The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12.23

c12.23

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.