The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c9.10

c9.10

There is nothing to contradict this hypothesis, though also nothing to establish it, in the four or five citations known of Vārṣagaṇya:† it has been suggested,‡ on the ground that one of these citations is in verse and the rest in prose, that we must distinguish two Ṣaṣṭitantras, of which the one sets out the doctrine of Sāṃkhya-Yoga and the other that of the Sāṃkhya, the former being composed in verse and the latter in prose. In favour of this hypothesis, however, there is no evidence of any kind available, unless it be considered that the assumption of two different texts would best explain the claim made that the Sāṃkhya Kārikā includes the whole meaning of the Ṣaṣṭitantra, but it is unnecessary to press this point. The claim is not made by Īśvarakṛṣṇa himself, and it was open for a later hand to hold that the essential doctrines of the Sāṃkhya were fully set out by Īśvarakṛṣṇa, even if he omitted those portions of the doctrines of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga school which were definitely theistic. This view is confirmed by the fact that the succession of the doctrine is asserted in the first of the verses added to the text* to have been from Kapila to Āsuri and then to Pañcaśikha, for the evidence available regarding that teacher shows him, as we have seen, to have represented the Sāmkhya-Yoga, not the atheistic Sāmkhya school.†