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Neo Carvaka and Vedanta: Two poles apart philosophies questioning each other on the ground of Hinduism

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Nabajyoti
Nabajyoti
I am a freethinker and a disbeliever who love his nation and its culture which makes me a proud hindu. Being a Carvaka I challenge the rules and dogma in hindu society to improve it further but I cannot allow someone to spread the false propaganda in the name of hindu culture... I believe Hinduism is not a religion but a composition of various cultures, developed and practiced in Bharat and I stand strong to protect and improve its values with the changing time.

India is a land of rich and diverse philosophies which are developed and practiced for a long period of time. All the philosophies coexisted parallel to one another even with a lot disagreements. In Abrahamic faiths, the people are sliced into two mutually exclusive parts that is, believers and non-believers. A believer of a faith is a person who has no doubt regarding the preaching and guidance provided by the almighty through a messenger. And a non-believer is someone who has doubts and questions against the preaching and guidance of the almighty due to the lack of sufficient evidence. It means they will restore the faith when sufficient evidences are provided in favor of it and the person has no doubt and ambiguity while accepting the evidences.

There are proper set of rules to deal with the non-believer and they will stick the rules whenever it is possible to implement that is, there is almost nil possibility to have disagreements in the faith and coexist harmoniously with equal rights. However, in India philosophies are developed based on the disagreements with the existing philosophies and with the sense to coexist harmoniously. In ancient India, sage Brihaspati introduced a philosophical idea against the popular idea of Vedanta and termed as Carvaka. This is the first materialistic ideology developed in India which rejects the essence of Vedic philosophy that is the existence of God. Moreover, it rejects the concept of karma and reincarnation in this way it rejects the essence of Buddhism and Jainism.

Now one may ask what is the difference between non-believer and Carvaka, the most important difference is non-believer supposes the non-existence of evidence to believe and Carvaka directly reject it’s existence as it cannot witness the existence of God. In Carvaka, the source of knowledge is either perception or direct experiment, they reject the idea of inference that is, to draw conclusions from various observation as the limited observation might lead to wrong conclusion. Thus the source of accumulation of knowledge is absolute and it is more prevalent in the scientific world, then why the Carvaka philosophy was rooted out in the mediaeval period? One of the justification that can be provided to explain the reason for the non-existence of Carvaka is the lack of moral and social values.

The nature of Carvaka philosophy is scientific and helps in the development of a realistic, scientific and free society but along with a free society one needs the values and morals to run it smoothly. In Carvaka philosophy, critical thinking and discussions based on perception is allowed but there is nothing in the philosophy that can guide us to a better society rather it deteriorates the level of compassion and love among the individual which eventually leads to destruction. Carvaka rejects the rule of inference to find truth which is important for social justice, it rejects the idea of charity that would lead to disparity between nations, it rejects the law of Karma which helps to maintain the social and moral values to some extend.

Thus introducing those values and concepts in old Carvaka philosophy it is possible to improve the values and convert the crude and scientific philosophy into a better form. This improved form of Carvaka philosophy is termed as Neo Carvaka.

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Nabajyoti
Nabajyoti
I am a freethinker and a disbeliever who love his nation and its culture which makes me a proud hindu. Being a Carvaka I challenge the rules and dogma in hindu society to improve it further but I cannot allow someone to spread the false propaganda in the name of hindu culture... I believe Hinduism is not a religion but a composition of various cultures, developed and practiced in Bharat and I stand strong to protect and improve its values with the changing time.
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