The untold history of India’s vital atheist philosophy

Rationality, skepticism, and atheism have been central parts of Indian thinking for 2,700 years. Contrary to common belief, the hallmark of India’s philosophy is its critique of religions.

This is part I of Herbjørnsrud’s text on the Cārvāka/ Lokāyata philosophy of India. The second and last part will cover three other aspects when it comes to these non-religious Indian schools of thinking: first, the Mughal era, atheism, and the influence on Europe; second, the spread of Lokāyata ideas to China; and third, it’s impact on Indian science.

Who said the following?

Fools prescribe alms-giving; and some assert that there is such a thing as merit in alms-giving; but their words are empty, false and nonsensical. Both the fool and the wise are annihilated and destroyed after death and dissolution of their bodies. Nothing exists after death.

No, this anti-religious statement is not from the latest American Atheists convention; rather it is a quote from the atheist philosopher Ajita Kesakambala (ca. 500 BCE) in the classical text “Discourse on the Fruits of Contemplative Life,” written in the Indian language of Pali. In this ancient Theravada Buddhist text, a king asks six “seeking” (sramana) ascetics about their different worldviews. Another of those teachers quoted, is the skeptic Sanjaya Belatthiputta (belonging to the Ajnana tradition, another heterodox school in Ancient India) – whose answer might be said to define radical agnosticism:

If you ask me whether there is another world, well, if I thought there were, I would say so. But I don’t say so. And I don’t think it is thus or thus. And I don’t think it is otherwise. And I don’t deny it. And I don’t say there neither is, nor is not, another world.

According to popular belief, atheism is a modern invention: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” Friedrich Nietzsche declared in 1882. Supposedly, it was the modern European mind that invented the criticism of religions and religiosity.

But what if it was the other way around? What if philosophical skepticism, rational arguments, and non-religiosity came first, while religions developed later? What if irreligiosity was suppressed by medieval religious minds, before this worldview was resurrected in the modern era? In the beginning was … atheism?

In that case, we need look no further than the birthplace of philosophy, alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt (Kemet), namely India (Bhārat). There, the world’s oldest and most persistent documented tradition of atheism and skepticism has been around for almost three millennia, since Vedic times and the oldest of the Upanishads (commentaries to the Vedas), ca. 7^th century BCE. Hundreds of years later, Pyrrho – who reportedly traveled east with Alexander the Great and discussed philosophy with the Indian gymnosophists – later introduced skepticism to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Greeks. But Pyrrho and Epicurus did not denounce the gods: hence, the European traditions lack a deeper historical and philosophical treatment of materialism and atheism. Contrary to the common Orientalist stereotype, both in the “West” and the “East” (including present-day India), the Indian philosophical traditions are more rational and less theistic than the European ones.

The Indian school that rejected supernaturalism was originally named Lokāyata, which can be translated as prevalent (ayata) among the people (loka) – in addition to meaning “this-worldliness”, “worldly”. Since the last half of the first millennium CE, the term Cārvāka (or Charvaka, possibly from “alluring speech”, caru vak, or from grinding with the teeth, carva) has also been used for these atheist, skeptical, naturalist, and materialist traditions.

The skeptical Indian schools have their forebears in the oldest of the Vedic texts. In Rig Veda (“Knowledge of Verses”, created in Punjab, in today’s Pakistan/India, ca. 1500–1100 BCE), we find a remarkable agnostic worldview. In contrast to the fairly clear-cut answers of the later monotheistic religions, the “Creation Hymn” (10.129) of the Rig Veda offers questions and speculations:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?

Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?

The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.

Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Such extracts illustrate that agnostic doubts do exist in the earliest of Indian writings. But could atheism, or irreligiosity, have been present as well?

Not according to today’s canonical sources in the US. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not even have a headword on Lokāyata/Cārvāka or Indian atheism. But the systematic works of present-day scholars deserve better recognition – as a clearer picture has emerged in the 21^st century.

