The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c6.13

c6.13

It seems best, therefore, to draw the conclusion that Buddhism did not draw its inspiration from the Sāmkhya in the form in which it appears even in the epic, for there the doctrine of the isolation of spirit and nature and of the three Guṇas is fully and completely evolved. We have indeed no means to assert that the Sāmkhya or its closely related Yoga may not have existed in gradually changing shapes long before it assumed its epic form, and that there may not have existed a variety of its development which directly affected the growth of Buddhism. But we have no means to reconstruct this stage of Sāṃkhya, nor can we say whether there ever was a system under that name without the Guṇas: the period from the Upaniṣads to the epic Sāṃkhya is a long one, and must have been marked by much intellectual activity, one form of which may have been a doctrine which cannot definitely be named Sāṃkhya, and from which both Sāṃkhya and Buddhism are derived. That such an atheist doctrine should have been evolved at an early date is not in the slightest degree wonderful. There is abundant evidence of the plentiful supply of heretical doctrines in India from an early date, and an atheist philosophy* can have hardly been open to more serious objection than an idealism which placed all reality in an incomprehensible absolute, and insisted that all real things were a mere illusion.†