Outlines of Indian Philosophy c19.97

c19.97

The Sāṅkhya-Yoga, like the other systems, believes in karma and transmigration. What transmigrates, however, is not the self, which because it is all-pervading does not admit of change of place, but the subtle body (liṅga-śarīra) consisting of the eleven organs of sense together with buddhi, ahaṃ-kāra and the five rudimentary elements (tanmātras). This is a permanent annexe, so to speak, to each self which leaves it only at release. Death and birth mean only the change of the gross body and not of the subtle. In the latter are stored up all traces of past thought and action; and the acquisition of right knowledge depends upon the cleansing of this empirical outfit or more strictly of the buddhi which forms its pre-eminent element. Dharma and adharma are here conceived not as qualities of the self as in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (p. 261), but only as modes of the buddhi which, owing to the congenital confusion between it and the puruṣa, are mistaken to belong to the latter.¹ It means that, like experience, morality also has significance only on the empirical plane. Intrinsically, neither the puruṣa nor the buddhi can be described as moral. In the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika likewise is the ethical life confined to the empirical sphere; but while it constitutes there an actual, though only a temporary, phase in the history of the self, here good and evil do not so much touch the puruṣa. To remain always absolutely untainted is, in fact, the essence of spirit as conceived here. The Kārikā² says: ‘No puruṣa is bound or liberated; nor does any migrate. It is prakṛti in its manifold form that is bound, is liberated and migrates.’