Cārvāka (Lokāyata)चार्वाक (लोकायत)

Cārvāka, also called Lokāyata (“prevalent among the people”, or “restricted to this world”), was the materialist and sceptical school of ancient India. Against every other school — Hindu, Buddhist and Jain alike — it denied the existence of a soul, of rebirth, of karma, of liberation and of God, and held that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge, that the world consists only of matter, that consciousness is a product of the body, and that the sensible aim of life is to enjoy it while it lasts. Its founder was said to be the sage Bṛhaspati, and its name may come from a disciple, Cārvāka, or from cāru-vāka, “sweet-tongued”. None of its own texts survive. Everything we know about it comes from the summaries and refutations of its opponents, who treated it as the arch-heresy — and who returned to it so often that it must have been a living challenge for over a thousand years. Modern Indian thinkers from the nationalist period onward have rediscovered it as evidence that India, too, had a tradition of radical rationalism.

History

Materialist ideas appear very early. The Upaniṣads already contain voices that deny the self: in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the demon Virocana learns that the body is the self and teaches this to the demons. In the early Buddhist scriptures, the Sāmaññaphala Sutta describes six teachers contemporary with the Gautama Buddha (5th century BCE), one of whom, Ajita Kesakambalī (“Ajita of the hair-blanket”), taught a clear materialism: “A human being is built up of the four elements. When he dies, earth returns to earth, water to water, fire to fire, air to air, and the senses vanish into space… Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and do not exist after death. There is no fruit of good or bad deeds.” Another teacher, Pūraṇa Kassapa, denied moral responsibility; Pāyāsi, a prince in another sutta, conducted gruesome experiments to find the soul — weighing criminals before and after execution, cutting them open — and found nothing.

The Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya lists Lokāyata with Sāṃkhya and Yoga as one of the three disciplines of reasoning (ānvīkṣikī). The epics mention materialists with alarm: in the Mahābhārata, a demon named Cārvāka, disguised as a Brahmin, insults Yudhiṣṭhira and is burned to death by the outraged Brahmins. The Rāmāyaṇa has the sage Jābāli urge Rāma, with materialist arguments, to return to Ayodhyā and enjoy the kingdom: the afterlife is a fiction, and “the śrāddha offerings are a waste of food” — and Rāma angrily rejects him.

A collection of aphorisms, the Bārhaspatya Sūtras, existed by the early centuries CE, and there were commentaries on it; all are lost, but around thirty fragments are quoted by others. Philosophers of all schools wrote refutations of Cārvāka until the medieval period. The most famous summary is the first chapter of the fourteenth-century Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (“Compendium of all philosophies”) of the Advaitin Mādhava, which presents Cārvāka at its most sardonic. One sceptical work in its broad tradition survives: the Tattvopaplavasiṃha of Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa (8th century), which goes further than the materialists, arguing that no means of knowledge whatever — not even perception — can be shown to be valid.

Doctrines

Knowledge: only perception

The foundation of Cārvāka is its epistemology. Indian philosophers argued about the pramāṇas, the valid means of knowledge: perception, inference, testimony, comparison and others. Cārvāka accepted only perception (pratyakṣa).

Their famous argument concerns inference (anumāna). The standard example of Indian logic is: “There is fire on the hill, because there is smoke; wherever there is smoke there is fire, as in a kitchen.” Inference depends on a universal connection, vyāpti — “wherever there is smoke, there is fire”. But how do we know this universal rule? Not by perception: we have seen only some instances of smoke and fire, never all, past, present and future. Not by inference: that would need another universal rule, leading to an infinite regress. Not by testimony: that itself is a kind of inference about the reliability of the speaker. Not by comparison. Therefore no universal connection can be known, and inference never gives certainty.

This is a strikingly modern argument — essentially the problem of induction that David Hume would state in eighteenth-century Scotland. Some later Cārvākas, according to their opponents, softened it: inference about things that could in principle be perceived (fire on a distant hill) is acceptable in practice, but not inference about things that can never be perceived (the soul, heaven, God, karma). On this reading Cārvāka is less a radical sceptic than an empiricist who refuses to go beyond possible experience.

Reality: only the elements

What we perceive are the four elements — earth, water, fire and air. (Cārvākas did not accept the fifth, ākāśa, space or ether, because it cannot be perceived.) Everything is made of them.

