'). He omits this portion because it is damaging to his theory of aligning Samkhya with Lokāyata. And if there is some evidence he is not free to omit, he chooses to abuse it as 'highly deceptive' (p. 364). To those who do not wish to lend themselves to DPC's ways of misleading, a remark from an authority on Vedānta may show the facts in their true perspective : If Sāmkhya and Yoga give up their insistence on the following three points, there would be no difference between them and Vedānta-(i) that Purusas Selves/Souls) are many; (ii) that the world is real; and (iii) that the Universal principle and the Self are different. (Pañcadaśī of Vidyāranya, VI. 228) But this valuation may be dubbed by DPC as based on an adulterated version of Samkhya resulting from Isvarakrsna's tampering of the original Sāmkhya in order to graft it on the Vedānta. (p 371)
Primitive conditions : Symptom of retarded society
What is objectionable in DPC's argument is that he takes a static view of a thought, denying possibilities of further development thereof, and, like a true Marxist, views the primitive conditions as ideal, Utopian. (Yes, the Marxists, too, like idealogists, have their own Utopia consistent with materialism.) This is the reason why he treats as adulteration the features of a system historically later to emerge. But thoughts, like those who create them, are never static, despite their champions' claims to their static nature. The child develops with years its intellectual and psychological, no less than its physical, faculties; and what is natural at one stage is not so at the next. If a full grown man continues to take interest in toys fit for a child, instead of human 'toys', it is perhaps a case of retarded growth and a matter of worry