Some Links to Charvaka Scriptures in English

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Some Links to Charvaka Scriptures in English Charvaka

2 points | Post submitted by jay 1077 days ago | 1 comments | viewed 998 times

The Brhaspatya sūtras (Lokāyata sutras) are the foundational texts of the nastika Charvaka school. This text has been lost, and is known only from fragmentary quotations. In 1928 published 60 such verses known as Charvaka Sixty and now again published in English.
Shankara discusses this philosophy in his book Sarva Siddhanta Sangraha.
The Sarva Darshana Sangraha written by Sri Madhava Acharya, a pontiff of Sringeri Math in the lineage of Adi Shankara in 1331 AD gives a detailed account of Charvaka, but it doesn't quote Charvaka texts directly, instead paraphrasing the doctrine.
Tattvopaplavasimha is regarded by some authors as belonging to the Cārvāka (Lokāyata) school. But it is disputed by others.
Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya has some details on this philosophy

jay1077 days ago | +0 points
Some background Information :
Cārvāka (or charvak), which is a sub-ideology within Hinduism, contains highly conflicting ideals with the core religious views. For example, it's dominantly atheistic (and that sort of defeats the purpose of a religion).
Moreover, according to this ideology:
- There's no soul.
- 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 ― don't exist.
- There's no afterlife.
- There's nothing wrong in sensual pleasure.
The ideology of Cārvāka fills the atheistic position in Hinduism. However, the thing to note is that this school of thought being faulty has already lost its prominence being refuted by other theist schools of thought hundreds of years back. Hence, the number of people who believe in God, afterlife, etc. are more than the number of people who do not believe in such things.
Now the reason that such school of thought existed was simple, to delude people. Charvak was a rishi (sage), sometimes even the ideology is attributed to sage Brihaspati. In the ancient time people were doing vedic rituals, sacrifices, etc. with great effort to attain a better afterlife. To drag their attention away from heavily indulging in such kinds of act such faulty ideologies were spread.
Another reason present in the Maitri Upanishad (7.9) is that, Brihaspati, the Guru of Indra (king of heaven) introduced such a faulty ideology intentionally so that people will not perform Vedic sacrifices such as the aswamedha yanjya which award the seat of Indra in heaven. The faulty ideology will lure people of demonic nature away into lower level of existence. Hence, by not following vedic rites and sacrifices the position of Indra will remain secured.
The bottom line is, the hedonistic Cārvāka philosophy is faulty and serves the purpose of luring people away from the right path.
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