THE INDIAN AND CHINESE PARALLELS TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS

Ajita Kesakambali (ca. 6 Century BCE) denied both the immortality of the soul and the effectiveness of gifts to the gods:

There is no such thing as alms or sacrifice or offering. There is neither fruit nor result of good or evil deeds...A human being is built up of four elements. When he dies the earthly in him returns and relapses to the earth, the fluid to the water, the heat to the fire, the wind to the air, and his faculties pass into space. The four bearers, on the bier as a fifth, take his dead body away; till they reach the burning ground, men utter forth eulogies, but there his bones are bleached, and his offerings end in ashes. It is a doctrine of fools, this talk of gifts. It is an empty lie, mere idle talk, when men say there is profit herein. Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not

According to James Thrower's book, The Alternative Tradition, page 68, in India a tradition of atheism/agnosticism began in the 6th Century BCE and lasted for 100s of years:

But whatever the historicity of Carvaka, and whatever the early origins of Lokayata, what is certain is that from about the sixth century BC there arose in India the philosophical articulation of views which we would now call naturalistic and which later tradition designated as Lokayata or Carvaka; views which challenged and continued to challenge the dominant religious interpretation of life for something like a thousand years.

Professor Tucci (1926) after an extensive examination of all surviving references to this school, reconstructs its tenets as follows:
1. Sacred literature should be disregarded as false.
2. There is no deity or supernatural.
3. There is no immortal soul and nothing exists after the death of the body.
4. Karma is inoperative and an illusion.
5. All (that is) is derived from material elements.
6. Material elements have an immanent force.
7. Intelligence is derived from these elements.
8. Only direct perception gives true knowledge.
9. Religious injunctions and the sacerdotal class are useless.
10. The aim of life is to get the maximum amount of pleasure. This philosophy, as can be seen from the above summary of its main tenets, is naturalistic (and therefore atheistic in the Western sense of the term) in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics.

In China, the concept of Tao was developed during the Warring States Period (ca. 480-222 BCE) and found its earliest expression in the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu. The Tao is not a god nor outside nature - it represents the whole Order of Nature but is in no sense a grand metaphysics: (from Thrower, pp. 113-14)

Speculation concerning the ultimate origin and the ultimate end of Nature the Taoists actively discouraged — suffice it for them to contemplate the operations of Nature and in that contemplation find peace. As we read in the Chuang Tzu:

Words can describe [the operations of nature] and knowledge can reach them — but not beyond the extreme limit of the natural world. Those who study the Tao [know that] they cannot follow these changes to the ultimate end, nor search out their first beginnings — this is the place at which discussion has to stop. (Legge 1801: 128)

The Taoists stressed, in fact, the eternity and uncreatedness of the Tao. We read, for instance, in the Tao Te Ching:

[In the beginning] there was something undifferentiated [hun] and yet complete [Ch'eng]
Before Heaven and Earth were produced,
Silent and Empty!
Sufficient unto itself! Unchanging!
Revolving incessantly, never exhausted.
Well might it be the mother of all things under heaven. I do not know its name.
`Tao' is the courtesy-name we give it.
If I were forced to classify it, I should call it 'Great'.
But being great means being penetrating [in space and time], And penetrating implies far-reaching,
And far-reaching means coming back to the original point.... The ways of men are conditioned by those of earth, the ways of earth by those of heaven, the ways of heaven by those of the Tao, and the Tao came into being by itself. (Waley 1934: ch. 25)

The important phrase is tzu-jan —by itself — and it is one which occurs frequently in Taoist writings and is indicative of the underlying naturalistic attitude to nature which we find there. Needham compares the above passage with that found in the Roman Epicurean philosopher Lucretius:

Nature, delivered from every haughty lord
And forthwith free, is seen to have done all things
Herself, and through herself, of her own accord
Rid of all gods....
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II, 1090-2. Needham 1956: 50)