Sāṃkhya-kārikā

Sāṃkhya-kārikā. A foundational text of the Samkhya school by the Indian scholar Īśvarakṛṣṇa.

Dan Lusthaus states:

Orthodox Sāṃkhya begins with the appearance of Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṃkhya-kārikās which synthesized centuries of conflicting Sāṃkhyan speculation. Its roughly seventy verses (the number varies in different commentaries) concisely presents the models, terminology, arguments, and systematic configurations that were to be definitive for Sāṃkhya from that time on. Virtually every subsequent Sāṃkhya text is either a commentary on the Sāṃkhya-kārikās or a commentary on the Sāṃkhya-sūtra, a text that appears around the fifteenth century which itself may be considered an expanded, reorganized version of the Sāṃkhya-kārikās. The many dozens of commentaries written over the centuries reflect the changing concerns and growing sophistication of Indian thought in general. While some of the commentaries display clever strategies and great erudition, and minor points are continually being redefined and reinterpreted, the basic parameters set by Īśvarakṛṣṇa are scrupulously followed. The same stock arguments and examples invariably appear century after century in every commentary - sometimes with embellishments - but no truly creative innovations to the system itself emerge. The earlier commentaries endeavor to deploy the latest developments in Indian epistemology and argumentative discourse to defend the statements of the Sāṃkhya-kārikās from actual and possible objections; the later commentaries make increasing concessions to non-Sāṃkhyan ideologies, often to the point of subverting or reversing the point of distinctive Sāṃkhyan teachings while attempting to retain the terminology and basic structure established by Īśvarakṛṣṇa. While orthodox Sāṃkhya, for instance, claimed that each individual possessed its own distinct puruṣa, later commentators sought to ground this multiplicity of selves in a universal single Self; orthodox Sāṃkhya denied the existence of God, but some later commentators reinserted God back into the system or encouraged their readers to reject Sāṃkhya's atheistic claims. These later concessions, whose most important advocates were Vācaspati Miśra (9th-10th century), Aniruddha (15th century) and Vijñānabhikṣu (16th century), were not so much efforts to change or reform the Sāṃkhya system as they were attempts to make Sāṃkhya palatable to contemporary audiences or promote reforms in the non-Sāṃkhyan ideologies of the day to which these commentators owed their true allegiance. They may have been emboldened by the Yoga School (whose classical text is Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras), which, unlike Sāṃkhya, accepted the existence of God (identifying God with puruṣa). Yoga also rejected the Sāṃkhyan duality of puruṣa and prakṛti, claiming instead that ultimately the latter dissolves into the former.

Further reading

• Dan Lusthaus, Samkhya, acmuller.net