Outlines of Indian Philosophy c19.54

c19.54

(2) Puruṣa.—Puruṣa is mere sentience. It is changeless, eternal and omnipresent. It is also entirely passive, all activity being restricted to prakṛti. It may accordingly be said to represent the affective or receptive side of the mind and is consequently described as an enjoyer or experient (bhoktā) without being a doer or agent (kartā). Like prakṛti, the self also is here sought to be established with the help of reason alone. Various arguments are adduced to prove why such a psychic entity should be supposed to exist.¹ First of all it is stated that the physical universe, being insentient, requires a sentient principle to experience it or that objects suggest a subject, although such an argument by recognizing a necessary relation between the two militates against the fundamental dualism of the system. Equally inconsistent with the same aspect of the doctrine is the second argument that prakṛti, which is complex, implies by contrast the existence of something which is simple, viz. the self. Again the design² that is found in nature, particularly in the living body, it is argued, leads to the same conclusion. A noteworthy point here is the manner in which the ‘design argument’ is utilized. It is explained as pointing not to the designer but to one that profits by the design. The Sāṅkhya concludes from the presence in nature of means adapted to the accomplishment of particular ends, not to God as their author, but to the self for whom it supposes them to exist. This conclusion may be taken as being on a par with the other, for any contriver must necessarily have in view one whose need his contrivance meets. No watches for example would be made if there was none to use them. But it may be asked why it should not equally well imply God as the contriving mind whom the Sāṅkhya, as an atheistic doctrine, declines to accept. Here is a point of much importance in the doctrine, especially in contrast to the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. In the latter, the material out of which the visible universe is made possesses no spontaneity of its own. Its various parts have accordingly to be brought together and also kept together by some external factor—God or karma or both. But here there is a great advance in the conception of prakṛti in that it is of an organic entity.¹ It is able to develop of itself. Such an entity has no need for an external manipulator. This is at the bottom of the atheism of the Sāṅkhya and shows the futility of attempts like that of Vijñāna Bhikṣu to read theism into the doctrine.² But prakṛti, though its conception is different from that of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atoms, does not evolve for itself and therefore points to sentient puruṣa. It is this teleology implicit in prakṛti that the design argument here makes use of. It serves as the point of departure from the Svabhāva-vāda with which the doctrine has much in common, and tells us by the way that spirit is the only true ultimate in the Sāṅkhya-Yoga. Unlike prakṛti, it is not a unity of parts; nor is it non-sentient like it. So it does not in its turn refer to anything beyond itself. A fourth argument is drawn from man's longing for escape from saṃsāra or the spiritual instinct to be free. What strives to escape must be other than what it is to escape from, viz. prakṛti. The puruṣas are conceived as many; and various arguments are put forward in support of that view,³ such as the divergent histories of men and the differences in their endowment—physical, moral and intellectual. But such reasoning only shows the plurality of the empirical selves. In themselves, it is hard to see how the puruṣas can differ from one another. There is not even a semblance of explanation here as in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, where each self is stated to be inherently characterized by its own viśeṣa (p. 235).