Three recent scholarly perspectives

In spring 2020, Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, a Fellow of the Pavlov Institute in Kolkata, published More Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) – summarizing a quarter of a century of work. He underscores two themes: that there have been many varieties of materialist thought in India; and that there is no foundation to the accusations of hedonism nor to the claim that these schools reject inference (anumāna) per se as a way of knowledge (pramāṇas).

In 2018, Ethan Mills launched Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India, dealing with the three central skeptics Nāgārjuna (c. 150–200 CE), Jayarāśi (c. 770–830 CE), and Śrī Harṣa (c. 1125–1180 CE). Of special interest here is how Mills identifies the South Indian Brahmin Jayarāśi Bhatta as belonging to a skeptical sub-school of Carvāka, as one who developed the materialism of the previously mentioned skeptic Sanjaya. Jayarāsi’s 1,200 year-old tome The Lion of the Destruction of Principles (“Tattvôpaplava-siṁha”) – a palm leaf version was rediscovered in 1926 and published in 1940 – is the best primary source we now have for Lokāyata/Cārvāka philosophy and irreligious skepticism. He atheistically states that “there is no other world” (paraloka), quoting the legendary materialist Brhaspati.

In 2015, meanwhile, Professor Pradeep G. Gokhale published an Oxford University Press book that demonstrates how “philosophy as a purely secular, rational, and non-dogmatic discipline in the context of Indian philosophy can be appropriately located in the Lokāyata approach.” Gokhale discusses the cognitive skepticism, extreme empiricism, and mitigated empiricism of these irreligious and materialist schools; a “pluralist approach.”

Hence, in addition to diversity among the Indian atheist philosophers of the past, there is also a complexity of approaches amid present Lokāyata/Cārvaka scholars.

On the Upanishads, Panini, Shankara

Historically, we have rich material from different opponents of, or commentators on, atheist materialism: both texts by religious Veda (astika) followers (Hindu) and from the non-Vedic (nastika), and non-theistic philosophies of the followers of Siddhartha Gautama (the founder of the Buddhist schools) or the non-violent (ahimsa) teachings of Mahavira (Jainism).

The original Buddhist and Jainist teachings, both from ca. 500 BCE, oppose the concept of a creator God. Or as the central Jain philosopher Jinasena wrote in the 9^th century:

Some foolish men declare that a creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.

At the same time, we can note that both Jainism and Buddhism are based upon the post-Veda idea of rebirth (samsāra), which the materialist atheists denounce. These Indian heterodox schools created a unique intellectual environment, which may explain why purely atheist ideas could also thrive. Following the scholar Krishna Del Toso, we can say that – on the basis of the oldest texts at our disposal – there were both materialistic, atheistic, and theistic ideas circulating at the same time. Each of them then took its own path, and sometimes these different paths intersected, some other time a path ended in self-extinction, and some other time they thrived and gave birth to different sub-paths.

Hence, the importance and prevalence of Lokāyata/Cārvāka thinking in India can hardly be overstated: In the oldest of the Upanishads, in chapter 2 of the Brhadāranyaka (ca. 700 BCE), the leading theorist Yājnavalkya states in a passage often referred to by the irreligious: “so I say, after death there is no awareness.”

This declaration arises in a discussion with his female philosophy interlocutor, Maitreyi, who notices that this might mean there is no afterlife – no religion: “After Yājñavalkya said this, Maitreyi exclaimed: ‘Now, sir, you have totally confused me by saying ‘after death there is no awareness’.”

In the main work by the “father of linguistics”, Panini (ca. 4^th c. BCE), the main (Kasika) commentary on his affix regarding nastika explains: “an atheist” is one “whose belief is that there is no Hereafter” (4.4.60). Cārvāka arguments are also present in the oldest Sanskrit epic, Ramayana (early parts from 3^rd c. BCE), in which the hero Rama is lectured by the sage Javali – who states that the worship of gods is “laid down in the Shastras by clever people, just to rule over other people and make them submissive and disposed to charity.”

