Within the Charvaka perspective, notions of rebirth and karma are set aside as speculative constructs without evidential grounding. Consciousness is understood as arising from the material elements of the body, an emergent function that ends when the body disintegrates. Because there is no enduring soul or metaphysical self that could outlive the body, the idea of a post-mortem journey or repeated births finds no foothold in this system. Rebirth, therefore, is not merely doubted but treated as impossible, since there is nothing that could meaningfully be said to “return” or transmigrate.

This materialist stance also shapes Charvaka’s view of karma. The school does not accept an unseen moral law that links actions in one life to rewards or punishments in another, nor any invisible accumulation of merit and demerit across lifetimes. Only directly perceptible causes and effects are granted validity, so a trans-mundane karmic mechanism is regarded as baseless and lacking empirical support. Charvaka thinkers often portray such doctrines as instruments of social control, sustained by priests and rulers through promises of reward and threats of punishment beyond this life. For them, whatever moral consequences actions may have unfold within the boundaries of this present existence, through observable social and psychological processes rather than through an otherworldly ledger of deeds.