In Dialogue
For two thousand years, Hindu philosophers sharpened their thinking against Buddhists, Jains and materialists — and they against them. Meet the other side of the conversation, in its own words.
Indian philosophy was born in argument. A teacher could not simply state his view; he had to state his opponent’s view first — at its strongest — and then answer it. The opponent was very often a Buddhist, a Jain or a materialist. Classical Sanskrit called these traditions nāstika, “those who say ‘it is not,’” because they did not accept the authority of the Veda; the six Vedic darśanas were āstika. The word does not mean “atheist”: Jainism and Buddhism have deep spiritual paths, and some āstika schools, like Mīmāṃsā, needed no creator God either (see The Six Schools at a Glance).
Buddhism and Jainism are living religions with their own scriptures, saints and self-understanding. This page, written from within the Hindu tradition, tries to describe them as their own followers would, and to give the debates without declaring a winner. If a Buddhist or Jain reader finds something misrepresented, that is an error worth correcting.
Buddhism: no fixed self
Each school now has its own full page: Buddhist Philosophy, Jaina Philosophy and Cārvāka. This page keeps to how they argued with the Vedic schools.
The Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 5th century BCE), taught a middle way between indulgence and harsh asceticism, and diagnosed the human condition in four noble truths: life is marked by suffering (duḥkha); suffering arises from craving; it can end; and there is a path, the Eightfold Path, to end it. Its most radical teaching — and the one Hindu philosophers argued with most — is anātman (Pāli anattā), “not-self”:
अथ निब्बिन्दति दुक्खे एस मग्गो विसुद्धिया ॥ sabbe dhammā anattā ti yadā paññāya passati,
atha nibbindati dukkhe esa maggo visuddhiyā “All things are not-self” — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purity. Dhammapada 279 (Pāli)
Look for the self, says the Buddha, and you will find only five changing “heaps” (skandhas): body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. None is permanent; none is under our full control; so none can be a lasting “I.” The famous illustration comes from the monk Nāgasena, questioned by King Milinda: is the chariot the wheels, the axle, the pole? None of them — and yet there is no extra chariot beyond the parts. “Chariot” is a convenient name for an arrangement. So is “I.”
This is not nihilism. Buddhists stress that the person is real as a process: a continuous stream, each moment causing the next, like a flame passed from lamp to lamp. Later Buddhist philosophers pressed the point into momentariness: whatever exists lasts only an instant, because to exist is to be causally active, and a permanent thing could never produce anything new. Liberation, nirvāṇa, is the “blowing out” of the fires of craving, hatred and delusion — not the discovery of a hidden eternal self.
Two later currents mattered hugely to Hindu thought. Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century CE), founder of the Madhyamaka, taught śūnyatā, “emptiness”: nothing has a fixed, independent essence, because everything arises dependently (pratītya-samutpāda):
सा प्रज्ञप्तिरुपादाय प्रतिपत् सैव मध्यमा ॥ yaḥ pratītya-samutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe,
sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā Dependent arising — that is what we call emptiness. It is a designation based on [parts]; it is itself the middle way. Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.18
And Dignāga (c. 480–540) and Dharmakīrti (c. 600–660) built a rigorous Buddhist epistemology, accepting only two means of knowledge — perception and inference — and forcing every rival school to defend its own pramāṇas with new precision.
Jainism: many-sidedness
Jains trace their faith through twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras, “ford-makers” who crossed the river of rebirth and showed the way. The twenty-fourth, Mahāvīra, was a contemporary of the Buddha (Jain tradition gives 599–527 BCE; many historians place him somewhat later). Jainism divides reality into jīva, living souls — infinite in number, each by nature all-knowing and blissful — and ajīva, the non-living: matter, space, time, and the media of motion and rest.
