The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.28

c7.28

The information which has been preserved as to the views of Pañcaśikha is fragmentary, but not unimportant, and the definiteness of some of these opinions suggests a real personality. The same impression of reality is borne out by the fact that Vācaspatimiśra, in his commentary on the Yoga Sūtra, regularly identifies as his views certain remarks quoted as from the teacher by Vyāsa in his commentary, and that views are expressly given as his in the Sāmkhya Sūtra. He appears also, if we may trust Vyāsa and Vācaspatimiśra, to have styled Kapila the Ādividvān and to have asserted that he taught Āsuri, but he does not hint that he himself was the pupil of Āsuri, a fact which discredits the assertion of this fact in verse 70 of the Sāmkhya Kārikā. From the form in which his views have been preserved for us[^ *] it would clearly seem that he wrote a work in prose Sūtras. The account of the three Guṇas attributed to him in the comment on the Sāmkhya Sūtra (i, 127) is perfectly in keeping with the normal Sāmkhya-Yoga view, and his doctrine of the reason of the eternal connection of spirit and nature quoted in the Sūtra (vi, 68) is the obviously correct one that it is due to lack of discrimination, a view much more thorough than the reply of the teachers generally that it was caused by works or that of Sanandana, who is elsewhere unknown, that it was caused by the internal body or psychic apparatus, since clearly the first answer merely gives a proximate cause, and the second not even a cause, but the mere form in which the connection expresses itself. Further, it is certainly in better agreement with the view of