The School That Denied Everything

Charvaka, also called Lokayata, made one decision and followed it everywhere it went.

The decision was that perception is the only means of knowledge.

What follows is a fully worked materialism. There is no afterlife, because nobody has perceived one. There are no gods. There is no karma, no soul that survives the body, and no authority in any text, because a text is testimony and testimony is not a source. The world is material, consciousness arises from the body, and death is the end.

This is not a modern reconstruction of something vague. It is an ancient Indian school that every other school had to answer, and answering it was a standard exercise.

There are two things about it worth dwelling on.

The first is its argument against inference, which is much better than its reputation.

The other schools pointed out, reasonably, that rejecting inference is ruinous. You see smoke and infer fire. You cannot function otherwise.

The Charvaka reply distinguishes between inferring within the range of experience, where the connection between smoke and fire has been repeatedly perceived, and inferring beyond it to things nobody has ever observed. And then it presses on the first case: what entitles you to move from the cases you have seen to the ones you have not? You need a guarantee that the pattern holds generally. Where does that guarantee come from? Not from perception, which only ever delivers the cases observed. Not from another inference, on pain of circularity.

That is the problem of induction, in India, centuries before Hume stated it in Scotland, and used for the same purpose: to show that a confident inferential structure rests on something it cannot itself establish.

This library teaches the Scottish version already, in the lesson on Hume. It is worth knowing it is not the only one, and that the Indian version was deployed as a weapon in a live dispute rather than as a puzzle.

The second thing is how the school reaches us.

Its own texts largely did not survive. What we have is quotation inside refutation: Charvaka positions stated, carefully and at full strength, in the books of the schools attacking them.

That is a direct consequence of the convention from the first chapter of this book. You cannot refute a position at full strength without first setting it out at full strength, and the requirement to do so accidentally became a preservation mechanism for views the preservers wanted destroyed.

There is something worth taking from that beyond the history. A tradition with a rule that you must state your opponent accurately ends up preserving its opponents. A tradition without that rule ends up with a record written entirely by whoever won.

One last note on the classification. Charvaka is nastika, heterodox, which means it rejected the authority of the Vedas. Buddhism and Jainism are in the same category, on the same criterion, despite disagreeing with Charvaka about almost everything, including whether there is an afterlife.

The categories in this tradition track sources of evidence, not conclusions and not piety. Once you know that, a great deal of the map stops looking strange.