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The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12: VIII. The Later Sāṃkhya

The Sāṃkhya System: A History of the Sāṃkhya Philosophy c12

Language
English

Contents

VIII. The Later Sāṃkhya

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SPECIAL attention has been drawn to the short tract, called the *Tattvasamāsa*, by reason of the fact that Max Müller* considered that it was the real text-book of the Sāmkhya system anterior to the *Sāmkhya Kārikā*. The argument in its favour is, that where it agrees with the *Kārikā* it appears to be the older: this view is not, however, supported by any detailed argument, and certainly does not seem conclusive. All that can be said of it with certainty is that Vijñānabhikṣu in his commentary on the Sūtra attributed it apparently to the same author as the Sūtra, being a brief exposition of what is said at length in the Sūtra, and that the text has, in comparatively recent times, at least in some parts of India, as at Benares, attained a popularity which is much greater than that of the *Kārikā*. The language is not marked by any special sign of date, and Max Müller thought that the different order of categories and the numerous names not elsewhere used were rather a sign of primitive and orginal character than of lateness. On the other hand, it must be said that the relegation to the end of the category of pain is certainly curious and artificial in appearance, as contrasted with the position which pain occupies at the beginning of the *Kārikā* as giving the tone to the whole system, and the fact that the term *Tattvasamāsa* shows that the work is a compendium is surely evidence against the text representing the original Sūtras of the school.

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∗ Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, pp. 318ff. The later date, after 1400 A.D, is preferred by Garbe, *Sāmkhya Philosophie*, pp. 68-70.

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After an enumeration and explanation of the twenty-five principles, arranged as the eight evolvents, nature, intellect, individuation, and the five fine elements; the sixteen evolutes, arranged as the five organs of perception, the five organs of action, mind and the five gross elements; and spirit, the tract proceeds to enumerate the three Guṇas and to explain their nature. Then come brief explanations of the process of evolution and the resolution of the evolved going from nature to the material elements, and from the material elements back to nature. Thereafter the intellect, individuation, mind and the ten senses are set out as psychical and subjective over against the objects of their activity and the presiding deities, a concept which is decidedly more at home in the Vedānta than in the Sāṃkhya. Then come the five Abhibuddhis, which are forms of the activity of intellect, ascertainment, self-reference, desire, will to act and action, terms of somewhat doubtful sense and import. Then come the five Karmayonis, sources of action, enumerated as energy, faith, desire of bliss, carelessness and desire of knowledge, but also differently explained. The next topic is the five winds or vital airs, Prāṇa, expiration connected with the mouth and nose; Apāna, connected with the navel which draws downwards; Samāna, connected with the heart which moves equally about, and which has been compared, though doubtlessly erroneously, with the circulation of the blood; Udāna is connected with the throat and goes upward: Vyāna is the all-pervader. The presence of these five as a special topic is in contrast with the view of the Kārikā, which does not accept the vital airs as anything more than the joint working of mind and the organs. After the vital airs come the five Karmātmans, which are descriptions of the activity of the self: they are Vaikārika, the doer of good works; Taijasa, the doer of bad works; Bhūtādi, doer of hidden works; Sānumāna, the doer of what is reasonable; and Niranumāna, the doer of what is not reasonable.

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The next topics discussed are the five Avidyās, the twenty-eight Aśaktis including the seventeen Atuṣṭis and Asiddhis, the nine Tuṣṭis, and the eight Siddhis. Then come the eight cardinal facts, Mūlikārthas, which are the existence, unity, purpose, and devotion to the interest of another of nature, the otherness from nature, the non-agency, and multiplicity of spirit, and the temporary union and separation of spirit and nature. The next two topics are the creation of benevolence, the production of the gross from the fine elements, and the Bhūtasarga, the divine creation in eight divisions, the animal and the vegetable creation in five, and the human creation in one. Bondage is then described as threefold, according as it is connected with belief in any of the evolvents as the highest reality, or with belief in a similar position as to the evolutes, such as is shown in devotion to objects of sense, and bondage by sacrificial gifts. This curious form of bondage arises when men through misconception give gifts to the priests, and is a distinct sign of hostility to the sacrifice, which is not seen in the Kārikā. Then come the three kinds of Mokṣa, release, arising from the increase of knowledge, the quieting of the senses, and lastly, as the outcome of the destruction of merit and demerit by these means, the destruction of the whole, producing the detachment of spirit from nature, and concentration of spirit upon itself. Then come three forms of proof, and finally the doctrine of misery, subdivided into three according as it is concerned with and arising from the body or mind, caused by others, or produced by fate. From this misery release can be obtained by the study of the Tattvasamāsa.

