BOOK REVIEW 91 Prof Ling has in mind. Marx is many things to many people. But when he i^ likened to Probhet Mohammed (leave aside the questions < f which then are the Mecca and Madina of Marxism) almost any argument can be made. Its logical extension would be to assert that Prophet Mohammed, Jesus and for that matter Buddha and the authors of the Upanishads were the first dialectcial materialist thinkers! This is pertinent because Ling does touch upon the agnosticism of Buddhism. He does not bother to think about the Karma Vipak^ theory of Buddhism. This theory, acceptable also to the Theravada Buddhism to which Ling makes repeated references, is not a materialist view point. The same is true of the way in which Buddhism thinks of the doctine of DMfefeAfl(suffermng).For a European the division of philosophies into idealist and materialist should have been quite obvious and as such should have given some clues to the Marxist view of religion. But Ling would not entertain any such problems. His argument would lead him to equate Moksha (the salvation^, the foundamental doctrine of Indian religions, with the revolution. It is well-known that six out of the nine Darshanas (schools of philosophy) are Avaidik in character. The conflict between the Vaidik and the Avaidik schools of philosophy has been the central problem of Indian philosophy. The "great tradition" in India has been that ot the Avaidik schools which the Brahman Triumphalism, to borrow Ling's term, suppressed, and did so quite successfully. The Marxist methodology is more important than what Marx himself did or did not say about Indian religion. Any study of Karl Marx and Indian religion should have properly concentrated on how this division can be explained, when it arose and why it arose and so on. The Brahmans were not the rulers but they were the philosophers of the ruling class, The other argument, which Ling cites, that there was no "great tradition" in India is erroneous on two counts. Firstly it accepts that "the great tradition" and "the little tradition" are historically correct and scientific categories. Secondly, the argument completely ignores the more accurate distinction between the triumphalist tradition and the apparently defeated tradition. Those who deny that there has been the great tradition in India usually refer to the Hindu and non-Hindu traditions refuting the claim that the Hindu tradition has been the great tradition. They are wrong not because it is otherwise but rather because there has not been the Hindu tradition. The so-called Hindu tradition carries within it a history and dynamics of the perpetual conflict between the Vaidik and the non- Vaidik traditions. If a modern-day secularist made the mistake of ignoring this conflict, he would end up accepting that Brahmanical triumphalism was the Hindu tradition. It would be a very unhistorical ^cularism indeed. The Charvaka Darshana or the Lokayata has received some