The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c9.9

c9.9

all likelihood to be identified with Īśvarakṛṣṇa,* the re-writing of a work attributed to Vṛṣagaṇa or Varṣagaṇa. The term “re-writing” seems to have been actually justified, in view of the contents of the Ṣaṣṭitantra as sketched in the *Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā*, and of the fact that the Ṣaṣṭitantra was evidently a manual of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga, and not of the Sāṃkhya in its atheistical form, and it is a reasonable conjecture that the origin of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā was due to an effort to set out in an authoritative form, in order to confute the doctrine of the Buddhists, a Brahmanical system which equally dispensed with the conception of God, but which avoided the difficulties attending the Buddhist denial of the reality both of an external world and of the soul.