Charvaka, or Lokayata, thinkers stood in radical opposition to the ritualistic core of Vedic religion, and their critique cut to the very foundations of that sacrificial worldview. They denied that the Vedas possessed any special authority, regarding them not as divine revelation but as human compositions whose claims about unseen realms and future rewards could not be verified. Because they accepted only direct perception as a reliable means of knowledge, any injunction that depended on invisible entities, heavenly worlds, or post‑mortem fruits of action was treated as speculation rather than truth. In this way, the scriptural basis of ritual was undermined at its root, since the very categories that gave ritual its meaning—gods, afterlife, karma—were themselves rejected.

From this epistemic stance flowed a sharp rejection of the efficacy of sacrifice and other Vedic rites. Charvaka thinkers denied that offerings poured into fire could reach deities or ancestors, and they ridiculed the idea that such acts could produce supernatural results. Rituals promising merit, heaven, or the favor of unseen beings were seen as irrational precisely because none of these outcomes could be perceived. Even funeral and ancestral rites were said to benefit only the living—socially or emotionally—rather than any surviving “spirit” of the deceased, since no such separate soul was admitted.

Their critique extended to the social and economic dimensions of ritual life. Elaborate sacrifices were portrayed as wasteful expenditures that enriched officiating priests while impoverishing the patrons who sponsored them. The priestly class was accused of promoting complex and costly rites not for the genuine welfare of practitioners but for its own livelihood and status. Claims that priests possessed unique powers or privileged access to the divine were treated as instruments of social control and exploitation, rather than as marks of spiritual insight.

Against this backdrop, Charvaka thought offered a very different orientation to life and value. Instead of sacrificing present well‑being for imagined future births or celestial rewards, they urged attention to tangible, worldly happiness grounded in direct experience. Ethical and practical conduct, on this view, should rest on what can be perceived and on workable social conventions, not on ritual prescriptions tied to unverifiable metaphysical schemes. Their response to Vedic ritualism thus amounted to a comprehensive rejection—philosophical, moral, and social—of any practice whose justification lay beyond the reach of immediate experience.