Desire and Liberation

Book excerpt: In Desire and Liberation, Vaddera Chandidas creates a new metaphysical system. He bases this new system on earlier Indian traditions of sutra literature. The author rejects major convergences in philosophy from both India and the West, especially on the ontological primacy of non-being that results in permanence, which he posits as a mere project of the intellect. He is especially opposed to the idea of permanence, which renders unreliable anything that is not permanent but changing. Thus, desire, which is not permanent, is marginalized. Chandidas points out that contradictoriness is the structural ‘tinge’ of reality. Therefore, in his philosophy all that is claimed to be permanent is marginal and derivative of the intellect. A. Raghuramaraju has curated and edited this volume, which proposes a major breakthrough in the field of philosophical studies. The volume reproduces not only Desire and Liberation and Kalidas Bhattacharyya’s introduction to it, but also the letters that Bhattacharyya wrote to Chandidas, and Chandidas’s own commentary on his text.