Barhaspati Sutras

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The Barhaspati Sutras , also Lokayata ("materialistic", "atheistic") sutras were the basic text of the Indian philosophical school called Charvaka .

The texts probably come from the Maurya period between 320 and 180 BC. They were lost and are only passed down in fragmentary quotations. Dakshinaranjan Shastri published sixty such verses in 1928. In 1959 he published 54 selected verses as the Barhaspatya Sutra . He believed that many more fragments could be found. R. Bhattacharya tried a new reconstruction in 2002. His conclusion was that the more verses you list, the more likely it is to be misquoted.

Most of the quotations can be found in Indian works of the 8th to 12th centuries. The 14th century book Sarvadarshanasamgraha by Sayana contains a detailed treatment of Charvaka without quotations from the point of view of a follower of Vedanta .

A text called Bārhaspatya sūtram arthāt Bārhaspatya Arthaśāstram is an obvious forgery (Ed. Frederick W. Thomas 1921).

literature

  • Dakshinaranjan Shastri: Charvaka philosophy . Rabindra Bharati, Calcutta 1996, ISBN 81-8643802-5 (reprint of the Calcutta 1967 edition).
  • Vivek R. Bhattacharya: Carvaka Fragments. A New Collection . In: Journal of Indian Philosophy , Vol. 30 (2002), Issue 6, pp. 597-640, ISSN  0022-1791 .
  • Frederick W. Thomas (Ed.): Bārhaspatya sūtram arthāt Bārhaspatya Arthaśāstram . Moti Lal Banarsi Dass, Lahore 1921.