Ajita Kesakambali

On a full-moon night in the kingdom of Magadha, in the Ganges valley, a king asked his ministers which holy man he might visit. That, at least, is how a Buddhist scripture begins. The king was Ajātasattu, ruler of Magadha from the city of Rājagaha, and his ministers named six famous teachers one after another. One of them was "Ajita of the garment of hair."¹²

Later the king told the Buddha what Ajita had said when he asked him what a holy life was worth. "There is no such thing, O king, as alms or sacrifice or offering. There is neither fruit nor result of good or evil deeds. There is no such thing as this world or the next." A person, Ajita said, is four elements, and at death each goes back where it came from.³⁴⁵ These few sentences are almost everything we know about a teacher who held that nothing of us survives death. They were written down by his opponents. This chapter tells what can be known about Ajita Kesakambali, and how little that is. (Quotations are from the English translations of T. W. Rhys Davids, 1899, and Hermann Jacobi, 1895.)

A name and a paragraph

No life of Ajita survives. No source gives his birth, his death, his family, his teacher or a single writing of his own; he appears only as a name in a list of six teachers and as the speaker of one paragraph.⁶ The texts that preserve him, the Pali scriptures of the Buddhists, are good evidence, the scholar Georg Bühler judged, "certainly for the fifth, probably for the sixth, century B.C.," though they were put into their final form later.⁷ He is usually placed around 500 BCE, a contemporary of the Buddha.

His name is a description. "Kesakambali" means "of the garment of hair," a blanket of hair; Buddhist commentators writing many centuries later said it was human hair.²⁸⁹ That is all the portrait there is.

The king's question

The scripture is the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, "the fruits of the life of a recluse." King Ajātasattu, it says, went to the Buddha in the mango grove of his physician Jīvaka at Rājagaha and asked him a practical question: craftsmen and soldiers can see the reward of their work in this life; can a monk? He told the Buddha that he had asked the same question of six other teachers, and he repeated their answers.¹³

Ajita's answer, as the king reported it, was the bleakest of all. "There is neither father nor mother, nor beings springing into life without them." "A human being is built up of the four elements. When he dies the earthy in him returns and relapses to the earth, the fluid to the water, the heat to the fire, the windy to the air, and his faculties pass into space." Gifts to holy men earn nothing: "It is a doctrine of fools, this talk of gifts. It is an empty lie, mere idle talk, when men say there is profit therein. Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not."³⁴⁵¹⁰ The king, the scripture says, neither applauded nor blamed what he heard, and went away.³

What the passage records is a denial of the religious economy of its world: of offerings and sacrifices, of good and bad deeds bearing fruit in later lives, of any world beyond this one. As Rhys Davids put it, Ajita, "in preaching annihilation at death, shuts out the possibility of any effect to be worked by Karma."¹¹ The text never says why he believed it; no motive survives.

Heard at third hand

It is worth being plain about how the words reach us. Ajita spoke to the king; the king, in the story, repeated it to the Buddha; and the Buddha's followers remembered and recited it, and wrote it down in the scriptures of their own school. The same paragraph appears in other Buddhist texts "as the view of a typical sophist."¹² The Buddha's answer to the king was not a point-by-point refutation of Ajita. He described instead the "immediate fruit" of a monk's life, a calm and insight "higher and sweeter" than any craft's reward.¹³ And he closed with a judgment on the king himself, who had come to power by killing his father: "If, brethren, the king had not put his father to death, that righteous man, and righteous king, then would the clear and spotless eye for the truth have arisen in him."¹³¹⁴

Other Buddhist texts answer the doctrine without naming him. One lists seven views of "annihilation," the first holding that the self "has form, is built up of the four elements, and is the offspring of father and mother," and is "cut off, destroyed, on the dissolution of the body." The Buddha calls all such speculations a net: "this way and that they plunge about, but they are in it."¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ Another sutta repeats Ajita's teaching word for word and offers the plainest argument against it: if it were true, the ascetic and the householder would end the same, and "without my doing a stroke, my task is done, and I have lived the higher life without essaying it at all."¹⁸¹⁹

The Jain record

The Jains, the other great ascetic movement of the time, preserved something very like it. Their scripture, the Sūtrakṛtāṅga, describes teachers who go to kings and teach that the soul and body are one and perish together, and it describes the same funeral the Buddhists described: "Other men carry it (viz. the corpse) away to burn it. When it has been consumed by fire, only dove-coloured bones remain, and the four bearers return with the hearse to their village."²⁰²¹ When Hermann Jacobi translated the Jain texts in 1895 he laid them beside the Pali and found the four bearers and the dove-coloured bones in both.²²

The Jains drew a harder conclusion from the doctrine than the Buddhists did. Its holders, they said, thought that a man who "kills and causes to kill ... he may even sell and kill a man ... does not do wrong."²³²⁴ That was an opponent's inference; the Pali report of Ajita says only that deeds bear no fruit.

The Cārvākas

Many centuries later Indian philosophers wrote of a materialist school called the Lokāyata or Cārvāka, and it is easy to make Ajita its founder. The evidence does not quite allow it. The fullest account of the Cārvākas comes from a fourteenth-century compendium of philosophies, the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha of Mādhava, which calls Cārvāka "the crest-gem of the atheistical school" and quotes verses attributed to a sage named Bṛhaspati: "There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world."²⁵²⁶ It also gives a cheerful refrain: "While life is yours, live joyously; None can escape Death's searching eye."²⁷²⁸ None of that pleasure-seeking is in the Pali report of Ajita.²⁹

Rhys Davids, writing in 1899, doubted that a Lokāyata school had ever existed as a school at all: "Throughout the whole story we have no evidence of any one who called himself a Lokayatika," and Mādhava's "very able description has all the appearance of being drawn from his own imagination."^30313233 Later scholars have disagreed with him, and the question is still argued.³⁰ What is clear is that Ajita's four elements are older than the name Cārvāka.

What he left

Ajita Kesakambali is the clearest case in this book of unbelief known only through its enemies. We do not know what made him think as he did, what he did with his life, or how he died. We know one paragraph, recited by a rival school to show the emptiness of every teacher but its own, and preserved for that reason for two and a half thousand years. It says that a person is earth, water, fire and air; that gifts to holy men buy nothing; and that the wise and the foolish alike, at death, "are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not." A Greek who reached a similar conclusion by a different road two centuries later, and who taught that death is nothing to fear, was Epicurus, and he has his own chapter in this book.