Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
What is Materialism?
It is necessary to understand what, in the philosophical context, materialism stands for. George Stack has recently defined materialism as follows:
Materialism is a set of theories which holds that all entities and processes are composed of or are reducible to - matter, matterial forces or physical processes. All events and facts are explainable, actually or in principle, in terms of body, material objects or dynamic material changes or movements. (George Stack. 1988. 'Materialism' in Edwin Craig ed. Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge Vol.6, p.170).
Keith Campbell enumerates three basic
tenets of materialism:
1) Everything that is, is material.
2) Everything can be explained on the basis of laws involving only the antecedent physical conditions.
3) There is a cause for every event. (Keith Campbell. 1972. ‘Materialism’ in Paul Edwards ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Vol. 5, p. 179).
Campbell
also cautions the naive reader that metaphysical materialism does not entail
the psychological disposition to pursue money and tangible goods despite the
popular use of ‘materialistic’ to describe this interest. (Ibid., p.
179)
The Indian Context
Those who have had their initiation
in philosophy through the Western tradition feel baffled when they encounter
the Indian scenario. Instead of individual philosophers, they find a number of
philosophical schools. Despite certain basic similarities in their approaches,
they contend against one another regarding several issues that are quite alien
to the Western tradition. Belief in rebirth is, for example, axiomatic to
nearly all the Indian schools, be it Brahminical, Jain or Buddhist. Their sole
aim is to find a way to escape from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. This
is what is meant by mukti, mokṣa or nirvāṇa. Whether
subjective idealist or realist, theist or atheist, adhering to the doctrine of
the inerrancy of the Vedas or not, each of these schools believed that it alone
could provide a way to deliverance from all earthly sufferings.
However,
there was one philosophical school which did not start from the premise that darśana
was mokṣa-śāstra. The very concept of deliverance and what- ever it
entailed were objects of ridicule to this school. This school is known as the
Cārvāka or Lokāyata.
The Cārvākas and the Presocratics
Unlike the other schools of Indian
philosophy, the Cārvāka/Lokāyata resembles the early materialist tradition of
philosophy in ancient Greece. Both the Presocratic philosophers and the
Cārvākas started from the premise of four elements as constituting the whole
world. Matter to them was primary; consciousness could not exist without a
material substratum. The presence of God or gods was irrelevant to them. They
intended to view the world in terms of nature in its various manifestations.
This kind of approach was so unique that the materialists, both in India and
Greece, had to suffer misrepresentation in the hands of their opponents.
The
problem of understanding materialism is bedevilled by the fact that the
original writings of the Indian and the Greek materialists are available only
in fragments, quoted or paraphrased in the works of their opponents. Despite
this limitation it is still possible to reconstruct, with some degree of
certainty, the philosophical position of the Cārvākas, as similar attempts have
been made in case of their Greek counterparts.
An Overview
1. Cārvāka or
Lokāyata is not a “brand name” for all sorts of materialist ideas that
flourished in India over the ages. There were several proto-materialist
thinkers in India right from the time of the Buddha (sixth/fifth century bce) or even earlier. The system that
came to be known finally as the Cārvāka/Lokāyata did not flourish not long
before the eighth century ce. It
is only from the eighth century ce
that the name Cārvāka is associated with
a materialist school (some later writers such as Śāntarakṣita and Śaṅkara
continued to call it Lokāyata). Both names, however, came to refer to the same
school of thought by the eighth century ce.
Neither of the two words occurs in the Vedic literature. Lokāyata in Pali and
Buddhist Sanskrit works means ‘the art and science of disputation’, or in a
narrower sense, ‘point of dispute’, not materialism. The word is ambiguous.
There are reasons to believe that the adherents of the materialist school that
flourished by the eighth century themselves called themselves Cārvāka, using it
as a nickname. The word might have been chosen from the Mahābhārata but the demon in that work has nothing to do with
materialism.
2. The
Cārvāka/Lokāyata is the only systematized form of materialist philosophy in
India that is known to date. There were other pre-Cārvāka proto-materialist schools too that preached
certain materialist views but their views were not systematically set down in
the form of aphorisms as the Cārvāka-s did. Some of these pre-Cārvāka
proto-materialist views are encountered in the Upaniṣad-s, Pali and Prakrit
canonical works (of the Buddhists and the Jains respectively) and their
commentaries as well as in the Jābāli episode in the Ayodhyākāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya in
the Mahābhārata and some of the Purāṇa-s
(particularly the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the
Padmapurāṇa), and last but not least,
in old Tamil poems such as the Maṇimēkalāi.
