Cārvāka

Cārvāka (T. ཚུར་རོལ་མཛེས་སྨྲ་བ་/ཚུ་རོལ་མཛེས་པ་), literally "Those Who Propound That it is Beautiful Here," were a school of Indian philosophy described as "materialist," "nihilist," "physicalist," etc. They are also known as the Lokāyata (T. འཇིག་རྟེན་རྒྱང་འཕེན་པ་/རྒྱང་འཕེན་པ་; C. shunshi waidao 順世外道; "worldly" or "naturalist") school.

In Buddhist texts, this school represented the extreme of nihilism. The Cārvāka's are said to have denied the possibility of rebirth.

Tsepak Rigdzin states that the Cārvāka's are:

A proponent of non-Buddhist tenets who assert the non-existence of past and future lives and that the mind arises adventitiously from the body as light is kindled from the lamp.

Overview

The Princeton Dictionary, using the name Lokāyata, states:

Its founding is attributed to the legendary figure Bṛhaspati, but during the Buddha’s lifetime, its most prominent exponent was Ajita Keśakambala. The Lokāyata school is claimed to have taken a rigidly materialist perspective toward the world, in which everything in the universe, including consciousness, was composed only of the four elements (mahābhūta) of earth, water, heat, and air.

A. K. Warder states:

The Lokāyata, the name of which probably meant originally 'natural science' or 'naturalism' (investigation of nature), was a materialist school. As opposed to the Ājīvakas they asserted complete freedom, absolute free will, as the natural way of life and were also known as the Do-as-you-like school (yadṛachāvāda). Everything happens through the spontaneous actions of itself (svabhāva, i.e. the own-being, of each reality). The school agreed with the Ājīvakas in rejecting moral causation, but for opposite reasons: all acts and experiences are spontaneous, not determined by anything; more- over there is no soul and no transmigration which could make the working out of moral causation possible. The aim of living beings is happiness, but for this school the highest happiness attainable is that of the pleasures of the senses (kāma). The pleasure of human relationships is also particularly mentioned. Unlike the Buddhists and probably most philosophers of the time, the Lokāyata school held that there is more happiness than unhappiness in life, what is needed being discrimination and the recognition (and acceptance) that happiness is by nature transient, permanence being boring and disgusting and contrast essential for enjoyment, whilst overcoming difficulties leads to increased pleasure.

According to this school the universe is constituted out of four elements: earth, water, heat and air. All realities consist of combinations of these four, and consciousness is such a compound, or rather a property of the elements combined in a particular way as a living body.

The most prominent Lokāyata teacher of the Buddha's time was Ajita, but he was not regarded in later times as the founder of the school. It is a legendary Bṛhaspati who was later regarded as the founder of the school and the composer of its basic text or sūtra.

Buddhist refutation of Carvaka views

According to Dan Arnold, Indian Buddhist scholar Dharmakīrti refuted the Carvaka view on (lack of) rebirth as follows:

What else, then, must be the case for it to be true that the Buddha exemplified such an astonishing degree of compassion? For Dharmakīrti, the first point to be made here is that thought (buddhi) cannot depend upon the body. Thus, in the same verse in which he asserts that the Buddha’s compassion warrants an inference to the Buddha’s authority, Dharmakīrti avers that this compassion is based on disciplined “repetition” (abhyāsa) of spiritual practice — repetition, that is, over the course of innumerable lifetimes. This occasions the objection — generally attributed to a physicalist of the “Cārvāka” school, and anticipated in the same verse — that this supposition is unwarranted “because of thought’s dependence upon the body.” The objection is that the death of the body terminates (insofar as the body is a necessary and sufficient condition of) the mental events that alone can be thought to motivate the alleged “repetition.” Dharmakīrti completes this verse (and introduces the ensuing critique of physicalism) by saying that this objection to his demonstration of the Buddha’s authority can be put aside “based on a refutation of [thought’s] dependence [on the body].

While the ensuing refutation of physicalism is elaborated over the course of many tens of verses, most of what is significant about Dharmakīrti’s characteristic position is actually stated in the next verse-and-a-quarter. Here, Dharmakīrti says:

“It is not the case that inhalation, exhalation, sensation, and thought arise, independently of [causes] of the same kind, from the body alone, since there are absurd consequences given the assumption of such arising.”

Sources

• Arnold, Dan (2014), Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind, Columbia University Press 
• Buswell, Robert E.; Lopez, Donald S. (2014), The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Princeton University 
• Warder, A.K. (2000), Indian Buddhism (Third ed.), Dheli: Motilal Banarsidass 
• cArvAka, Christian-Steinert Dictionary
• རྒྱང་འཕེན་པ་, Christian-Steinert Dictionary
• འཇིག་རྟེན་རྒྱང་འཕེན་པ་, Christian-Steinert Dictionary
• Lokayata, Christian-Steinert Dictionary

External links

• Charvaka, Wikipedia