The Materialism of the Charvakas Lokayatikas

 V Brodov

Brhaspati (c. 7th-6th century B.
C.) is believed to be the founder of the Charvaka Lokayatika
School and the author of
its Sutras.
The Charvakas Lokayatikas are materialist philosophers. It would be a rude error,
however, to restrict the Brhaspati line to the materialism of the Charvakas
Lokayatikas. That would mean narrowing down the social basis of Indian
materialism, belittling its significance, and distorting the actual history.
The materialist tendency is actually inherent in nearly all the systems or
schools of Indian philosophy, including the objective-idealist system of the
Vedanta of the new times, which is shown in the second half of the present
work.

To characterise the philosophical
materialism of the Sutras period, it is important to single out the following
general features:

• 
  
• recognition of the fact that the external world, of
  which man is part, exists objectively and is therefore not a product of his
  brain but exists independently of any consciousness;
• recognition of the fact that the external world
  manifests itself in a law-governed fashion, the laws being capable of change
  only through physical action rather than through ideas, magic, or prayer;
• negation of the existence of supernatural forces; the
  view that the world develops spontaneously, without outside interference;
• recognition of man’s perceptions of the objects or
  phenomena of the outside world (sense experiences) as the only source of
  knowledge;
• rejection of the
  view that knowledge is esoteric, innate, or intuitive (mystical);
• recognition of the fact that the nature of man’s life
  and activity is determined by the conditions of his life and not by a deity.

Some of these features are
inherent, in some form and to a certain extent, in many systems of Indian
philosophy of the medieval period and even of the modern times.

It was Brhaspati who gave ancient
Indian materialism its distinctive shape. Another outstanding representative
of this school was Bhishan. One of the most ancient puranas, the Padma Purana, says that a certain man named Kanada
discovered the great teaching called Vaisesika. Gotama compiled the Nyaya shastras, Kapila wrote the Samkya shatras, a certain Brahman named Jaimini
expounded the greatest atheist teaching and a man named Bhishan, the despised
Charvaka teaching, while Vishnu himself, to rout the demons, took the image of
Buddha to preach the completely impious doctrine of Buddhism.

This passage from the Padma
Purana is also quoted by Vijnana Bhiksu, a major representative of the Samkhya
philosophy. Bhishan’s name is mentioned in the Mahabharata (Santiparva and
Salyaparva), in the writings of Manu, and so on. Expressing the hopes and moods
of the poorest strata of Indian society, Bhishan was sharply critical of
Brahmanism, the Vedic religion, and the ideology of the priests. The compilers
of the Vedas,

he said, were hypocrites and
swindlers. Invoking the Vedas, the priests dupe the simple people with
meaningless jumbles of words, living in luxury at the expense of the poor
people bringing them offerings. Who the offerings for? Gods were nonexistent
and had never existed. Should there be offerings to the deceased relatives?
But these became dust and needed no food. Just as a lamp that became extinguished
would not be rekindled if oil was added to it, a dead man would not rise from
the dead after a sacrificial ritual. Even if we assume that our dead relatives
need food, why should we pass the food to the priests? Why should the priests
eat the food if our dead ones are to be fed? That is about the same as feeding
the people of one village while intending to feed those of another.

The Charvakas rejected the idea
of the existence of God, recognising four material elements as the substance:
earth, water, fire, and air. Combinations of these elements produce all
objects and phenomena of nature, both material and spiritual. The soul is a
body endowed with consciousness; the soul does not exist outside the body.
Consciousness emerges from unconscious elements as their temporary combination
in a specific form under definite conditions. In substantiating this
proposition, Bhishan said that a man could not get drunk by eating some rice
and a kind of molasses made of beetroot. A mixture of rice and molasses, however,
is used to prepare wine on which man can get drunk. Consciousness is nothing
but the result of a certain process of combining material elements. A man’s
death signifies simultaneous destruction of both consciousness and soul. A
Charvaka named Ajita Kesakambalin (6th century B. C.) said that both a wise man
and a fool die along with the body, both are dead, and have no existence after
death.

The Charvakas decried religious
superstition which kept the people ignorant and oppressed, and opposed their
view of cognition as the result of sense perception to religious visions. This
viewpoint of naive sensualism certainly had its weak points. While recognising
sensations and perceptions to be the only source of knowledge, the Charvakas
failed to realise the dialectical unity of the sensual and the rational
elements in cognition. They viewed the results of man’s cognitive activity in
the form of abstract thinking as untrue or at any rate unreliable, containing
elements of subjective arbitrariness and errors. The mind (that is, abstract
thinking), said the Charvakas, did not exist without sensations and
perceptions. Propositions and syllogisms were only possible on the basis of
those data which were obtained through sensory channels. Moreover, abstract
logical thinking (the mind) could not add anything to that which was given in
sense perceptions. In other words, they failed to see the dialectics of the
transition from cognition of phenomena to cognition of the essence, having a
very limited and narrow conception of human practice and its role in the
process of cognition. For the Charvakas, practice was the process itself of
sense perception of the individual objects and phenomena of nature. The role of
practice as the criterion of truth was reduced to the verifying activity of our
sense organs.

