The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.4

c7.4

The philosophy presented by the epic in the form which we have it is a conglomerate of very different views, and, what is most important, of very different views repeated in immediate proximity to one another without any apparent sense of their incongruity. There is, however, one decided characteristic which holds good for the epic philosophy, and that is its theistic tinge, which constantly intrudes, and which is natural in an epic which had a far more popular appeal than had the more philosophical speculations which are here and there referred to in it. Hence we need not be surprised that the idealistic interpretation of the Upaniṣads, which seems in all empiric reality nothing but the self-illusion of the Brahman, is represented only in the feeblest degree in the epic, and that there is no passage there which can fairly be set beside the bold declaration of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (iv, 10) that nature is nothing but illusion, Māyā. On the other hand, the epic has often the doctrine of the development of the whole universe as a reality from the Brahman. Thus the self is said (xii, 285, 40) to send out from itself the Guṇas, the constituents of nature, as a spider emits a web, and the same idea of the productive activity of the Brahman is found in other shapes. Characteristic of this strain of thought, and linking it closely with the Brāhmaṇa tradition, is the statement (xii, 311, 3) that from the Brahman was created the god Brahman, who sprang forth from a golden egg, and that this forms the body for all creatures.