Charvaka stands in striking resonance with Western materialist and atheist currents, yet it arises from a very different soil. Both perspectives share a refusal to grant reality to gods, souls, or invisible metaphysical realms, and both deny any afterlife, rebirth, or karmic continuation beyond death. Reality, for each, is the tangible, material world, and consciousness is understood as emerging from matter rather than existing as an independent spiritual substance. There is also a shared suspicion toward scriptural authority and priestly power, whether in the Brahmanical or in the Judeo‑Christian context, and a corresponding insistence that religious claims must not override what is given in experience.

At the same time, Charvaka’s way of grounding this stance is notably distinctive. It is often characterized as a form of radical empiricism that accepts only direct sense perception as fully valid knowledge, and it treats inference and testimony with deep suspicion, allowing them, if at all, only in very limited and mundane cases. Western materialist and atheist philosophies, by contrast, generally embrace inference and systematic theory as legitimate tools, especially within scientific inquiry, and are willing to posit unobservable entities so long as they help explain and predict experience. In this sense, modern Western naturalism is often more epistemically expansive than Charvaka, even while arriving at similarly non‑theistic conclusions.

Ethically, Charvaka is frequently portrayed as an explicit hedonism that places pleasure and worldly well‑being at the center of life’s purpose, sometimes captured in the slogan that one should enjoy life even at significant cost, since only this life is real. Western materialist and atheist traditions, though they may include hedonistic strands, display a far wider range of moral outlooks, from utilitarianism and secular humanism to more austere or duty‑based ethics. The Charvaka emphasis on artha and kāma, on wealth and enjoyment in this world, mirrors some secular Western emphases on human flourishing, yet lacks the same diversity of developed ethical systems.

The historical and social horizons of these philosophies also shape their character. Charvaka emerges as a nāstika voice within the Indian philosophical landscape, directly challenging Vedic ritualism, sacrificial practices, and the karmic social order, and it does so without evolving into a long, self‑documented tradition; much of what is known comes through the reports of its opponents. Western materialism and atheism, by contrast, develop through a continuous textual lineage, in dialogue with Greek thought, Christian theology, and later scientific and political transformations. Both, however, can be seen as attempts to anchor human life in what is immediately given, to turn attention from promised otherworldly rewards toward the concrete, finite reality of this embodied existence.