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This summary of the contents of the Tattvasamāsa does not suggest that it has any special claim to antiquity: it probably represents one of several forms of arranging the Sāmkhya principles, of which another form is preserved in the Ṣaṣṭitantra list of topics. In any case, however, as the treatise itself is far too brief to give valuable information regarding the system, the value of the work is much inferior to that of the Sāmkhya Kārikā on the one hand, or the Sāmkhya Sūtra on the other.

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It is probably of importance for the later date of the Tattvasamāsa that it is not cited by Mādhava in his account, written about 1380 A.D., of the Sāmkhya in the Sarvadarśanasamgraha, where he uses as the basis of his exposition of the system the Kārikā. He also ignores the Sāmkhya

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[^ *]: Above, Chap. V.

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Sūtra itself, which thus appears to be later than his period. On the other hand, it cannot be much later, for it is commented on by Aniruddha, who wrote about 1500 A.D., and by Vijñānabhikṣu in the second half of the sixteenth century A.D. The work has also been commented on by Vedāntin Mahādeva at the end of the seventeenth century, and Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa at the beginning of the eighteenth; the former in his comment on the last five books follows Aniruddha faithfully, in the first copies Vijñānabhikṣu, but has independent value; the latter is a mere imitation of Vijñānabhikṣu. Despite, however, the modern date, the Sūtra is a source of considerable importance, and may contain a good deal of old matter, though in its present form it is certainly not so pure an exposition of the system as the Kārikā.

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This is obviously, in some measure at least, the case as regards the criticisms of other philosophies, which make up an essential part of every Indian, as of other, philosophic systems. The appended verses to the Kārikā expressly say that these critiques are omitted, and much of the omission may be supplied in the Sūtra. On the other hand, we cannot say how much : the Sūtra which freely uses the Kārikā also uses phrases borrowed from Śaṃkara, and therefore must be treated as a work the composers of which were quite capable of adding much of their own. As the text stands, practically all the leading philosophical systems receive their share of disapproval. The materialism of the Cārvākas is met by the refutation of their denial of the validity of reasoning by the reference to its self-destructive nature, since no amount of perception will give a doctrine any validity, and by the reply to the favourite argument of the production of intelligence from unintelligent things, on the analogy of intoxicating power from an aggregate of herbs, that the intoxicating power is latent in the ingredients, but there is no trace of souls in the psychic organs. The Jain doctrine of the co-extension of soul with body is refuted by the argument that, as all that is limited is temporary, souls would be temporary also.

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Objections are raised to the Buddhist denial of the soul, to its assertion of the momentary character of the world, and to its belief in the annihilation of personality as final release. The special doctrine of the Vijñānavādins, that nothing exists but consciousness, is refuted as well as the nihilism of the Mādhyamikas. The Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika philosophies are severely criticized: their schemes of categories are rejected as inadequate, their belief in atoms is rejected, and their denial of a primitive material is answered. The doctrine of the eternity of the mind, space, time, the ether and the atoms of the other four elements is denied, as is the atomic size of the mind, on the ground that it must have some dimension in order to act simultaneously with more than one of the senses. The derivation of the senses from the elements is equally contested. Moreover, the doctrine of causality of the Sāṃkhya, which asserts the permanence of the cause in the product is defended against the logicians' view that the product has no existence before its production and after its destruction as such. The category of inherence, Samavāya, supported by these schools is rejected in favour of the simpler view that what it means is really to be expressed by the nature of the object in question. The whole theory of soul as really active is rejected, and with it the theory that release consists in the freeing of the soul from certain characteristics.