All of these are not to be equated with the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Some of the views
recorded in them are authentic expositions of this or that proto-materialist
view, but some are of dubious authenticity. There is a tendency in the Rāmāyaṇa and some Purāṇas to treat the Buddhists,
the Jains and the Cārvākas as representing a single school of nāstikas, that is, defilers of the
Vedas, and to ascribe the views of one to the other quite inappropriately.
3.1. All the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata works were lost before the fourteenth century CE, so much so
that Sāyaṇa-Mādhava, aka Mādhavācārya and Vidyāraṇya, or whoever was the author
of the first chapter of this digest of a compendium of philosophies (Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha), could not quote
a single sentence from any Lokāyata text nor name a single authority other than
the mythical Bṛhaspati. Yet this book, first edited and published by
Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgara, better known as an educationist and social reformer,
in 1853-58 from the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, has proved to be more influential
than any other work. However, it is worth noticing that the reading of several
lines of some verses attributed to the Cārvākas are wilfully distorted in this
compendium. The original reading of a line in a verse, for example, was as
follows: “Live happily as long as you live; nothing is beyond the ken of
death.” It is so found in all other works (no fewer than thirteen). The last
part of the line was changed in this compendium to read: “Live happily as long
as you live; eat ghee (clarified butter) even by running into debts.” To many
educated Indians and maybe others abroad this distorted reading is granted to
be the epitome of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. It is amusing that the digest itself
quotes the original reading of this verse at the beginning of the chapter but
quotes the distorted reading at the end of the same chapter.
3.2 However,
from the available fragments found quoted or paraphrased in the works of
anti-materialist philosophers it is evident that the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system
had developed along the same lines as Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika.
This means:
(a) There was a base text, that is, a
collection of sῡtras or aphorisms,
tersely phrased because they were meant to be memorized, and
(b) Several commentaries (and
probably sub-commentaries) were written to explicate the aphorisms,
(c) Besides the above sources, a
number of verses have traditionally been ascribed to the Cārvākas. Some of
these epigrams make fun of the performance of religious rites, particularly
sacrificial acts, and deny the existence of an extracorporeal soul which can
survive the death of a person. Some other verses, however, might have
originated in the Buddhist and Jain circles. The denunciation of ritual
violence (killing of animals in a Vedic sacrifice) and condemnation of
non-vegetarian diet accord better with the Buddhist and the Jain teachings than
with any other school. There might have been some materialists who renounced
both marriage and eating of animal flesh. In that case, the charge of
promiscuity and indulgence in flesh and wine brought against the Cārvākas by Guṇaratna,
a fifteenth-century Jain writer, loses its force.
3.3. The Tattvopaplavasiṃha by Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa is not a Cārvāka/Lokāyata
work: it represents the view of a totally different school that challenged the
very concept of pramāṇa (means of
knowledge). The Cārvākas did believe in pramāṇa and whatever else it entails
(knowledge, the knower, and the object to be known). Even those who, like Eli
Franco, prefer to call it the only surviving Cārvāka text do not claim that it
is a materialist text. So the work is quite irrelevant to the study of
materialism in India.
4. The basic
plank of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata may be summed up as:
i) Denial of rebirth and the other-world
(heaven and hell), and of the immortal soul,
ii) Refusal to believe in the
efficacy of performing religious acts,
iii) Acceptance of the natural origin
of the universe, without any creator God or any other supernatural agency,
iv) Belief in the primacy of matter
over consciousness, and hence of the human body over the spirit (soul), and
finally,
v) Advocacy of the primacy of
perception over all other means of knowledge; inference, etc. are secondary,
and acceptable if and only if they are based on perception, not on scriptures.
The
first three refer to the ontology, and the rest to the epistemology of the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata. As to ethics all that can be said is that the Cārvākas did
not believe in practising asceticism and advised seeking of pleasure in this
world rather in the next, for there is no such world. This teaching has been
misinterpreted as a recommendation for unrestrained sensual enjoyment.
Regarding their social outlook it may be said that the Cārvākas were opposed to
gender discrimination and caste (varṇa)
distinctions (see the Prabodha-candrodaya
by Kṛṣṇamiśra, Act 2 verse 18 and the Naiṣadha-carita
by Śrīharṣa, Canto 17 verses 40, 42, and 58. Incidentally both were non-dualist
Vedāntins, and opposed to the Cārvākas). They relied on human endeavour (puruṣakāra), not on fate (daiva), and rejected the concept of adṛṣṭa or karman.
