The History of Buddhist Thought c14.12

c14.12

The rest stand merely as the representatives of certain doctrines, Pūraṇa of the denial of moral action, Ajita of materialism and a denial of the survival of the individual, and Pakudha of another kind of denial of moral action. Sañjaya is a mere caricature of shallow irresolution. No doubt there was materialism at all times. The Hindu philosophical systems mention the Chārvākas as such a school, but all that we know of them is much later than early Buddhism. Among the six the system of Pakudha, with its seven indestructible elements, most resembles a tendency of Indian thought—the attempt to find something ultimately real behind the phenomena rather than in co-ordinating experience and interpreting it as the real. But nothing like this actual system is elsewhere found.¹