Outlines of Indian Philosophy c19.1

c19.1

THIS should once have been a widely influential school to judge from references to it in the Mahābhārata and kindred literature¹; but its vogue, especially on the Sāṅkhya side, is not very great now.² The surviving part of its literature also is relatively poor. Modern scholars, as we have already had occasion to notice (pp. 106, 132), are divided in their opinion as regards its origin. All agree that references to what appear as the Sāṅkhya-Yoga doctrine are found in the Upaniṣads, especially in the later ones among them. But while some are of opinion that the system is independent in origin and almost as old as the Upaniṣads, others maintain that it is an offshoot of the teaching of those ancient treatises. There is indeed a reference in one of the Upaniṣads³ to Kapila ṛṣi, the supposed founder of the Sāṅkhya according to tradition; but both old Indian thinkers⁴ and present-day scholars⁵ agree that it is only apparent. The expression there means the ‘red wizard,’ not ‘Kapila, the seer,’ as it may at first appear and denotes not a real person at all but Hiraṇyagarbha or some other mythical being. As the discussion of this question requires an acquaintance with the details of the doctrine, we cannot enter upon it now. We shall merely state in passing that whatever its true origin, there was one stage in the history of the system when its adherents traced it to the Upaniṣads. Bādarāyaṇa, as is well known, has systematized the teaching of the Upaniṣads in his Vedānta-sūtra, and one of the topics to which he recurs time and again is whether the Sāṅkhya is the teaching of the Upaniṣads.⁶ His conclusion is that it is not, and his repeated reference to it cannot be satisfactorily accounted for without assuming that there were Sāṅkhya thinkers in his time who contended that that was the teaching of the Upaniṣads. Even so late as the sixteenth century A.D. Vijñāna Bhikṣu, the author of the Sāṅkhya-pravacana-bhāṣya, which is a commentary on the Sāṅkhya-sūtra, maintained a similar view. This may of course be the result of later Sāṅkhya teachers trying to find support for their doctrine in the Upaniṣads, whose authority had come to prevail, but it may also indicate a desire on their part to trace it to its real source even when the modifications in it had changed its character so very much.