Sāṃkhya school
from 400 BCE c.; the earliest surviving text is 4th century CE
Two things exist and neither is God: pure witnessing consciousness, and everything else. Freedom is realising you were only ever the first.
- Active
- from 400 BCE
- Where
- Northern India
- Also
- सांख्य Sāṃkhya
- Status
- extinct as a school, absorbed everywhere
- Tradition
- Indian
The claim
Purusha is consciousness and does nothing. Prakriti is everything else — matter, mind, intellect, ego — and does everything. Bondage is the mistake of taking the witness for the actor.
What it held
Sāṃkhya means enumeration, and the name is exact: the system works by counting out twenty-five principles and showing how twenty-four of them evolve from one root.
The root is prakriti, unmanifest nature, held in balance by three strands — sattva, rajas, tamas. Disturb the balance and it unfolds: intellect first, then ego, then mind and the senses and the elements. All of that is material, including thought. Consciousness is not in the list.
Purusha, consciousness, is the twenty-fifth and is entirely inactive. It illuminates without doing. The famous image is the lame man riding the blind one: prakriti can act but cannot see, purusha can see but cannot act, and the appearance of a person is the two combined.
Liberation is not achieving anything. Nothing changes in purusha, which was never bound. What ends is the misidentification — and the Karika's last verses have prakriti withdrawing like a dancer who has been seen, and stopping.
The system is atheistic. There is no God in classical Sāṃkhya, and its arguments against one were used by Buddhists and Jains for centuries.
How it argued
Enumeration and causal argument, especially satkaryavada — the claim that an effect pre-exists in its cause, which is why oil comes from sesame and not from sand.
What it was arguing against
Vedic ritualism as a route to liberation, Nyaya atomism, and any account in which consciousness is a product of matter.
Where it disagreed with itself
How purusha and prakriti interact at all, given that one is inert and the other unconscious. Whether the plurality of purushas is required or a concession.
Common misconceptions
That it is a form of theism because Yoga adds a God. Classical Sāṃkhya is explicitly atheistic, and the Yoga school's Ishvara is a distinctive addition rather than a shared assumption.
How it began
Attributed to Kapila, of whom nothing certain is known. The doctrine is visible in the Mahabharata and the early Upanishads before any Sāṃkhya text survives.
What became of it
The school as an institution disappeared, but its categories were absorbed by Yoga, Vedanta, Ayurveda and Indian aesthetics so completely that they read as common property.
Lasting influence
Yoga is built on it. The three gunas are standard vocabulary across Indian thought. Its analysis of mind as material anticipates a position Western philosophy took much longer to formulate.
Why it still matters
The claim that everything mental is material while consciousness is not is close to what contemporary philosophy calls the hard problem, stated in the fourth century.
Put another way
A lame man on the shoulders of a blind one, going somewhere neither could reach alone.
Where to start
The Karika itself. Seventy-two verses, and a good translation will have the commentary beside it.
The surprising bit
The system has no God, and Indian philosophy did not treat that as disqualifying. Sāṃkhya is one of the six orthodox darshanas — orthodox meaning accepting Vedic authority, not accepting a deity.
In their own words
As a dancer ceases from the dance having been seen by the audience, so prakriti ceases having shown herself to purusha.
No one is bound, no one is liberated, no one transmigrates.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Purva Mimamsa, Nyaya
- Influenced
- Classical Yoga (Pātañjala), Advaita Vedanta
The verdict
The oldest of the Indian systems, dissolved into everything that came after it.