In the previous post on Carvaka Darshan, we looked at the arguments they used to reject inference as a valid source of knowledge. They consider only perception as a means to know the truth, grounding their philosophy in perceptual empiricism.
We must first ask ourselves: what sources do we have on Carvaka Darshan? Unfortunately, we don’t have a single authentic source written by the Carvakas themselves about their philosophy. It is only when other philosophers criticize Carvaka philosophy that we find references to what they believed. But a conflict of interest is hiding here. No philosopher in history has ever objectively viewed and written about a competitor’s philosophy. I’ll get back to this issue later in the post.
Some people believe that Carvaka was a real person who learned this philosophy from Brihaspati. Others argue that Carvaka does not refer to any single person but instead to the group of people who followed and preached this philosophy. They were so named because the word Carvaka means “sweet-tongued,” and their philosophy attracted many commoners. This is why they were also referred to as Lokayata.
When writing about Carvaka or Lokayata, the philosophers of competing schools describe it as a philosophy that attracted commoners of unrefined taste. You can imagine how objective their writings on Carvaka will be.
Why did Carvaka philosophy appeal to the masses? The primary reason is that while other Indian philosophies view the world as a place of suffering, the Carvakas embrace the world as the only reality. Other Indian philosophies start with suffering and end in liberation or kaivalya. They believe that pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin, and that every pleasure has a pain hidden within it. Thus, we should aim to go beyond the entanglements of both, pleasure and pain.
But the Carvakas ask: do we stop eating grains just because they are wrapped in husk? It is in the very nature of things that pleasure and pain accompany each other, but that does not mean we must abandon pleasure and the world. Instead, we should try to maximize our pleasure in life, a view known today as hedonism.
By rejecting inference and verbal testimony as valid sources of truth, the Carvakas rejected everything transcendental: God, soul, karma theory, afterlife, etc. They argued that these entities and concepts cannot be perceived and hence cannot be true. They even suggested that priests and sages fabricated these lies because faith in such realities sustains their livelihood. For the Carvakas, the world we live in is the only reality, as that is what we can perceive ourselves. Moreover, perceptual empiricism led them to believe that the world is completely material and made up of fire, earth, air, and water as its fundamental elements.
Instead of a permanent soul, the Carvakas suggest that what we identify as the self is just our conscious body, a concept called Dehatmavada. But how is it that most material substances, like rocks and clouds, are not conscious while the human body, which is also made up of material constituents, is conscious? The Carvakas respond to this with interesting analogies:
- A betel leaf, areca nut, and lime produce a red color when chewed, while none of them are red in themselves.
- Fermented yeast produces the intoxicating quality in wine, while none of the ingredients in wine, taken individually, are intoxicating.
With these analogies, they try to show how a particular combination of material elements can produce consciousness, even though none of these elements are conscious on their own. In today’s age, chemistry allows us to come up with even more examples: hydrogen and oxygen cannot individually quench our thirst, but when combined in a certain ratio, they form water. Modern psychology and neuroscience are also converging on the idea that consciousness is merely a byproduct of the brain.
Let’s look at some of the objections raised by other philosophical schools and the responses offered by modern materialists:
- Subject-object duality: If we say that the body is the source of consciousness, then the body becomes the subject while the world around it becomes the object. In experience, however, we are aware of our body. How can the subject also become the object here? Hence, consciousness cannot be a byproduct of the body. Essentially, if the body itself is the source of consciousness, it becomes hard to explain how it could also be the object of consciousness.
Response: Modern materialists argue that the brain constantly processes information about the body and the environment, and part of that processing includes representing its own internal states (such as emotions, thoughts, and sensory inputs). This creates the experience of “being aware of oneself,” not because there is an immaterial self, but because the physical system has built-in mechanisms for self-monitoring. In this view, self-awareness is an emergent property of complex neural networks, not something separate from matter. Fire does burn other objects, but it also burns itself in that process. - Inseparability problem: If consciousness is an essential property of the human body, it should be inseparable from it. Yet, in swoons, fits, epilepsy, dreamless sleep, etc., the living body is seen without consciousness. Hence, consciousness cannot be an inseparable or essential property of the body.
Response: Modern physiology and cognitive science have shown that the body is never truly living yet totally unconscious. It is simply non-responsive or non-reflective, not “blank” in any absolute sense. Moreover, bodily and neural processes can account for varying levels of awareness. - Consciousness without the body: In dreams, the physical body is lying still, but consciousness is active. Thus, consciousness occurs without the body’s activity or perception, showing that it is not dependent on the physical body.
