India’s atheist influence on Europe, China, and science

The atheist Carvaka philosophers were present at the Muslim emperor Akbar’s court in the late 16^th century, and beyond. How much did they influence modern Europe, and China from the 3^rd century?

This is part II of Herbjørnsrud’s text on the Carvaka/Lokayata (Cārvāka/Lokāyata) philosophy of India. The first part explored India’s atheist philosophy by studying the history of rational, skeptical, and atheist thought in Hindu, Buddhist, and other texts.

The initial piece of this text on the ancient atheist and materialist philosophy of India covered the development from the Harappa and Vedic era to the modern Dalit movement. In this second part I will argue that there are three more aspects of the Lokayata/Carvaka philosophy that could be dealt with more thoroughly, especially in American and European scholarship.

First, that this atheist philosophy endured into the Mughal era and influenced European intellectuals from the 16^th century onward; secondly, that Lokayata philosophy spread east to China from the third century, and thirdly, this school’s impact on Indian math and science.

Let’s start with the endurance of atheist and skeptical philosophy, and its connection to modern Europe.

According to the common view among many scholars, the Carvakas vanished in India after the 12^th century. The British Encyclopedia states that this materialist doctrine had “disappeared by the end of the medieval period.”

But, contrary to this claim, we have rather decisive proof that the non-religious Cārvāka philosophical tradition continued to flourish in India until the arrival of European colonial representatives and beyond. These atheists were reportedly present at the court of the Muslim-born Mughal ruler, Akbar (1542–1605). Akbar was a patron of arts and libraries, and the foremost of the emperors of the Mughal Empire (16^th–19^th century), an inquiring skeptic who believed in “the pursuit of reason” over “reliance on tradition.”

Thus, in 1578 he started inviting philosophers and representatives of the different religions to his new “House of Worship” (Ibadat Khana) in Fatehpur Sikri every Thursday. In this unique setting, religious leaders met to discuss their views of the world and afterlife (in the end, Akbar began to promulgate a new, tolerant, and syncretic religion, known as “God’s religion,” Din-i Ilahī, in 1582).

According to the liberal, Persian-writing chronicler Abul Fazl (1551–1602), those discussing religious and existential matters at Akbar’s court included the Hindu Brahmin Devi, the Parsi Dastur Mehrji Rānā, the Jain ascetic Hiravijaya, and the Catholic Jesuits, Ridolfo Aquaviva and Antonio Monserrate.

Atheists at the Mughal court

In addition, Fazl writes in his third volume of the official chronicle Akbarnama (1602), the atheist Cārvākas were present. He describes them as follows:

They do not believe in a God nor in immaterial substances, and affirm faculty of thought to result from the equilibrium of the aggregate elements (…) They admit only of such sciences as tend to the promotion of external order, that is, a knowledge of just administration and benevolent government. They are somewhat analogous to the sophists in their views and have written many works in reproach of others (…)

Here, we may note Abul Fazl’s emphasis on the Carvākas’ promotion of “just administration and benevolent argument”, and the fact that he also compares them with Sophists.

Fascinated by the religious openness and discussions, the Jesuit missionaries mentioned above reported back to Europe – first in 1582, with further reports in the 1590s and the early 1600s, in Latin, French, and German.

The Europeans were surprised by the openness and rational doubts of Akbar and the Indians. In Pierre De Jarric’s Histoire (1610), based on the Jesuit reports, the Mughal emperor is actually compared to an atheist himself: “Thus we see in this Prince the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to make reason subservient to faith (…)”

As Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski concludes about the Jesuit descriptions in her groundbreaking paper “East-West Swerves: Cārvāka Materialism and Akbar’s Religious Debates at Fatehpur Sikri” (2015):

…The information they sent back to Europe was disseminated widely in both Catholic and Protestant countries (…) A more detailed understanding of Indian philosophies, including Cārvāka, began to emerge in Jesuit missionary writings by the early to mid-seventeenth century.

The Jesuit Roberto De Nobili wrote in 1613 that the “Logaidas” (Lokayatas) “hold the view that the elements themselves are god”. Some decades later, Heinrich Roth, who studied Sanskrit in Agra ca. 1654–60, translated the Vedantasara by the influential Vedantic commentator Sadananda (14^th). This text depicts four different schools of the Carvaka philosophies.