This is how materialism as a
full-fledged philosophical doctrine made its debut in ancient India. It is evident that the issues are peculiarly
relevant to the Indian context (rebirth being the most noteworthy). The
Cārvāka/Lokāyata then obviously had an indigenous origin.
5. There was no continuity in the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition after the twelfth century ce or thereabouts. Whatever is written on the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata after the twelfth century is based on second-hand knowledge,
learned from preceptors to disciples, who in their turn could only teach what
they had heard from their preceptors, not what they had actually studied. Some
of their knowledge correspond to what the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophers had or
might have really said, but much of their accounts are biased against
materialism and are mere fabrications.
6. The
Yogācāra Buddhists, Jains, Advaita Vedantins and Nyāya philosophers considered
the Cārvāka/Lokāyata as one of their chief opponents and tried hard to refute
materialist views. Such refutations were made even after all the authentic
Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts had been lost. So, the representation of the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata in the works of these schools are not always firmly grounded on
first-hand knowledge of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts.
7. Because of
this lack of acquaintance with original sources, the opponents, and many modern
scholars, often confuse pre-Cārvāka and Cārvāka views, considering them as one
and the same. This gives an impression that there were several kinds of
Cārvākas while the fact is that there were several kinds of materialists, but all of them were not Cārvākas. Some of
them were definitely pre-Cārvāka and held different views. For example,
regarding the number of natural elements, the Cārvākas admitted four, namely,
earth, air, fire and water, while others spoke of five, adding ether or space
to the list.
8. We have no
evidence of any post-Cārvāka materialist school in India, existing or
flourishing after the thirteenth century ce.
What Abul Faḍl (Fazl) had gathered from the North Indian pundits about the
Cārvāka system (most probably from a Jain scholar) and recorded it in Persian
in his Ain-i Akbari, betrays the same
lack of information as evinced in his contemporary and later Sanskrit digests
of Indian philosophy. Only a few highlights of the materialist system were
known to all of them. In addition to this a few verses attributed to the
Cārvākas had been orally transmitted from one generation to another. Their accounts
therefore are removed from the original sources and should be taken with the
customary pinch of salt.
9. Some
Sanskrit poems and plays (particularly Naiṣadha-carita,
Prabodha-candrodaya, Āgama-dambara
and Vidvanmoda-taraṅgiṇī ) and one
prose work (Kādambarī ) contain
representations of the Cārvākas. The evidence is dubious, for the authors of
these works were thoroughly anti-materialist and tried to portray the Cārvāka
in unfavourable light. Hence whatever is written there should not be accepted
uncritically.
10. The
commonest charge levelled against the Cārvākas is that they did not believe in
any other means of knowledge except perception. But there is enough evidence to
suggest that some of the pre-Cārvāka schools as well as the Cārvāka-s considered
inference based on perception to be a
valid means of knowledge, although it is of secondary importance. It was well
known from the eighth century ce.
Nevertheless, the opponents continued to level the same charge almost in the
fashion of Goebbels (“Repeat a lie ten times and it will sound like the truth.”
Whether Goebbels had actually said so or not is irrelevant, since such strategy
was followed by him in practice).
11. Another
baseless charge made by the opponents is the alleged heedless hedonism of the
Cārvākas. Of course, there is enough evidence to show that the Cārvākas did not
consider human life to be full of misery but there is absolutely no evidence to
prove that they prescribed sensual enjoyment to be the end of life. The case is
similar to that of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher. Although he used to lead a
very austere life, his name has been maligned as a spokesperson of an ’eat,
drink and be merry’ view of life. Ajita
Kesakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha and one of the earliest proto-materialists
known to us, had in fact made a cult of austerity. The Sāṃkhya doctrine too has
been satirized as one advocating sensual enjoyment. No serious student of Sāṃkhya
has ever paid any heed to this absurd charge. However, in case of the Cārvāka
such a groundless allegation is repeated ad
nauseam by the present-day textbook
writers of Indian philosophy.
12. Yet
another misconception circulated by many authors past and present is that there
were several Cārvāka schools, believing in the mind as the spirit, life breaths
as the spirit, the sense organs as the spirit, etc. Such doctrines might have
been prevalent before the Common Era, for some of them are mentioned in several
Upaniṣads. Such views, however, are not only pre-Cārvāka but also pre-philosophical.