Consciousness from matter

Then where does consciousness come from? From the body. When the elements combine in a particular way, consciousness arises, “just as the intoxicating power arises from the mixing of the ingredients of liquor” — from molasses and grain, neither of which is intoxicating on its own. The self is simply the living body characterised by consciousness; we say “I am fat”, “I am thin”, “I am dark”, identifying ourselves with the body. When the body dies, consciousness ends.

No other world

It follows that there is no soul that survives death, no rebirth, no karma, no heaven or hell, no liberation, and no God who creates or judges the world. Things happen by their own nature (svabhāva): “Who paints the peacock? Who makes the cuckoo sing? There is no cause here other than nature.”

Against the Veda and the priests

The Cārvākas were savage about the Vedic religion. The Vedas are tainted by three faults — falsehood, self-contradiction and tautology. The priests are frauds who live off the credulous. Verses quoted in the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha include:

If a beast slain in the Jyotiṣṭoma sacrifice will itself go to heaven, why does the sacrificer not offer his own father?

If the śrāddha offerings to the dead produce gratification in beings who are dead, then here too, in the case of travellers when they start, it is needless to give provisions for the journey.

If beings in heaven are gratified by our offering the śrāddha here, then why not give the food down below to those who are standing on the housetop?

The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves and demons.

Ethics: pleasure

The goal of life is pleasure (kāma) — the only good we can be sure of. The Cārvākas rejected the ascetic argument that since pleasure is mixed with pain, we should renounce it:

The enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping company with young women, wearing fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, sandal paste… Pain is hell… Liberation is the death of the body.

Men do not stop planting rice because there are weeds; they do not stop cooking because there are beggars.

Who would throw away the grain because it is covered with husk?

And the most famous verse of all, quoted everywhere:

yāvaj jīvet sukhaṃ jīvet, ṛṇaṃ kṛtvā ghṛtaṃ pibet; bhasmībhūtasya dehasya punarāgamanaṃ kutaḥ

While life is yours, live joyously; borrow money and drink ghee. When once the body becomes ashes, how can it ever return?

The middle phrase — “borrow and drink ghee” — may be a hostile caricature added by opponents; other versions read differently. Whether the Cārvākas were really crude hedonists is doubtful. Some sources distinguish “cultured” (suśikṣita) Cārvākas, who admitted inference about the observable and lived moral lives, from vulgar ones. Their ethic may be closer to that of Epicurus — enjoy life sensibly, free from fear of the afterlife — than to the debauchery their enemies attributed to them.

The refutations

Every school took on the Cārvākas, and their arguments shaped Indian philosophy:

• Nyāya philosophers defended inference: the Cārvāka’s own argument against inference is itself an inference. When the Cārvāka argues that the soul does not exist because it is not perceived, he relies on a universal rule (“whatever is not perceived does not exist”) he cannot perceive. And everyone acts on inference daily: a man who hears his son’s voice outside knows his son is there. See Nyāya.
• On consciousness, the opponents argued that if consciousness belonged to the body, the dead body would be conscious; that we remember our childhood though the body has changed entirely; that the newborn knows how to suck, which shows impressions from a previous life; that “I have a body” shows the self is distinct from the body.
• Buddhists, Jains and Vedāntins all argued that without karma and rebirth, the inequality of births — one child born a prince, another a pauper — is unexplained.

Legacy

For two thousand years “Cārvāka” was a term of abuse, like “atheist” or “Epicurean” in medieval Europe. In the twentieth century, Indian thinkers looking for a native rationalist tradition revived it. The Marxist philosopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, in Lokāyata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959), argued that it preserved the worldview of ordinary working people against priestly ideology. Rationalist movements in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and Periyar’s “self-respect” movement, invoked it. Amartya Sen, in The Argumentative Indian (2005), cited it as proof that scepticism and atheism are as Indian as devotion. The philosopher Ramkrishna Bhattacharya devoted his career to reconstructing its fragments.

Cārvāka in conversation

The single line everyone knows is yāvaj jīvet sukhaṃ jīvet… bhasmībhūtasya dehasya punarāgamanaṃ kutaḥ — “while you live, live happily; once the body is ash, how can it return?” Philosophically more interesting is their argument against inference: no one has seen all smoke, so no one can know that smoke always means fire — Hume’s problem of induction, two thousand years early.