The Cārvākas appear in the massive epic Mahabharata as well. And even the most important Veda philosopher of the past 1,500 years, Adi Shankara (ca 790–820), who consolidated the non-dualist Advaita Vedanta tradition, spends several pages trying to refute the non-religious schools, as he argues against “Unlearned people, and the Lokayatikas (…)”

Atheism: Long-lasting, widespread, vital

In recent years, scholars like Eli Franco, Johannes Bronkhorst, and Del Toso have also made important contributions in the field of Lokāyata/Cārvāka. In this text, I will build upon such works in order to argue that these Indian atheist and non-religious schools of thought have been:

1. more long-lasting than generally presented: different strands of Lokāyata/Cārvāka philosophy were continuously present in India from Vedic times until the arrival of the British, were vital during the anti-colonial struggle for liberation, and have remained so from the birth of modern India in 1947 until this very day;
2. more widespread, both geographically and demographically, than generally presented: the god-denying and rational approaches have not only been present in northern India, but also in the south – expressed in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Dravidian, and Tamil – and among the Brahmins, Dalits, and the common people. Lokāyata was exported to China in the 7^th century, where it made an impact, and influenced European intellectuals from the late 16^th century;
3. more vital for both the scientific and religious schools than generally presented: the scientist Aryabhata (476–550), who laid the groundwork for the mathematical use of the number zero, was presented as a materialist with similar views. Religiously, it is possible to be an atheist Hindu. As the Sanskrit scholar and grandfather (b. 1880) of Amartya Sen, a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, calmly replied when his grandson announced that he was irreligious: “You have placed yourself, I see, in the atheistic – the Lokayata – part of the Hindu spectrum!”

From Harappa to the orthodox schools

In addition, new research indicates that non-theistic ideas also preceded the composition of the Rig Veda, more specifically in the Harappa culture or Indus Valley Civilization (in today’s Pakistan and Western India), which was at its height between 2600 and 1900 BCE. Until recently, scholars thought that these, most likely Dravidian-speaking, peoples worshipped “Mother Goddesses.” But a new, detailed study by senior archeologist Shereen Ratnagar demonstrates how the hundreds of female clay statues at Mohenjo-Daro were more likely depictions of real people, not gods. After all, no temples or signs of any systematized religion have yet been found among the Harappans.

These first Indian urban dwellers might have had “no religion at all, in the sense of a state cult or an enforced dogma,” Wendy Doniger asserts in her book The Hindus. She postulates that the people of the Indus Valley Civilization created the world’s “first secular state”; “Could they have been more like protoatheists than protoyogis?”

It was into this Harappan culture that an Aryan-speaking and horse-riding people immigrated from Central and Western Asia around 1500 BCE. A new Veda culture developed. Were the ideas of “no life after death” present first in Vedic thinking, while the religious systems came after? Johannes Bronkhorst, at least, argues that only later did the urban Brahmins have “to face the brunt of the onslaught of the new ideas of rebirth and karmic retribution …”

In contrast to the conventional presentations – in which only religious concepts such as rebirth and karma are described as “original Indian” – one might rather allege that skepticism, materialism, and atheist thinking are even older; and at least as “truly Indian”.

After all, one of the oldest, and possibly pre-Vedic, of the six “orthodox” (astika) “Hindu” schools, Samkhya (rationalist, number-related, dualist) is based on an atheist ideology. When it comes to the five other schools, the brahmanical philosopher Kumārila observed, in the 8^th century, that “atheistic sentiments” were “common” among the adherents of the school of Purva-Mimāmsā (critical investigation). Close to a century ago, S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) noted that both Nyaya (formal reasoning) and Vaisheshika (naturalism, atomism) has been regarded as “originally atheistic, though their modern adherents have made of them theistic creeds.” Meanwhile the pre-Vedic and self-knowledge-seeking Yoga school is non-theistic. Only the last of the six orthodox schools, Vedanta (“end of the Vedas”, c. 800) is clearly theistic and religious.

Theoretical onslaught against atheism

As Bhattacharya underscores in his new book, even in the Katha Upanishad (possibly 6–5^th c. BCE), in which karma is launched as a concept in a later added chapter, Yajnavalkya states that he does not want to offer any public opinion on what happens when humans die. Meanwhile the Pluto-like figure Yama makes the following agnostic statement about a possible afterlife: “As to this even the gods of old had doubts, for it’s hard to understand, it’s a subtle doctrine.”

