Charaka / Caraka (चरक), redactor of the Carakasamhita (चरकसंहिता)
fl. c. 100 BC - AD 200 · Hindu Darshanas · Prominent
The Carakasamhita, the founding compendium of Ayurvedic medicine, carries Charaka's name, though whether he was one man, a title or a lineage is unsettled. The text does philosophy in the open: it defines life as body, senses, mind and self held together, sets out four means of knowledge, and supplies one of the earliest Indian manuals of formal debate. Its own doctrine is prajnaparadha, a failure of judgment as the root cause of disease.
Signature
The position Charaka is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- strongly leans Beyond Brain
- Death
- Karmic Cycle
Positions on the 6 axes the sources answer
- Society
- strongly leans Collectivism (8 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- strongly leans Beyond Brain (96 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- strongly leans Unchanging (0 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Order
- strongly leans Vertical (6 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Transcendence (100 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- strongly leans Objective (95 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
14 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Charaka refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Good and Evil
- Karmic Balance
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Age of Decline
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Direct Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Testimony
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Karmic Causation
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Cyclical Return
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Wisdom
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Death
- Karmic Cycle
What happens at death?