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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The whole literature of the Cārvāka system is lost. Scholars have ransacked all Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit works to glean whatever little that can be salvaged. However, the Arabic and Persian sources have not been tapped yet. Here I propose to discuss three such works.
The first source is, of course, India by al-Bīrūnī (1031). The passage runs as follows:
[…] the book Laukâyata [Lokāyata], composed by Bṓihaspati, treating of the subjects that in all investigations we must exclusively rely upon the appreciations of the senses; the book Agastyamata, composed by Agastya, treating of the subject that in all investigations we must use the appreciation of the senses as well as tradition […]
Bīrūnī apparently had no access to the first work he refers to. That is why he could mention only one aspect of this system, viz. sense-perception (pratyakṣa) as the only valid means of knowledge (pramāṇa). From earlier sources we know that the Laukāyatika-s denied everything that the theists believed in: God, the infallibility of the Vedas, the efficacy of the observance of religious duties either for this world or for the next, etc. The Buddhists and Jains too had no faith in God and the Vedas but they believed in after-life or the otherworld (though, unlike the Jains, the Buddhists did not accept the idea of the imperishable soul). The Laukāyatika-s had gone several steps ahead: they were rooted in this world and had nothing to do with anything beyond the senses.
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