A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s9: 9. Cārvākas or Lokāyatas
A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s9
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9. Cārvākas or Lokāyatas
c33.s9.1
Materialists existed, we need not doubt, in early India, though curiously enough efforts have been made¹ to explain away the Lokāyata philosophy, which is condemned by Buddhists and Brahmins alike, as simply in origin a popular philosophy of common sense. No books of these materialists have been allowed to come down to us, and we have merely summaries of their doctrines by their opponents, from which we learn that they endeavoured to prove the birth of spirit from matter by analogies from chemistry, and contended that as this was the origin of the body, so, when it dissolved in death, the spirit ceased to be. They, therefore, commended only the pleasures of the body, ridiculing the doctrine of the reward to be reaped in heaven by those who sacrifice and give presents to greedy and fraudulent priests whose Vedas and ceremonies they condemned as being merely tricky means of livelihood. We need not doubt that works were current, under the name of Bṛhaspati, who had an evil repute among the orthodox as the teacher of the Asuras, the demon foes of the gods, and from one or other of these may come the few phrases which can be ascribed more or less safely to the school.¹ The term Cārvāka applied to it may have been due to a teacher of that name, or be an abusive nickname from a famous infidel, not necessarily a member of the school. But the oblivion of its writings probably does not correspond at all to the actual importance it enjoyed.
c33.s9.2
¹ Jacobi, GGA. 1919, p. 22.
c33.s9.3
¹ Hillebrandt, *Festschrift Kuhn*, pp. 14 ff.; ERE. viii. 403 f.