Svabhāvavāda and the Cārvāka/Lokāyata: A Historical Overview

Abstract

svabhāva (own being) and yadṛchhā (chance, accident) are named as two different claimants among others as the first cause (jagatkāraṇa) in the ŚvUp. But in later works, such as Aśvaghoṣa’s poems, svabhāva is synonymous with yadṛchhā and entails a passive attitude to life. Later still, svabhāva is said to be inhering in the Lokāyata materialist system, although in which sense—cosmic order or accident—is not always clearly mentioned. Svabhāva is also a part of the Sāṃkhya doctrine and is mentioned in the medical compilations. It is proposed that the idea of svabhāva as cosmic order became a part of Lokāyata between the sixth and the eighth century ce and got widely accepted by the tenth century, so much so that in the fourteenth century Sāyaṇa-Mādhava aka Vidyāraṇya could categorically declare that the Cārvāka/Lokāyata upheld causality, not chance. But the other meaning of svabhāva, identical with yadṛchhā, continued to circulate along with kāla, time, which was originally another claimant for the title of the first cause and similarly had acquired several significations in course of time. Both significations of svabhāva continued to be employed by later writers, and came to be used in another domain, that of daiva (fate) vis-à-vis puruṣakāra (manliness or human endeavour).

Appendix

Besides the mention of one or the other of the first cause, (see Bhattacharya 2001c) several lists of the “competing causalities” [in Wilhelm Halbfass’s (p. 291) words] are available. In addition to the first of such lists provided in ŚvUp, 1.2, we have JM, 23.17–20 (svabhāva, īśvara, pūrvakṛta karma, ucchedavāda), ŚVS, chap. 2 (kāla, svabhāva, niyati, karman), Siddhasena Divākara, qutd. by Kulkarni, 16 n22 (kāla, svabhāva, niyati, pūrvakarma, puruṣakāra), TS, chs. 1–6 (prakṛti,, īśvara, both the two, svabhāva, śabdabrahman, ātman), ĀSVṛ on ĀS, 1.1.3 (kāla, niyati, svabhāva, īśvara, ātman), Māṭhara and Gauḍapāda on SK, 61 (īśvara, puruṣa, svabhāva, kāla), GS, verses 679–683 (kāla, īśvara, ātman, niyati, svabhāva), SS,1.1.11 (svabhāva, īśvara, kāla, yadṛcchā, niyati), SKā, 548 (īśvara, niyati, karman, svabhāva, kāla), Kumbhaka, as quoted by al-Bīrūnī, I:321 (mahābhūta, kāla, svabhāva, karman), Kriyākalpataru, as quoted in YTC, Book 5, 458 (vidhi, vidhātā, niyati, svabhāva, kāla, droha, daiva, karman), and TRD, 11–15 (kāla, īśvara, ātman, niyati, svabhāva, yadṛchhā).

Thus from the fourth century CE to the fifteenth century, we have some such lists that however, intentionally or not, confuse the two domains, cosmological and ethical, in which svabhāva and kāla are generally common (I have omitted such texts as the HV, Bhaviṣyaparvan, 20.22 (vulgate ed.), which too mentions kāla and svabhāva). We also have references to svabhāva in various parvans of the Mbh (Bhattacharya 2007b, pp. 275–277) and stray references to the bhūtacintakas, kālakāraṇikas, haṭhavādakas, and syncretic views in various sources (see Bhattacharya 2001a, b, and 2007b passim).

In order to understand what svabhāva means in a particular base text and commentary we have to determine at first which domain is being referred to, cosmological or ethical, and then decide what svabhāva there stands for, causality or accident. All the syncretic views may be safely ignored, for they are expressions of mere wishful thinking: excepting a few Jains none used to think in such syncretic terms. Even all the Jain philosophers did not hold the same view in relation to svabhāva in either domain, cosmological and ethical, and some viewed svabhāva as causality, others as accident (Bhattacharya 2005, 2006). As to the relation between svabhāvavāda and the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, too, the Jains were not unanimous in their opinion.