The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.46

c7.46

It is clear that the theory of Dahlmann is extremely ingenious, and it is of minor importance that the efforts to trace the twenty-fifth principle as Ātman is probably based on the mistaken rendering of Ātman as self instead of trunk of the body, as opposed to the hands, feet, fingers and toes, which are the other twenty-four principles. It is a different thing to conjecture that this fondness for the number twenty-five which is often seen in the Brāhmaṇas, where Prajāpati is described as twenty-five fold, is not one of the sources of the doctrine that there are twenty-five principles. But the attempt to hold that the epic is a unity and that it teaches a unitarian philosophy is one which offends every canon of criticism and commonsense, and the main doctrine that the atheistic Sāmkhya is really a doctrine which accepts the Brahman, but denies the personal deity of the Yoga, is a *tour de force*. The epic, which certainly is devoted to the doctrine of the Brahman and to the reverence of great personal deities, on the other hand, certainly tends to regard the Sāmkhya system as a sort of Brahmaism, but it is perfectly obvious from the epic that the system itself was not one of this kind at all. The truth of the matter is much better expressed by Hopkins,* who finds in the epic the traces of at least six systems, Vedic orthodoxy, Brahmaism, *i.e.*, the doctrine of the Brahman but without the illusion theory, rarely the doctrine of the Brahman with the illusion theory, the Sāmkhya, the Yoga, and the Pāśupatas and Bhāgavatas, sectarian worshippers of Śiva and Viṣṇu respectively, who adopt in their systems a good deal of Sāmkhya-Yoga philosophy.