26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST there is no readymade philosophical treatise of the period preserved and handed down to us. We have, therefore, to turn to literary texts and mainly to Purananuru and Pattupattu, anthologies of poetry on the secular life of the Tamils between the second century B C and the third century AD. Philosophical disputations of the various schools of metaphysics are recorded in Buddhist and Jain works of a later period, that is, between the third and ninth centuries AD. In these, materialist thought called Bhutavada and Lokayata is taken up for censure and attack. This paper will also examine the account of Lokayata in the Buddist work, Manime" kalai, and in the Jain text Neelakesi. The period after the ninth century A D is outside the compass of this study. Chakravarthi Nayanar in his introduction to Meelakesi has this to say about Bhutavada in Tamil Nadu : There lived in Nalanda near Rajgriha a Brahmin named Madhava. He had a son named Koshtilla and a daughter named Sari. Koshtilla went to South India to study Bhutavada, Sari married a Brahmin from Southern India called Tishya. She had a son named Upatishya called so after his father. He had another son named after his mother Sariputta. In a village nearby, there was a purohit whose wife Modgal bore a son. He was called Moggalana. Both Sariputta and Moggalana studied under Sanjaya. Hearing about Buddha, they went to meet him. They joined the Buddhist order. Ghakravarthi Nayanar, himself a Jain, mentions that Bhutavada or Lokayata was taught in the South in the sixth century B C and that these schools of thought attracted scholars from the North. Dakshin Narayan Sastry and Chakravarthi Nayanar also admit that Lokayata was one of the earliest systems of thought prevalent in the South. But they did not collect evidence for their conclusions from Tamil or other South Indian sources. The chronology of the literatures of the southern languages with the exception of Tamil cannot be assigned to a period earlier than the tenth century A D. Only Sangam literature in Tamil is assigned to a period ranging from the second century B C to the third century AD. It is, therefore, reasonable to look for traces of early materialist thought in Sangam works of this period and in Jain and Buddhist works of the period closely following the Sangam age. Mature of the Sources To gef a clear idea of the nature of the sources, one should know the purport of the themes of the Sangam works. It can be said that all books of the Sangam literature are anthologies of compositions of different poets belonging to different periods, and classified into two main genres Aham and Puram. Aham poetry is devoted to pre-marital and post-marital love while Puram poetry deals with social life in all its aspects. As this study is centred mainly on Purananuru^, it is pertinent to highlight the theme of this book as representative of the Sangam literature. Purananuru is an anthology of poems numbering 400. We get