All of us have grown up with many folk tales and mythologies of India. While some have captured our imagination for centuries, a few were lost in the abyss of the past. One such forgotten tale is of King Mandamati and the legendary warrior Jāgrat. The kingdom of Bayāg, ruled by Mandamati, was rich with natural resources of every kind — from flora and fauna to gold and mineral deposits. And yet its people were unhappy. Wealth of any kind requires intellect to sustain and grow over time. But much to the agony of Bayāg’s people, the ruler of the land was a dimwit. His corrupt advisors, psychics, and quacks ensured that the kingdom's riches fell upon them rather than its people. In the darkness of ignorance, the only hope was the commander of the army, Jāgrat. He had served the royal family for years with his wisdom and unparalleled combat skills.
As the story goes, one day, a psychic named Thyāmī arrived at the king’s court. The news spread like wildfire as Thyāmī was known far and wide for his nefariousness. But alas, this did not matter to Mandamati, who asked Thyāmī how he could capture the future in the present. The dimwit desired to enslave time to become greater than the Gods. The evil psychic, well-aware of the king’s denseness, asked for a fortune greater than the kingdom’s wealth. Jāgrat, angered by his king’s foolishness, asked Thyāmī if he could predict his own time of death. The psychic answered that he would live for another fifty years as the greatest seer on Earth. But before Thyāmī spoke another word, Jāgrat unsheathed his sword and beheaded the psychic with a single stroke of his blade. The court went numb, and the king speechless. And for once, Jāgrat saw a twinkle of insight in the astonished eyes of Mandamati. But as oil repels water, wisdom was elusive to the king. And the next day, Jāgrat’s head was found on a spike in front of the castle.
Our tragic hero likely believed in the Lokāyata philosophy — an Indian school of materialism hardly known to people of this era. But it was significant in ancient and classical India. Buddhists and Jains widely debated it even in the era of Gautama Buddha and Mahavir. Kautilya, the well-known teacher and advisor of Chandragupta Maurya, mentions it as one of the three important schools of philosophy in Arthaśāstra(अर्थशास्त्र):
सांख्यं योगो लोकायतं चेत्यान्वीक्ष्की ।।१०।।
There have been different interpretations of the term “Lokāyata.” It’s often translated as something prevalent among the people (लोकेषु आयतम), or what we can call as “common sense” in today’s world. However, this translation does not do justice to the philosophical approach and objective of the school.
According to Pradeep P. Gokhale, Lokāyata should be understood as a rationalist philosophical movement that attempted to solve individual and social issues merely on empirical, rational, and practical grounds without taking recourse to religion. 1
The Lokāyata philosophers have also been identified with the “Cārvākas,” who shared similar empirical and pragmatic philosophical views. We will use these terms interchangeably in this article.
Unlike the other schools of Indian philosophy, we don’t have any surviving texts from Lokāyatas apart from the fragments of Brhaspati Sūtras. Even the identity of Lokāyata philosophers is dubious. What we know is mostly derived from the arguments made by Buddhists, Jains, and Vedāntins in their texts against the Lokāyata philosophy. It’s apparent that defensive arguments made in other texts will never do justice to the original thought of Lokāyata philosophers. But we can still get the essence of their philosophy. As we shall see in the next section, the Lokāyatas did give a lot of trouble to other schools by logically questioning the existing dogmas.
Upending the systems
In 1936, A.J Ayer published Language, Truth, and Logic to reject metaphysical claims and establish logical positivism at the forefront of western philosophy. Although positivism was dead by the 1960s, Ayer did stir up the philosophical community with his invigorating arguments. According to his criterion of verifiability:
A sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify which it purports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. 2
Centuries ago, Lokāyatas made similar arguments against the metaphysical and spiritual concepts of Self, Soul, Rebirth, and Afterlife. None of them could be empirically verified. Hence, the Lokāyatas rejected these ideas as nothing but philosophical woolgathering. For our materialist philosophers, there’s no separate entity like soul different from the body. The soul is nothing but the breath. Of course, this irked everyone — from Brahmins to Buddhists and Jains. While Bhagavad Gita considers the Soul as eternal and indestructible, the Upanishads consider Self ( Atman) as the ultimate reality identified with the infinite Brahman.
“But have you seen the Soul? And how do you know about the Self?” asks the skeptical Lokāyata philosopher. When other schools defend with further metaphysical arguments, the Lokāyatas brush them aside as non-experiential and hence non-existent. Consider the following verses from Brhaspati Sūtra:
प्राण एवात्मा
Vital breath is soul
मरणं एवापवर्गः
Death itself is liberation
नास्ति परलोकः
There is no next world
परलोकिनो भावात् परलोकाभावः
Since none has seen the next world, it does not exist.
For the Cārvāka or the Lokāyata, all that we have is life. Nothing else has any connection with reality. They reject the notion of rebirth and Nirvana found in Buddhist and Jain philosophy. Neither is there any evidence of rebirth nor has anybody communicated anything after attaining Nirvana.
“But you’re missing the point. The person who has attained Nirvana is beyond worldly matters, and hence there’s no communication of any kind.”, says the Buddhist philosopher. The Cārvākas dismiss the reasoning as petitio principii and give a counter-argument similar to Russell’s teapot — the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.
