1. Materialism as an Inchoate System

“Materialism” metaphysically denotes that system of thought which refuses to recognise, as the source of the created manifold, a First Cause other and higher than the mere working out of the forces and tendencies inherent in the non-sentient matter qua matter, unsupervised by any non-material power or principle like the Ātman or the Deity. And as a consequence it recognises for the human being no ethical goal higher than a life of pleasure or happiness to the end of his period. Materialism is accordingly a tendency of thinking which can appear almost at any stage of social or religio-philosophical evolution; and as we saw (p. 78 above), even the Rigveda is not without it. But from a mere tendency it can develop into a regular system of thought, as it apparently seems to have done towards the end of the Upanishadic period. As forerunners of it we already meet in the earlier Upanishads those Elemental Cosmologies with Water or Ether as the First Principle, from which, the texts¹ tell us, all the creation was produced; and that this First Principle might not be a sort of an eternal self-subsistent entity, it was actually conceived of as the Asat or non-existing. Chhāndogya vi. 2. 1 mentions (and controverts) a definite set of thinkers who made the world evolve from Non-existence; while at the other end of the process we have, in texts like Chhā. viii. 11–12 and Bṛihad. ii. 4. 12, the negativistic conclusions about everything knowable and namable being reduced to non-existence, from the clutches of which Yājñavalkya is almost frantically endeavouring to exclude the “Ātman” in those darkly enigmatic stanzas with which he drops the curtain down upon the great “symposium” at the court of Janaka in the third Chapter of the Bṛihadāraṇyaka, — stanzas which distinctly foreshadow the “Ajāti-vāda” or the acosmic absolutism of Gauḍapāda. — For an Upanishadic expression of “Materialism” on the ethical side we have to turn to Chhā. viii. 8. 4, where a powerful body of Epicurean non-believers is introduced under the opprobrious nickname of the “Asuras.” The Upanishads of course were not by themselves expected to go out of their way and detail the tenets of these “Materialistic” systems, which later claimed as their founder no less a name than that of Bṛhaspati, the Teacher of the Gods.² But the animus which the Bhagavadgītā shows towards them in Chapter xvi of the poem, as also the several “heretic” doctrines strongly tinged with “Atheism” and “Materialism” that came to be preached in the pre-Buddhistic period, may be safely taken as evidence for the existence, outside the “orthodox” circle of Upanishadic speculation, of a definite school of philosophy for the apostles of which the Maitrāyaṇī Up. uses such select epithets as “unheavenly,” “robbers,” and the like. It is also worth noting here that certain tendencies of Upanishadic speculation such as (1) the denial of Ātman’s liability and power of doing or suffering anything (p. 399), and (2) insistence upon the inexorable character of the Law of Karman as revealed by Yājñavalkya to Ārtabhāga (Bṛihad. iii. 13, and elsewhere) — which are both jointly capable of a one-sided development towards passive fatalism — as also (3) belief in the impermanence and mutability of things of which Bṛhadratha in Maitrā. i. 3–4 gives perhaps, if not the earliest,³ at any rate the most pathetic, expression on the Brāhmaṇic side, together with (4) the doctrine of the unknowability of the Real in which Upanishadic philosophy in its most transcendent flights culminated, may have conceivably accentuated the move towards philosophical Materialism and Agnosticism, of which the next age is to afford us such a bewildering array of illustrations.

2. Ajita Kesa-Kambalin and Early Materialism

In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta and elsewhere the following doctrine is ascribed to the philosopher Ajita, nicknamed⁴ “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 deeds. There is no such thing as this world or the next. There is neither father nor mother, nor beings springing into life without them (opapātika). There are in the world no Recluses or Brahmins who have reached the highest point, who walk perfectly, and who, having understood and realised, by themselves alone, both this world and the next, make their wisdom known to others. A human being is built up of the four Elements. When he dies, the earthy in him returns and relapses to the earth, the fluid to the water, the heat to the fire, the windy to the air, and his indriyas or faculties pass into space. The four bearers, he on the bier as a fifth, take his dead body away. Till they reach the burning ground men utter forth eulogies: but there his bones are bleached, and his offerings end in ashes! It is a doctrine of fools, this talk of gifts. It is an empty lie, mere idle talk, when men say there is profit therein. Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, are annihilated; and after death they are not.”

As is evident, this doctrine of Kesa-kambalin is a violent denunciation of both the Brāhmaṇic ritualism and the Upanishadic doctrine of the Ātman. With evident allusion to texts like Kaush. Up. iv. 19, or the anupraveśa texts from the Aitareya or Chhāndogya Upanishads, Ajita declares that nothing is real that is not corporeal: “As a man drawing a sword from the scabbard can say, ‘This is the sword and that is the scabbard,’ not so are we able to separate the soul from the body, pointing out, ‘this is the soul and that is the body.’” Ajita’s view comes nearest to the view of the Materialists like Chārvāka, whose (or whose teacher’s) obiter dicta are familiar to us in the opening pages of the Sarvadarśanasaṁgraha.

3. The Lokāyata School

The Lokāyata is a school with a very venerable ancestry,⁵ Bṛhaspati the preceptor of the gods being regarded as its first Founder. The doctrine is sometimes styled the Bhūtavāda, as well as the Lokāyata, and from the numerous references to it in orthodox as well as non-orthodox works, it would seem that the doctrine was more than mere tendency: that it had, in other words, early developed into an orderly system of thinking. It, for instance, accepted direct perception (Pratyakṣa) as the only valid source of knowledge, denied Causality, and preached prudential Hedonism. And its constructive programme probably included an earnest effort, by cultivating the social and physical sciences such as they were known at the time, to ameliorate human suffering and augment the sum-total of human happiness. The School has had the misfortune of being known to us only through the versions of its opponents; but its great seductive charm and extensive vogue cannot be readily explained on the usual assumptions regarding the purely negative and destructive character of its tenets. The Kauṭilīya, as is well known, assigns it quite a prominent place as a system of philosophy, and it is likely that the teacher mentioned in the Mahābhārata as the friend and contemporary of Duryodhana, viz. Chārvāka, must have exercised considerable influence in giving unto what was merely the natural tendency of the human mind — presenting itself at specific periods of its social evolution — a metaphysical basis and back-ground. The teaching of Ajita Kesa-kambalin, as we saw, agreed with the Lokāyata in quite a number of details; and the Bhagavadgītā, it may be recalled, selected this very school for a particularly virulent frontal attack (Chap. xvi). We can understand of course how it did happen that at a time when no two prophets or philosophers seemed quite to agree even on the most elementary of questions; and when there was no authority living or dead that dared to prove that a thing was so-and-so, or was not so-and-so, a voice which — acting on the famous dictum that where ignorance was bliss it was folly to be wise — advised men to turn away from the giddy heights of speculation and descend to the plain normal life of sense and sensibility, was most likely to secure the readiest response. Its attacks on the Śrauta religion and on all established institutions in fact were marked by a trenchancy of style, wealth of illustrations and, a perspicacity of argumentation which rarely failed to hit where it aimed and achieved the victory, as indeed the few preserved specimens of it abundantly testify.