As Wojciehowski notes: “Rather than proclaiming a Cārvāka renaissance in Akbar’s court, it would be safer to suggest that the ancient school of materialism never really went away.”

This argument is supported by the fact that the logician, and Jain, philosopher Yashovijya (1624–1688), from Gujarat on the western coast, also noted that there were at least two branches of this materialist and rational school.

What’s more, we have the 400-page book Dabistan (School of Religions, ca. 1660), credited to the Persian historian writing in Kashmiri, Mohsin Fani (b. ca. 1615). This text – possibly supported by the Mughal prince Darah Shikoh – discusses more than 20 philosophical and religious schools, including Carvaka.

As far as I can see, Dabistan is not discussed in the existing Carvaka/Lokayata literature; this means there is still potential for further scholarly treatment, since Fani devotes several pages in this book to the atheists (rupa skandha, “understood by means of the senses”). His description is not written from a critical but rather from a non-dogmatic perspective. Fani states, in his Dabistan, that these 17^th century atheists argue that “the world and its inhabitants have no creator (…)”

We might also note how the positive sides are stressed in his Carvaka summary:

However, nobody is to hurt living beings, as by it he is liable to cause some harm to himself. It is agreed by the wise that no injury is to be done to another; by the observance of which men may be set at ease, their numbers increased, and cultivation be promoted. This is the substance of the belief of the Charvak.

Fani’s Dabistan also covers the discussions at the court of Akbar. Towards the end of the book, a “learned philosopher” enters the royal hall. This philosopher criticizes the Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Veda followers who are present, and none of them manage to beat him in the debate. The learned philosopher argues for the adoption of the thought system of “Akbar the wise” – yet he also states:

You seem not to know that the irrational cannot be the creator of the rational (…)

This “learned philosopher” applies Carvaka arguments, Wojciehowski points out in a footnote in her paper.

Influence on Europe: Bernier, Hume, Mill

So, our next question could be whether the Jesuit reports of the heterodoxical Indian discussions, including Cārvāka, that were disseminated through Europe from the late 1500s and early 1600s could have influenced the late Renaissance, the early Enlightenment, and the emergence of secular and atheist ideas in Europe?

It is worth noting that both the early empiricist Francis Bacon and the scientist Pierre Gassendi started writing after the Jesuit reports. Wojchiehowski raises the question of “how Akbar’s debates could have influenced similar contests of belief in Europe,” but she does not reach any conclusion on the matter.

There are other paths of connection westward as well. Interestingly, the French philosopher Francois Bernier set sail for Mughal India in 1656. He ended up cooperating with Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), the intellectual prince and patron of arts mentioned in part I, who commissioned the world’s first translation of the Sanskrit Upanishads. Most likely, Bernier was also in contact with the author of Dabistani.

In Mughal India, Bernier moved in the same circles as the leading “new reason” (Navya Nyaya) philosophers in Varanasi. These rather secular thinkers advocated empiricism, for example by reviving the ancient Vaisesika atomism of Kanada. As Jonardon Ganeri writes in The Lost Age of Reason. Philosophy in Early Modern India (1450–1700) (2011):

The ‘new reason’ philosophers in India depict materialism (Cārvāka) much as Bacon does the empiricists, and monism (Advaita Vedānta) the way he does the rationalists, in order analogously to secure a middle ground for themselves.

In Varanasi, Bernier met Jayarama Nyayapancanana – who wrote Garland of Principles about Reason (ca. 1660), Ganeri notes. In that work, Jayarama includes an appendix by the Bihar philosopher Samkara Misra (late 15^th c.), who mentions atheist Cārvāka and Buddhist thinking.

When he was in India, Bernier was very well connected to the early European Enlightenment thinkers, the libertins érudits. The translation into English of his Travels was, for example, vital for John Dryden’s play about the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1675).

As Ganeri states, David Hume, who supported atheism, “may well have read Bernier directly, or it is possible that he obtained the simile [the world arose from an “infinite spider”, “the Brahmins assert”] from Bernier’s correspondent Pierre Bayle (…)”

Could there be a connection between India’s atheistic materialism and the later British empiricism of Bacon and Hume? We do not know yet, as such complex matters call for serious studies.

