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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7: § 7. Māyā and Prakṛti—Illusion and Nature

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7

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§ 7. Māyā and Prakṛti—Illusion and Nature

(a) Illusion

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In the doctrine of Yājñavalkya we have seen the tendency of the Upaniṣads to assert over again, and in still more emphatic terms, the unity of the world, which the poets of the Rigveda already foreshadowed, and to deduce from it the conclusion that the world is nothing that is real in the full sense of the word, since everything in it is not ultimately to be regarded as having a truth of its own. In what sense, then, can the empiric world be said to exist? This Yājñavalkya leaves vague, but in his exposition to Maitreyī of the doctrine that after death there is no consciousness he uses terms to which later at least great weight was attached. A duality is necessary, he argued, for one to see another, smell another, hear another, and so forth, and in death no such duality is present; the phrase,⁴ however, which he uses in this contention is ‘where there is a duality as it were (*iva*)’, and it may be deduced, not unfairly, from the addition of the qualification that he was not prepared to admit as absolutely certain the existence of the duality. Later in the Upaniṣad⁵ we have similar wording, ‘when there seems to be another’, the same particle being used. Here again we cannot simply ignore the qualification; to do so is as one-sided as to ascribe to it the value of a definite assertion of the unreality or illusory character of the universe. What we have is the germ of the illusion theory.

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⁴ ii. 4. 14.

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⁵ iv. 3. 31. Oldenberg (*Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 344) unduly minimizes the essence of *iva*.

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A further passage which has been adduced in this connexion is the declaration of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad¹ regarding the modifications of the three fundamental constituents of being, fire, water, food; just as all that is made of clay, copper, or iron, is only a modification, a verbal expression (*vācārambhaṇa*), a mere name, the reality being clay, copper, or iron, so all things can be reduced to the three primary forms of reality. Further, all reality, it is clearly indicated, is reducible to reality only, all things being mere modifications, &c. In Deussen’s view² we have here the first open assertion of the unreality of the universe, a doctrine which shortly afterwards was to be realized by Parmenides in the famous declaration:

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¹ vi. 1. 3 ff.

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² *Sechzig Upanishad’s*², p. 156.

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τῷ πάντʼ ὄνομʼ ἔσται
ὅσσα βροτοὶ κατέθεντο πεποιθότες εἶναι ἀληθῆ
γίγνεσθαί τε καὶ ὄλλυσθαι,

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and later by Spinoza in his doctrine of modes of the one substance, God. The alternative view³ is to regard the whole as frankly realistic; the name is not a mere name in the sense of disguising a reality; on the contrary it serves to mark out a reality, just as the phrase *nāma-rūpa* can be used to designate a concrete individual made up of intellectual and other faculties and matter. In this case we have a doctrine frankly pantheistic, but not of illusion. The difficulty of deciding is increased by the uncertainty of the correct rendering of the text, which Deussen interprets as directly asserting that ‘change is a mere matter of words, a simple name’, treating the words *vācārambhaṇaṁ vikāro nāmadheyam* as a distinct sentence, instead—as is possible—of taking it as a predicate description, ‘a matter of words, a change, a simple name’, and it would be unwise to draw any far-reaching conclusion from the passage.

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³ S. Schayer, *Mahāyānistische Erlösungslehre*, p. 14. The sense of *vācārambhaṇa* (of dubious formation) is uncertain; cf. Oldenberg, p. 343.

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We find also in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad⁴ in a verse which occurs with slight variation in the Kaṭha,⁵ a distinct assertion that there is no diversity and that a failure to realize this fact is the source of repeated death. The Īçā emphatically demands that the universe be merged in God, and, moreover, denies becoming and passing away, thus condemning the doctrine of the reality of change; this at least is Deussen’s interpretation,⁶ though it is open to argue that the real sense is merely that the absolute stands above becoming and passing away, which it transcends. In the late Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad⁷ we find the comparison of the absolute with the spark which, made to revolve, creates apparently a fiery circle, an idea which is taken up and expanded by Gauḍapāda in the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, and which undoubtedly is consistent with the conception of the illusory nature of empirical reality. In other cases adduced by Deussen¹ there is no need to suspect any idea of the world as unreal, the frequent assertion,² that with the knowledge of the self all is known, does not exclude the reality of what is derived from the self; the reality of the absolute may be contrasted³ with empirical reality, which is styled real by man, without making the latter an illusion; when the Aitareya⁴ asserts that the universe is founded in consciousness and guided by it, it assumes its reality, not its merely apparent existence, and, if the elements of being rest on the consciousness and it on the Prāṇa,⁵ we need not suspect any lack of reality in them.

