Samkhya

(“enumeration”) One of the six schools
of traditional Hindu philosophy, whose
founding text is the Samkhyakarikas,
written by Ishvarakrishna in the third
century B.C.E. Samkhya espouses an
atheistic philosophical dualism positing
two fundamental principles as the
source of all things. The first of these is
called purusha (“person”), which is conscious, but completely inactive and
unchanging. It is seen as a passive witness to the transformations going on
around it. As the source of consciousness, purusha is ultimately identified
with an individual’s true and eternal
Self. Purusha is inferred as plural, given
the plurality of conscious beings, combined with the fact that one person can
gain enlightenment while all the rest
remain in bondage.
The other fundamental principle is
prakrti, (“nature”), which provides the
object to the purusha’s subject. Prakrti is
better conceived of as force or power
rather than a specific material object.
Prakrti contains within it forces with three
different primordial qualities (gunas):
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sattva tends toward the good, rajas
towards activity or passion, and tamas
towards darkness and decay. In the primal prakrti these three forces are in perfect equilibrium, each perfectly balancing the others. The two principles of
purusha and prakrti are distinct, separate, and alone.
When prakrti’s initial equilibrium is
disturbed, it sets in motion a pattern of
evolution that creates both the exterior
physical world and the interior psychological world. From prakrti emerges
mahat (“the great one”), which has as its
psychological counterpart the subtlest
form of mental activity (buddhi). From
buddhi evolves ahamkar, which contains the first real ideas of individual
identity. From ahamkar evolves the
mind (manas), the sense organs (jnanendriyas), the organs of action (karmendriyas), and the subtle elements
(tanmatras); from the last evolve the
gross elements that actually make up
the material world. All of these evolutes—material or psychic—have a differing balance of the three gunas, which
ultimately determines their character as
wholesome, active, or unwholesome.
Throughout this process of evolution,
purusha remains unchanged, a mere
witness to prakrti’s unceasing transformations. Their mutual functioning is
described using the metaphor of the
lame man (purusha) being carried by
the blind man (prakrti).
The ultimate source of bondage,
according to the Samkhya school,
comes because people do not recognize
the difference between these two principles. Through this lack of discrimination
between the two, the Self (purusha)
appears as if it is an agent, and the evolutes (from prakrti) as if they are conscious. The Samkhyas illustrate this misunderstanding using the example of the
rose behind the crystal, in which the latter appears to be colored but is in fact
unchanged. Although for the Samkhyas
prakrti undergoes real transformations,
the primary problem is epistemological—that is, how one comes to know
things—rather than ontological, or rooted
in the nature of things themselves. Since
the purusha never changes, there is no
question of making it into anything else
or regaining the way that it used to be;
the real problem is making the distinction between the differing realities of
these two principles. Once this has been
done, the evolution of prakrti is said to
reverse, leaving the purusha again in its
state of magnificent isolation (kaivalya).
Of course, once one has a developed (if
erroneous) idea of (conventional) personality, this discrimination becomes all
the more difficult. This mistaken idea
becomes the basis for one’s volitional
actions (karma) and one’s emotional
dispositions. One’s actions and dispositions reinforce each other, and both of
these are undergirded by the notion of a
Self.
The Samkhya metaphysics were
adopted wholesale by the yoga philosophical school, and the two schools are
usually mentioned together—Samkhya
as the theoretical foundation, and Yoga
as the practical component. One of
Samkhya’s lasting contributions to
Indian thought is the idea of the gunas, a
basic concept running through Hindu
culture. Another influential but less pervasive idea is their model of evolution,
which has been adapted by other
schools but often subsumed under theistic assumptions in which God is the
source of both consciousness and the
material world. The one philosophical
problem that the Samkhya could never
surmount was to explain the source of
bondage, given their starting assumptions. If purusha and prakrti are completely separate, how could the two of
them interact—much less mistake one
for the other—and how did the process
of evolution begin? Although their contributions remain significant, they were
largely eclipsed by Vedanta, which
claimed that the problem is ignorance of
the Self and not-Self, and that the world
around us is not an actual evolution, but
only an illusory transformation (vivarta).
This philosophical model is called
Vivartavada. For further information
see Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and
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Charles A. Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in
Indian Philosophy, 1957; and Gerald
Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya
(eds.), Samkhya, 1987.