The Lokāyata School

The Lokāyata is a school with a very venerable ancestry,¹ 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.