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The idea of a personal deity which is accepted in the later, if not in the original form of both these philosophies, is definitely rejected, partly because it is unnecessary and interferes with the effective work of transmigration, and partly because to allow such a deity would be to leave him responsible for the misery in the world. The doctrine that the Veda is a product of a god is naturally also denied, and in its place is developed a doctrine of the recreation of the Veda at each creation of the world as a result of itself alone, in this point departing from the doctrine of the eternity of the Veda adopted by the Mīmāṃsā school, from which also the Sāṃkhya differs in rejecting the additional means of proof, such as analogy, accepted by that system, and its theories of the eternity of sound, and of the essential connection of word and sound. From the Vedānta of Śaṃkara the system differs by opposing bitterly the doctrine of the unity of soul, of the sole existence of the soul, the refusal to accept a primitive material, the doctrine of ignorance and illusion, and the view that the released soul has enjoyment as its characteristic, a view which contradicts the whole theory of the Sāmkhya that isolation alone is the end.

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The Sāmkhya also rejects, in its sister system of Yoga, the doctrine of a personal deity and of the eternity of the Sphoṭa, the concept expressed in the complex of letters of the alphabet which make up a word.* But in rejecting many of the theories of the other schools the Sāmkhya Sūtra shows itself not uninfluenced by one at least of them: the work makes remarkable efforts to prove that its views are in full accord with scripture, to which it attributes conclusive value, and endeavours to show as accordant with the Sāmkhya itself the statements in scripture regarding the personality of God, the unity in the absolute, the joy which is asserted to be part of the nature of the absolute, and the heavenly bliss acknowledged in the Vedānta as a step on the way to final release. Indeed, the text goes so far as to hold that obedience to the traditional rules of action has a good effect towards securing final release, and to talk of the attainment of the nature of the absolute.

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In the main doctrines of the system the later texts throw little new or valuable light. Peculiar to them is the doctrine that the spirit throws light on the inner organ, or that the spirit serves as a mirror in which the inner organ is reflected. The importance of this doctrine lies in the fact that it is held to explain the mode in which spirit is apprehended. All perception is due to the inner organ forming in itself a picture of the thing to be perceived, which is reflected in spirit; similarly it forms such a picture of the spirit, and when the spirit reflects itself in the inner organ it brings its reflex, and therefore its self, to conscious knowledge. Another simile used to express the relation of spirit and nature which is in itself purely unconscious, is that of the reflection of the red Hibiscus shoots in a crystal near which the flower lies: the crystal remains unaffected by the reflection. Ingenious as all these comparisons are, it cannot be said that they lend much clearness to the subject-matter with which they deal. But they warn us of the danger of treating the evolutes of nature as being essentially material and as made into psychic states by the influence of spirit. The conception of the inner organ, consisting of intellect, individuation and mind, cannot be conceived as equivalent, as suggested by Garbe,* to the nervous system, to which psychic meaning is given by the reflection in spirit or the light thrown by spirit. Rather the conception is that everything including the psychic states of experience in an unconscious condition, is present in the inner organ, waiting to become actual by the addition of the element of consciousness given by spirit. With this view accords best the fact that the system of the Sūtra regards as persisting in unconsciousness in the intellect the impressions of experience which give rise to psychic dispositions, Saṃskāras.

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∗ See E. Abegg, *Festschrift E. Windisch* (Berlin, 1914), pp. 188-195.