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⁴ iv. 4. 19.

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⁵ iv. 10 f.

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⁶ 1, 12–14; *Sechzig Upanishad’s*², p. 527; cf. Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, iii. 25.

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⁷ vi. 24; Kārikā, iv. 47–52.

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¹ *Phil. of Up.*, pp. 234 ff.

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² BAU. ii. 4. 5, 7–9; CU. vi. 1. 2; Muṇḍ. i. 1. 3.

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³ TU. ii. 6.

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⁴ iii. 3.

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⁵ Kauṣ. iii. 8.

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Far more importance attaches to a late Upaniṣad.⁶ The precise character of the nature of the external world is summed up finally in the doctrine of the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad,⁷ which sees in the world other than the absolute—which it conceives in a theistic way—an illusion, Māyā, a term thus first introduced into the philosophy of the Upaniṣads, to become, through the adoption of this theory of the universe by Gauḍapāda and Çaṅkara, the basis of the orthodox Vedānta system. It would, however, it is clear, be a mistake to regard the new term as being a mere individual innovation of the Çvetāçvatara school without previous preparation in the literary tradition. The idea of the concealment of the divine nature by illusion is seen in the Atharvaveda,⁸ where it is said that the flower of the water, who is Hiraṇyagarbha, the personal Brahman, in whom are fixed gods and men as spokes in a nave, is concealed by illusion, and the illusions of Indra in his many shapes are mentioned in the Rigveda.⁹ It may, therefore, be assumed that the term had obtained considerable favour in philosophic circles,¹⁰ before it appears in the Upaniṣad as a definite doctrine of importance. Still more important is the fact that the term was by no means ill adapted to express the nature of the relation of the empirical world to the real absolute, as it was conceived by Yājñavalkya. It is, of course, impossible to say that the actual term and its precise connotation would have approved themselves to that sage, or to those who evolved the doctrines which passed current under his name: on the other hand, the doctrine is a legitimate and natural development from the principles which he enunciated. They are clearly not to be derived in any reasonable way from a system, which was pantheistic or cosmogonic, and in which, therefore, the assumption that the world was illusory would have been ridiculous. A pantheism and still more a cosmogonism are under the danger of falling to the level of materialism, but not of evoking an illusionism.

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⁶ Oldenberg (*Die Philosophie der Upaniṣhaden*, p. 280) denies the force of this passage, but his doubt seems hypercritical.

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⁷ iv. 10.

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⁸ x. 8. 34.

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⁹ vi. 47. 18; BAU. ii. 5. 19; ÇB. xi. 1. 6. 10.

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¹⁰ *Contra*, Hopkins, JAOS. xxii. 385, 386. Cf. Speyer, *Indische Theosophie*, pp. 123.

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A very different suggestion as to the development of ideas is put forward by Schayer.¹ On this theory the Māyā doctrine comes in as the expression of a conception wholly alien to the normal Brahmanical idea of the regular working of the world, in which nature and the ritual stand in constant parallelism. The Brahman signifies the regular and orderly procedure of the universe; Māyā, on the other hand, introduces the conception of the unregulated, self-determined, intervention of a god; Indra's Māyā in the Rigveda² is the expression of his might, revealed in his great deeds. When, naturally, opposition came into being directed against the Brahmanical conception of the Übermensch whose knowledge makes him ruler of the universe, we find the idea of the necessity of divine intervention as in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,³ and the condemnation by the Īçā⁴ of knowledge as even more unsatisfactory than ignorance, and finally in the Çvetāçvatara⁵ the natural step is taken of ascribing to god the epithet *māyāvin*. The suggestion is ingenious but unconvincing. The Çvetāçvatara certainly does not mean that god is a real creator and that matter is his real creation; the sense of delusion or illusion⁶ is paramount.

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¹ *Mahāyānistische Erlösungslehre*, pp. 22 ff.

