[a][3][b][5][c] Charvaka holds direct perception, empiricism, and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge, embraces philosophical skepticism, and rejects ritualism.
[11][12] Charvaka developed during the Hindu reformation period in the first millennium BCE, after Buddhism was established by Gautama Buddha and Jainism was re-organized by Parshvanatha.
[26] In 8th century CE Jaina literature, Saddarsanasamuccaya by Haribhadra,[27] Lokayata is stated to be the Hindu school where there is "no God, no samsara (rebirth), no karma, no duty, no fruits of merit, no sin.
[41] There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world, Nor do the actions of the four classes, orders, etc., produce any real effect.The earliest Charvaka scholar in India whose texts still survive is Ajita Kesakambali.
It was in the 6th century BCE onwards, with the emergent popularity of Buddhism, that ancient schools started codifying and writing down the details of their philosophy.
[44] E. W. Hopkins, in his The Ethics of India (1924), claims that Charvaka philosophy predated Jainism and Buddhism, mentioning "the old Cārvāka or materialist of the 6th century BC".
[11][12] Billington 1997, p. 43 states that a philosopher named Charvaka lived in or about the 6th century BCE, who developed the premises of this Indian philosophy in the form of Brhaspati Sutra.
[45] Arthur Llewellyn Basham, citing the Buddhist Samaññaphala Sutta, suggests six schools of heterodox, pre-Buddhist and pre-Jain, atheistic Indian traditions in 6th century BCE, that included Charvakas and Ajivikas.
[48] The Charvaka epistemology holds perception as the primary and proper source of knowledge, while inference is held as prone to being either right or wrong and therefore conditional or invalid.
[10][34] This epistemological proposition of Charvakas was influential among various schools of Indian philosophies, by demonstrating a new way of thinking and re-evaluation of past doctrines.
[53][54] Advaita Vedanta scholars considered six means of valid knowledge and to truths: Pratyakṣa (perception), Anumāna (inference), Upamāna (comparison and analogy), Arthāpatti (postulation), Anupalabdhi (non-perception, cognitive proof) and Śabda (word, testimony of past or present reliable experts).
[56] Therefore, Charvakas denied metaphysical concepts like reincarnation, an extracorporeal soul, the efficacy of religious rites, other worlds (heaven and hell), fate and accumulation of merit or demerit through the performance of certain actions.
Some scholars argue that the Charvaka school is nihilistic, focusing solely on rejecting concepts like "The Good" and divinity, rather than actively promoting hedonism.
The Sarvasiddhanta Samgraha states the Charvaka position as follows,[60] There is no world other than this; There is no heaven and no hell; The realm of Shiva and like regions, are fabricated by stupid imposters.
Unlike many of the Indian philosophies of the time, Charvaka did not believe in austerities or rejecting pleasure out of fear of pain and held such reasoning to be foolish.
[48] The Sarvasiddhanta Samgraha states the Charvaka position on pleasure and hedonism as follows,[61] The enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping company of young women, using fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, sandal paste... while moksha is death which is cessation of life-breath... the wise therefore ought not to take pains on account of moksha.
The scholar Bhattacharya argues that the common belief that "all materialists are nothing but sensualists" is a misconception, as no authentic Carvaka aphorism have been cited by the movement's opponents to support this view.
[57] Charvakas rejected the need for ethics or morals, and suggested that "while life remains, let a man live happily, let him feed on ghee even though he runs in debt".
[57] The Jain scholar Haribhadra, in the last section of his text Saddarsanasamuccaya, includes Charvaka in his list of six darśanas of Indian traditions, along with Buddhism, Nyaya-Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Jainism and Jaiminiya.
Under the heading "Nastika" Abul Fazl has referred to the good work, judicious administration and welfare schemes that were emphasised by the Charvaka law-makers.
After invoking, in the Prologue of the book, the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu ("by whom the earth and rest were produced"), Vidyāraṇya asks, in the first chapter:[75] ...but how can we attribute to the Divine Being the giving of supreme felicity, when such a notion has been utterly abolished by Charvaka, the crest-gem of the atheistic school, the follower of the doctrine of Brihaspati?
10, 29–32 states that the claims against Charvaka of hedonism, lack of any morality and ethics and disregard for spirituality is from texts of competing religious philosophies (Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism).
[69] Countering the argument that the Charvakas opposed all that was good in the Vedic tradition, Riepe 1964, p. 75 states, "It may be said from the available material that Cārvākas hold truth, integrity, consistency, and freedom of thought in the highest esteem."
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski writes this concerning the Jesuit descriptions in the paper "East-West Swerves: Cārvāka Materialism and Akbar's Religious Debates at Fatehpur Sikri" (2015):...The information they sent back to Europe was disseminated widely in both Catholic and Protestant countries (...) A more detailed understanding of Indian philosophies, including Cārvāka, began to emerge in Jesuit missionary writings by the early to mid-seventeenth century.
Wojciehowski notes: "Rather than proclaiming a Cārvāka renaissance in Akbar's court, it would be safer to suggest that the ancient school of materialism never really went away."
In Classical Indian Philosophy (2020), by Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, they mention a lecture by Henry T. Coolebrooke in 1827 on the schools of the Carvaka/Lokayata materialists.
They write that Mill "sounds like a follower of Brhaspati, founder of the Cārvāka system, when he writes in his System of Logic that 'All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature (...)'" The historian of ideas Dag Herbjørnsrud has pointed out that the Charvaka schools influenced China: "This Indian-Chinese materialist connection is documented in a little-known but groundbreaking paper by professor Huang Xinchuan, "Lokayata and Its Influence in China," published in Chinese in 1978 (English version in the quarterly journal Social Sciences in March 1981).
Xinchuan, a senior researcher at the China Academy of Social Science, demonstrates how the Indian Lokāyata schools exercised an influence on ancient Chinese over the centuries.
"[78] Xinchuan's paper explains how the Buddhists regarded the Lokayatikas as fellow-travellers of the Confucian and the Taoist Schools, and how they launched an attack on them because of their materialistic views.
In the text, the Mughal historian Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak summarizes the Charvaka philosophy as "unenlightened" and characterizes their works of literature as "lasting memorials to their ignorance".