- Length
- 96 pagesLarson, Classical Samkhya, 2nd ed. 1979 - with the karika text and translation
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Samkhya Karika
The oldest complete system in Indian philosophy, and the one that put a conscious witness and an unconscious nature on opposite sides of an unbridgeable line. Every later Indian school had to deal with it, most of them by attacking it, and the school that adopted it wholesale became classical yoga.
- Date
- c. 350-450
- Author
- Isvarakrsna
- Region
- India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 550 Chinese, Paramartha The Golden Seventy; the earliest datable witness to the text Consensus
- 1837 English, H. T. Colebrooke Public domain; among the first Sanskrit philosophical texts in English Attested
- 1979 English, Gerald Larson With study of the system; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Superseded — Overtaken by later work rather than defeated
The school stopped producing original work early and survives as a position other schools argue against, and as the metaphysics presupposed by classical yoga.
What the book says
Seventy-odd verses setting out the oldest surviving system of Indian philosophy in its finished form. The problem it starts from is suffering, and the claim is that suffering can be ended permanently only by understanding what you actually are. The answer is dualist, and the two principles could not be more unlike each other. One is nature, which is single, unconscious, and in ceaseless activity: everything material, and also everything mental - intellect, the sense of being an individual, the mind, the senses and the elements all evolve out of it in a fixed order, twenty-three products in all. Nature is composed of three strands whose changing proportions account for every difference in the world: one bright and light, one active and painful, one heavy and obscuring. The other principle is the witness: conscious, inactive, plural, and doing nothing whatever except being aware. It does not think - thinking belongs to nature - it simply illuminates. Bondage is the mistake of taking oneself to be the machinery, and liberation is nature ceasing to perform once it has been seen through, which the text describes with a dancer leaving the stage when the audience has had enough. There is no god in the system, and none is needed.
What it argues
That consciousness is not a product of anything and cannot be. Everything we normally call mental - reasoning, the sense of self, perception - belongs on the side of nature and is unconscious machinery, sophisticated but no more aware than a mirror. What is aware is a separate principle that contributes nothing to the process and is never involved in it. The argument for the machinery is an inference from effect to cause: an effect must pre-exist in its cause, since otherwise anything could come from anything, so the world's variety must already be latent in a single unmanifest source. The argument for the witness is that all this apparatus is arranged and functioning, and arrangement is for the sake of something else - a bed is not for the bed's sake.
What answered it
Shankara, at length and repeatedly, because Samkhya was the strongest rival account and shared too much with Vedanta to be ignored. The Buddhist critique came earlier and cut differently: a permanent unchanging witness is exactly the sort of entity Buddhist analysis exists to dissolve. Nyaya attacked the doctrine that the effect pre-exists in its cause. What is striking is that almost nobody defended Samkhya after about the tenth century - the school produced no significant new work, and its positions survive largely in the words of the people refuting them.
How it argues
By enumeration - the name means counting - and by simile. The verses are numbered lists: three sources of suffering, three means of knowledge, twenty-five principles, eight dispositions, fifty conditions of the intellect. The arguments themselves are compressed to a phrase and expanded by commentary. Where the reasoning gets hardest the text switches to images, and the images are what survive: nature performing for an audience of one and withdrawing when seen; milk flowing unconsciously for the calf; and the union of witness and nature compared to a lame man riding on the shoulders of a blind one, each supplying what the other lacks.
The moment
The Karika is a late codification of a much older tradition whose earlier literature is entirely lost. Samkhya ideas appear in the Upanishads, in the Mahabharata and in early Buddhist and Jain texts, which means the system was in circulation for centuries before anyone wrote this summary of it. What the text does is fix a fluid body of doctrine into a form compact enough to be memorised and precise enough to be attacked, which is what happened.
How it travelled
East before west. Paramartha translated the Karika with a commentary into Chinese in the sixth century, and that version - the Golden Seventy - is the earliest datable witness to the text and remains important for establishing its readings. Within India it travelled attached to yoga, whose metaphysics it supplies. Europe met it early in the colonial encounter: Colebrooke's translation of 1837 was among the first Sanskrit philosophical texts rendered into English, and Samkhya's dualism was for a while taken by European scholars as the representative Indian philosophy, which it is not.
The strongest objection
That the two principles cannot be as separate as the system needs and still interact. If the witness does nothing at all, then it cannot cause nature to evolve; if nature is entirely unconscious, it cannot be aiming at anything, least of all at the liberation of a witness it cannot know about. The text's answer - that nature acts for the witness's sake as unconsciously as milk flows for the calf - is an analogy in place of a mechanism, and Shankara said so. The problem is the Indian version of the difficulty Descartes left behind, and Samkhya has fewer resources for it than Descartes did, because it will not allow the two sides even to touch.
Why read it
Because it is the clearest statement anywhere in Indian philosophy of a position most Western readers assume is Western: a hard dualism of consciousness and everything else, arrived at independently and pushed further. It is short. Read it with a commentary, since the verses are compressed past the point of standing alone.
- First printed
- 1837
- First in English
- 1837
- Digitised
- Yes
Transmitted with several early commentaries, of which the one attributed to Gaudapada and the Yuktidipika are the most important; the latter was recovered only in the twentieth century and changed the picture of early Samkhya considerably.
Colebrooke's 1837 English is public domain. Larson's and Mainkar's are in copyright.
Where it stands
Superseded as a living school and permanently present as a position. Its vocabulary - the three strands, the twenty-five principles, the distinction between the witness and the mental apparatus - is used across Indian thought by people who reject its conclusions, and its account of consciousness as something other than a process is argued about in contemporary philosophy of mind under different names.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and Colebrooke's English is too, but his renderings of the technical terms are now regarded as misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The number of verses is uncertain - seventy, seventy-two and seventy-three are all defended, and the last verses may be later additions. Isvarakrsna's date rests almost entirely on the Chinese translation. Whether classical Samkhya was originally atheistic or whether the absence of a god is a later development is argued, and the recovery of the Yuktidipika commentary in the twentieth century revealed an early Samkhya more varied than the Karika suggests. The relation between this text and the Samkhya of the epics, which differs in important respects, is unresolved.