The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.107

v2.c40.s7.t3.107

While it is, as has been seen, impossible to accept the derivation of the Sāṁkhya from a materialism, it is probable that its realistic elements were partly due to a contemporary tendency in this direction of which, not unnaturally, we have no direct early evidence. The Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad, however, records¹¹ possible or actual theories of the absolute or final principle (*brahman*),¹² which include necessity (*niyati*), chance (*yadṛcchā*), time, inherent nature (*svabhāva*), matter (*bhūtāni*), and spirit. In the records of Buddhism¹³ we have given to us as existing contemporaneously with the Buddha the doctrine of Ajita Kesakambalin, who was in effect a materialist, and who, according to the Jain tradition,¹⁴ believed, as did the Cārvākas of the later tradition, in pleasure as the one end to be followed. The terms used of this doctrine¹ certainly suggest that it was based on some degree at least on the principle enunciated by Yājñavalkya,² that on dissolution of the body there exists in certain cases no consciousness, which, if the belief in the existence of the Brahman be removed, would result in a pure materialism, regarding the body as the reality of which life is a mere accompaniment, a view attributed also in Buddhist tradition³ to the king Pāyāsi, who experimentally established that soul did not survive bodily death. The records are important, since they show that the renunciation of belief in the Brahman could produce materialism as well as the Sāṅkhya dualism and the negation of soul in Buddhism.