Ajita Kesakambali (अजित केशकम्बली)
fl. c. 5th c. BC · Śramaṇa Traditions · Known
Ajita Kesakambali taught in Magadha a generation before the Buddha and is the earliest named materialist in Indian thought. A person, he told King Ajātasattu, is a composite of four elements that return at death to earth, fire, liquid and wind, while the sense-faculties scatter into space. There is no next world, no fruit of good or bad actions, and the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated. Nothing he wrote survives, and the doctrine reaches us only through the Buddhist canon, quoted by opponents in order to refute it. Those sources support materialism and annihilation and nothing else, so the epistemology and hedonism of the later Cārvāka school are not his.
Signature
The position Ajita is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence
- Death
- Annihilation
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (0 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Ajita refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death?