Many, if not most, people nowadays go straight to the internet rather than look up a book to know something about anything under the sun. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of files on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system of philosophy there. Regrettably, many of them, though well-intentioned, are ill-informed and highly misleading. Having researched the history of materialism in India for several decades, I find it necessary to disabuse enquirers of several false notions.

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1. Cārvāka as a Label

Cārvāka or Lokāyata is not a “brand name” for all sorts of materialist ideas that flourished in India over the ages. There were several proto-materialist thinkers in India right from the time of the Buddha (sixth/fifth century BCE) or even earlier. The system that came to be known finally as Cārvāka/Lokāyata did not flourish before the sixth century CE or a bit later.

It is only from the eighth century CE that the name Cārvāka is associated with a materialist school (some later writers such as Śāntarakṣita and Śaṅkara continued to call it Lokāyata). Both names, however, came to refer to the same school of thought after the eighth century CE. Neither of the two words occurs in Vedic literature. Lokāyata in Pali and Buddhist Sanskrit works means ‘the science of disputation’, or in a narrower sense, ‘point of dispute’, not materialism. The word is ambiguous. There are reasons to believe that the adherents of this materialist school called themselves Cārvāka, using it as a nickname. The word might have been chosen from the Mahābhārata, but the demon in that work has nothing to do with materialism.

2. Systematisation and Early Precursors

The Cārvāka/Lokāyata is the only systematised form of materialist philosophy in India known to date. There were other pre-Cārvāka proto-materialist schools too that preached certain materialist views, but their views were not systematically set down in the form of aphorisms as the Cārvākas did.

Some of these pre-Cārvāka proto-materialist views are encountered in the Upaniṣads, Pali and Prakrit canonical works (of the Buddhists and the Jains respectively) and their commentaries, as well as in the Jābāli episode in the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya in the Mahābhārata, some of the Purāṇas (particularly the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Padmapurāṇa), and last but not least, in old Tamil poems such as the Maṇimēkalai.

All of these are not to be equated with Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Some of the views recorded in them are authentic expositions of a particular proto-materialist view, but some are of dubious authenticity. There is a tendency in the Rāmāyaṇa and some Purāṇas to treat the Buddhists, the Jains, and the Cārvākas as representing a single school of nāstikas—that is, defilers of the Vedas—and to ascribe the views of one to the other quite inappropriately.

3. Textual Tradition and Reconstruction

3.1 Loss of Primary Sources

All the Cārvāka/Lokāyata works were lost before the fourteenth century CE, so much so that Sāyaṇa-Mādhava (aka Mādhavācārya and Vidyāraṇya), or whoever was the author of the first chapter of this digest of a compendium of philosophies (Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha), could not quote a single sentence from any Lokāyata text nor name a single authority other than the mythical Bṛhaspati. Yet this book, first edited and published by Iswarchandra Vidyāsāgara (better known as an educationist and social reformer) in 1853–58 by the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, has proved to be more influential than any other work.

However, it is worth noticing that the readings of several lines of some verses attributed to the Cārvākas are wilfully distorted in this compendium. The original reading of a line in a verse, for example, was as follows:

“Live happily as long as you live; nothing is beyond the ken of death.”

It is so found in all other works (no fewer than thirteen). The last part of the line was changed in this compendium to read:

“Eat ghee (clarified butter) even by running into debt.”

To many educated Indians and perhaps others abroad, this distorted reading is taken to be the epitome of Cārvāka/Lokāyata. It is amusing that the digest itself quotes the original reading at the beginning of the chapter but quotes the distorted reading at the end of the same chapter.

3.2 Structure of the System

From the available fragments found quoted or paraphrased in the works of anti-materialist philosophers, it is evident that the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system had developed along the same structural lines as Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Nyāya, and Vaiśeṣika. This means:

• Base Text: A collection of sūtras (aphorisms), tersely phrased because they were meant to be memorised.
• Exposition: Several commentaries (and probably sub-commentaries) written to explicate the aphorisms.
• Epigrams: A number of verses traditionally ascribed to the Cārvākas. Some of these epigrams make fun of the performance of religious rites, particularly sacrificial acts, and deny the existence of an extracorporeal soul which can survive the death of a person.

Some other verses, however, might have originated in Buddhist and Jain circles. The denunciation of ritual violence (killing of animals in a Vedic sacrifice) and condemnation of a non-vegetarian diet accord better with Buddhist and Jain teachings than with any other school. There might have been some materialists who renounced both marriage and the eating of animal flesh. In that case, the charge of promiscuity and indulgence in flesh and wine brought against the Cārvākas by Guṇaratna, a fifteenth-century Jain writer, loses its force.