Its account of bondage is strikingly concrete. Karma is not just a moral law but subtle matter, drawn to the soul by every action and glued to it by passion — anger, pride, deceit and greed. Hence the supreme Jain virtue, ahiṃsā, practised more rigorously than anywhere else: to harm any living being, down to the smallest, binds the soul. Liberation comes by stopping new karma and burning off the old through right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, and above all through austerity. The freed soul rises to the summit of the universe, omniscient, forever. There is no creator God; the Tīrthaṅkaras are worshipped as perfected exemplars, not world-makers. The Jain motto states its ethic:
Jainism’s great philosophical gift is anekāntavāda, “non-one-sidedness.” Reality is complex, and every statement about it is true only from some standpoint. The parable of the blind men and the elephant — one feels the trunk and says “a snake,” another a leg and says “a pillar” — makes the point; the story is told in several traditions, including Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi ones, though Jains made it their own. Jain logicians formalised the idea as syādvāda, the doctrine of “in some respect” (syāt): a pot in some respect exists (as clay, here, now), in some respect does not exist (as cloth, elsewhere), in some respect both, in some respect is inexpressible — seven combinations in all.
Cārvāka: only this world
The Cārvāka or Lokāyata school — “those who hold to the world” — was India’s materialism. Its sūtras, attributed to Bṛhaspati, are lost; we know it almost entirely from its opponents’ summaries, above all the first chapter of the 14th-century Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha, a survey of schools written from an Advaita standpoint. (One remarkable work does survive, the Tattvopaplavasiṃha, “The Lion that Overthrows All Principles,” of Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa, c. 8th century — though it is more radical scepticism than materialism.) So any summary must be read with care.
At its strongest, Cārvāka is a philosophy of evidence. Only perception gives certain knowledge. Inference to things no one has ever seen — a soul, a heaven, a karmic reward — cannot be secured, because we can never observe that the link it relies on holds in every case. The world is made of four elements; consciousness emerges when they combine as a body, as the power to intoxicate emerges from fermenting ingredients that do not intoxicate on their own. When the body dies, the person ends. The proper aim of life is happiness, and the rituals that promise rewards after death are, they said, a living for the priests. The Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha gives them this verse:
भस्मीभूतस्य देहस्य पुनरागमनं कुतः ॥ yāvaj jīvaṃ sukhaṃ jīven nāsti mṛtyor agocaraḥ,
bhasmībhūtasya dehasya punarāgamanaṃ kutaḥ While life lasts, live happily; no one escapes the eye of death. Once the body is turned to ashes, how could it ever return? Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha, ch. 1 (Cārvāka), attributed to the Cārvākas A popular later version replaces the first line’s ending with “borrow money and drink ghee” — scholars think this is a parody, not the school’s own words.
Alongside them stood the Ājīvikas, followers of Makkhali Gosāla, a contemporary and rival of the Buddha and Mahāvīra. They taught niyati, fate: every soul passes through a fixed number of lives, “like a ball of thread unwinding to its end,” and effort cannot hasten it. Their own texts are lost, but the Mauryan emperors Aśoka and Daśaratha dedicated rock-cut caves to them in the Barabar hills of Bihar, and the movement lasted, in dwindling form, for well over a thousand years.
What is the self? Four answers
Tap each tradition:
An eternal ātman exists — though the schools differ on what it is: pure witnessing awareness (Advaita, Sāṃkhya), an atomic soul dependent on God (Vedānta’s theistic schools), or an all-pervading substance that has consciousness as a quality (Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika). Liberation reveals or restores it.
No unchanging self is found — only a dependently arising stream of physical and mental events. Clinging to a self is the root of suffering; seeing through it is freedom. Some later schools, like the Pudgalavādins, accepted an indescribable “person,” and Mahāyāna texts on Buddha-nature use self-like language — debated inside Buddhism itself.
Countless real souls (jīvas), each conscious, each the size of the body it lives in, each able to become omniscient. The self is real and enduring — but changing in its states, as a Jain would add, in true many-sided fashion.
The self is the living body. Consciousness is a property of matter organised in a certain way, and ends with it. There is no rebirth, and so no need of liberation — only of living well and happily now.