Response: Modern neuroscience views dreams as internal mental events produced by the brain. The body may be outwardly inactive, but its nervous system and sense traces still operate internally. Hence, dream consciousness is not independent of the body; it is a bodily phenomenon occurring during partial sensory shutdown. - The problem of subjectivity: How can something subjective (like an experience) arise from something objective (like the body)? Ordinary material properties, like the hardness of a rock, can be perceived by multiple people, measured, and described objectively. If consciousness were a material property of the body, then like other material properties, it should also be observable by others and knowable in the same way by everyone. But consciousness is first-person and private: Only you feel your pain, joy, anger, or thoughts. Others cannot access your experience directly.
Response: Just because something is private does not mean it is non-physical. The brain and its internal states are material, yet others cannot directly see or feel what is happening inside it. Material processes can be hidden or private to a single locus. For example, digestion, heart rhythm, or neuron activity are also not directly knowable by others, yet they are material. Also, we cannot “share” consciousness directly, but we can communicate about it through behavior and language. That is, we can infer others’ mental states based on physical cues, showing a consistent correlation between bodily states and consciousness.
There are many other strong and weak criticisms, along with their weak and strong responses. None of the arguments on either side are convincing enough to have resolved the debate on material versus immaterial consciousness.
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who founded Epicureanism, a highly influential school of philosophy. His philosophy is quite close to Carvaka, as he also emphasises materialistic metaphysics, empiricist epistemology, and hedonistic ethics. While no authentic work of Carvaka remains, some fragments of Epicurus’s works do survive. How is it that the four Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Vedangas, the Upanishads, the Agamas, etc., survived, but not a single source of Carvaka remains?
Sadananda, in his Vedantasara, mentions four different materialistic schools that existed long ago in India. But we do not even know their names today.
In my humble opinion, the priests and sages of our land are the main culprits here. Any thought that rejected the authority of the Vedas, the afterlife, and rituals such as sacrifice or ancestor worship was slowly but systematically murdered. How is it that Indian philosophy, which could come up with the highest philosophy of monism in the Upanishads, has no doctrine skepticism?
If one reads Western philosophy, it becomes very clear that materialism eventually leads to Hume’s skepticism. It is from this skepticism that thinkers like Kant emerge, taking skepticism to its final climax, leaving us with no option but to differentiate between empirical reality and the transcendent. A similar pattern could have be played out in India with Carvaka, Buddha, and Nagarjuna but we didn’t let any of these philosophies survive. Spirituality in India became superficial the day we discounted these thinkers.
It would not be wrong to say that materialism provides the ground on which spirituality can eventually be built. The result of skipping materialism and skepticism and directly jumping to the transcendental is clearly visible in India. While we were rejecting materialism as a philosophy, we were simultaneously developing an extremely materialistic lifestyle. We claim to know secrets such as the immortality of the soul, the illusory nature of the world, and the identity of everything with Brahman, but these secrets do not seem to have changed our way of living in the slightest. This shows that we are merely repeating what others realized, without realizing these truths ourselves.
If our priests and sages had allowed us to question, challenge, and think, the spirituality of this land would not have been so shaky. With their egos dressed up as enlightenment, they ask us not to hear anything negative about priests, Vedas, gods, etc., but questioning or doubting is one of the most natural qualities we possess. The entire spiritual landscape in India is built on these suppressed doubts, which is why even the most spiritual people one meets are merely performing wisdom rather than living its truth.
When Socrates said “Knowledge is virtue,” he wasn’t talking about the kind of knowledge we gather by memorizing books written by anonymous authors. His entire philosophy was built on the dialectic method, where he encouraged everyone to question as much as possible until the hidden fallacies or cracks in a theory were revealed. It is precisely for this reason that he ended up losing his life. But we choose to memorize and repeat the same shlokas and mantras every day like a parrot. How can verbal testimony be a source of truth if we do not even know the person or their credentials behind the testimony?
Buddha completely rejected verbal testimony, and his rejection of the Vedas is the reason Buddhism is considered a heterodox school. He also suggested that people find their own path to the ultimate truth, which is why he said “Appo Deepo Bhava,” meaning “Be a light unto yourself.” It is no surprise that the priestly class tried their best not to let his ideology survive.
I often think about how the Mahabharata is estimated to have happened at least 5000 years ago and the Bhagavad Gita is said to have been written around 2500–3000 years ago by someone who was not even present there. How can we believe everything the book says when it was orally transmitted for thousands of years? Moreover, we also know that the number of verses in the Mahabharata has increased substantially compared to its first version.
I am not saying that mantras are useless or that our authorless books are full of lies. I am simply hoping that we can learn to question these things openly. Otherwise, we will never be pioneers in science, philosophy, or spirituality.
Thank you for reading!