3.3 The Misattribution of Tattvopaplavasiṃha

The Tattvopaplavasiṃha by Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa is not a Cārvāka/Lokāyata work: it represents the view of a totally different school that challenged the very concept of pramāṇa (means of knowledge). The Cārvākas did believe in pramāṇa and whatever else it entails (knowledge, the knower, and the object to be known). Even those who, like Eli Franco, prefer to call it the only surviving Cārvāka text do not claim that it is a materialist text. So the work is quite irrelevant to the study of materialism in India.

4. Core Tenets

The basic plank of Cārvāka/Lokāyata may be summed up as:

1. Denial of rebirth, the other-world (heaven and hell), and the immortal soul.
2. Refusal to believe in the efficacy of performing religious acts.
3. Acceptance of the natural origin of the universe, without any creator God or any other supernatural agency.
4. Belief in the primacy of matter over consciousness, and hence of the human body over the spirit (soul).
5. Advocacy of the primacy of perception over all other means of knowledge; inference, etc., are secondary, and acceptable if and only if they are based on perception, not on scriptures.

The first three points refer to the ontology, and the rest to the epistemology of Cārvāka/Lokāyata.

As to ethics, all that can be said is that the Cārvākas did not believe in practising asceticism and advised the seeking of pleasure in this world rather than in the next, for there is no such world. This teaching has been misinterpreted as a recommendation for unrestrained sensual enjoyment.

Regarding their social outlook, it may be said that the Cārvākas were opposed to gender discrimination and caste (varṇa) distinctions (see the Prabodha-candrodaya by Kṛṣṇamiśra, Act 2, verse 18 and the Naiṣadha-carita by Śrīharṣa, Canto 17, verses 40, 42, 58). They relied on human endeavour (puruṣakāra), not on fate (daiva), and rejected the concept of adṛṣṭa or karman.

This is how materialism as a full-fledged philosophical doctrine made its debut in ancient India. It is evident that the issues are peculiarly relevant to the Indian context (rebirth being the most noteworthy). Cārvāka/Lokāyata then obviously had an indigenous origin.

5. Historical Continuity and Decay

There was no continuity in the Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition after the twelfth century CE or thereabouts. Whatever was written on Cārvāka/Lokāyata after the twelfth century is based on second-hand knowledge, passed down from preceptors to disciples who in turn could only teach what they had heard, not what they had actually studied. Some of their knowledge corresponds to what Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophers had or might have really said, but much of their account is biased against materialism and consists of mere fabrications.

6. Polemics and Secondary Accounts

The Yogācāra Buddhists, Jains, Advaita Vedantins, and Nyāya philosophers considered Cārvāka/Lokāyata as one of their chief opponents and tried hard to refute materialist views. Such refutations were made even after all authentic Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts had been lost. So, the representation of Cārvāka/Lokāyata in the works of these schools is not always firmly grounded on a first-hand knowledge of Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts.

7. Conflation of Proto-Materialism and Classical Cārvāka

Because of this lack of acquaintance with original sources, opponents—and many modern scholars—often confuse pre-Cārvāka and Cārvāka views, considering them one and the same. This gives the impression that there were several kinds of Cārvākas, while the fact is that there were several kinds of materialists, but not all of them were Cārvākas. Some were definitely pre-Cārvāka and held different views. For example, regarding the number of natural elements, the Cārvākas admitted four (earth, air, fire, and water), while others spoke of five, adding ether or space to the list.

8. Later Accounts and the Ā’īn-i-Akbarī

We have no evidence of any post-Cārvāka materialist school in India existing or flourishing after the thirteenth century CE. What Abū ‘l-Faḍl gathered from North Indian pundits about the Cārvāka system (most probably from a Jain scholar) and recorded in Persian in his Ā’īn-i-Akbarī betrays the same lack of information as evinced in contemporary and later Sanskrit digests of Indian philosophy. Only a few highlights of the materialist system were known to them. In addition, a few verses attributed to the Cārvākas had been orally transmitted from one generation to another. Their accounts, therefore, are far removed from original sources and should be taken with a grain of salt.

9. Depictions in Classical Literature

Some Sanskrit poems and plays (particularly Naiṣadha-carita, Prabodha-candrodaya, Āgama-ḍambara, and Vidvanmoda-taraṅgiṇī) and one prose work (Kādambarī) contain representations of the Cārvākas. The evidence is dubious, for the authors of these works were thoroughly opposed to materialism and tried to portray the Cārvākas in an unfavourable light. Hence, whatever is written there should not be accepted uncritically.

10. The Epistemological Misconception

The commonest charge levelled against the Cārvākas is that they did not believe in any means of knowledge except perception. But there is enough evidence to suggest that some pre-Cārvāka schools, as well as the Cārvākas themselves, considered inference based on perception to be a valid means of knowledge, although secondary in importance. This was well known from the eighth century CE. Nevertheless, opponents continued to level the same charge almost in the fashion of Goebbels (“Repeat a lie ten times and it will sound like the truth”).