Vasiliĭ Vasilʹevich Brodov

It should be borne in mind,
however, that the primary goal of the Charvakas was dealing a crushing blow to
the ideology of Brahmanism. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote on this account: “The
materialists attacked authority and all vested interest in thought, religion
and theology. They denounced the Vedas and priestcraft and traditional beliefs,
and proclaimed that belief must be free and must not depend on pre-suppositions
or merely on the authority of the past. They inveighed against all forms of
magic and superstition. Their general spirit was comparable in many ways to the
modern materialistic approach, it wanted to rid itself of the chains and burden
of the past, of speculation about matters which could not be perceived, or
worship of imaginary gods … ” 1

The opponents of materialism
(mostly the priests, the Brahmans) did not only persecute the materialist
philosophers themselves, they burned their works, so that materialist
literature (the literature of the Charvakas Lokayatikas) was almost completely
wiped out. “Among the books that have been lost,” Nehru points out,
“is the entire literature on materialism which followed the period of the
early Upanishads. The only references to this, now found, are in criticisms of
it and in elaborate attempts to disprove the materialist theories.,,2

The Charvaka materialism is
characterised by direct orientation against idealist and religious doctrines,
the desire to prove the untenability of idealism and to denounce the falsity
and deception of religion and its preachers. Thus the Charvakas’ main purpose
was denouncing Brahmanist ideology rather than creating a consistent
philosophical system.

The doctrine of the Charvakas
Lokayatikas can be reduced to the following four propositions.

(1) Four material elements (mahabhuta) are the basis of all that
is: fire, earth, water, and air.3 These elements are spontaneously active, with a
force of their own (svabhava)
inherent in them.

(2) Only “this world” (laka) exists; there is no hereafter or
life after death;4
that is, after man’s death, his life is neither continued “there”
(that is, in the Brahman-Atman world) nor revived “here” (on this
earth). The Charvakas said:

While life is yours, live
joyously:

None can escape Death’s searching
eye;

When once this frame of ours they
burn

How shall it e’er again return?5

The Charvakas criticised the
religious idealist proposition that “consciousness is the property of the
immortal soul”, insisting that consciousness died with the death of man,
while man himself disintegrated into the four basic elements. “Man is
composed of four elements,” they wrote. “When man dies, the earthly
element returns and relapses into the earth; the watery element returns into
the water, the fiery element returns into the fire, the airy element returns
into the air, the senses pass into space.’6

(3) There are no supernatural
(divine) forces. God is an invention of the rich to dupe the poor. Charvakas
taught that the religion of Brahmanism, just as any other religion, was
untenable and harmful, for it distracted the attention and strength of the
poor towards worshipping imaginary gods, offering sacrifices to unknown
forces, listening to abstract preaching, etc. Religious writings were based on
the fantasies of a certain group of persons materially interested in all this.

(4) There is no soul – in the
sense in which the ministers of religious cults and, in agreement with the
latter, the philosophers used the term. It is matter that thinks, rather than
the soul which is alleged to exist independently of matter.

(5) The law of karma (requital for both good and bad
deeds) is an invention of the adherents of religion employed also by idealist
philosophers. The source of evil on this earth should be looked for in the
cruelty and injustice existing in society rather than in the properties of
human nature and inevitable sufferings said to be predetermined from on high.

(6) The only source of the
knowledge of nature is sense perception. Only direct perception (through the
five senses) gives man genuine knowledge (pratyaksa).
Only that exists which can be directly perceived. That which cannot be
perceived does not exist; it does not exist precisely for the reason that it
cannot be perceived. By “that which cannot be perceived” the
Charvakas meant first and fore- most such religious “essences” as
God, the soul, the heavenly

According to the Charvakas, sense
perceptions can be of two kinds, external and internal. Internal perceptions
emerge through the action of reason (manas).
External perceptions are linked with the activity of the five sense organs.

Accordingly, knowledge itself is
divided into two kinds or forms: the first kind is the result of contact
between the sense organs and the objects of the external world; the second kind
of knowledge arises through mental operations on the basis of sense data. 

Notes:

1. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1961, p.100
2. Ibid. The same idea is to be found in
   many other studies in the history of Indian philosophy. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya,
   a prominent Marxist scholar, writes: “Apart from the mere mention of such
   lost treatises, what we now concretely possess are a few stray references to
   the Lokayata – views, or to its followers called the Lokayatikas, as preserved
   in the writings of those who wanted only to ridicule and refute the Lokayata
   … This philosophy had the misfortune of being known to us only through the
   writings of its opponents ..:’ (D. Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata. A Study in
   Ancient Indian Materialism, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1959, p. 7) 
3. Hence one of the most probable versions of the
   origIn of the name “Charvaka”; char “four”, vak
   “word”, that is, “four words”.  
4. Loka means “world”, so that the
   ancient Indian materialists are sometimes called “Lokayatikas”.
   Etymologically, the word taka means “that which is widespread among the
   people”; “that which is essentially secular”. 
5.  S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, 1977,p. 281
6. Ibid, p. 273