The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c9.1

c9.1

In the last verse of the *Sāṃkhya Kārikā* it is expressly stated that that compendium of the Sāṃkhya system contains the substance of the whole Ṣaṣṭitantra, omitting only the illustrative stories and the discussions of the views of other philosophies. The verse is not original, it being agreed that the text of Īśvarakṛṣṇa terminated at verse 69, but there is no reason to doubt the correctness of the version of fact given in it. It is, however, not clear that the term Ṣaṣṭitantra represents, as has been suggested by Garbe* a special work: on the contrary the context and the wording of the verse suggest that Ṣaṣṭitantra is a term for the Sāṃkhya philosophy as a system of sixty principles. This, moreover, is the sense in which the expression was taken by the *Rājavārttika* as cited by Vācaspati. According to this account the sixty referred to are the fifty Bhāvas of the Sāṃkhya system, together with a set of ten fundamental principles, stated as the reality, unity, and purposefulness of Prakṛti, its difference from spirit and its action for the sake of spirit, the plurality of spirits, their distinction from and connection with Prakṛti, the evolution of the other principles, and the inactivity of spirit, an order of topics which may have been rendered incoherent by the exigencies of the verse. The explanation is older than the *Rājavārttika*, for it is found in the Chinese version of the commentary on the *Sāṃkhya Kārikā* made by Paramārtha in the sixth century A.D. But despite its antiquity, the explanation of the number is open to the criticism that it confounds two different principles of division: the Bhāvas should be included under the Mūlikārthas. This seems to have been realized even in the tradition of the school, for Nārāyaṇatīrtha in his commentary on the Sāṃkhya Kārikā gives as the ten required to make up the sixty not the fundamental principles, but spirit, Prakṛti, intelligence, individuation, the three Guṇas, the Tanmātras, senses, and gross matter, an enumeration which is clearly arbitrary and unjustifiable.