S.K.Belvalkar R.D.Ranade In the Samannaphala Sutta and elsewhere the following doctrine is ascribed to the philosopher Ajita, nicknamed[1] “of the Hair-garment,” very probably because he and his followers affected that mode of dress – “There is no such thing as alms or sacrifice or offering. There is neither fruit nor result of good or evil…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The Cārvāka/Lokāyata school of philosophy flourished in India in or around the eighth century CE and was a living system till the twelfth or thirteenth century. Thereafter it seems to have vanished into the blue, without leaving any trace whatsoever. It was the most uncompromising philosophical system that ever appeared in India. It refused to accept the notions…
Walter Ruben The problem of when and how philosophy in India began is of great importance. In 1954, I started the theory that the first Indian philosopher was Uddalaka Aruni in Ch. Up. vi.1 According to my interpretation, he was a hylozoist, which means a primitive materialist. Such an interpretation must provoke criticism, because it…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Very much like the Pre-Socratic philosophical works, the basic texts of the Cārvāka system are lost. Only a few fragments — passages of varying length — have come down to us. Even then all of them are not genuine, as they seem to offer contrary points of view. Earlier scholars from H. T.…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (a) Did the Carvakas Refuse to Admit Inference? In the Indian philosophical context, besides the issues of rebirth, afterlife and otherworld, the instruments of cognition (prammana) are considered to be of seminal importance. The Carvakas are generally branded as a philosophical school that accepted perception as the only means of knowledge. But there…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya What is Materialism? Before proceeding to details, it is necessary to understand what, in the philosophical context, materialism stands for. George Stack has recently defined materialism as follows: Materialism is a set of theories which holds that all entities and processes are composed of—or are reducible to—matter, material forces or physical processes. All…
Giuseppe Tucci It will seem strange enough that among the multiplicity of Indian philosophical schools and systems I have chosen as the subject of my paper the Carvaka – or Lokayatamata – which as a particular school has disappeared long ago from India, and which was so greatly looked down upon that according to Brahminical…
Erich Frauwallner (December 28, 1898 – January 5, 1974) It is advantageous to join the nature-philosophical schools with the description of Materialism, as the latter stands nearer to them than all other schools. By the way the Indians themselves, as a rule, speak not of Materialism but they characterize its adherents usually as deniers or…
Sita K Nambiar We earlier posted certain sections of Krsna Misra’s 11th century allegorical drama, Prabodhacandrodya, in which the character Cārvāka makes an appearance. Though Prabodhacandrodaya does caricature Carvaka/Lokayta philosophy, the play is an important source of our present day knowledge about materialist philosophy in ancient India. We now reproduce parts of the critical introduction…
Almost all of what we know today about Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophy comes from secondary sources, most of which quote the philosophy’s opponents, who aimed to refute or even ridicule its arguments. Unsurprisingly, these works tended to caricature the philosophical stance of these ancient Indian materialists. Yet, as the only materials available to reconstruct this tradition, these…