The Lion of the Destruction of Principles (Tattvopaplavasiṃha)

The only substantial work linked to the Cārvāka or Lokāyata materialists to survive, though its link to them is debated and its position is far more radical than theirs. A palm-leaf manuscript was found in a Jain library at Patan in 1926 and first published in 1940. Jayarāśi takes, one after another, the definitions of the means of knowledge offered by the Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhist and Jaina schools, chiefly perception and inference, but also testimony, comparison, presumption and absence. For each, he lists every way the definition could be understood and shows that each one fails, without putting forward a rival view of his own. If no means of knowledge can be established, then no claims about what is real, including claims about the self, the afterlife or the elements, can be established either. The work ends by suggesting that ordinary practical life carries on unaffected, and can be enjoyed, without philosophical foundations.

It is classical India's most thorough sceptical work, and a striking parallel to Greek Pyrrhonism in its method of dismantling every theory of knowledge without asserting one of its own.