11. The Charge of Hedonism

Another baseless charge made by opponents is the alleged heedless hedonism of the Cārvākas. Of course, there is enough evidence to show that the Cārvākas did not consider human life to be full of misery, but there is absolutely no evidence to prove that they prescribed sensual enjoyment as the end of life.

The case is similar to that of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher. Although he led a very austere life, his name has been maligned as a spokesperson for an “eat, drink and be merry” view of life. Ajita Keśakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha and one of the earliest proto-materialists known to us, had in fact made a cult of austerity. The Sāṃkhya doctrine, too, has been satirised as advocating sensual enjoyment; no serious student of Sāṃkhya has ever paid any heed to this absurd charge. However, in the case of Cārvāka, such a groundless allegation is repeated ad nauseam by present-day textbook writers on Indian philosophy.

12. Unitary Nature of the School

Yet another misconception circulated by many authors past and present is that there were several Cārvāka schools believing in the mind as the spirit, life-breaths as the spirit, the sense organs as the spirit, etc. Such doctrines might have been prevalent before the Common Era, for some of them are mentioned in several Upaniṣads. Such views, however, are not only pre-Cārvāka but also pre-philosophical.

The Cārvāka/Lokāyata was systematised much later, and there is nothing to show that its exponents drew anything from such older sources. Only the doctrine of bhūtacaitanyavāda or dehātmavāda is the doctrine of the Cārvākas. It was a unitary school, although the commentary tradition is not uniform and commentators are not always unanimous in their interpretation of certain aphorisms.

13. Non-Cārvāka Commentators

Not all commentators on the Cārvākasūtra were Cārvākas themselves. Some are known to be adherents of Nyāya who, besides their works on Nyāya, had also written commentaries on the Cārvākasūtra. Quite naturally, they introduced a number of sophisticated Nyāya terms alien to the original Cārvāka tradition.

Nevertheless, what is common to all commentators is their firm adherence to the basic doctrine of considering the spirit to be nothing but consciousness in a living body, and the rejection of the view that inference independent of perception and/or based on scriptures should be accepted as a valid means of knowledge.

14. Summary of the Historical Evolution

In brief, then, the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system emerged as the culmination of all previous proto-materialist views which had never been systematised into the prevailing sūtra-bhāṣya (base text and commentary) style before the sixth century CE. These views are mainly known to us as floating ideas current among some freethinkers who were opposed to futile religious practices sanctioned by the Vedas and refused to offer gifts to Brahmin priests.

The early materialists did not believe in the existence of heaven and hell, and therefore rejected the immortality of the spirit. That is all there is to it in the pre-Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition. Ontological issues seem to have been their chief preoccupation, and this was their contribution to the later Cārvāka/Lokāyata system which inherited and assimilated it. Epistemological issues might have underlain their teachings, but no such explicit formulation is met with in available evidence.

15. Cārvāka vs. Folk Cults (Great vs. Little Traditions)

Whether the Cārvākas had any affinity with the Kāpālikas or obscure folk cults (such as the Sahajiyās, Bāuls, etc., in Bengal) is a vexed question. It is probable that these cults adopted some ideas from pre-Cārvāka and/or Cārvāka teachings, such as accepting perception to be the only means of knowledge, opposition to Vedism, the caste system, and gender discrimination.

• Folk Cults (Little Tradition): These cults are guru-oriented, compose songs in local dialects as the vehicle for expressing their ideas (rather than writing philosophical discourses), and consider themselves affiliated with Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, or Śakti-worshipping communities. They belong to the Little Tradition—differing from conventional religious communities by abjuring Brahminical priesthood, avoiding conventional places of pilgrimage, and setting up their own meeting spots in village fairs. They aspire for liberation (mukti) alone and developed elaborate systems of worship and religious practice (sādhana-paddhati).
• Cārvāka/Lokāyata (Great Tradition): The Cārvākas belong to the Great Tradition: they redacted a sūtra work and composed elaborate commentaries on it in Sanskrit, not in any vernacular. They were interested in true knowledge (tattva) and studiedly rejected all rituals based solely on faith.

Thus, there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two that cannot be resolved by juxtaposing them as reflecting the same approach in two different ways. It should be borne in mind that Little Tradition cults were present in India even in Upaniṣadic times, as testified by the Maitrī (or Maitrāyaṇī / Maitrāyaṇīya) Upaniṣad. Most probably, both traditions had a common source, but they diverged into two separate streams: one thoroughly rational and atheistic, the other irrational and theistic. Philosophy and religion are not to be treated on a par with each other.

Acknowledgements: Grateful acknowledgements are made to Amitava Bhattacharyya, Johannes Bronkhorst, Siddhartha Dutta, Pradeep Gokhale, Ashish Lahiri, and Krishna Del Toso for offering comments and suggestions on the draft.