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The Lokāyata, Nāstika and Cārvāka 541 it is wrong to suppose that even in these stages consciousness exists as a potential power, for power presupposes something in which it exists and there is no other support for consciousness excepting the body, and, therefore, when the body is destroyed, all consciousness ceases with it. It cannot also be admitted that at death consciousness is transferred to another intermediary body, for no such body is ever perceived and cannot therefore be accepted. There cannot also be the same series of consciousness in two different bodies; thus the mental states of an elephant cannot be in the body of a horse.
The Buddhist reply to this objection of the Cārvākas is that if by discarding after-life the Cārvākas wish to repudiate the existence of any permanent entity that is born and reborn, then that is no objection to the Buddhists, for they also do not admit any such permanent soul. The Buddhist view is that there is a beginningless and endless series of states of conscious states which, taken as a period of seventy, eighty or a hundred years, is called the present, past or future life. It is wrong on the part of the Cārvākas to deny the character of this series as beginningless and endless; for if it is so admitted, then a state of consciousness at birth has to be regarded as the first and that would mean that it had no cause and it would thus be eternal, for since it existed without any cause there is no reason why it should ever cease to exist. It could not also have been produced by some eternal consciousness or god, for no such eternal entities are admitted; it cannot be admitted as being eternal by itself; it cannot be produced by eternal atoms of earth, water, etc., for it may be shown that no eternal entities can produce anything. Thus, the last alternative is that it must have been produced by the previous states of consciousness. Even if the atoms are regarded as momentary it would be difficult to prove that consciousness was produced by them. The principle which determines causation is, firstly, that something is the cause which, being present, that which was worthy of being seen but was not seen before becomes seen?. Secondly, when two instances are such that though all the other conditions are present in them both, yet with the introduction of one element there happens a new phenomenon in the one which does not happen in the other, then that element is the cause of that
1 yeşām upalambhe sati upalabdhi-laksana-prāptam pūrvam anupalabdham sad upalabhyate ity evam āśrayaniyam. Kamalaśila, Pañjikā, p. 525.
