The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c10.3

c10.3

Garbe* adds to these parallels, which he admits not to be conclusive evidence of borrowing, the fact that Persia was a perfectly possible place in which Greek thinkers, of whom travels are often recorded, should acquire knowledge of the Indian views, and supports his opinion that borrowing is probable by the case of Pythagoras, who is supposed to have borrowed from India his theory of transmigration, his conception of a religious community, his distinction of a fine and a gross body of the soul, his distinction of a sensitive organ, θυμός, and of the imperishable soul, φρήν, his doctrine of an intermediate world between earth and sky filled by demons, the doctrine of five elements including ether, the Pythagorean problem, the irrational and other things. Into this question of the relation of Pythagoras to Greek thought and to India it is unnecessary to go, as the Sāṃkhya elements—as contrasted with the elements which are not specifically Sāṃkhya in his teachings—are negligible. Von Schroeder,* indeed, invents an older form of Sāṃkhya, which he understands as denoting reckoning, in which number played a much greater part than in the classical Sāṃkhya; Garbe thinks that Pythagoras may have invented his doctrine of number as the result of his misinterpreting the fact that the Sāṃkhya owed its name to its enumeration of principles, into the view that the Sāṃkhya made number the basis of nature. Both theories are based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the views of Pythagoras,† and the only possible conclusion is that we have no early Greek evidence for the existence of the Sāṃkhya school.