ABSTRACT
The first, strongest and the extremist reaction against the Mīmāmsā school was expressed by Cārvāka, who belonged to the later Vedic (Brāhmaṇa, about 600 BC) times. He seems to have been called Lokāyata and Bṛhaspati also. Lokāyata literally means 'one who goes the worldly way'. We do not know how exactly the word Cārvāka was derived. It is perhaps a combination of cāru (sweet) and vāk (speech) and so meant the 'sweet-tongued', because he taught what all human beings generally want, viz. that pleasure is the ultimate aim of life. Perhaps the two names, Lokāyata and Cārvāka, were his titles, and Bṛhaspati his original name. The Aphorisms (sūtras) he composed also go by the name of Bṛhaspati-sūtras. But Bṛhaspati was the name also of the priest of gods. And so tradition tells that this priest of gods propounded a rankly materialistic philosophy in order to mislead the enemies of gods, namely, the demons. However, the Bṛhaspati Aphorisms and also a commentary on them seem to have been irrecoverably lost. We find references to them in works of the rival schools up to the fourteenth century. The literature of this school is very scanty. We find only one systematic work on it, Jayarāśi's Tattvopaplavasimha (The Lion that Devours all Categories) 1 of the seventh century AD, which shows that no category (tattva) can be proved to be real, that nothing can be real except what we see with our senses, and that therefore everything that man does is justified. Thus the philosophy of Cārvāka was turned into a philosophy supporting any immoral policy and action. However, we have no evidence to show that Cārvāka himself went so far.
