We know, too, that Yāska, the well-known Vedic commentator, who is believed to have lived before the grammarian Pāṇini (probably in the fourth century B.C.), found himself obliged to refute the sceptical arguments of Kautsa and others who pronounced the Veda a tissue of nonsense (Nirukta I. 15, 16).
Again, Manu—whose law-book, according to Dr. Bühler, was composed between the second century B.C. and the second A.D., and, in my opinion, possibly earlier—has the following remark directed against sceptics:—
‘The twice-born man who depending on rationalistic treatises (hetu-ṡāstra) contemns the two roots of law (ṡruti and smṛiti), is to be excommunicated (vahish-kāryaḥ) by the righteous as an atheist (nāstika) and despiser of the Veda’ (Manu II. 11).
Furthermore, the Mahā-bhārata, a poem which contains many ancient legends quite as ancient as those of early Buddhism, relates (Ṡānti-parvan 1410, etc.) the story of the infidel Ćārvāka, who in the disguise of a mendicant Brāhman uttered sentiments dangerously heretical.
This Ćārvāka was the supposed founder of a materialistic school of thought called Lokāyata. Rejecting all instruments of knowledge (pramāṇa) except perception by the senses (pratyaksha), he affirmed that the soul did not exist separately from the body, and that all the phenomena of the world were spontaneously produced.
The following abbreviation of a passage in the Sarva-darṡana-saṅgraha[6] will give some idea of this school’s infidel doctrines, the very name of which (Lokāyata, ‘generally current in the world’) is an evidence of the popularity they enjoyed:—
No heaven exists, no final liberation,
No soul, no other world, no rites of caste,
No recompense for acts; let life be spent,
In merriment[7]; let a man borrow money