In the long run, though, the worldly philosophy of Lokāyata and Cārvāka lost ground to more theistic, religious readings of the Vedas. Or as Bronkhorst concludes, regarding the materialist and Vedic Brahmans:

Later centuries would depict the early defenders of the Vedic tradition against this onslaught as being themselves critics of the Vedic tradition. The Cārvākas would turn in their graves if they knew.

In the same vein, S. Radakrishnan stated in his modern classic Indian Philosophy (1929): “Even in its early stages rational reflection tended to correct religious belief.” And: “Materialism is as old as philosophy, and the theory is to be met with in pre-Buddhistic period also. Gems of it are found in the hymns of the Rg-Veda.”

A similar and updated account can be found in the Doniger’s latest book, Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics (2018). Doniger demonstrates how, in the first centuries of the common era, “the three aims” (tri-varga) were established: dharma (justice, religion), artha (money, political power), and kama (love, desire) – or piety, profit, and pleasure.

But, as the poet exclaims towards the end of the gigantic epic Mahabharata, composed some two millennia ago: “Artha and kama come from dharma; why is it not practiced?”

Today, it is the religious dharma part of India that is known to the world. But for centuries, artha and kama were as important: In the third century, the redaction of the massive secular scientific treatise Artha-sāstra (the science of political power and economy, credited to Kautilya) was finished. The treatise is dedicated to one Brhaspati and introduced with the words: “Sāmkhya, Yoga, Lokāyata – these constitute critical inquiry. It benefits the people by critically inquiring through logical reasoning (…)”

In the same era, some 1,800 years ago, the kama aim was covered by Vātsyāyana in his famous Kama Sutra: one should enjoy all three aims, but dharma is meant for the last part of life in order to gain moksa, release from transmigration. Interestingly, Vātsyāyana uses a religious perspective to argue for sexual pleasures (kama). Hence, in the beginning of the Kama Sutra, the atheists and skeptics are presented as Vātsyāyana’s main opponents:

“The Lokayatikas say: – Religious ordinances should not be observed, for they bear a future fruit, and at the same time it is also doubtful whether they will bear any fruit at all.”

But the atheists used even harsher words. A common Cārvāka saying, attributed to Brhaspati, is that the authors of religious texts are “buffoons, knaves and demons.” Not even Nietzsche was ever that anti-religious; rather, he wanted to reform monotheism. In contrast to the Greek materialists, the Indian Lokāyatas argued from a clear-cut atheistic perspective: there is no God. No soul. No next world. Everything is material. If there is an afterlife, why doesn’t the priest kill his own father and make him come back?

Atheism among the people

The Cārvāka Brahmins disparaged the new attempts to divide people into “castes” (varnas), with the Brahmins at the top. But it was not only the elite who denied the religious ideology of offerings and rebirth. The god-denying and worldly thinking was also common among ordinary people, several have argued. In his pioneering 1959 work, Lokāyata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, Debiprashad Chattopadhyaya (1918–1993) made this point about “the masses”: “Their world outlook was instinctively materialistic.”

We can, for example, find support for this “prevalent among the people” argument in the impressive work The Anthology of All Philosophies (“Sarva-darsana-samgraha”) by Madhavacarya (Vidyaranya, c. 1300). This Advaita Vedtanta scholar depicts 15 of the other main philosophical schools in India at the time, each of which is presented as if it is his own. Madhavacarya starts with the arguments of the atheist Cārvākas in chapter one. Over some seven pages, he describes their philosophy: how they held that “there is no other Hell than mundane pain,” that “the soul is identical with the body,” and that they are “denying the existence of any object belonging to a future world.” Thus, they captivate the masses:

The efforts of Chárváka are indeed hard to be eradicated, for the majority of living beings hold by the current refrain: ‘While life is yours, live joyously/ None can escape Death’s searching eye/ When once this frame of ours they burn/ How shall it ever again return?

