India, particularly to westerners, is still a land of fakirs lying on thorn beds, of yogis sitting cross-legged and practising austerity, of mendicants with matted locks clad in saffron, of awe-inspiring idols, of hundreds of gods and goddesses, and of elephants, tigers, snakes and snake-charmers, and everything exotic. Above all, she is known to be the home of all sorts of obscure religious cults, mysticism, and diverse rituals. In short, she is ‘the other’ of whatever western civilization stands for.

Ajita Kesakambala (Keśakambalin in Sanskrit), a senior contemporary of the Buddha, is generally recognised as an early (if not the earliest) materialist in India. As with the later Cārvāka/Lokāyata-s, no authentic report of his teachings—not to speak of any work composed by him or his disciple—has come down to us. Whatever little we know of him is derived from Buddhist (Pali) and Jain (Prakrit) sources. Both the sects regarded him as a rival, so their accounts may not be accurate or without prejudice (as Goonasekere admits).

One full statement of Ajita's views is found in the SPhS. He tells king Ajātasattu (Ajātaśatru) of Magadha:

Jayatilleke points out that the view expressed in the last part of the passage does not square with the materialist position:

Opponents of the Cārvāka-s were never wanting. Idealist and fideist philosophers and custodians of different religious groups rallied to refute the Cārvāka doctrine, not only on philosophical grounds with arguments but also by spreading false charges and calumnies in order to make the doctrine appear morally reprehensible.

Two such oft-quoted charges will now be examined on the basis of original sources.

The Cārvāka system of philosophy is generally known as one of hedonism. The following verse is supposed to epitomize its basic position:

It has been shown that the earlier sources of this verse read the second hemistich differently: nāsti mrtyor agocaraḥ (no one is beyond death) in place of rṇaṃ krtvā ghrtaṃ pibet. Apparently this slight but skilful alteration was made by S-M in order to make the doctrine appear in an unfavourable light.

However, the fact remains that the verse does urge people to ‘live happily’, sukhaṃ jīvet. What could the Cārvāka-s mean by it? Did they not advocate enjoyment of sensual pleasure as the summum bonum of life?

I shall attempt to answer this question. Needless to say, where the Cārvāka-s are concerned, there are very little positive evidence to go by, for everything is culled from the polemical writings of their opponents.

The NM of Jayantabhaṭṭa is a seminal work of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika system of philosophy. The author was a staunch opponent of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata and missed no opportunity of reviling it in the strongest possible terms. One of his favourite abuses employed against his adversaries is varāka, ‘wretched’. On one occasion he remarks: “But in such kind of assemblies (discussing philosophical questions), who would indeed care to remember the (name of the) wretched Cārvākas?” He always mentions the Cārvāka-s in a tone of derision and his attempts are directed to the refutation of the materialist tenets as they developed in India, viz.

a. bhūtacaitanyavāda (the doctrine of consciousness arising out of matter).

b. śarīrātmavāda or dehātmavāda (the doctrine of the self as something inseparable from the body, i.e., there can be no self independent of the body).

The Cārvāka-s are made to appear as an opponent (pūrvapakṣin) in relation to a third question, viz.

c. whether or not inference (anumāna) is to be admitted as a means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa).

Here, too, Jayanta ridicules the Cārvāka-s who allegedly do not recognize any other means of valid knowledge except perception (pratyakṣa). It is in this connection that he refers to the well-learned (suśikṣita) and cunning (dhūrta) Cārvāka-s. These two adjectives gave rise to the idea that there were at least two schools of the Cārvāka-s. This view has been accepted uncritically by almost all historians and analysts of Indian philosophy.

At the beginning of the Nyāyakusumāñjali Udayana, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher, in his endeavour to prove the existence of God, declares all men to be theists at heart. Every school of philosophers and even non-philosophers like the craftsmen, he says, believe in Him in some form or the other, notwithstanding the difference in calling Him by various appellations. By way of example he refers to the Cārvāka-s who, according to him, consider ‘What is established in the worldly practice’ to be their God (lokavyavahārasiddha iti cārvākāḥ).

Commentators have tended to explain the term, lokavyavahāra in two ways. Varadarājamiśra, the earliest known scholiast, offers two alternatives: (i) the visible king and the like, or (ii) idols of gods in the form of having four arms.

He is followed by Kāmākhyānātha Tarkavāgīśa and T. Vīrarāghavācārya Śiromaṇi. Four other commentators, viz., Vardhamāna Upādhyāya, Rāmabhadra Sārvabhauma, Śaṅkaramiśra and Guṇānanda Vidyāsāgara, mention only the second interpretation. The point they wish to make is that one needs a visible entity for one's god, not an invisible one.