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A further development of doctrine, and not a happy one, may be seen in the treatment of intellect and individuation. The only tolerable theory is that in some way nature is converted into intellect or consciousness by the influence of spirit, and that the result of individuation is to split up this consciousness, which must be regarded as not having attained to consciousness of itself, into definite individuals possessed of definite selves. These individuals would essentially possess also individual consciousnesses, as the principle of individuation would carry with it as an essential presupposition consciousness in order to become self-conscious: this fact explains why in the Sūtra (iii, 9) the constituents of the inner organ, fine body or psychic apparatus, are reckoned at seventeen in place of eighteen, intellect and individuation falling under one head. From the individual principle naturally can be derived the senses with mind, and as suggested in the Kauṣitaki Upaniṣad (iii) the objects of the senses in the shape of the fine elements, from which the gross elements proceed, and this is clearly the main view of the Kārikā. On the other hand, the Sūtra evidently regards the whole process as being a cosmic one, the principle of individuation producing cosmic organs, and elements, and the individual corresponding principles being derived from the cosmic. It is characteristic of the difficulty of the doctrine, and of its absurdity, that the explanation of the derivation is nowhere given: the Sūtra (iii, 10) merely says that from the one psychic apparatus many were produced by reason of the difference of the works, an explanation which is subject to the disadvantage that it begs the question, since the distinction of works presupposes individuals, and individuals presuppose separate psychic apparatuses with which to perform works. The probable explanation of the effort to fill up the system is to be seen in the fact that the Kārikā itself evidently allows inorganic nature to be in some way directly connected with nature, and not merely, as it should consistently be, derived for each individual from the fine elements which form part of his psychic apparatus.

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∗ Sāmkhya Philosophie, p. 255. The doctrine is probably derived from Śamkara's system. Cf. A. E. Gough, Philosophy of the Upaniṣads, p. 39.

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In the third place, the Sūtra develops in detail the doctrine of the process of the creation and the destruction of the world, which presents in a more philosophic shape the doctrine of the ages of the world found in the epic and common to the philosophies. Nature and spirit are ever ready for creation: the former seeks to develop for the enjoyment and final release of spirit, and the latter is ready to play its part of onlooker, but, of course, it is impossible to find any beginning in time for the process. Each creation follows on a period of destruction in which everything has been resolved back into a state of inactivity, in the sense that the three Guṇas, instead of intermingling in their constant activity, merely produce each its self. Nevertheless, as soon as the result of the work done before has found the correct time, the process commences afresh, all spirits having their psychic apparatuses evolved according to the impressions left upon them by the acts done in their last existences, which have left them with a definite moral character, and with the disposition produced by their failure to recognize the separation of spirit and nature. During the period of the continuance of the world in a state of destruction, as the psychic apparatuses of the spirits are existing only in a fine condition and are not evolved, there is no difference as regards actual conditions of existence between the free and the bound spirits, but the evolution exposes the latter to all the woes of existence. In each period some escape for ever by the acquisition of the essential knowledge, but the work of nature will never be over since the total number of spirits is infinite, and the whole can thus never be released.

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In the relation of the fine and the gross elements to the senses, there is clearly a difference of opinion between the Kārikā and the Sūtra. The former evidently holds the simple view that the senses can perceive the fine elements, and that it is not the gross elements alone which can thus be seen. The Sūtra, on the other hand, restricts to gods and Yogins the power to see the fine elements and accords to the senses the power only of seeing the gross. Moreover, it seems probable that the view of the fine elements taken in the Sūtra was that each of them was only the basis of the senses in question: thus sound represents the base element of sound, but not the sound which is heard, and so forth, this being the explanation of the term Aviśeṣa, without distinctions, which in the Kārikā points rather to the fine elements being each composed of the substance in question alone, and not like the gross elements of portions of all the others. These fine elements are expressly declared not to be indivisible, and are thus distinguished from the atoms of the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika theory, which are rejected by the Sāmkhya on the ground that they could never, in view of their possessing no extension, make up an extended object. Moreover, the distinction between the fine elements and the subtle portions of the gross elements, which belong, with the fine elements, to the psychical apparatus, is maintained in the later texts, in the form of the doctrine of the Ātivāhika body (iii, 12; v, 103). On the other hand, further details are given of the process of growth of the gross body, which is really composed of earth, not of three elements, fire, water, and food, that is earth, as in the view of the Vedānta, nor of four, nor of five as in the popular view, which in the epic is attributed to Pañcaśikha himself. The other four elements aid only in producing the stability of the body: water sustains the blood, fire the heat of the body, air the breath, and ether the windpipe. The breath which in the Kārikā plays a very restricted part, here appears under the influence of the Vedānta as the principle controlling the growth of the body under the guidance of spirit, with which, indeed, it seems to be conceived as united even before the production of the embryo. The kind of body is determined by the power of former action, but not the building up of the body, a point in which the Sāmkhya differs from the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika doctrine. The other organic beings, those of station superior to man, beasts and plants are similarly composed, but plants are, though endowed with bodies, deprived according to the later texts, but not according to the epic, of outer senses, so that spirits in them cannot act, but merely undergo penance for previous actions.

