The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.55

c7.55

It is now clear in what way we must regard the Sāmkhya of the epic. It is not a blurred version of the classical Sāmkhya, nor is there any reason to believe that the classical Sāmkhya had already been excogitated by this period. On the other hand, it is not a Sāmkhya which recognizes an absolute, and merely denies a personal creator: it is, apart from efforts made by the epic to torture it into more orthodox pantheism, a system which denies an absolute, and asserts instead a multiplicity of individual souls, but in the epic, as far as we can judge, it is still without some of the more characteristic of its minor doctrines, and has not achieved the completeness and, subject to its main conceptions, clarity of outline which mark its classical form.