By dismissing the notion of soul, Nirvana, and rebirth, the Lokāyatas also disprove the moral theory of action, which relates the conduct in this life to consequences in the next life. But how can we judge our actions if there’s no Nirvana or rebirth? This argument was certainly problematic for many religions as it shakes the very foundation on which we justify moral actions.
Consequently, the Lokāyata/Cārvāka were often dismissed as hedonists. Some also blamed them for making arguments from personal incredulity. But it’s not the case that the Cārvākas were merely naysayers. On the contrary, they had certain epistemological and ontological beliefs rooted in sense-perception and verifiable inferences.
The world is all that is the case
Ludwig Wittgenstein begins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the proposition, “The world is all that is the case.” Wittgenstein intended to define the world as the philosophical boundary of his work. He excludes traditional metaphysics and even the propositions of ethics as not in the world but at its limit.
In the same spirit, the Lokāyatas also consider the world as the only objective reality with the senses as the sole means to understand it.
एतावान् एव पुरुषो यावान् इन्द्रियगोचारः
That much is man which is seen by the senses.
It’s not a surprise that they take perception as the only valid means to knowledge, with some exceptions made for a few cases of inferences.
प्रत्यक्षम् एव प्रमाणं
Perception is the only valid proof
Lokāyata’s case for perception reminds us of Hume.
He said that “everything which appears to the mind is nothing but a bundle of perception..to hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.”
The epistemic and ontological stance of Lokāyata is clear from two basic deductive arguments (Modus Tollens) :
If it can be perceived, then it can be verified
It can be perceived.
Therefore, it can be verified.
If it can be verified, then it exists
It can be verified.
Therefore, it exists.
The Lokāyata also reject any non-verifiable inference as a valid means to knowledge. Remember that in a standard case of inference (अनुमान), the argument's validity depends on the invariable universal relation (vyāpti) between hetu and sadhya. But we cannot verify it empirically as the universal relation runs into the problem of induction. Consequently, the Lokāyata discard the Nyāya theory of inference.
अनुमानं अप्रमाणं
Inference is not valid
But can we live in this world without inference? Causal relations and deductive arguments form the basis of our reasoning. Discarding them will leave us in a perpetual state of doubt. The Lokāyatas, despite their strong empirical stand, are not irrational philosophers. They accept the inference of an object that has already been experienced before (utpanna pratiti, उत्पन्न प्रतीति) as a valid pramana (प्रमाण). Whereas the inference of an object which is yet to be experienced (utpādya pratiti, उत्पादय प्रतीति) still stands invalid. Thus, there’s no need to verify that wet clothes will dry on a sunny day, as we can infer it from our prior experience. However, the existence of a soul or God is still questionable.
While their arguments are convincing, there are still some open issues. For example, how can the Lokāyatas explain consciousness? The experience argument fails in this case. Neither do we have any empirical verification. To resolve the issue, the Lokāyatas rely on argument from analogy and common sense empiricism.
According to Lokāyatas, the four elements of Earth, water, fire, and air make the world. Our body, being part of this world, is also an aggregate of the four elements. Consciousness thus emerges from the interaction of these elements.
पृथिव्यपतेजोवायुरीति तत्त्वानि
Earth, water, fire, and air are the elements
तत्समुदये शरीरेन्द्रिय विषया संज्ञा
The names, body, senses, and objects are their aggregates
तेभ्यस् चैतन्यं
From them consciousness appears
For the Lokāyatas, just like the red color appears after chewing or processing the various ingredients of paan, consciousness arises from the interaction of the four elements in the body. The example seems crude and primitive to explain something as complex as consciousness. But it’s the concept of emergence that’s more important than the example itself. In the study of complex systems, we understand emergence as the formation of properties or behaviors when the parts interact in a wider whole.
An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when several simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective.
The Lokāyatas explain consciousness as an emergent property from the complex interaction of the elements. If this seems odd, consider the fact that humans are indeed made from stardust.
As Doctor Ashley King elaborates, “Every element was made in a star, and if you combine those elements in different ways you can make species of gas, minerals, and bigger things like asteroids, and from asteroids, you can start making planets, and then you start to make water and other ingredients required for life and then, eventually, us.”
According to Pradeep P. Gokhale, the argument for the material origin of consciousness is typical of lokprassidha anumān (लोकप्रसिद्ध अनुमान) or common sense empiricism. The plausibility of such an argument is not based on logical necessity or empirical necessity but on an explanatory necessity. 3
The red color arising from mixing paan ingredients or intoxication arising from processing molasses is widely accepted as an emergent phenomenon. So is the case with consciousness.
The Lokāyata philosophy seems relevant in today’s scientific and pragmatic age. It tells us not to rely on dogmatic ideas but on the sensory experience. Only the perceptible world is real; the rest is unreal.
While the Lokāyatas make strong arguments, their philosophy is too reductive to explain the variety and complexity of human experiences. Thoughts reduced to just validation and verification takes away all the richness of this world. But this is not a polemic against Lokāyatas. In fact, it’s rather amazing that such contradictory philosophies co-existed in India. Some might seem irrelevant in today’s age, while others will be more acceptable. But what we need to appreciate is that all of them are sublime creations of the human mind.
P.S - Based on your feedback, I’ve decided to make Indian philosophy a fortnightly newsletter. Expect the upcoming issues to be lengthier and meatier. 😁
Materialism in Indian philosophy - Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics
Language, Truth, and Logic
Materialism in Indian philosophy - Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics