Charvaka thinkers approached the issue of post-mortem existence from a rigorously empirical and materialist standpoint. They held that only direct perception is a fully reliable means of knowledge, and that what cannot be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed lacks sufficient warrant for belief. Since no one has directly perceived a soul journeying after death, nor heaven, hell, or rebirth, such realms were treated as speculative constructions rather than established realities. Inference and scriptural testimony, often invoked to defend these doctrines, were regarded as too uncertain to support claims about an unseen world.

This epistemological stance was closely tied to their understanding of consciousness and the body. Charvakas described consciousness as an emergent property of the material elements arranged in a particular way, comparable to the intoxicating power that appears only when certain ingredients are combined. When the body disintegrates at death, the specific configuration that gave rise to awareness dissolves, and with it consciousness itself. There is, on this view, no independent, immaterial self that could detach from the body and continue elsewhere; the living person is not something over and above the living body.

From this vantage point, ordinary experience of death becomes a kind of philosophical testimony. All observable signs of awareness vanish when a person dies, and there is no verifiable case of anyone returning from death to report another world. The burden of proof, Charvakas argued, lies with those who affirm an afterlife, yet the evidence offered—scriptural claims, ritual prescriptions, and speculative reasoning—does not meet the standard of direct, repeatable observation. Religious narratives about reward and punishment after death therefore appear less as descriptions of fact and more as instruments of social control, relying on fear and hope to shape conduct.

Their critique extended to the ritual culture surrounding death and the afterlife. Sacrifices and ceremonies said to benefit the departed were viewed as devices by which priests enriched themselves, rather than as effective means of aiding a surviving soul. If offerings cast into the fire truly sustained the dead, Charvakas asked, why does the same offering not produce tangible benefit in this world, such as lighting a lamp for the deceased? Through such pointed questions, they sought to strip away what they saw as illusion and to ground human life in what is directly given: a single, embodied existence, finite yet fully present to the senses.