The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.40

c7.40

The Purāṇas show also traces of the influence of doctrines similar to those of the epic. The cosmological accounts of these works contain here and there approximations to the evolutionary series of the Sāṃkhya, and they agree with it in the doctrine of the three Guṇas, but this point of view is in them associated to some extent with conceptions taken from the illusionist doctrine of the Vedānta, and far more with the doctrines of the sectarian Vaiṣṇava or Pāśupata schools. Thus in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, while we find both nature and spirit described in terms appropriate to the Sāṃkhya principles, it is declared that Viṣṇu, as supreme spirit, is one not only with spirit but with nature, and with time. The *Matsya Purāṇa* again finds that the three Guṇas in the great principle are identical with Brahman, Viṣṇu and Śiva. Naturally these and similar views* in the Purāṇas give us no information of worth as to the antiquity of the Sāṃkhya system or its primitive character.