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The union of spirit with the inner organ, the senses, the fine elements and the body produces the empiric soul, Jīva, a term which is mainly Vedāntic, while the inner organ and the other elements, which produce from spirit the soul, are styled Upādhis, again a term proper to the Vedānta. The individual soul has, however, no real existence at all: it is not an entity; all that exists on the one hand is the body and the psychic apparatus, and on the other hand pure spirit, which is really unaffected by the Upādhis, but which by its light causes them to emerge into consciousness. Release consists in the realization that spirit is not bound by the Upādhis, and cannot be so bound. The parallelism of this view with that of the Vedānta is too marked to be accidental, and doubtless the influence of that school must here be recognized. The connection of spirit and its psychical apparatus is absolutely continuous and without beginning in time, though it can be ended: it arises from the failure to discriminate between spirit and nature, and this failure in each life is a consequence of a failure in the preceding life, which leaves in the empirical soul an impression which becomes real in its next existence. The result of the attainment of discrimination is made very much more clear in the Sūtra than in the Kārikā: the fate of spirit is existence, but entirely without consciousness, as follows inevitably from the fact that there is now no object for the subject to become united with. Moreover, the idea that such a state is one of bliss is properly and logically in accordance with the *Kārikā* expressly rejected, as against the Vedānta theory.

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On the means of proof the later text gives little new light: the appeal to the evidence of scripture is far more frequent than might be expected in a system which lays such great stress on reasoning, but this appeal is accepted in the *Kārikā*, and there is not the slightest reason to assume* that the term Āptavacana, which is the normal designation of this branch of proof, ever meant merely skilled instruction. But a real advance is made on the *Kārikā* in the assigning of a definite character to space and time, which are made to be qualities of nature regarded as a unity, and to be eternal and all-present. In the empiric world both appear as limited, and are explained in a quite inconsistent way by origination from the ether through its conditioning by the masses of corporeal nature, on the one hand, in the case of space, and by the movement of the heavenly bodies in the case of time. The first conception is no doubt superior to that of the Vedānta, which produces space from the Ātman, but it is not much superior to the view of the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, which call space and time substances,† nor in any of the cases is the real problem of either space or time seriously faced or realized.

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The *Sūtra* also includes many points which the *Kārikā* leaves out as unessential. It deals doubtfully with the old question of works as opposed to knowledge and is inconsistent, in one place allowing them value while in others the more consistent view of their total valuelessness comes out, a fact which accords with the lack of any ethical side to the Sāmkhya system. The necessity of a teacher is laid down, and the only true teacher is one who has attained the saving discrimination in the period before his final release in death: the winning of such a teacher is the result of good deeds in previous lives. A real furtherance, but not a means to secure release, is indifference, Vairāgya, which, again, is a motive for refraining from doing good deeds, with which it is incompatible: moreover, the same quality is definitely opposed to a man's association with other men, which is a hindrance to the desired end. Indifference is divided into the higher which arises only after the attainment of discrimination, and the lower which precedes it: if the latter is carried to its furthest limit, the result is birth as a god in the next world period, pending which the person is merged in nature. Mere hearing of the teaching of the truth is not enough: it must be accompanied by reflection and meditation, and in a marked degree, in contrast to the earlier Kārikā, the Sūtra adopts large masses of the Yoga technique as a means of producing the desired isolation of spirit and nature. Moreover, the Sūtra also accepts from the Yoga the doctrine of the high value of asceticism and the Yogin's power to see all things future and past, a power which is consistent with the Sāmkhya doctrine of the reality of the product in the cause.

