The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c6.1

c6.1

THE essential fact of the atheism of the Sāṃkhya system in its classical form and the atheism of Buddhism naturally raises the problem whether the view is borrowed by the one system from the other. There is, of course, no *a priori* reason to deny the possibility of such borrowing; in definitely historical times there was clearly a lively interchange of views between Buddhism and the Brahmanical schools: the growth of logic was furthered by discoveries or developments now by the one side, now by the other, and there is striking similarity between the doctrine of void, which was brought into special prominence by the Buddhist Nāgārjuna, in the first or second century A.D., and its development into the Vijñānavāda of Asaṅga, probably in the fourth century A.D., which has suggested the view* that the illusion theory of the Vedānta, which has attained its classical shape in the doctrine of Śaṃkara, was derived from Buddhism as regards a very important part of its content. But that Buddhism is the source of the Sāṃkhya is most improbable, since the divergence of the two systems suggests that Buddhism represents a further advance in the disintegration of the earlier philosophy of the Upaniṣads. It is true that the Sāṃkhya abandons the idea of the existence of the absolute, but it is, on the other hand, careful to retain the idea of spirit and of nature; the doctrine of Buddhism, on the other hand, has in effect abandoned these two conceptions, and has left itself with only the fleeting series of mental states as a quasi reality, from which the development of the doctrine of the void is a natural enough step. It is impossible to prove, and certainly not plausible to believe, that from so developed a doctrine as that of Buddhism there could have grown the Sāmkhya, which is indeed not a believer in the absolute, but as little a believer in the view that the only existing principle is the law of movement, which in essence is the view of Buddhism.