The Cārvāka/Lokāyata was systematized much later and there is nothing to show
that its exponents drew anything from such older sources. Only the doctrine of bhῡtacaitanyavāda or dehātmavāda is the doctrine of the Cārvākas. It was a
unitary school although the commentary tradition is not uniform and the
commentators are not always unanimous in their interpretation of certain
aphorisms.
13. All the commentators of the Cārvākasῡtra were not Cārvākas
themselves. Some of them are known to be adherents of Nyāya who, besides their
works on Nyāya, had also written commentaries on the Cārvākasῡtra. Quite naturally they had introduced a number of
sophisticated Nyāya terms, quite alien to the original Cārvāka tradition.
Nevertheless what is common to all the commentators is their firm adherence to
the basic doctrine of considering the spirit to be nothing but consciousness in
a living body and the rejection of the view that inference independent of
perception and/or based on scriptures should be accepted as a valid means of
knowledge.
14. In brief, then, the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system
emerged as the culmination of all previous proto-materialist views which,
however, had been systematized into the
prevailing sῡtra-bhāṣya (base
text and commentary) style not long before the eighth century ce. These views are mainly known to us
as floating ideas current among some freethinkers, who were opposed to futile
religious practices sanctioned by the Vedas and refused to offer gifts to
Brahmin priests. The early materialists did not believe in the existence of
heaven and hell, and, therefore, in the immortality of the spirit. That is all
there is to it in the pre-Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition. Ontological issues seem
to have been their chief preoccupation and this was their contribution to the
later Cārvāka/Lokāyata system which inherited and assimilated all this. The
epistemological issues might have underlain in their teachings, but no such
formulation is met with in available evidence.
15. Whether
the Cārvākas had any affinity with the Kāpālikas or some such obscure folk
cults (such as the Sahajiyās, Bāuls, etc. in Bengal), is a vexed question. It
is probable that the these cults had adopted some ideas from the pre-Cārvāka
and/or the Cārvāka teachings, such as,
accepting perception to be the only means of knowledge, opposition to
Vedism, caste system, gender discrimination, etc. But it should be noted that
these cults are all guru-oriented, the adherents compose songs in local
dialects as the vehicle of expressing their ideas (not write philosophical discourses), and all of them consider
themselves affiliated to one or the other Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava or
Śakti-worshipping community. They constitute themselves as the ’other’,
belonging to the Little Tradition – similar in some respects to the Great
Tradition religious communities but differing from them by virtue of abjuring
Brahminical priesthood, avoiding the conventional places of pilgrimage, and
setting up their own meeting-spots in village fairs. The Cārvākas, on the other
hand, belong to the Great Tradition:
they redacted a sῡtra work and
composed elaborate commentaries on it in Sanskrit, not in any vernacular. In
short, the two belong to two different traditions – the Great and the Little –
and their ends are more often than not quite different. While the
Cārvāka/Lokāyata was interested in true knowledge (tattva), the Little Tradition cults aspire for liberation (mukti) alone. The former studiedly
rejected all rituals based solely on faith but the latter had developed
elaborate systems of worship and religious practice (sādhana-paddhati) as taught by their gurus. Thus there is a
fundamental incompatibility between the two that cannot be resolved by
juxtaposing them as reflecting the same approach in two different ways. It
should, however, be borne in mind that the Little Tradition cults were very
much present in India even in the Upaniṣadic times, as testified by the Maitrī (or Maitrāyāṇī or Maitrāyaṇīya) Upaniṣad. Most probably both
the traditions had a common source, but they diverged into two separate
streams, one thoroughly rational and atheistic; the other, irrational and
theistic. The Cārvāka/Lokāyata is a system of philosophy but the
anti-Brahminical folk cults are nothing but religious coteries outside the
Brahminical (Vedist) fold. In spite of some similarities in approach (such as,
insistence on sense perception, denial of the Vedas as authoritative texts, and
rejection of Brahminical priesthood) they belong to two different domains.
Philosophy and religion are not to be treated on a par with each other.
This
is the first of the three lectures delivered by Dr Ramkrishna
Bhattacharya at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Inst of Social Sciences,
Mumbai delivered on December 2, 3 & 5, 2014.
Click here for Part II and Part III of the lectures.
Dr
Bhattacharya taught English at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata and was an
Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He is now a Fellow of Pavlov
Institute, Kolkata.
