Charvaka, also known as Lokayata, advances a rigorously materialist vision of existence in which there is no room for an afterlife. For this school, consciousness is not a separate, enduring essence but a function or product of the body’s material elements. When the body disintegrates at death, consciousness ceases entirely; there is no surviving entity that continues its journey elsewhere. The notion of a soul distinct from the body is therefore rejected, along with any idea that such a soul might persist beyond bodily death.

From this standpoint, all familiar religious images of postmortem existence—heaven, hell, rebirth, or any other realm of continued personal experience—are dismissed as speculative and lacking empirical grounding. Charvaka thought treats rituals for the dead and hopes for reward or fear of punishment after death as resting on assumptions that cannot be verified through direct experience. The physical world alone is taken as real, and what is commonly called the “person” is understood to be inseparable from the living body. Death, in this view, marks the complete and final cessation of individual existence, leaving no remainder that could enjoy pleasure, suffer pain, or carry karmic consequences forward.