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∗ See Garbe, Sāmkhya Philosophie, pp. 59, 60. † Cf. Frazer, Indian Thought, pp. 97, 98.

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It is characteristic of the Sāmkhya that it does not restrict, like the Vedānta, the saving knowledge to the three upper classes of the Aryan community to the exclusion of the Śūdras. This generosity of outlook is seen already in the great epic (xiv, 19, 61), where the result of Yoga is distinctly declared to be open even to women and to Śūdras, and the same sentiment can doubtless legitimately be recognized in the fact that the system, despite its fondness for sub-divisions, actually classes in its theory of the kinds of living creatures men in one division only, while divine beings fall under no less than eight. The motive for the difference of treatment doubtless lies in the fact that the Sāmkhya, like the Yoga, does not build on the Veda as an exclusive foundation, and therefore, unlike the Vedānta, they do not fall under the rule which excludes Śūdras from even hearing the Veda recited. The fact that the Veda formed one of the sources of proof of the system was not any more inconsistent with the system being made available to all, than the fact that the epic which contains Vedic quotations was equally open to Śūdras to hear.

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The tendency to obliterate the differences between the Sāmkhya and the more orthodox philosophies appears in the most pronounced form in the commentary of Vijñānabhikṣu on the Sāmkhya Sūtra, which was probably written about the middle of the sixteenth century A.D. Vijñānabhikṣu, as is seen also in his other works, was convinced that all the six orthodox systems of philosophy contained the absolute truth in their main principles. This paradoxical result is achieved by holding that the Nyāya and the Vaiśeṣika systems are true in so far as they treat of the difference between the self and the material body, but that in attributing agency to the self they merely use popular terminology, which is corrected in the Sāmkhya system. That system is in appearance atheistic, but Vijñānabhikṣu explains this difficulty away in various modes. The atheism of the Sāmkhya is in his view merely a concession to current phraseology, or again it is advocated in order to prevent men failing to obtain true enlightenment by devotion to the ideal of attaining divine rank, or again, as suggested in the Padma Purāṇa, the doctrine is expressed in order to mislead evil men and prevent their attaining the true knowledge. After this achievement, it is easy for Vijñānabhikṣu to overcome the difficulty that the Vedānta teaches the non-existence of individual souls, and the doctrine of the unity of the absolute, while the Sāmkhya believes in innumerable individual souls and denies an absolute. The unity of souls of the Vedānta is resolved into a denial of difference in kind, and the monism of scripture is either attributed as a view for the mind devoid of the discriminative understanding, or is asserted merely to mean the absence of separation in space of the souls and matter, which accords with the Sāmkhya view that souls and matter are alike all-pervasive. Similarly, the assertion of the Vedānta that nature is not real, as in the Sāmkhya, but a mere illusion, is explained away by the adoption of the view that the Māyā of the Vedānta is really equivalent to the matter of the Sāmkhya. While in these views of the Vedānta Vijñānabhikṣu is following in the main the original sense of the Brahma Sūtra it is perfectly clear that his treatment of the Sāmkhya is radically in contradiction with the atheism of that system, which is set out with arguments in the very text (v, 2-11) which he professes to expound.

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The attitude adopted by Vijñānabhikṣu is significant of the theistic spirit of his age: in his exposition the six systems present themselves as nothing but a theistic exposition of the universe, presented less directly in the four systems of the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya and Yoga, and brought out in the clearest manner in the Vedānta. By this device the Sāṃkhya philosophy is brought into the main current of Indian thought and relieved from the disadvantages of its atheism, which doubtless accounts for the comparative disfavour in which the Sāṃkhya system had long fallen in India, and to which Vijñānabhikṣu himself bears emphatic testimony.