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² x. 54. 2; vi. 47. 18. In iv. 16. 9 Schayer treats *ábrahmā* as 'dem brahman feindliche Dasyu', which is impossible.

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³ ii. 23.

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⁴ 9.

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⁵ iv. 10.

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⁶ Schayer's effort (cf. also pp. 42 f.) to establish the doctrine that Māyā is a free creation, not an illusion, is as ingenious as it is unconvincing. There is no evidence that the idea of illusion was unknown to India in connexion with a juggler's work (contrast the stories given *ibid.* pp. 53), and the synonyms of Māyā include such as Gandharvanagara. The idea of Māyā is akin to the product of the juggler in the Ratnāvalī who conjures up the appearance of a fire, into which the king rushes, whereas none exists. Cf. Asaṅga's account in the Sūtrālaṁkāra, as given by Schayer himself (ZII. ii. 103–5), which is perfectly clear as to the unreality of Māyā.

(b) Nature

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While, however, one side of the teaching of the Upaniṣads develops in this brilliant manner, and in the hands of Gauḍapāda and Çaṅkara emerges as the *chef d’œuvre* of the Indian philosophical intellect, another and important scheme of philosophy was growing up, and was destined to exhibit itself, at a period not far distant from the close of the great Upaniṣads, in a living and effective form. The existence of this system as the definite Sāṁkhya of the classical period is not attested until comparatively late: the oldest text-book, the Sāṁkhya Kārikā, may be assigned to about the fourth century A.D.,⁷ and for the earlier form of the system we are reduced to conjectures built on that text, the history of the parallel system of Yoga, and the indications of the epic, which knows well the Sāṁkhya and Yoga systems, but which in regard to its date is so uncertain, that it does not necessarily afford us any information older than that contained in, and to be inferred from, the Sāṁkhya Kārikā itself. Very briefly put,¹ the classical Sāṁkhya system discards entirely the idea of an absolute: it reduces the universe to a multitude of individual subjects, which have nothing true about them save their subjectivity, a subjectivity which has no creative power and is not properly realized at all by having an objective content. On the contrary, it is only by error in any way connected with the existing world, through its fancied connexion with Prakṛti, ‘nature’.

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Through the development of Prakṛti there arises the principle called the great one or intellect, Mahān or Buddhi: the Prakṛti is, therefore, to be regarded as purely unconscious, a conception vaguely analogous to the Aristotelian Hyle, and connected, directly as it would seem, with the older views of the Rigveda and the Brāhmaṇas as to the primitive condition of the universe as a chaos. The development of consciousness must therefore, it would appear, be cosmic, and the Mahān or Buddhi would thus correspond to the Hiraṇyagarbha of the later Upaniṣads and the Vedānta, the spirit which, in the earlier view, appeared on the waters after the creation of the waters by Prajāpati or the Brahman. But at the same time the Buddhi is the first element of the subtle body, the Liṅga, which is the essence of the individual spirit, and which passes through transmigration.

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The Buddhi serves as the basis for the development of the principle of individualism, Ahaṁkāra, from which are derived on the one hand the mind and the ten organs—or rather potentialities or faculties—of sense, five of perception, and five of action, and on the other hand the subtle elements, from which in their turn come the gross elements, though an epic variant gives in lieu the elements and the objects of sense, sound, &c.² The Liṅga, which is perhaps most appropriately called the ‘psychic apparatus’, contains in itself all the elements down to the subtle elements, and even of the gross elements it has the fine parts,³ and it is through it that the individual subject experiences—or rather seems to experience—the facts of this world. The experience is painful and unhappy, even though alleviated by the joys of earth, and the real aim of life is to be rid of the connexion with nature. But that connexion does not really exist: it is only thought to exist by an error and, when this error of ignorance is removed, then the connexion is seen not to exist and ceases to exist, the subject being freed from any connexion with an object, and on the other hand, the Prakṛti is freed from any pain or trouble, since being absolutely unconscious in the absence of subject there is no possibility of its suffering or enjoying anything.

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Strictly speaking, therefore, the spirit is never troubled or suffers anything or enjoys anything: it merely illumines nature, which accordingly suffers, but is set free by the cessation of illumination. But the difference of the result in the two cases is enormous: the subject by ceasing to have an object is emancipated for all time, the Prakṛti in that one case is delivered, but that is a matter of indifference since the infinite number of other souls means that Prakṛti is ever being unrolled for the gaze of the subject and ever is suffering.

