ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an Marx's works that are definitely of use in the reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Indian philosophy. The reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Europe owes something to Marx's own doctoral dissertation and the reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Indian philosophy, too, has to follow the same method as adopted by Marx and other classical scholars. Marx's analysis, as Farrington has shown, reverses the traditional judgment on the two ancient philosophers: Tradition had made of Democritus the profound philosopher and of Epicurus the shallow imitator. To sum up, Marx's approach to the history of materialism in Europe helps us understand how materialism developed in India in very many different ways before the formulation of the Carvaka/Lokayata system and how the later aberrations in its misrepresentations are to be detected and rejected.
