Abstract

Materialism in India, very much like materialism in Greece, has to be reconstructed on the basis of fragments. Although the materialist tradition can be traced back to the early Upaniṣads on the one hand and the Buddhist and Jain canonical works on the other, the fragments offer only a glimpse of materialist thought. The same is true of the Presocratic philosophical tradition in Greece. Yet the glimpses we have from other, non-philosophical works are no less illuminating than those found in philosophical works proper. Some instances of the early sources related to pre-Cārvāka materialism have already been offered before. In what follows, I propose to add a few more instances related to the anti-Vedic tradition mentioned by Patañjali, the voice of rationalism found in the Purāṇas, the reception of Jābāli, a proto-materialist thinker as well as the Cārvāka/lokāyata in modern Indian literature, the representation of Lokāyata in Jain literature and the Rājataraṅgiṇī.