Publisher's Note

Jamalpur, Bihar, is the eastern Indian town where AMPS was founded in 1955.

• It was previously known for its large railway workshop, at one time the largest in Asia, established during the British period.

Here, in the summer of 1959, Sarkar gave lectures, in a mixture of English and Hindi, to a small group of followers.

• At the conclusion of the seminar, the notes of the participants were assembled and edited into an English manuscript.

Sarkar classified Idea and Ideology, together with Ánanda Sútram, as the darshana shástra, or philosophical treatise, of AMPS.

Ánanda Sútram was dictated by Sarkar 2 years after the Idea and Ideology seminar.

• It is a collection of Sanskrit aphorisms with terse explanations.
• Its style of presentation is different from that of Idea and Ideology. But its subject matter and order of topics closely resemble the Idea and Ideology pattern.

Editions 2-4 of Idea and Ideology involved only minor grammatical alterations of the first edition.

At the time of the drafting of the fifth edition in 1978, certain grammatical changes were made with the express approval of Sarkar.

These changes related to passages where initially the meaning was not completely clear, and where therefore to edit the grammar might affect the meaning.

The sixth edition involved no change from the fifth edition. The present, seventh, edition is the first annotated edition.

Readers comparing this edition to other recent editions will find on page 5 of this edition a sequence of nine words, and on page 81 another sequence of nine words, that did not appear in editions 4-6.

These sequences of words appeared in the first three editions, but were inadvertently omitted thereafter.