Were a majority of Indians non-religious in the 14^th century? Maybe not. It is possible that Madhavacarya overstated the popularity of the Cārvāka in his era. But again, as he added:

The mass of men… denying the existence of any object belonging to a future world, are found to follow only the doctrine of Carvaka. Hence another name for that school is Lokayata – a name well accordant with the thing signified.

Madhavacarya concludes his first chapter on the atheists by stating: “Hence, in kindness to the mass of living beings must we fly for refuge to the doctrine of Carvaka. Such is the pleasant consummation.”

Dalits and atheism: Modern era

Based on the quotes above, is should come as no surprise if some of the main opponents of the gradual implementation of the systems of “castes” (varnas) – vehemently developed and enforced by the British from the 19^th century – included the underprivileged Dalits (“broken”, known as “untouchables”), who constitute some 20–30 percent of the population in north-West India for example.

Non-religious questions are not only a matter for the past. In 1997, the Dalit scholar and intellectual Katti Padma Rao published his study Charvaka Darshan: Ancient Indian Dalit Philosophy, describing how an atheist and materialist worldview has been a component of the struggles of underprivileged peoples. Thus, Cārvāka was an “ancient Dalit philosophy.”

In 2012, the scholar Johannes Quack portrays the vital, modern non-religious movements in India in his prizewinning book Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India. Quack underscores that “nearly all the rationalist organizations are connected in one way or another to Dalit movements and see themselves as part of this heritage.”

Consequently, we have a peculiar situation in which the atheist philosophies (Lokāyata/Cārvāka) seem vital for both the original Brahmin Vedic scholars (cf. Bronkhorst, Doniger, etc), the people at large (Madhavacarya, Chattopadhyaya), and the Dalits (Rao, Quack) – not to mention the influence the atheists had on the other philosophical schools and religions. This complexity clearly calls for more inquiry.

Just look at the vital and earliest 19^th century social reformer of the Dalit movement, the defender of women’s rights, Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890). In one of his central books Phule quotes the anti-religious maxim of Brhaspati that “the Vedas were made by thugs.” (Brhaspati’s Cārvākasutra is lost, but has been reconstructed by Bhattacharya, who stresses that we know of at least four commentators on it: Bhāvivikta, Kambalāśvatara, Aviddhakarṇa, and Udbhaṭa – who can be viewed as revisionists or reformists.) Thus, this earliest modern Dalit leader concludes that it is untenable to say that religious texts were God-created and proposes the reinstatement of a traditional and pre-Vedic egalitarian Indian society.

In the mid-19^th century, Gulab Das (1809–1873) gained a large following (Gulabdasis) of Dalits and women in Punjab, around Lahore in today’s Pakistan, by propagating what has been described as an atheist doctrine for the people. Gulab Das was born a Sikh, a religion which opposed castes, and in line with Cārvāka tradition he propagated a this-worldly life.

His closest companion was the Muslim-born female writer Piro Preman (1832–1875), as Anshu Malhotra describes in her book Piro and the Gulabdasis. Gender, Sect, and Society in Punjab (Oxford University Press, 2017). Preman came from the lower castes and challenged religious leaders, and Gulab Das saved her from captivity. Today, Preman is recognized as Punjab’s first modern female poet. Her words against both men and religions are harsh: “They make false religions making false promises.”

Preman and the Gulabdasis are included here to showcase how modern religious criticism can be understood within this larger Indian historical tradition of atheist skepticism. As Bhattacharya has attested, women’s rights were also a natural part of the Cārvāka movement against the religious patriarchy.

But there is more – for example when it comes to the connection between Indian atheism and the European intellectuals from the late 16^th century and beyond. This will be covered in part II on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophy here at the Blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA).

Dag Herbjørnsrud (@DagHerbjornsrud) is a global historian of ideas, former editor-in-chief, and author. Latest journal article: “Beyond decolonizing: global intellectual history and reconstruction of a comparative method” (Global Intellectual History, 2019). Herbjørnsrud is the founder of Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas (SGOKI).

Bibliography

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