When does a commentator offer two or more alternatives in interpreting a word or a passage in the text? Instead of digressing into a long excursus, the question may be answered briefly as follows: If a commentator finds several interpretations equally appropriate to the context and/or equally logical but is not sure which of them corresponds to the author's intention, he records all the possible ones.

At the end of the first chapter of the SDS, S-M quotes a number of verses and ascribes them to Bṛhaspati. One of them runs as follows:

J. Muir, the first English translator of this passage from the SDS, renders it thus:

The verse seems to strike an odd note. It is well known that Bṛhaspati, the eponymous founder of the Lokāyata doctrine, denied the existence of God, after-life, etc. Why should he speak of the Creator, dhātṛ?

Cowell indeed felt that there was something wrong here. He therefore translated dhātṛnirmitā as “made by Nature”. In a note he added, “I take Dhātṛi as God, or nature, speaking by common parlance. Dr Hall (Catalogue, p. 162) would seem to take Dhātṛi as the name of an author. —‘Dhātṛi may sometimes stand for Bṛihaspati’.”

There is no evidence elsewhere or in the lexicons that Bṛhaspati was also called Dhātṛ. In any case, even accepting that would be of no avail in the given context. How could Bṛhaspati or a mere author (as Hall would have it) make or ordain the livelihood of the ascetics?

Materialism, it has been said, is as old as philosophy. India too had her share of heretics, sceptics and proto-materialists right from the Vedic times. We read of them in the Upaniṣads and the epics. “Any number of these unbelievers is known, who deny everything there is to deny,” said Hopkins. “Materialists and other heretics without special designation appear to fill the whole land.” As the culmination to all these developments we have the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system of philosophy.

How and from when did materialism face a challenge? According to Frauwallner,

At the end of the first chapter of the SDS, S-M quotes a number of verses and ascribes them to Bṛhaspati. One of them runs as follows:

To many this has become the epitome of the Cārvāka philosophy, which is thus reduced to hedonism par excellence —a doctrine that urges man to seek happiness at any cost and, at the same time, makes happiness a matter of sensuous gratification alone.

Where did S-M get this verse? No authority is cited in his work though some other verses or parts thereof can be traced back to earlier Purāṇas, plays and poems. The authenticity of such passages is therefore doubtful. It is also probable that S-M as well as his predecessors borrowed them from a common source —perhaps purely oral. That is why T.W. Rhys Davids suggested that S-M's description of the Lokāyata “is chiefly based on certain infidel doggerel verses which cannot possibly have formed a part of the Lokāyata studied by the Brahmins of old.”

There are, however, reasons to believe that at least in case of the verse cited above, S-M reproduced a distorted version of the original.

Lokāyata (substantive) along with its derivative lo(lau) kāyatika (adjective) is often encountered both in Pali and Sanskrit, and as logāyata, logayaya or loyāyata in Prakrit. The word does not seem to be Vedic. In Sanskrit it first occurs (indirectly) in the Pāṇinīya Gaṇapāṭha 23; in Pali in the Tipiṭaka itself. The word, both in Prakrit and Sanskrit, has generally been taken to mean the materialist system of philosophy, later known as the Cārvāka and that is how it is generally rendered in English.

T.W. Rhys Davids, however, noticed that on many occasions in the Pali Sutta-s, the rendering, viz. “materialism”, does not suit the context. Accordingly the PTS Pali English Dictionary decided to omit this meaning altogether. It glossed lokāyata as

The Dictionary also refers to Rudolf Otto Franke's German translation of the DN in which lokāyataṃ is rendered as “logically proven explanation of nature” (logisch beweisende Naturerklärung).

Thus the chief meaning in Pali and Sanskrit seems to have diverged into two altogether different ways, having no apparent relation to each other. It is not that such a case is unprecedented. What is interesting to note is that the gloss provided in the PTS Dictionary never found favour with any Pali scholar excepting Rhys Davids himself.

The publication of the TS along with its commentary, Pañjikā (TSP) in 1926 was an epoch-making event in the history of Indian philosophical studies. It is a voluminous work consisting of 3645 verses divided into twenty six chapter. 2 Śāntarakṣita, the author of the work, was the rector (upādhyāya) of the University of Nalanda (the remains of which are still to be seen in Bihar) in the second half of the eighth century CE. He then left for Tibet where he founded bSam-yas, modelled on the Buddhist monastery of Odantapurī. Tibetan scholars in this institute were trained to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan. After staying in Tibet for twenty five years or so, Śāntarakṣita died in the first decade of the ninth century.

The commentary on his work was written by his disciple, Kamalaśīla, who had accompanied his master to the land of snow. He is said to have been killed by some rivals whom he defeated in a public debate.

Both Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla belonged to the Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy. The TS was written with a view to refuting all other philosophical systems and establishing the Yogācāra view. The book has been called “a veritable encyclopaedia for us of Indian philosophy current in his (sc. Śāntarakṣita's) time.”

One of the many philosophical systems that Śāntarakṣita examines in the TS is the Lokāyata (Chapter 22). As usual he first presents the exponent's view (pūrvapakṣa) and then proceeds to refute it.

In what follows I propose to point out (a) an erroneous meaning of lokāyata, and (b) a redundant entry, lokāyatana, in the Sanskrit-Wörterbuch (abbreviated later as S-W) and to account for the mistakes.

(a) Lokāyata

S-W inter alia says: “In Pali (it) is said to mean an imaginary story, romance, cf. Burnouf in Lot (us), de la b(onne) 1(oi), 409 and lokāyatika.” Under lokāyatika it refers to “perhaps another meaning of the word” (other than “a materialist”) and cites Burnouf, ibid., 168 and 409.

Burnouf in his French translation of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra (Ch. 13) writes, “[A Boddhisattva Mahāsattva] does not court the Lokāyatikas” (ne recherche pas les Lokāyatikas) and explains in a note:

He refers to Moggallāna's Abhidhānappadīpikā as printed in Clough (1824) as his source.

T.W. Rhys Davids strongly objected to this interpretation:

Introduction

A collection of all available Cārvāka fragments has been a desideratum since Henry Thomas Colebrooke first wrote on the materialist tradition in India in 1827. For a pretty long time scholars relied almost exclusively on S-M's exposition in the SDS, Chapter 1. Slow but steady discovery of many a Cārvāka fragment, specially in the Buddhist and Jain works and other compendia of philosophical systems, made it clear that there was more than meets the eye. Formerly only two legendary names were associated with the materialist system: Bṛhaspati and Cārvāka. Śāntarakṣita's TS and Kamalaśīla's TSP provide three historical names of Cārvāka authors: Aviddhakarṇa, Kambalāśvatara and Purandara. Cakradhara mentions two more: Bhaṭṭa Udbhaṭa and Bhāvivikta. Several aphorisms and extracts from the works of these commentators were welcome additions to the meagre number of Cārvāka fragments known before the 1920s.

D.R. Shastri (1894-1961) first attempted to compile the Cārvāka fragments in his English-Sanskrit work, Chārvāka Shashṭi (1928). Not satisfied with those attributed to Bṛhaspati or the Cārvāka-s in general, he sought to find materialist traits in other systems of philosophy. Thus he compiled one hundred aphorisms from various sources, some of which, however, are not of Cārvāka origin (he quoted from the Mīmāṃsā-, Nyāya- and Sāṃkhya-sūtra-s as well). He also reproduced sixty verses (hence the title of the work, Cārvāka-ṣaṣṭi). They are taken from the NC by Śrīharṣa (verses 1-47), SDS by Mādhavācārya (48-55, 57-59), VMT by Cirañīva Bhaṭṭācārya (56) and ṢDSam by Haribhadra (60).

The name of Purandara, a Cārvāka philosopher, was unknown to modern scholars before 1914. It was from the editio princeps of Vādidevasūri's SVR that they came to know of a work called Paurandaraṃ sūtram along with an aphorism quoted from it: pramāṇasya gauṇatvād (sic) anumānād arthaniścayo durlabhaḥ. The SVR, however, does not seem to have attracted much attention. P.D. Gune in his introduction to the edition of Dhanapāla's Bhavisayatthakahā (1923) refers to a verse which mentions, among others, Akalaṅka and Purandara. He then quotes from the marginal notes on a passage found in a MS of Pupphadanta's Tisaṭṭhimahāpurisaguṇālaṃkāra which identified Akalaṅka as nyāyakārakartā and Purandara as cārvākamate granthakartā. G. Tucci noticed this reference and mentioned it in a paper in 1925. None of them refers to the SVR.

The aphorism quoted in the SVR was also found in Abhayadevasūri's TBV, first published in 1924 with a variant reading: pramāṇasyāgauṇatvād, etc., though there is no mention of Purandara in this work.

The aphorism itself, however, was not a discovery. It was known from the first edition of the NM (1895) but it was not attributed to any work called Paurandaraṃ sūtram. Prabhācandra also cited this aphorism in the PKM but spoke of the Cārvāka-s in general, not specifically of Purandara. Later it was found that others too had quoted the same aphorism without, however, naming Purandara.

The publication of the TS and TSP (1926) was an epochmaking event in many respects.

Hemacandra, respectfully called kalikālasarvajña (the omniscient one of the Kali era), was not the first Jain author to write about the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Long before him Haribhadra had dealt with this system of philosophy in his ṢDSam, SVS and LTN. So had Siddharṣi in his UBhPK. However, some passages in Hemacandra's works contain something of special interest in connection with the Cārvāka.

A passage in the AC runs as follows:

Hemacandra mentions six systems of philosophy:

1. Syādvādavādin or Ārhata (i.e. the Jain), 2. Śūnyavādin or Saugata (i.e. the Buddhist), 3. Naiyāyika or Ākṣapāda or Yauga, 4. Sāṃkhya or Kāpila, 5. Vaiśeṣika or Aulūkya, and 6. Bārhaspatya or Nāstika or Cārvāka or Laukāyatika.

Why Hemacandra excludes Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta and Yoga is rather puzzling. Haribhadra in his ṢDSam begins with a short exposition of the Buddhist system and proceeds to deal with Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, Jain, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, and Cārvāka. He too excludes Vedānta. But his inclusion of the Cārvāka seems to have been an afterthought. Having concluded the section on the doctrine of Jaimini (i.e. Mīmāṃsā), Haribhadra suddenly remembers that some scholars preferred to treat Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika as a single system and, according to them, the number of the āstikavādin-s is five, not six (v. 78).

Humour is not a strong point of ancient Indian philosophers, or philosophers in general. Besides some sharp repartees, ingenious ironies and downright abuses, humour proper is seldom to be met with in philosophical works. One notable exception is the parable of the wolf's footprint. In what follows I propose to discuss the parable in some detail. The parable most probably originated with the Cārvāka-s and was quite well known in the Jain, Buddhist and Brahminical circles.

The first allusion to the parable occurs in the MBh, Śāntiparvan, Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya. Bhīṣma tells Yudhiṣṭhira that the acquisition of righteousness (dharma) and wealth is the direct object of a Kṣatriya (one born in the warrior caste) and one should not get involved in deciding what is righteousness and what is not, for no one has seen their results. So it is as useless as the discussion about the wolf's footprint:

Nīlakaṇṭha in his commentary left the word, vṛkapadaṃ, unexplained, presumably because he did not know the parable behind the simile. He wrote, “As the judgment regarding the footprint on the ground —whether it belongs to a wolf or a dog or a leopard— is futile, so is the judgment whether something contributes to righteousness or to its opposite.”

An earlier scribe fared no better. Baffled by the word, vṛkapadaṃ, he ‘emended’ it to read vṛkṣaphalaṃ, ‘fruit of a tree’.

Vātsyāyana in his commentary (Bhāṣya) on the NS employs the word, nāstika and its derivatives, nāstikatva, and nāstikya, thrice (on NS, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 and 3.2.61, IIIb60 in Ruben). The meaning of nāstika (lit. negativist) in the last two instances is conventional and readily comprehensible. But it is not so evident in the case of the first. I propose to deal with this problem in detail and consider the views of other explicators of the NS.

Let us begin with NS, 1.1.2. In course of explaining what is meant by false knowledge (mithyājñāna), Vātsyāyana enumerates how evils produced under the influence of attraction and repulsion lead to moral lapses: “Driven by the evils and through the agency of the body one commits violence, theft and incest. Through words (one is led to) plotting against others, covetousness and nāstikya.” Vātsyāyana adds that motivations like these are sinful, resulting in adharma, lack of merit.

Apparently nāstikya is here associated with irreligiosity. The Manu very succinctly explains nāstika as ‘a defiler of the Veda’, nāstiko vedanindakaḥ (2.11). Defiling the Veda is one of the worst sins in the eye of Brahminical orthodoxy. By including nāstikya in the enumeration of vices, Vātsyāyana records his unflinching devotion to the Veda as well as his own orthodoxy.

It is, however, well known that the term, nāstika, is also employed by the Buddhists and Jains to designate those who, instead of denying the validity of the Veda, used to deny the existence of the other-world or after-life (paraloka) and hence the concept of virtue and vice.