Shared questions
- What remains of ethics, knowledge, and social life if perception is given priority over ritual and postmortem claims?
Internal disagreements
- How securely materialist positions can be reconstructed from fragmentary reports and polemical sources.
Key texts
- The Cārvāka fragments — No Lokāyata work survives; the position is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote in order to refute it.
Scholarly notes
A tradition preserved by its critics · resolved
No Lokāyata or Cārvāka work survives. The position is reconstructed from summaries written by opponents in order to refute it, and the term nāstika that names it is itself a critical label applied from outside.