A classic debate
For a thousand years, Naiyāyikas and Buddhists argued over the self, from Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara to Dharmakīrti and, in the 11th century, Udayana’s Ātmatattvaviveka. Here is the debate in miniature. Choose whose argument convinces you:
Is there an enduring self behind experience?
You remember seeing a mango yesterday, and now you taste it. Who saw, who remembers, who tastes?
The Naiyāyika’s case
The Nyāya Sūtra (3.1.1) argues that we grasp one object through two senses — I see and touch the same thing — so there must be one who does both. Desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain and cognition are “marks of the self” (1.1.10): I desire the mango because I remember enjoying one. If yesterday’s seer had vanished, today’s taster could not remember what someone else saw.
The weak point
The Buddhist replies: you are assuming what you need to prove. Memory needs only a causal link between moments, not a permanent owner — and no one has ever perceived this permanent self.
The Buddhist’s case
Yesterday’s seeing left an impression in the stream; the impression causes today’s memory, as a seed causes a sprout. Nothing needs to stay the same for that. Look within: you find feelings, thoughts, perceptions — never a separate “self” having them. And a permanent self could never change or act, so it could explain nothing.
The weak point
The Naiyāyika presses: in what is the impression stored? If every moment perishes, who recognises “this is what I saw”? Recognition itself — “I who saw now taste” — is a perception of unity. (Kashmir’s Pratyabhijñā made this its central argument; see Kashmir Shaivism.)
The Jain’s case
The soul is enduring as a substance, and changing in its modes — just as gold endures while the bracelet becomes a necklace. The Naiyāyika sees only the substance; the Buddhist sees only the modes. Each is right from his standpoint and wrong to make it the whole.
The weak point
Both rivals object that “in some respect it is, in some respect it is not” dodges the question. Shankara, in his commentary on Brahmasūtra 2.2.33, argued that contradictory properties cannot belong to one thing at once. The Jain reply: they can, if the respects differ.
The Cārvāka’s case
No one has ever seen a self without a body. Memory, desire and thought appear in living bodies and vanish with them. The simplest explanation is that the living body — the elements arranged as a body — remembers. Why multiply invisible entities?
The weak point
Every other school answered: the body changes completely over a lifetime, yet I remember my childhood; and the elements are not conscious, so how could a mere sum of them be? The Cārvāka’s “emergence” analogy, the others said, explains a property, not a subject.
How did the debate end?
It didn’t. Each side refined its arguments for centuries, and both grew sharper for it. Many readers today notice that modern philosophy and neuroscience are still asking the same question.
What Hindu thought learned
These debates changed everyone who took part. A few of the lasting effects:
- Sharper logic. Buddhist logicians forced Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta to define perception, inference and testimony with new rigour. The later Navya-Nyāya (“New Nyāya”) of Bengal grew partly from this long contest.
- “Crypto-Buddhism.” Shankara’s Advaita was attacked by its critics as pracchanna-bauddha, “Buddhism in disguise”; the charge and the Advaitin reply are told on Advaita Vedānta.
- Ahiṃsā and diet. Many historians link the spread of vegetarianism and the decline of animal sacrifice in Hindu practice partly to Jain and Buddhist influence. Patañjali’s five yamas are the same list as the five great vows of Jain monks.
- The Buddha as avatāra. Several Purāṇas count the Buddha among Vishnu’s avatāras. The Bhāgavata (1.3.24) says he came to bewilder the gods’ enemies; Jayadeva’s 12th-century Gītagovinda praises him for compassion:
सदयहृदयदर्शितपशुघातम् ।
केशव धृतबुद्धशरीर जय जगदीश हरे ॥ nindasi yajña-vidher ahaha śruti-jātaṃ
sadaya-hṛdaya-darśita-paśu-ghātam,
keśava dhṛta-buddha-śarīra jaya jagadīśa hare With a compassionate heart you condemned the Vedic rules of sacrifice that showed the slaughter of animals. O Keśava, who took the form of the Buddha — victory to you, Hari, Lord of the world! Jayadeva, Gītagovinda 1 (the hymn of the ten avatāras) Buddhists do not accept this. For them the Buddha was a human being who awakened, not a form of Vishnu; B. R. Ambedkar’s vows at his conversion to Buddhism in 1956 explicitly rejected the idea. Purāṇic view
Shared ground, then and now
For all their disagreements, the three great Indian traditions share a family likeness: karma and rebirth (saṃsāra), the hope of final liberation, renunciant monasticism, meditation and yoga, and non-violence as a high ideal. Words like dharma, nirvāṇa and mokṣa move across all of them. The Jain festival of Mahāvīra’s liberation falls on Diwali night, and Hindu and Jain families in Gujarat and Rajasthan have long intermarried and worshipped side by side.
