The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c8.6

c8.6

In the epic the relation of Sāṃkhya and Yoga is precisely as in the Upaniṣads: the two stand side by side as philosophy and religion, as theory and practice, and some details of the Yoga practise, as given, show how much the system had advanced in the direction in which it appears in the Yoga Sūtra. But there appears a distinct tendency to ascribe to the Yoga, as opposed to the Sāṃkhya, a twenty-sixth principle, a perfectly enlightened spirit with which the individual spirit is really identical. The Sāṃkhya is resolutely without an Īśvara, but the Yoga has an Īśvara, who is identified with Brahman, who is here a supreme spirit into which the individual spirit is resolved, having been in essence a part of the absolute spirit which multiplied itself. The end of Yoga is in accordance with this view, the vision of the one true self (vi, 30, 10, 12; xiv, 19, 17-19), but it is also represented in more accurate agreement with the Sāṃkhya in its atheistic form as an isolation of the spirit from matter (xii, 306, 16, 17; 316, 14ff). From the former point of view it is not difficult to see the development of the meaning of devotion to God, which it often has in the *Bhagavadgītā*, or the further sense in that text, especially in chapters three and five, of action without hope of reward or desire of reward.