“There is no heaven, no liberation, nor any soul in another world,
Nor do the acts of the asramas or castes produce any reward. 
If the animal slain in the Jyotishtoma sacrifice will go to heaven,
Why does not the sacrificer immolate his own father? 
While life remains let a man live happily:  let him feed on butter even
if he runs into debt. 
When once the body becomes ashes, how can it ever return?”

The author of the Dabistan, who lived in the seventeenth century, also mentions the Carvakas in somewhat similar terms.[793]

Brahmanical authors often couple the Carvakas and Buddhists.  This lumping together of offensively heretical sects may be merely theological animus, but still it is possible that there may be a connection between the Carvakas and the extreme forms of Mahayanist nihilism.  Schrader[794] in analysing a singular work, called the Svasamvedyopanishad, says it is “inspired by the Mahayanist doctrine of vacuity (sunya-vada) and proclaims a most radical agnosticism by asserting in four chapters (a) that there is no reincarnation (existence being bubble-like), no God, no world:  that all traditional literature (Sruti and Smriti) is the work of conceited fools; (b) that Time the destroyer and Nature the originator are the rulers of all existence and not good and bad deeds, and that there is neither hell nor heaven; (c) that people deluded by flowery speech cling to gods, sacred places, teachers, though there is in reality no difference at all between Vishnu and a dog; (d) that though all words are untrue and all ideas mere illusions, yet liberation is possible by a thorough realization of Bhavadvaita.”  But for this rather sudden concession to Hindu sentiment, namely that deliverance is possible, this doctrine resembles the tenets attributed to the Carvakas.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 736:  In the Sarva-darsana-sangraha, the best known compendium of Indian philosophy.]

[Footnote 737:  J.C.  Chatterji’s definition of Indian philosophy (in his Indian Realism, p. 1) is interesting.  “By Hindu philosophy I mean that branch of the ancient learning of the Hindus which demonstrates by reasoning propositions with regard to (a) what a man ought to do in order to gain true happiness ... or (b) what he ought to realize by direct experience in order to be radically and absolutely freed from suffering and to be absolutely independent, such propositions being already given and lines of reasoning in their support being established by duly qualified authorities.”]

[Footnote 738:  See Chatterji’s work above cited.]

[Footnote 739:  It is this idea which disposes educated Hindus to believe in the magical or sacramental power of mystic syllables and letters, though the use of such spells seems to Europeans incredible folly.]