Pradip Baksi
Abstract:
Marx had made two near identical statements on the concept of nothingness
(Sanskrit:Śūnyatā;Pali:Suññatā; Vietnamese:Không) in some forms of Buddhism in two of his letters written on 18and 20 March 1866. He wrote those letters while suffering from
hidradenitis suppurativa and residing as a medical tourist in Margate, England. He arrived at his understanding of nothingness in Buddhism from the following books of his intimate friend
Carl (Karl) Friedrich Koeppen(Köppen) (1808-1863):
Die Religion des Buddha, 2 Bde. Erster Band.
Die Religion des Buddhaund ihre Entstehung, 1857. Zweiter Band.
Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, 1859; Berlin:Ferdinand Schneider.
Die Religion des Buddha, 2 Bde. Erster Band.
Die Religion des Buddhaund ihre Entstehung, 1857. Zweiter Band.
Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, 1859; Berlin:Ferdinand Schneider.
Marx’s personal copies of these books appear to be lost; they are not yet
indicated in the reconstructed catalog :MEGA 2 IV/32.
indicated in the reconstructed catalog :MEGA 2 IV/32.
The above indicated statements of Marx may be treated as the ground zero for future investigations on the interrelationships of Marxism's and Buddhism's. Many currents of Buddhism and Marxism have converged in Vietnam over many years from many directions. That has created some unique opportunities for the future emergence of scientific investigation on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautam Buddha and those of Karl Marx from within the contemporary societies there.
Engels, Dialectics and Buddhism
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
Marx had encouraged Engels to take up this work in right earnest and Engels felt it incumbent upon him to establish dialectics in the domain of nature as in the world of man. In spite of many errors and shortcomings in the work, nuggets of wisdom as well as pregnant hypotheses make the work more valuable as a quarry of ideas rather than a finished formulation to be treated as the outcome of detailed research and analysis. Everything was in the draft stage. Engels certainly would not have published the draft without drastic revision. That there are glaring errors in the drafts has been pointed out by the Marxists themselves.
Elsewhere there are statements which are certainly untrue, for example, in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the last sixty years’ (xi).In spite of all this, Haldane frankly admitted: ‘Had his (sc. Engels’s) remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking’ (xiv). Hence, what Sebastiano Timpanaro said about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism – ‘the value of which is no way affected by the ten or fifty errors in physics which can be found in it’ (42) – also applies to Dialectics of Nature
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
The paper explores the sources from which Frederick Engels might have got his idea of the Buddhists of India being adepts in dialectics.
The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Nature
is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engels. The material was never published in Engels’s life time although parts of it were published in 1896 and1898 posthumously. The full text of the manuscripts was first published in the then USSR in 1925 alongside a Russian translation. Later editions and translations mostly follow the text and the arrangements of the folders made in the 1941 Russian edition. Neither Marx nor Lenin had seen the drafts that Engels had been preparing for along time. Yet Dialectics of Nature is Engels’s most significant contribution to the extension of the area of dialectics to the natural sciences.
The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Nature
is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engels. The material was never published in Engels’s life time although parts of it were published in 1896 and1898 posthumously. The full text of the manuscripts was first published in the then USSR in 1925 alongside a Russian translation. Later editions and translations mostly follow the text and the arrangements of the folders made in the 1941 Russian edition. Neither Marx nor Lenin had seen the drafts that Engels had been preparing for along time. Yet Dialectics of Nature is Engels’s most significant contribution to the extension of the area of dialectics to the natural sciences.
Marx had encouraged Engels to take up this work in right earnest and Engels felt it incumbent upon him to establish dialectics in the domain of nature as in the world of man. In spite of many errors and shortcomings in the work, nuggets of wisdom as well as pregnant hypotheses make the work more valuable as a quarry of ideas rather than a finished formulation to be treated as the outcome of detailed research and analysis. Everything was in the draft stage. Engels certainly would not have published the draft without drastic revision. That there are glaring errors in the drafts has been pointed out by the Marxists themselves.
J.B.S. Haldane, for instance, in his Preface to the first English translation of
Dialectics of Nature (1940/1946), noted: ‘In the essay on “Tidal Friction,” Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have done so. … I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on “Tidal friction.” But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the mistakes which lead to a correct result…. Such mistakes have been extremely fruitful in the history of science
Dialectics of Nature (1940/1946), noted: ‘In the essay on “Tidal Friction,” Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have done so. … I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on “Tidal friction.” But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the mistakes which lead to a correct result…. Such mistakes have been extremely fruitful in the history of science
Elsewhere there are statements which are certainly untrue, for example, in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the last sixty years’ (xi).In spite of all this, Haldane frankly admitted: ‘Had his (sc. Engels’s) remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking’ (xiv). Hence, what Sebastiano Timpanaro said about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism – ‘the value of which is no way affected by the ten or fifty errors in physics which can be found in it’ (42) – also applies to Dialectics of Nature
