The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.44

c7.44

A very different theory of the epic Sāmkhya is presented by Dahlmann.* In his view the epic is not, as is usually supposed, a heroic epic into which there has been put at various times vast masses of didactic and unepic material. From its earliest period the epic was, he holds, not different from what it now is: it was essentially a book of customary law and usage, which the epic tale illustrates. It follows from this view that the epic is held to be of great antiquity, and that in place of seeing in it a heterogeneous mass of contradictory views, we must see in it the expression of one single doctrine. This is the epic Sāmkhya which represents the development of the unsystematic teachings of the early Upaniṣads. It is essentially a science of the Brahman, Brahmavidyā, but it is at the same time based on logic, Ānvīkṣikī, and while it never abandons traditional foundations—only once, and that on the doctrine of Ahimsā, which he supports against tradition, is Kapila pronounced the holder of an unorthodox view in the epic—still it freely uses the processes of reasoning. Its special aim is the investigation and setting forth of the number of principles involved and their evolution from the absolute. It is atheistic merely in the sense that it denies any personal deity such as that accepted by the Yoga, but not in the sense that it denies the absolute and impersonal Brahman, which on the contrary it unquestionably recognizes, and in which the individual soul finds Nirvāṇa. But beside the absolute it recognizes the existence of a material nature, which is the source of the manifold character of the empiric self, since through it the absolute becomes multiplied, and it sets itself to define in detail nature and its workings. It is merely in its substance a clearing up of the doctrines which are contained in the older Upaniṣads, such as the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Chāndogya: these texts lay great stress on the fact that there is one self or absolute, and that all else is not true reality, and that it is a mistake which leads to transmigration to believe that the empiric is the true reality. But these Upaniṣads do not deal distinctly with the nature of the empiric reality: the question whether it is merely an illusion is not discussed and the doctrine of mere illusion is not set out, though no doubt the extreme stress laid on the unreality of the world of experience, from the point of view of true reality, tends to render the growth of this doctrine not unnatural. Ultimately the epic Sāṃkhya with its logical theory of the Brahman becomes, on the one hand, the classical Sāṃkhya which has learned to do without the Brahman, and on the other hand, by the laying of increased stress on the unreality of the world is developed the illusion theory of Śaṃkara. Dahlmann traces the origin of the theory not merely back to the older Upaniṣads: he sees in the hymn of the Ṛgveda, x, 129, the creation of the universe from an indefinite substance described as water by an absolute already existing, and he considers that the fact that the Ātman is called the twenty-fifth in the Śatapatha and Śāṅkhāyana Brāhmaṇas is a foreshadowing of the twenty-four principles of the Sāṃkhya other than the self, while the three Guṇas he finds adumbrated in the Atharvaveda, where (x, 8, 43) mention is made of the nine-doored lotus with three coverings in which there is a soul, a theory which has, as we have seen, no probability.