However, we might note Alison Gopnik’s paper in Hume Studies, “Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles François Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network.” She points out that Hume wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) in France, had access to the Jesuit library at the Royal College at La Flèche, and met Jesuits who were familiar with the missionary Ippolito Desideri and his studies in Tibetan Buddhism. But, at the same time, Hume’s views regarding atheism and inference seem more similar to the arguments of the Carvakas than the Buddhists.

After all, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) states that the Indian atheist schools are generally “compared to the empiricism of John Locke and David Hume. The Cārvākas denied philosophical claims that could not be verified through direct experience.”

Gopnik’s article is referred in the new book Classical Indian Philosophy (2020) by Peter Adamson and Ganeri. In addition, they mention a lecture by Henry T. Coolebrooke in 1827 on the schools of the Carvaka/Lokayata materialists. Adamson and Ganeri compare the Carvakas to the “emergentism in the philosophy of mind,” which is traced back to John Stuart Mill.

They write that Mill “sounds like a follower of Brhaspati, founder of the Cārvāka system, when he writes in his System of Logic that ‘All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature (…)’”

Hence, the search for the origins and inspirations for the modern European mind is therefore still ongoing.

“Export” of Lokayata to China

The second rather unexplored part of Carvaka/Lokayata philosophy is the spread of this thought system not only to the west, but also to the east.

The presence of these atheist schools in both the north and south of the Indian subcontinent has gradually been revealed: Krishna Del Toso has demonstrated how this material school is described in Buddhist manuscripts that are only extant in Tibetan. And Ramkrishna Bhattacharya has covered, for example, the classic Tamil epic play Manimekalai by Satthan, written in this Dravidian language in Southern India in the first centuries of the common era: The epic’s female protagonist is in pursuit of the best philosophy, and after exploring the teaching of nine different thought systems in Tamil Nadu, she ends up with the Bhuta-Vadi (materialists), who declare that they follow the Lokāyatas:

It is absurd to believe in the existence of another life in which we would gather the fruits of our deeds in this one. Our existence as well as our joys and sorrows terminate with our life.

Far more absent from present-day Carvaka/Lokaya scholarship, as far as I can see, are discussions on how this atheist tradition traveled east as well – especially to China.

This Indian-Chinese materialist connection is documented in a little-known but groundbreaking paper by professor Huang Xinchuan, “Lokayata and Its Influence in China,” published in Chinese in 1978 (English version in the quarterly journal Social Sciences in March 1981). Xinchuan, a senior researcher at the China Academy of Social Science, demonstrates how the Indian Lokāyata schools exercised an influence on ancient Chinese over the centuries.

He lists 62 classical texts in China that refer to these Indian material-atheistic schools, from the Brahmajala Sutra translated by Zhi Qian (Chih Chien, 223–253), of the Kingdom of Wu, to An Explanation for Brahmajala Sutra written by Ji Guang (Chi-kuang, 1528–1588) of the Ming Dynasty. In addition, Xinchuan mentions four texts on Lokayata in Chinese by Japanese Buddhist writers.

Xinchuan’s paper explains how the Buddhists regarded the Lokayatikas as fellow-travellers of the Confucian and the Taoist Schools, and how they launched an attack on them because of their materialistic views. Xinchuan cites, as also Rasik Vihari Joshi noted in 1987, dozens of texts where Chinese classical works describe Lokayata either as “Shi-Jian-Xing” (“doctrine prevailing in the world”), “Wu-Hou-Shi-Lun” (“doctrine of denying after-life”), or refers to “Lu-Ka-Ye-Jin” (the “Lokāyata Sutra”).

We might note that Xinchuan states the Lokayatikas had “a great influence among the traders, craftsmen, peasants and other lower sections of the people in the village communities of that time.” He also writes:

As recorded in the Matangi Sutra and the Brahmajala Sutra, most of the Lokayatikas studied medicine, astronomy, agronomy and so on and engaged themselves in secular work. Again in the Mulasarvastivada — nikaya— vinaya (fasci. 35), it is said that the Lokayatikas, while debating with Indian Buddhists, burst into such rough manners that they fought each other with blows and kicks.

One example of such a philosophical confrontation is a 7th century debate between Xuan Zhuang (Hsiian-tsang) and an Indian Lokayatika at Nalanda Monastery. The latter affirmed that the four basic elements are the origin of all human beings and substance, while the former “refuted him by elaborating [the] Mahayana doctrine.”

