The nāstika schools — Cārvāka, Buddhism, Jainism

Nāstika does not mean atheist — several orthodox schools are non-theistic. It means a school that does not accept the Veda as a valid means of knowledge. Three are counted: Cārvāka, Buddhism and Jainism.

Cārvāka / Lokāyata

Thoroughgoing materialism. Perception alone is a valid means of knowledge; inference is unreliable because the invariable relation it depends on can itself only be established by inference. Consciousness is a product of the elements, as intoxicating power arises from the combination of ingredients that separately have none. There is no soul, no rebirth, no afterlife, and no merit in sacrifice. Pleasure is the reasonable aim of life.

Four elements, not five — ether is dropped, because nobody has ever perceived it and the school admits nothing it has not perceived. The second half is the whole materialist thesis in two words, and the argument for it is an argument from analogy that has aged remarkably well: ferment rice and molasses separately and neither intoxicates; combine them and an intoxicating power appears that was in neither ingredient. So consciousness may arise from a particular arrangement of unconscious elements without having been present in any of them. Every orthodox school had to answer this, and their answer was invariably the one Sāṅkhya gives — that an aggregate exists for the sake of a user who is not himself an aggregate.

The verse is quoted by opponents and is doubtless meant to make the school look coarse; but the reasoning in the second line is exactly the school's, and it is not coarse at all. There is no observed instance of a burned body returning. Rebirth is therefore an unperceived thing asserted on the strength of an inference — and the Cārvāka's central move is to deny that inference can ever license a claim about the unperceived, because the universal premise it needs could only be established by another inference, and so on without end. That is the problem of induction, stated in India before it was stated anywhere else, and stated as a weapon.

The standard orthodox reply is short and is still the best one: the claim that inference is never valid is itself a general claim about all inferences, past, future and unobserved, and no perception delivers that. The Cārvāka is either making an inference in the act of denying inference, or saying nothing general at all. Some later Cārvākas accepted the point and retreated to a narrower position — inference is fine for everyday purposes and cannot establish soul, God or the afterlife — which is a considerably harder position to refute, and is roughly where modern empiricism sits.

Buddhism

The Buddha accepted karma and rebirth and rejected both the Vedic sacrifice and the permanent self. Its central positions — impermanence, suffering, non-self, dependent origination, the four noble truths and the eightfold path — were argued against the orthodox schools for a thousand years in a debate that improved both sides. Nāgārjuna's dialectic and the Yogācāra analysis of consciousness forced Nyāya and Vedānta to sharpen their own positions, and Śaṅkara's Advaita is unimaginable without that pressure.

The formula on which everything else rests is stated in four clauses, and it is a statement about conditions rather than about things.

Notice what is absent: any noun for a thing that does the arising. The formula describes a regularity between conditions, and the Buddhist claim is that this is all there ever was to describe — that what we call a person is a sequence of conditioned events with no bearer underneath. The orthodox objection is immediate and was pressed hardest by Nyāya: if there is no continuing subject, who remembers? Recognition — 'this is the same man I met last year' — requires one knower present at both moments, and a series of momentary cognitions can no more remember than a row of people can each see a different half of a scene and thereby have seen the whole. The Buddhist answer is causal continuity without identity, the flame passed from lamp to lamp; the Naiyāyika answers that a flame that is not the same flame does not remember the first wick.

Nāgārjuna then made the sharpest move in the history of the debate: he took the doctrine of dependent origination and drew from it that nothing has a nature of its own.

The argument in one line: whatever arises in dependence on something else does not have its being from itself; to lack being from oneself is what 'empty' means; therefore dependent origination and emptiness are the same fact described twice. And the second half blocks the obvious misreading — emptiness is not nothingness, since it is itself a dependent designation and not a thing found under the appearances. Nāgārjuna guards this with the doctrine of two truths, conventional and ultimate, insisting that the ultimate cannot be taught without relying on the conventional, and that liberation is not attained by rejecting the conventional.

The orthodox response ran in two directions at once. Kumārila and the Naiyāyikas attacked frontally: a doctrine that refutes every thesis and defends none is vitaṇḍā, and a philosopher who says all views are empty has said something, which is a view. Śaṅkara devoted a section of his commentary to refuting the Buddhist schools one by one — and was then accused by Bhāskara and by later Vaiṣṇavas of being a crypto-Buddhist, prachanna-bauddha, for teaching a world that is neither real nor unreal. The charge is worth taking seriously and is answerable: Nāgārjuna's analysis leaves no positive ground, while Śaṅkara's whole position depends on there being one, self-luminous and undeniable. Emptiness and Brahman are opposite answers arrived at by strikingly similar arguments.

Jainism

Jainism accepts an eternal, individual soul and a rigorous doctrine of karma as a subtle material substance that adheres to it. Its distinctive contributions are anekāntavāda — the many-sidedness of reality, the doctrine that any single statement captures only one aspect — and the most uncompromising ahiṁsā in any tradition. Its influence on the wider Indian world, especially on vegetarianism and on the practice of non-violence, is out of all proportion to its numbers.

The plural verb matters: the three are one path, not three, and no one of them suffices. But the school's philosophically interesting contribution is its account of what a real thing is — an account designed from the start to hold permanence and change together instead of choosing between them.

All three at once, in every existing thing. A gold ornament melted and recast: a form originates, a form ceases, the gold persists — and no one of the three descriptions is more true than the others. Set this against the schools on either side and the point of it is plain. The Buddhist keeps only origination and cessation and loses the persisting substance; the Vedāntin keeps only persistence and demotes the change to appearance; the Jain refuses the choice on the ground that experience delivers all three and a metaphysics should not delete any of them.

Anekāntavāda follows directly. If a thing genuinely has many aspects, then any single assertion about it is true only in a respect, and the school builds this into its logic as the sevenfold predication — for any statement: in a certain respect it is; in a certain respect it is not; in a certain respect it both is and is not; in a certain respect it is inexpressible; and the three combinations of that fourth with the first three. The prefix syāt — 'in a certain respect' — is not a hedge meaning 'maybe'. It is an operator that makes explicit the standpoint under which the claim holds, and without it, the Jain says, every philosophical dispute is two people asserting different partial truths at each other.

Śaṅkara's objection is the standard one and is a good one: if every statement is both true and false in some respect, then anekāntavāda itself is both true and false, and a doctrine that undermines its own assertion cannot be taught. Some things must be flatly so — including that sentence. The Jain reply is that syāt does not assert contradictories of the same thing in the same respect, which is the only thing the law of non-contradiction forbids; it asserts them in different respects, which no logic forbids and which any careful speaker does daily. Whether that fully answers the charge is still argued; that it is a real answer, and not a dodge, is not seriously disputed.

Five words, and they carry the ethics. If every living thing is a soul of the same kind as oneself, and souls exist in mutual support, then injury is not a rule imposed from outside but a contradiction of the structure of things. Jainism's definition of injury is correspondingly precise — the severing of vitalities through a mind moved by passion — which makes the intention part of the act and explains why the tradition treats carelessness as violence. This is the doctrine that, transmitted through Gujarat and through Gandhi, became a technique of political action in the twentieth century.

॥ ❖ ॥

Last revised 2026-08-16. Corrections are welcome — see how this site is written.