Relations have also known tension — over temples, over conversion, and over who tells whose story. At Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha awakened, the great temple has been managed under Indian law by a mixed Hindu–Buddhist committee, an arrangement some Buddhists still contest. Community practice In Malaysia, where Buddhism is the second-largest religion, Hindus and Buddhists — most of them Chinese, with Sri Lankan and Thai communities too — share streets, festivals and sometimes shrines; small Jain communities keep their own traditions. The old debates are best continued as they were at their finest: with each side stating the other’s view at its strongest.
- Nyāya answered Buddhism’s no-self with arguments from memory, recognition and the unity of experience, and Cārvāka’s perception-only view by showing that daily life runs on inference.
- Mīmāṃsā (Kumārila) defended the eternal, authorless Veda against Buddhist and Jain critiques of scripture.
- Vedānta (Shankara, Brahmasūtra 2.2) rejected Buddhist momentariness, idealism and emptiness, and Jain syādvāda — while Advaita was itself accused of borrowing from Buddhism.
- Buddhists and Jains answered in kind: against the Veda’s authority, against a creator God, and against an unchanging self.
Check your knowledge:
In classical usage, “nāstika” means a school that…
Buddhism and Jainism have rich spiritual paths; they simply do not accept the Veda.
For Jains, karma is…
Drawn in by action and glued by passion — hence the rigour of Jain ahiṃsā.
Nāgārjuna identified emptiness with…
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.18: things are empty because they arise dependently.
Most of what we know about Cārvāka comes from…
Its texts are lost; the Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha is the best-known account.
Questions people often ask
Are Buddhism and Jainism “branches” of Hinduism?
Their followers say no, and that should be respected. They arose in the same world, share much vocabulary, and have influenced Hindu traditions profoundly — but they have their own founders, scriptures and communities, and define themselves apart from the Veda.
Did Hindus drive Buddhism out of India?
Historians give many causes for Buddhism’s decline in India: loss of royal patronage, the absorption of its ideas and practices into Hindu devotion, and the destruction of great monasteries such as Nālandā during the conquests of the late 12th century. Local conflicts also occurred. It was a long, complex process rather than a single event.
Is moksha the same as nirvāṇa?
They are cousins: both end rebirth. But mokṣa is usually the freedom of an eternal self, while Buddhist nirvāṇa involves no permanent self at all. See Samsara & Moksha.
॥ Pause and reflect
- Search for your “self” for one minute. What do you actually find?
- Pick a belief you hold strongly. How would it look “in some respect” from another person’s standpoint?
- Which argument in the debate above did you find hardest to answer?
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Key terms on this page
Sources & further reading
- Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Gordon Fraser, 1959).
- Jay L. Garfield (trans.), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Oxford University Press, 1995).
- Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (University of California Press, 1979).
- Nathmal Tatia (trans.), That Which Is: Tattvārtha Sūtra (HarperCollins, 1994).
- Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata (Anthem Press, 2011).
- Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokāyata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (People’s Publishing House, 1959).
- A. L. Basham, History and Doctrines of the Ājīvikas (Luzac, 1951).
- E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (trans.), The Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha (Trübner, 1882).
- Matthew Kapstein, Reason’s Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (Wisdom Publications, 2001).
- Bimal Krishna Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Clarendon Press, 1986).