Cārvāka, or Lokāyata, emerged around the sixth century CE as India’s only systematized materialist school, featuring formal sūtras and commentaries. Rejecting supernaturalism, immortal souls, and ritualism, it prioritized matter, perception, and empirical inference. Historical texts lost by the fourteenth century led opponents to misrepresent its teachings as unrefined, hedonistic, and promiscuous.