The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.51

c7.51

While there are no arguments of any value which can be adduced for the view that the Sāṃkhya is a product of un-Brahmanical circles, there is every evidence that the system is a natural growth from the philosophy of the Upaniṣads. We have seen that the Upaniṣads, in their later period of development beginning with the Kaṭha, show traces of the doctrines which we find in the Sāṃkhya, such as the evolution of principles, and the drawing up of classes of principles. The Upaniṣads, however, differ essentially from the Sāṃkhya in the fact that they definitely accept either the doctrine of the absolute in its pure form, as does the Kaṭha, or the doctrine in a theistic form, as does the Śvetāśvatara. There is, in detail, in the Sāṃkhya little that cannot be found in the Upaniṣads in some place or other: not only the doctrine of the Guṇas but also that of the Tanmātras can be found there, and the work of the Sāṃkhya in large measure evidently takes the form of systematizing and developing of ideas which were not the creation of the Sāṃkhya, but which required to be put into a definite system. Indeed, in one sense, the Sāṃkhya must be treated as one of the early attempts to systematize and reduce to order the somewhat confused mass of speculation found in the Upaniṣads, the characteristic feature of the systematization being the attention paid to order and the principle of development.