Charvaka (Sanskrit: चार्वाक; IAST: Cārvāka), also known as Lokāyata, is an ancient Indian school of materialism. It is regarded as one of the atheistic schools within the broader landscape of ancient Indian philosophies, and is categorised among the nāstika or heterodox schools of Indian thought.
The school holds direct perception, empiricism, and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge. It embraces philosophical skepticism and rejects ritualism. According to Charvaka epistemology, whenever a truth is inferred from a set of observations or premises, doubt must be acknowledged; inferred knowledge is therefore treated as conditional rather than absolute.
Charvaka was a well-attested belief system in ancient India. The philosopher Brihaspati is traditionally referred to as the founder of the Charvaka or Lokāyata tradition, although some scholars dispute this attribution. The school developed during the period of Hindu reformation in the first millennium BCE, and is considered a philosophical predecessor to subsequent or contemporaneous heterodox traditions such as Ajñāna, Ājīvika, Jainism, and Buddhism.
No primary texts of the Charvaka school survive in their original form. Its teachings have been reconstructed largely from historic secondary literature, including references found in the shastras, sutras, and Indian epic poetry, where its positions are often summarised or discussed by adherents of other schools.
Adapted from the English Wikipedia article on Charvaka.