Cārvāka

Cārvāka, also frequently transliterated as Charvaka or Cārvāka, and also known as Lokayata or Lokyāta, was a materialist and atheist school of thought with ancient roots in India. It proposed a system of ethics based on rational thought. However, this school has been dead for more than a thousand years. The etymology of Charvaka (Sanskrit: चार्वाक) is uncertain. Some believe it to mean "agreeable speech" or pejoratively, "sweet-tongued" (from Sanskrit's cāru "agreeable" and vāk "speech"). Others contend that it derives from the root charv meaning to eat possibly alluding to the philosophy's hedonistic precepts of "eat, drink, and be merry". Yet another theory believes it to be eponymous in origin, with the founder of the school being Charvaka, a disciple of Brihaspati.

Bhattacharya notes that the word Charvaka is of irregular construction, as cara as an adjective means "agreeable, pleasant", but as a noun is another name of Brihaspati, and both derivations are plausible.

The Charvaka school of philosophy had a variety of atheistic and materialistic beliefs. They held perception to be the valid and reliable source of knowledge.

Comparison with other schools of Hinduism

Charvaka epistemology represents minimalist pramāṇas (epistemological methods) in Hindu philosophy. The other schools of Hinduism developed and accepted multiple valid forms of epistemology. To Charvakas, Pratyakṣa (perception) was the one valid way to knowledge and other means of knowledge were either always conditional or invalid. Advaita Vedanta scholars considered six means of valid knowledge and to truths: Pratyakṣa (perception), Anumāṇa (inference), Upamāṇa (comparison and analogy), Arthāpatti (postulation), Anupalabdhi (non-perception, cognitive proof) and Śabda (word, testimony of past or present reliable experts). While Charvaka school accepted just one, the valid means of epistemology in other schools of Hinduism ranged between 2 and 6.