On the influence of Indian Lokayata on China’s philosophical thought, Huang Xinchuan notes that there are certain similarities between Chinese Taoism and Indian Tantrism, which in many respects have the “same fundamental concepts and close relationship with Lokayata.”

For example, Ji Zang (Chi-tsang) (549–623) classified the materialistic ideas of the Confucians and the Taoists and Lokayata into the same category when he was forming the idealistic system of San-lun (“Three Sastras”) in China. Hence, Huang Xinchuan summarizes:

In conclusion, Lokayata as a materialistic system of philosophy is by no means of little significance, as has been suggested by some scholars. On the contrary, it had won wide support and popularity among the people, as its name itself shows. It spread as far as China and exercised an influence on ancient Chinese thought and literature and art. As far as its popularity is concerned, Lokayata matched other systems of Indian philosophy and is an important cultural legacy of India deserving further study and exploration.

Huang also states that more facts about Lokayata and the Lokayatikas would emerge if similar research were to be done “in other countries where Indian cultural influence has been felt”; which makes make one think of the huge Hindu-Buddhist impact in Indonesian Java (Borabudur) and in Cambodia (Angkor Wat).

In the 2020s, we could also take into consideration the Encyclopedia of India-China Cultural Contacts – a bilateral work that launched in two volumes in 2014. In the first volume, more than three pages are devoted to the atheist and materialist Lokayata philosophy. The text is written by Beijing University professor Yao Wequn, who concludes as follows:

In modern China, Lokayata is attached great importance. Due to its atheism and materialism, it attracts attention from quite many Chinese thinkers, and there are translations of Indian works on Lokayata, while Chinese scholars also publish their studies of Lokayata. Some works on Indian philosophy have chapters dedicated to Lokayata, and college courses on Indian philosophy also have introduction or study of Lokayata.

Atheist influence on Indian science

Thirdly, and finally, there seems to be one more rather overlooked topic in Carvaka/Lokayata scholarship – namely these schools’ influence on science. As Amartya Sen has highlighted, the remarkable achievements of Indian science and mathematics from the 5^th century and Gupta period onwards, “benefited from the tradition of skepticism and questioning which had been flourishing in India at that time.”

The foremost scientist of that era was the mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata (476–550), from the southern Indian Asmaka region of Deccan where the Lokayatas had a particularly strong following. Not only did Aryabhata begin to use zero in the place value system some three hundred years before the Indian numerals were spread to the Arabs; he also demonstrated that the Earth rotates around its own axis – an idea that provoked reactions from the orthodox Brahmins and even his successor Brahmagupta (7^th century). Aryabhata was accused of “false knowledge”.

In his main work, supposedly from 499, Aryabhata explains lunar and solar eclipses, and he challenges those who do not use perception as the basis of knowledge. He – like the Lokayatas – argued that the world was made up of four, not five, elements.

Thus, in the paper “Aryabhata and Lokayatas” (1977), Grigory M. Bongard-Levin concludes: “Aryabhata advocated a number of rationalist ideas which are comparable to the concepts of the Lokayata, the most consistent materialist school of ancient India.”

Also the Persian polymath Muhammad Al-Biruni (b. 973), who studied for years in India in the early 11^th century, declared that “the followers of Aryabhata” contended: “that which is not reached by perception is not knowable.” By chance, this is one of the main arguments of the Lokayatas. We might note, since Bongard-Levin misses this point, that in the same volume Al-Biruni also writes about Brihaspati’s book Laukayata. According to Al-Biruni, this materialist Lokayata book says that “in all investigations we must exclusively rely upon the apperception of the senses.”

One of Aryabhata’s main followers, the polymath astronomer Varahamihira(6^th c.) stated that the gods have nothing to do with “the truth of science”. Such “rational trends”, Bongard-Levin writes, “played an extremely important role, exercising a tremendous impact on the development of Indian scholarship.”

One might wonder: How important have the atheist, skeptical, and materialist traditions of India been to the development of our modern societies? We do not know, as we have barely attempted to investigate this yet. But as S. Radakrishnan concluded close to a century ago, “the heretic, the sceptic, the unbeliever, the rationalist and the freethinker, the materialist and the hedonist all flourish in the soil of India.”

It seems reasonable to say at least that the atheist Carvaka and Lokayata thinking – whether its prototypes began in the Harappa civilization 4,000 years ago or later – have permeated all the vital parts of India’s philosophies and religions until the present day.

Bibliography

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