Sāṃkhya

Sāṃkhya (Sanskrit, “enumeration”, “discrimination”) is one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Indian philosophy, and probably the oldest of them. It is a thoroughgoing dualism. Reality consists of two utterly different kinds of thing: puruṣa, pure consciousness — of which there are countless instances, one for each living being — and prakṛti, nature or primal matter, a single, unconscious, ever-active principle made of three strands or qualities, the guṇas. From prakṛti evolves everything in the world, including what we would call the mind: intellect, ego, thought, the senses. Consciousness itself does nothing; it only witnesses. Suffering arises because consciousness mistakenly identifies itself with the workings of nature — with the body, the mind, the emotions — and liberation, kaivalya (“isolation”), comes when it realises that it was never involved at all. Sāṃkhya’s analysis of nature into the guṇas and its evolutionary scheme of twenty-five principles became the common vocabulary of Indian thought: it underlies the Yoga (darśana) of Patañjali, much of the The Bhagavad Gītā, the Purāṇas, Āyurvedic medicine and Tantra. Its classic text is the Sāṃkhya Kārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. 350–450 CE).

History

Origins

Sāṃkhya’s legendary founder is the sage Kapila, who is said to have taught it to a disciple, Āsuri, who taught Pañcaśikha. These figures are semi-mythical. Ideas recognisably like Sāṃkhya appear in the middle Upaniṣads — the Kaṭha Upaniṣad lists a hierarchy of senses, mind, intellect, “the great self”, “the unmanifest” and puruṣa, “beyond which there is nothing”; the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad mentions Kapila and speaks of an unborn female nature “red, white and black” (the three guṇas) producing many offspring. The Mahābhārata, especially its philosophical sections (the Mokṣadharma), contains many versions of “proto-Sāṃkhya”, often theistic and combined with Yoga: “There is no knowledge equal to Sāṃkhya, no power equal to Yoga.”

The Buddhist sources say the Buddha’s first teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, taught meditative attainments resembling Sāṃkhya-Yoga; the Buddha’s analysis of the person into aggregates may partly respond to Sāṃkhya’s enumerations. Early Sāṃkhya seems to have had many versions; a major treatise, the Ṣaṣṭitantra (“System of Sixty Topics”), is lost.

The classical system

The classical form of the school is the Sāṃkhya Kārikā (“Verses on Sāṃkhya”) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, a terse poem of 72 verses in the āryā metre, composed around the fourth or fifth century CE. It was translated into Chinese by the Buddhist monk Paramārtha in the sixth century. Its commentaries include the Gauḍapāda Bhāṣya (not by the Advaitin Gauḍapāda), the Yuktidīpikā — the richest — and the Tattvakaumudī of Vācaspati Miśra (9th–10th century), which became the standard textbook. Later, the Sāṃkhya Sūtras, attributed to Kapila but probably composed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, were commented on by Vijñānabhikṣu (16th century), who tried to reconcile Sāṃkhya with Vedānta.

As an independent school, Sāṃkhya declined after the first millennium; its rival Vedānta absorbed and transformed many of its ideas. But its concepts never ceased to be the lingua franca of Indian thought.

The two principles

Puruṣa: consciousness

Puruṣa (literally “person”, “man”) is pure consciousness or awareness. It is eternal, unchanging, inactive and without qualities. It does not think, feel or will; it simply witnesses. It is not the mind — Sāṃkhya assigns thinking to matter — but the light of awareness in which the mind’s activity appears.

Sāṃkhya argues for the existence of puruṣa with five reasons (Kārikā 17): composite things exist for the sake of another (as a bed exists for someone to lie on, so the body-mind complex exists for something that is not itself composite); there must be something different from the three guṇas; there must be a controller; there must be an enjoyer; and there is striving for liberation, which only makes sense if there is something to be liberated.

And puruṣas are many, not one (Kārikā 18): because birth, death and the faculties are distributed separately among beings; because they do not all act at once; and because the guṇas are distributed differently among them. If there were only one consciousness, when one person was born, all would be born; when one was liberated, all would be. This is the decisive point of difference from Advaita Vedānta, for which there is a single Self.

Prakṛti: nature

Prakṛti (from pra-kṛ, “to make forth”, “to produce”) is primal nature: the single, unconscious, uncaused source of everything that changes. In its original state it is unmanifest (avyakta), its three guṇas in perfect equilibrium. When that balance is disturbed — by the mere proximity of puruṣa — it begins to evolve, producing the whole world.

Sāṃkhya infers prakṛti from its effects (Kārikā 15): the things of the world are limited, homogeneous in type, produced by power, distinct as cause and effect, and dissolve back into a source; so there must be one unlimited unmanifest cause.

The three guṇas

Prakṛti consists of three guṇas (“strands”, like the strands of a rope, or “qualities”):

• Sattva — lightness, clarity, illumination, intelligence, goodness, pleasure. It is white.
• Rajas — activity, passion, energy, motion, desire, pain. It is red.
• Tamas — heaviness, inertia, darkness, obstruction, dullness, delusion. It is black.

Everything in the world, physical or mental, is a mixture of the three, and their changing proportions account for all variety. They work together “like a lamp” (Kārikā 13): the oil, the wick and the flame are different, yet together they give light. The guṇas became one of the most pervasive ideas in Indian culture. The The Bhagavad Gītā devotes chapters 14, 17 and 18 to them, classifying food, sacrifice, austerity, gifts, knowledge, action, intellect, resolve and happiness as sattvic, rajasic or tamasic. Āyurveda adapts them; ordinary Hindi still speaks of sāttvik bhojan, pure food.

