Surama Dasgupta
In the different cross-currents
of thought in the Mahabharata we have
traced a positive trend of ideas commingled with the traditional, which has
taken a more definite form and a different line in the Ayurveda. Both of these
steer a middle course between the two different ideals; that of transcending
the worldly experiences, and that of being in the world and enjoying life, and
its various aspects, in a beneficial and pleasant manner. We may now turn to
the materialistic school of thought where the positive attitude reaches its
climax and taking an extreme form, completely dissociates itself from any
traditional and scriptural injunctions. It formulates its own tenets in an open
revolt against the orthodox systems; and it is interesting to note the growth
and development of such revolutionary school of thought on Indian soil.
This materialistic philosophy is
known as the Lokayata, the Carvaka or the Barhaspatya and, probably, had its
origin in very ancient times. It does not believe in any such permanent entity
as self that abides after death, rebirth, or the efficacy of karma, as determining the happy or
sorrowful experiences in life. According to it, consciousness is but a product
of matter or is manifested by the inter-action of atoms of air, water, fire and
earth. It had different schools of adherents as the names, dhūrtta Carvaka, suśiksita
Carvaka, Lokāyata, Bārhaspatya, suggest. No treatises of this school have come
down to us, but their doctrines can be collected from the various other
philosophical systems where they have tried to refute them.
Late Professor S.N. Dasgupta, in
his very learned and scholarly account of the nihilistic schools in the
appendix to his History of Indian
Philosophy, vol. III, discussed in detail the materialistic doctrines from
different sources and traced their origin as early as the Vedas or still
earlier, as having been current among the Sumerian people of pre-Aryan times.
Rhys Davids collected the Pāli passages referring to such doctrines which point
to the important place occupied by these. Professor Dasgupta referred to the
Buddhistic, Nyāya, Pāninian and other texts and to the stories about asura custom in the Chandogya Upanisad, the story of Virocana who took the ātman to be the same as the body and to
the similar theories referred to in the Mahabharata,
Visnupurana, and showed what these doctrine were. There might be slight
differences as regards detail, the main contention was the same, namely, they
all denied an after-life, effects of karma,
good or bad, and admitted pleasure as the summum
bonum of life. We shall briefly discuss their philosophic and ethical
position.
The susiksita Carvakas hold that so long as the body remains, there is
an entity as the constant perceiver and enjoyer of all experiences, but this
does not persist after death. If there were such an abiding entity, travelling
from one birth to another, then it should have remembered the incidents of past
life just as a man remembers the experiences of his childhood.[1] By
similar arguments they try to prove that no such entity can pass on to another
body, nor can the consciousness belonging to a particular body be regarded as
the cause of a different series of conscious states in a different body. The
views of the Carvaka, as represented by Sriharsa, in his Naisadhacarita are that, since we often see the sinful men prosper
and virtuous people suffer, there is no justification for thinking that virtue
and vice are responsible for happiness and sorrow. One should, therefore,
devote oneself to the fullest possible enjoyment of life.
Thus pleasure is the aim to be
attained in life as the highest good, and therefore, the standard of morality.
But the question arises whether the Carvakas restricted themselves to the pure
sensualistic pleasure of the moment, like the Cyrenaics, or whether they
regarded a total life of pleasure as the goal to be sought. There is a passage
attributed to the Carvaka in the Sarvadaranasamgraha
which states, yāvaj jivet sukham jivet,
implying that a whole life of pleasure is to be attained. But the next line, rnam krtva ghrtam pivet, (one can eat
butter by borrowing money) implies that the Carvaka did not care for the sorrow
that might come, out of the debt incurred, and that it had a ring of Omar
Khayyam,
‘Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum’.
It is indeed difficult to
reconcile this Omaric ring with the more sober line of the previous line,
implying that a complete life of pleasures is to be preferred to momentary
enjoyment. It has often been held that because the Carvakas do not admit the
existence of soul as a spiritual entity, they are committed to the view of
pleasure as mere sensuality of the moment. But it is hardly tenable, because
denial of a permanent self does not involve the denial of thoughts and ideas.
If the soul were regarded as a mere epiphenomenon or a mere chemical product,
even then mental pleasures could not but be admitted, for such a position does
not imply the denial of the mind as a product of the body. We know that the Susiksita
School
Again, the Cārvākas denied that
there could be any pleasure from the mental equanimity such as is produced by
meditation. Pleasures, according to them, imply continual desires and their
satisfaction. They do not take the Stoic view and that of other Indian
philosophers that desires unfulfilled produce pain and, therefore, it is better
to reduce them. They hold that pains are indeed inevitable, but since
satisfaction cannot be had without giving free scope to desires which involve
pains also, it should be our aim to minimise the pains as far as possible and
to attain the maximum amount of pleasure. Since we do not get any detailed
account of the Cārvākas, we cannot say whether the desire of avoidance of pain
could be pushed further so as to result in a paradox of hedonism, namely one
should sacrifice pleasure for getting pleasure.
The Cārvākas, however, do not
seem to have gone beyond the individual state and, therefore, we cannot trace
the maxim of the greatest happiness of the greatest number in their pleasure
calculus. They regarded artha
(objects) and kama
(desire) as the determinants of morality.
All that we can collect is that
the Cārvākas laid emphasis on immediate sense-pleasures, without recognising
any qualitative difference between them. There was no ring of pessimism,
immediate sense-pleasures were all that they wanted, and any display of
prudence, restraint or other considerations which might lead to the sacrifice
of present pleasures had no value. If we could emphasise from other sources the
suggestion that they wished for a whole life of pleasure, as implied by the
line ‘yavaj jivet sukham jivet’, we
could have contended otherwise, but from the scanty materials at our disposal
we have no authority to do that.
[1] Nyayamanjari, Refutation of the
Carvakas, Ahnika 7
[2] Kamasutra, 1, 2, 29, 30
The
author of this essay on the whole takes the traditional view (expressed by
those opposed to materialism) that Carvakas are sensualists and this opinion is
based on a single verse from Sarvadarsanasamgraha.
But this particular verse is, as Ramkrishna Bhattacharya has shown, a
deliberate misquote on the part of the author of Sarvadarsanasamgraha.
This
essay is an extract from Surama Dasgupta’s Development
of Moral Philosophy in India (First Edition: 1961, Second Edition: 1994,
Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New
Delhi .
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