The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12.22

c12.22

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.