Ancient India had a school of materialists who doubted every inference
Long before modern empiricism, Charvaka thinkers in ancient India trusted only what the senses reported. They rejected ritual, treated every conclusion drawn from observation as provisional, and, according to one Jain summary, denied God, rebirth and karma outright. Almost none of their own writing survives, so we know them mainly through their opponents.
Charvaka, also called Lokayata, is counted among the nastika or heterodox schools of Indian philosophy. It is atheistic, naturalistic and hostile to the supernatural. Its theory of knowledge accepts direct perception, empirical observation and inference only on condition: anything reasoned out from a set of observations must carry a measure of doubt. Tradition credits a philosopher named Brihaspati as founder, though some scholars question that.
The school took shape in the first millennium BCE, during what is described as a period of Hindu reformation, and it is seen as an intellectual forerunner of other heterodox movements, among them Jainism and Buddhism. Hints of its atheistic ideas appear in the later layers of the Rigveda. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, dated to around 900 BCE, the sage Yajnavalkya tells Maitreyi that awareness ends at death, and she protests that he has left her bewildered.
The label itself is a puzzle. The grammarian Hemacandra derived it from a root meaning to chew, which may nod to the school's reputation for an eat, drink and be merry attitude. Others read it as agreeable speech, or unkindly as sweet-tongued, and a third idea holds it was named after a disciple of Brihaspati called Charvaka. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya argued that Lokayata, the older name, meant the outlook common among ordinary people.
That second name shifted meaning over time. Chanakya's Arthashastra lists Lokayata with Yoga and Samkhya as disciplines of reasoned inquiry, apparently as a science of debate rather than an attack on the Vedas. By the 8th century CE, the Jain author Haribhadra described it as a school rejecting God, rebirth, karma, duty, merit and sin. Because texts such as the Brhaspati Sutra are lost, the school has been reconstructed from epics like the Mahabharata, the dialogues of the Buddha and Jain commentaries, all written by people who disagreed with it.
Source: Charvaka