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While the attempt of Vijñānabhikṣu could not expect to result in the establishment of the authority of the Sāṃkhya as a system, the influence of that philosophy may doubtless be traced directly in the free admission of elements of the Sāṃkhya into the texts of the later Vedānta. This interfusion of Vedānta and Sāṃkhya elements is seen in the *Bhagavadgītā*, but the doctrine of Guṇas was distinctly repudiated by Śaṃkara, and its reappearance in texts, which accept his general principles and believe in the illusory character of the world, is a clear proof that the reasoning of the Sāṃkhya was felt to have great weight. Of this syncretist tendency, which is seen clearly in the *Pañcadaśī* of Mādhava in the fourteenth century A.D., the classical example is to be found in the *Vedāntasāra* of Sadānanda, a work written before 1500 A.D. Sadānanda identifies, as in the *Svetāśvatara Upaniṣad*, the Māyā, or Avidyā, of the Vedānta with the Prakṛti of the Sāṃkhya, and by accepting the view that Prakṛti is composed of three elements obtains the means of fitting much of the Sāṃkhya system into the Vedānta. From Brahman, who is regarded by him as essentially Caitanya, or spirit, is produced through envelopment with ignorance in its constituent of Sattva the world-spirit, Īśvara, whose causal body out of which he creates all things is composed by the whole of ignorance. On the other hand, from the Caitanya through envelopment with Sattva in an impure form, that is mixed with the constituents, Rajas and Tamas, arises the individual spirit, Prājña, which has as its causal body out of which it creates individuation, etc., and is composed of only a part of ignorance. A further result of envelopment is the creation of the world soul, Sūtrātman, and the individual soul, Taijasa, from the world-spirit and the individual spirit, by the production, through the effect of the constituent Tamas, of the fine body. From the Caitanya enveloped by ignorance through the predominance of Tamas arises the ether, from the ether, wind; from wind, fire; from fire, water; and from water, earth. In each of these elements, however, which are only in a fine state, there is a portion of the constituents Rajas and Sattva as well as of Tamas. From these five Tanmātras arise the fine body, consisting of five organs of perception produced from the Sattva portions of the corresponding five elements, of five organs of action arising from the Rajas portions of the elements, of intelligence and mind consisting of united portions of Sattva from the elements, and of the five breaths, consisting of united portions of Rajas from the five elements. In intelligence and mind spirit, Citta, and individuation are held to be included, and in this respect, as in the giving of an independent position to the five breaths, the Sāmkhya doctrine is abandoned. Similarly, in the view of the production of the elements from each other in a series, Sadānanda follows the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (ii, 1) and not the Sāmkhya. On the other hand, the development of the gross world body and the individual body, Vaiśvānara and Viśva, takes place according to the Sāmkhya rule of five elements, not according to the Vedānta rule of three.

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At the same time it must be noted that the influence of the Sāmkhya is clearly limited in extent: the whole system of four states, Brahman, Īśvara and Prājña, Sūtrātman and Taijasa, Vaiśvānara and Viśva, is based on the Vedānta view of the four conditions of the self, in its conditions of freedom from bondage, deep sleep, dreaming, and waking, respectively, as set out in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (iv, 3-4), the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (3-5), and in a developed form in the Nṛsimhottaratāpanīya Upaniṣad. It is, however, possible that in the care taken to insist on the cosmic character of the process, which in the earlier Upaniṣads is expressly restricted to the states of the individual souls, there may be seen the influence of the Sāṃkhya, with its insistence on the cosmic character of the development of Prakṛti, and, despite the constant variation of detail, the importance of the Guṇas in the system is obvious.

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While the interaction of Vedānta and Sāṃkhya is thus marked, there are few traces of close connection with the Nyāya school. The most important is the exposition of the doctrine of inference found in Vācaspatimiśra’s commentary on Sāṃkhya Kārikā 5, which appears to mark an independent development by the Sāṃkhya of principles adopted, more or less uncritically in the first instance, from the Nyāya rather than to contain a record of a doctrine presupposed by the early form of Sāṃkhya.* In this view inference is divided into direct (*vīta*) and indirect (*avīta*); the latter category coincides with *śeṣavat*, and means proof by the elimination of alternative explanations; the former includes *pūrvavat* and *sāmānyato dṛṣṭa*, which differ in that the result of the former is a judgment dealing with realities which can be perceived, while the latter gives knowledge of such imperceptible entities as the senses or the soul.

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∗ As suggested by A Bürk, Vienna Oriental Journal, XV, 259, 261.

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