The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.8

c7.8

On the other hand, beside this enumeration of twenty-five principles, which entirely declines to recognize the existence of any personal deity and recognizes a multitude of individual spirits, there stands a view which adds a twenty-sixth principle. When the spirit realizes its distinction from nature, and attains enlightenment, it, as free from the Guṇas, recognizes nature as possessing the Guṇas and unspiritual, and it becomes one with the absolute, thus attaining its own true self, free from empiric reality, unageing and immortal. In this condition, as all duality has disappeared, the spirit ceases to have knowledge, which is essentially a result of multiplicity. From this point of view also it is possible to give an answer to the insistent problem of the number of souls, and to overcome the discrepancy between the views of multiplicity and of unity. The souls so long as they are in union with nature are numerous, but as soon as they realize their distinction from nature, they fall back into the twenty-sixth principle, which is the inner self of all corporeal beings, the onlooker, free from the Guṇas, which can be seen by no one who is connected with the Guṇas (xii, 350, 25, 26; 351, 2-4). The holders of this view represent the Yoga of the epic, as the maintainers of the twenty-five principles alone represent the Sāṃkhya school. The statement is several times made that the two schemes lead to one end and are not fundamentally different, but this claim is made only from the point of view of the Yoga, and its inaccuracy is expressly shown by the discussion in xii, 300, where the differences of the two systems are found to lie in the fact that the Sāṃkhya disowns an Īśvara, while the Yoga accepts one; and the Sāṃkhya relies on reasoning, while the Yoga relies on the direct perception of the devotee. This passage is of importance also in showing the original force of the terms Sāṃkhya and Yoga: the first must refer not merely to the enumeration of principles but to reflective reasoning, while Yoga denotes religious practices, and in special the striving after the ideal of freedom by means of the adoption of various devices to secure mental exaltation and the severance of mind from things of sense.