The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.31

c7.31

While this doctrine points to the early date of Pañcaśikha in the Sāmkhya school tradition, it would be an error to place his date unduly high, for in the Sāmkhya Sūtra (v, 32) he is cited as giving a definition of Vyāpti, pervasion, which rests on the basis that intellect, etc., and nature, etc., stand to one another in the relation of what is to be supported and the support. This definition shows that Pañcaśikha must have been familar with the terminology of the Nyāya school and, without postulating that he must have known the Nyāya Darśana as preserved to us, it indicates that he does not belong to an early period, for the Nyāya school is certainly, along with the Vaiśeṣika, the latest of the orthodox systems, being barely known even in the latest parts of the great epic. This fact harmonizes well with the fact that his style agrees most closely with that of the writer Śabarasvāmin, whose period has been fixed by Jacobi† as comparatively late, perhaps the fifth century A.D. There is no reason to place Pañcaśikha so late as this: it is most probable that he is older than Īśvarakṛṣṇa, who is not to be dated after 300 A.D. The date of the first century A.D., ascribed conjecturally to Pañcaśikha by Garbe,‡ may therefore be regarded as not excessively early: the evidence for the present hardly carries him beyond the second century A.D. This date would leave it open for his fame to become distorted and for strange doctrines to be ascribed to him in the epic. It is, however, in keeping with his independent position that the epic should ascribe to him the older doctrine that the gross body was composed of all five elements, as against the theory of the Sāṃkhya Sūtra that it was made up of one only, the other four serving merely ancillary purposes.