The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12.17

c12.17

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.