The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c5.5

c5.5

On the other hand, it is impossible to find in the Upaniṣads any real basis for the Sāṃkhya system. The Upaniṣads are essentially devoted to the discovery of an absolute, and, diverse as are the forms which the absolute may take, they do not abandon the search, nor do they allow that no such absolute exists. There are, however, elements here and there which mark the growth of ideas which later were thrown into systematic form in the Sāṃkhya, but it is impossible to see in these fragmentary hints any indication that the Sāṃkhya philosophy was then in process of formation. It is, of course, possible, as a matter of abstract argument, to insist that the elements in the Upaniṣads which suggest the later Sāṃkhya views are really borrowings by the Upaniṣads of doctrines already extant in a Sāṃkhya system, but, in the absense of the slightest evidence for the existence of such a system in the Vedic literature, it is methodologically unsound to take this hypothesis as possessing any value, in face of the natural conclusion that we have in the Upaniṣads scattered hints which were later amalgamated into one system. Just like the Vedānta of Śaṃkara, or the Vedānta of Bādarāyaṇa, the Sāṃkhya is a system built on the Upaniṣads: from both of these it differs in that it goes radically and essentially beyond the teaching of the Upaniṣads.