The evolution of the world

When the guṇas lose their balance, prakṛti evolves in a fixed order into twenty-three further principles (tattvas). With puruṣa and prakṛti, they make up the twenty-five tattvas of Sāṃkhya:

1. Puruṣa — consciousness (not evolved, not evolving).
2. Prakṛti — primal nature (unevolved, but evolving).
3. Buddhi or Mahat (“the great one”) — intellect, the faculty of judgement and decision; the first and finest evolute, predominantly sattvic.
4. Ahaṃkāra — “I-maker”, the ego or sense of self, which appropriates experience as “mine”.
5. Manas — mind, which coordinates the senses and organs. 6–10. The five senses (buddhīndriyas): hearing, touch, sight, taste, smell. 11–15. The five organs of action (karmendriyas): speech, grasping (hands), moving (feet), excretion, generation. 16–20. The five subtle elements (tanmātras): sound, touch, form, taste, smell — the essences of sensation. 21–25. The five gross elements (mahābhūtas): space (ākāśa), air, fire, water, earth.

The striking thing about this list is that intellect, ego and mind are material. They are products of prakṛti, as much as earth and water — just subtler. Everything we call mental, thinking, feeling, deciding, is the activity of matter. What is not material is the bare light of consciousness that makes this activity experienced. Sāṃkhya thus divides reality not where Descartes did — between mind and matter — but between awareness and everything that can be an object of awareness, including thoughts.

Causation: satkāryavāda

Sāṃkhya’s evolutionary scheme rests on its theory of causation, satkāryavāda, “the doctrine that the effect exists (beforehand)”. The effect pre-exists, unmanifest, in its material cause; causation is the manifestation of what was already there, as oil is in sesame seeds, or the pot in the clay. The Kārikā (9) gives five arguments: what does not exist cannot be produced (no one gets oil from sand); an effect needs a specific material cause; not everything comes from everything; a cause can produce only what it is capable of producing; and the effect has the nature of its cause.

This theory, and its opposite — the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika asatkāryavāda, that the effect is a new thing that did not exist before — was one of the great debates of Indian philosophy. Advaita Vedānta adopted a version of satkāryavāda but argued that the effect is only an appearance of the cause (vivartavāda), as the snake is an appearance of the rope.

Bondage and liberation

If puruṣa is inactive and untouched, how is it bound? Sāṃkhya’s answer is that it is not really bound at all; it only seems to be. Through proximity (saṃyoga) with prakṛti, consciousness and the intellect (buddhi) reflect each other, and a confusion arises: the activities of the intellect seem conscious, and consciousness seems to act and suffer. The Kārikā gives a famous image: a lame man and a blind man join together, the lame one riding on the blind one’s shoulders, so that one sees and the other walks (21). Prakṛti can act but cannot see; puruṣa can see but cannot act.

Life is suffering, threefold: from within oneself (ādhyātmika, bodily and mental illness), from other beings (ādhibhautika) and from supernatural or natural forces (ādhidaivika). The very first verse of the Kārikā asks how suffering can be ended — and answers that ordinary remedies and Vedic rituals give only temporary relief. The real remedy is discriminating knowledge (viveka-jñāna): the direct realisation that “I am not, nothing is mine, I do not exist” — that is, that consciousness is not the intellect, not the ego, not any of the evolutes of nature (64).

When this knowledge arises, prakṛti ceases to act for that puruṣa. The Kārikā’s most famous image (59): “As a dancer stops dancing after she has shown herself to the audience, so prakṛti ceases after she has shown herself to puruṣa.” And (61): “Nothing, I think, is more modest than prakṛti, who, knowing ‘I have been seen’, never again appears before the gaze of puruṣa.” The liberated puruṣa remains in kaivalya, “isolation” — pure consciousness alone, free of all experience. The body may continue for a time, “like a potter’s wheel continuing to spin” through momentum (67), until death brings final release.

Why does prakṛti evolve at all? For the sake of puruṣa: to provide it with experience and then with liberation. “As unconscious milk flows for the nourishment of the calf, so prakṛti acts for the liberation of puruṣa” (57). Nature works, selflessly, to free the spirit from itself.

God

Classical Sāṃkhya is usually described as atheistic (nirīśvara): it does not need or accept a creator God. Prakṛti evolves by its own nature; karma operates without a supervisor. The Sāṃkhya Sūtras argue that God cannot be proved: a liberated God would have no motive to create, and a bound one would lack the power. The Yoga school, by contrast, adds a special puruṣa, Īśvara, untouched by affliction and karma — which is why Yoga is sometimes called “Sāṃkhya with God” (seśvara).

Critics

Sāṃkhya was attacked from every side. Advaita Vedānta — above all Ādi Śaṅkara, whose commentary on the Brahma Sūtras treats Sāṃkhya as its chief opponent (“the principal opponent”, pradhāna-malla) — argued that unconscious matter cannot by itself produce an orderly world: “a heap of stones does not build a palace”. If prakṛti acts for puruṣa’s sake, unconscious matter must somehow know what puruṣa needs. Nor can a single prakṛti be both bound and released for different puruṣas. Nyāya attacked satkāryavāda: if the effect already exists, why is the potter needed? Buddhists rejected the permanent, unchanging puruṣa altogether.

Modern readers have compared Sāṃkhya with Descartes’s mind–body dualism (the difference: thought is on the material side), with Aristotle’s matter, with Hegel’s self-developing nature, with Schopenhauer’s will and representation, and with contemporary debates about the “hard problem” of consciousness: Sāṃkhya’s puruṣa is essentially awareness itself, which no functional or material account seems to explain.

Sāṃkhya in conversation

The dancer is the image to remember: nature performs for consciousness, and when consciousness has truly seen, the dance stops. And the guṇas — sattva, rajas, tamas — remain the most useful three-word psychology India has given the world.