Outlines of Indian Philosophy c19.12

c19.12

The earliest book of authority on classical Sāṅkhya we now have is the *Sāṅkhya-kārikā*, which is a work of about the fifth century A.D. Roughly speaking, we may take its author Īśvarakṛṣṇa to have been a contemporary of Kālidāsa. It consists of seventy stanzas and is on that account sometimes designated as the *Sāṅkhya-saptati*. It contains a brief but exceedingly lucid exposition of the theoretical teaching of the system and has been described as ‘the pearl of the whole scholastic literature of India.’ It has been commented upon by several, including Vācaspati—the well-known advaitic scholar of the ninth century A.D. This book, with a commentary whose identity is not quite certain, was translated into Chinese under the name of ‘the Golden Seventy Discourse’ by one Paramārtha, a Brahmin of Ujjain who went to China in A.D. 546 on the invitation of its then Emperor and spent the rest of his life there. Another work of note on the system is the *Tattva-samāsa*, which, as its name indicates, is very brief—hardly more than a table of contents, as it has been characterized. It was regarded by Max Müller as the oldest work on the subject,¹ but that view is not generally accepted now.² A third work of importance on the system is the *Sāṅkhya-sūtra*, ascribed to Kapila himself; but the work, though much of its material may be really old, is clearly a very late production and cannot be assigned to a date earlier than the fourteenth century A.D. It is in six chapters of which four are concerned with the elucidation of the doctrine, one criticizes the rival systems and one gives the parables (ākhyāyikā) illustrating the chief points of the doctrine—rather a novel feature in a Sūtra work. It has been commented upon, among others, by Vijñāna Bhikṣu, to whom reference has already been made. In this commentary the Sāṅkhya appears considerably modified, the general effect of the modification being to bring it nearer to the Vedānta. We may regard it as *later* Sāṅkhya. We shall refer to its divergences from the earlier where they are of importance. As regards the Yoga system, Patañjali’s *Yoga-sūtra* is the recognized text-book. It has been assigned to about the end of the fifth century A.D.¹; and if this date be correct, the traditional identification of its author with Patañjali, the grammarian who is known to have lived in the second century B.C., must fall to the ground. It consists of four chapters which deal respectively with the nature of mental concentration (samādhi), the pathway to it (sādhana), the supernatural powers that may be acquired through it (vibhūti), and the nature of the goal of life which consists in the isolation of the self (kaivalya). It has been commented upon by Vyāsa² (A.D. 500) and King Bhoja (A.D. 1000) among others. The former’s commentary has a splendid gloss by Vācaspati and another by Vijñāna Bhikṣu.