Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 37

The clearest form of early materialism was the ‘Lokayata’

tradition. ‘Loka’in both Pali and Sanskrit means ‘the world’,

which has been extended to mean ‘people’ (its primary meaning

in Indian languages today). Lokayatas would then be those who

saw the existing empirical world as the total of everything. The

founder of the Lokayata tradition is often said to have been

Brhaspati, who is taken in Sanskrit literature as the legendary guru

of the gods—only with the proviso that he taught the demons

materialism in order to mislead them. This ambivalence indicates

the existence of a famous historical sage whose main philosophy

could not be made to fit what became Brahmanical orthodoxy but

who was so far back in the dim historical past that he could be

distorted and coopted (ibid.: 126–28).^5

The Lokayatas were vigorously materialistic and atheistic. They

used an empiricist logic, denying the role of inference (on the

grounds that there can always be exceptions) and denying the exis-

tence of entities such as the ‘soul’ which could not be empirically

sensed or proven. They thus defended a reductive materialism, saw

the four elements (earth, water, fire and air) as the only original

components of being, and consciousness as a product of the mate-

rial structure of the body, which perishes with the body. Their most

famous teacher was Charvak (they are also called Charvakas) and

the existing story about him in the Mahabharata has him appear-

ing in a council at the conclusion of the great war to protest the

killing shows: this was indeed nonviolence, but it was the killing of

kin that was the greatest sin (ibid.: 33–35). The Lokayata philoso-

phy has been criticized as hedonism, but this is oppositional slan-

der. The Lokayata tradition was described in a later Buddhist text

(Rhys-Davids, Introduction to Kutadanta Sutta, Digha NikayaI,

2000: 166) as linked to ‘nature-lore’ and was taken as a respectable

part of Brahmanical learning. Probably the original materialism of

the Lokayata helped to give birth to a natural science tradition.

The Sankhya system, supposedly founded by the sage Kapila,^6 is

known classically as a dualist philosophy. It combines a material

not one of primitive communism in any case, and the gana-sanghas
in particular were not truly ‘tribal’ or ‘equalitarian’. The Ajivikas,
who denied the moral responsibility asserted by Buddhists and
Jains, may indeed have modified their asceticism by including songs
and ritual.
Two of the teachers, Ajita Kesakambali and Pakudha Kaccayana,
appear to be materialists. Ajita denies the reality of both soul and
afterlife:

There is no such thing, O king, as alms or sacrifice or offering. There

is neither fruit nor result of good or evil deeds....there are in the world

no recluses or Brahmans who have reached the highest point, who

walk perfectly....A human being is built up of the four elements.

When he dies the earthy in him returns and relapses to the earth, the

fluid to the water, the heat to the fire, the windy to the air, and his

faculties pass into space....

Similarly, Pakudha Kaccayana appears to be a kind of atomist,
postulating a ‘soul’ but one that neither affects nor is affected by
the material world:

the following seven things, O king, are neither made nor commanded

to be made, neither created nor caused to be created...they move not,

neither do they vary, they trench not one upon another, nor avail aught

as to ease or pain or both. And what are the seven? The four elements—

earth, water, fire and air—and ease, and pain, and the soul as a seventh.

So there is neither slayer nor cause of slaying, hearer or speaker, knower

or explainer. When one with a sharp sword cleaves a head in twain, no

one thereby deprives any one of life, a sword has only penetrated into

the interval between seven elementary substances.

According to the study of ancient Indian materialism by
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, the Tantra, Lokayata and early
Sankhya were all different forms of materialism. However, their
own original texts do not survive and none are clearly described in
either early Buddhist or Brahmanic literature. Tantric traditions were
ancient, and may well have had a base in ancient tribal collectivism
and in rites connected with early agriculture and women’s role in
it. They identified the human body with the cosmos and empha-
sised male–female intercourse as the basis of life and the fertility of
the soil and the earth itself (Chattopadhyaya 1981). But they were
diffuse and did not acquire a written philosophical form.

36 Buddhism in India

(^5) Interesting, Phule later cites in his Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak(1891) a
reported saying of Brhaspati that the Vedas were made by thugs; see Chapter 8.
(^6) Chattopadhyaya also argues that the original form of the name may have been
Kapilaa, that is the sage was a woman, and that she or he was from the northeast,
a classic ‘region of mother right and Tantrism’ (Chattopadhyaya 1981: 380–82).