The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c5.27

c5.27

Efforts have been made to find references to distinctively Sāṃkhya doctrines in older Upaniṣads, such as the Chāndogya and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka. In the latter text (iv, 4, 8) the term Liṅga appears beside mind, and the suggestion to treat it as meaning psychic apparatus* presents itself, but it is much more likely that the sense is simply “bearing a characteristic mark.” In iv, 4, 13, a verse found also in Īśā Upaniṣad 12, Śaṃkara sees a reference to the Sāṃkhya doctrine in the term Asambhūti which he renders as Prakṛti, but this view has in itself no probability, and the commentator, Uvaṭa, declares that the polemic against the believers in Asambhūti, destruction, is directed against the materialists. The statement in i, 4, 15, of the Upaniṣad, that in the beginning the universe was undiscriminated, and was later discriminated by name and form, is a repetition of a very old concept, which has had its share in moulding the Sāṃkhya concept of Prakṛti, but it is not specifically Sāṃkhya. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad in vii, 25,1 has the word Ahaṃkāra, but uses it merely as a synonym for the self, Ātman, and in vii, 26, 2, the term Sattva has not yet the technical sense of one of the three constituents of nature which belongs to it in the Sāṃkhya. Nor in iii, 19 is there anything specifically Sāṃkhya: that paragraph is a legend of the origin of being from non-being, the coming into existence of an egg, the two halves of which are sky and earth, and from which the sun arises. This form of creation myth is of importance for the creation legends seen in Manu and the Purāṇas, but its relation to Sāṃkhya is merely the vague one that it contemplates a process of production, though the idea of not being as prior to being is completely contrary to the developed Sāṃkhya view, which does not regard Prakṛti, when unevolved, as not-being, because it is nothing definite. The conception of the Upaniṣad version with that of the cosmogonic hymn, Ṛgveda. x, 129, is obvious, but here also we have only an idea which later is in part adopted by the Sāṃkhya, that of an unformed primitive matter. More importance attaches to a passage in the Atharvaveda (x, 8, 43)