Lokayata

The word

Lokayata is usually analysed as "prevalent in the world" or "directed to this world", and both readings have been urged. The first suggests a popular or widespread view; the second a doctrine confined to the observable world and denying any other.

The term appears earlier than Charvaka, occurring in Buddhist and Jain texts and in the Arthashastra, where lokayata is listed among the branches of learning a ruler should know — which indicates it was a recognised discipline of argument rather than merely an insult.

Relation to Charvaka

By the classical period the two names are used for the same school, with Charvaka increasingly the standard label. Whether they were originally distinct is unresolved: some scholars treat Lokayata as an older tradition of disputation and worldly reasoning that materialism later occupied, others as simply the earlier name.

The lost literature

The Brihaspati Sutra, attributed to a teacher named Brihaspati and regarded as the foundational text, is lost, as is everything else the tradition produced. What survives is fragments quoted by opponents, and the outline preserved in doxographies such as Madhava's Sarvadarshanasangraha, which places Lokayata first as the position to be refuted before all others.

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's study of 1959 argued for a much wider Lokayata tradition with roots in popular and pre-Vedic practice, a reading that has been influential in Indian scholarship and contested elsewhere.

Why it disappeared

Unlike Buddhism and Jainism, Lokayata built no monastic order, no lay community and no institutions of transmission. A doctrine that denies an afterlife, rejects ritual and recommends ordinary satisfaction has less to organise around, and nothing preserved its texts when the manuscript tradition that copied its rivals' works had no reason to copy its own.