The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.25

c7.25

The case of Pañcaśikha offers more difficulty, and he has often been treated as an authentic teacher: indeed, the Chinese tradition * attributes to him the work known as Ṣaṣṭitantra, though doubtless by an error. There has been seen a certain similarity between the doctrines attributed to Pañcaśikha in the few passages quoted from him in the commentary on the Sāmkhya Sūtra and doctrines expressed in the epic. Thus his view of the infinitely small size of the soul may be compared with the same doctrine expressed in xii, 346, 13-18, and his view of the unenlightened individual with that expressed in xii, 310, but these comparisons do not carry us any further, as they do not by any means connect even the Pañcaśikha of the epic with the reputed Pañcaśikha of the school tradition. The only conclusion available is that the identity of the presumably actual teacher mentioned by the commentators and the epic Pañcaśikha is not proved, and that the latter, at least, certainly did not teach as he is represented any single doctrine, and certainly not a Sāmkhya one. We have, therefore, two possibilities open to us: either we can assume that the name, Pañcaśikha, was that of an ancient sage, perhaps as may be indicated by Buddhist evidence cited below, originally a divine personage, to whom, as to Kapila, for reasons unknown to us, certain doctrines were ascribed, just as, for instance, Sanatkumāra, clearly a divine being, is cited as an authority in the epic, or that the late epic uses the