The trail of Cārvāka, or Lokāyata, thought runs almost entirely through the pages of its critics, rather than through its own scriptures or monuments. No independent Cārvāka treatise has survived, and there are no inscriptions, temples, or other archaeological remains that can be securely linked to a Cārvāka community. Classical sources speak of foundational works such as the Bṛhaspati Sūtra and related texts like the Lokāyata or Bārhaspatya-śāstra, but these are known only by name and through later reports. What remains is a faint but persistent echo of a materialist voice, heard mainly in the refutations composed by rival schools.

The most substantial textual evidence is thus indirect and often hostile. Brahmanical authors such as Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, Udayana, and later Mādhavācārya in the Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha summarize and attack positions they attribute to Lokāyata: the primacy of perception as the sole means of knowledge, the denial of an eternal self, and the rejection of Vedic authority, ritual, karma, and afterlife. Buddhist sources, from early discourses describing annihilationist materialists like Ajita Kesakambalī to later doxographical works, likewise present a school that accepts only the four elements and denies rebirth and moral causality. Jain authors, too, preserve critiques of thinkers who dismiss karma, asceticism, and any world beyond the senses.

Scattered within these refutations are a few verses and slogans presented as direct Cārvāka utterances. Some celebrate embodied pleasure and mock sacrificial rites and hopes of heaven, while others encapsulate an epistemological stance in the claim that perception alone is a valid means of knowledge. Their authenticity cannot be taken for granted, since they survive only through the pens of opponents, yet they help sketch the contours of a worldview that grounded consciousness in the body and refused to lean on unseen realms. Literary and legal texts that use labels such as lokāyata, nāstika, bārhaspatya, or cārvāka to denote skeptics and hedonists further suggest that such figures were a recognizable presence in the intellectual landscape, even if their own books and institutions did not endure.

Modern scholars, working with this fragmentary and filtered record, have had to reconstruct Cārvāka thought by patiently collating these scattered citations across Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain literature. The emerging picture is not of a fully mapped philosophical system, but of a persistent current of materialist and this-worldly reflection that stood in sharp tension with the dominant religious visions of karma, rebirth, and liberation. The very absence of temples, icons, and preserved scriptures can itself be read as an expression of that stance: a school disinclined to build sacred architecture or to sacralize texts, and marginalized by traditions that did. What remains is a set of traces that invite careful, critical reading, and a reminder that even in a culture rich with metaphysical speculation, voices affirming only what is seen and lived here and now were present and heard.