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⁷ A later date is usually given (cf. Garbe, *Sāṁkhya und Yoga*, p. 7), but the earlier date is now the most probable; see Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* ii. 256; iii. 452 f.

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¹ In the main I agree with Deussen (*Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii) when he departs from the views of Garbe (*Sāṁkhya-Philosophie* and *Sāṁkhya und Yoga*). The account of Deussen in the *Phil. of Up.* is slightly inaccurate. Cf. my *Sāṁkhya System* (1918, 2nd ed. 1924). Berndl's reconstruction (*Über das Sāṁkhya*) is clearly unhistorical; see below.

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² Cf. O. Strauss, *VOJ.* xxvii. 257 ff.

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³ Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii. 497. This is the only possible or at least natural sense of Sāṁkhya Kārikā 38–41, though this fact is often ignored, and normally the fine parts are treated as if the subtle elements included them. Maitr. vi. 10 may be thus explained instead of being amended. For an attempt to regard *sūkṣma* as *tanmātra*, see Strauss, p. 262.

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The whole theory is one mass of difficult paradoxes, despite its seeming elegance and simplicity of structure. The main basis of the conception, that there is suffering through the connexion of the soul with nature, is contradicted by the fact that there is really no connexion: the suffering is produced by a connexion which does not exist, and is only imagined to exist, but an imagined connexion is no ground for results which a real connexion alone could produce. The relation of the one Prakṛti with the psychical apparatuses which are not conscious except under the illumination of the subject is never clearly explained, or perhaps understood.¹ At best we may endeavour to conceive the position that the connexion—which, however, as we have seen, is not really existent—of the spirit with Prakṛti, as a single undifferentiated unit, produces a primal consciousness (Buddhi), which develops under the influence of the individuation (Ahaṁkāra) of the spirit an individual form or psychic apparatus, on which is based the life of the individual. In that case the conception of a cosmic development of individuation and the other things would be in the main a mistaken complement of the system which is not essential to it. But there is the grave objection to this theory that already in the Sāṁkhya Kārikā the paternal and maternal portions of the gross elements are supposed by the author to fall back into and be picked up out of Prakṛti by the psychic apparatus in the case of death and rebirth, and not as would be logical and proper, if the development of Prakṛti were individual from the point of Buddhi onwards, recalled into and evolved from the subtle elements, while the Prabhūtas, which represent the material world, are made to stand over against the selves as an independent real world.

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¹ Cf. Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 261 ff. Jacobi's account (*Die Entwicklung der Gottesidee bei den Indern*, pp. 30 f.) leaves the obscurity unaffected.

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It is, however, unnecessary to consider further the contradictions of the Sāṁkhya, and it is only requisite to note that in the nature of Prakṛti there is supposed to be contained a triad of constituent factors, Guṇas, literally 'threads' rather than 'determinant qualities', which in the passive condition of Prakṛti are in a quiescent state of equilibrium, but which in the process of evolution develop differently in the several psychic apparatuses, producing, therefore, the very varied characters of men and of life. These factors are Sattva, the light, the intellectual principle, Rajas, the active and emotional principle, and Tamas, the dark and gloomy principle. The terms are wholly indefinite and unphilosophical, and the use made of them in practice is mainly psychical, whereas, as constituents of Prakṛti, they ought to have received some different cosmic sense, such as that of conditional being, energy, and inertia, suggested by Hopkins.¹ Their importance in the system, however, cannot be underestimated, and it is significant that, while Çaṅkara rejects definitely the validity of these principles, they are accepted by the later school of Vedānta and interwoven with the Vedānta philosophy.²

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¹ *Great Epic of India*, p. 113, n. 1. See also Garbe, *Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*², pp. 274 ff.

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² E.g. in the Vedāntasāra, as pointed out by Col. Jacobs in his edition, and by Deussen in his translation (*Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii); Keith, *Sāṁkhya System*, chap. viii.

(c) The Origin of the Sāṁkhya and Buddhism

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The question inevitably arises in what manner these views are to be connected with those of the Upaniṣads,³ and the further problem must be mentioned of the origin of Buddhism, which has been traced to the Sāṁkhya. The Buddhist system differs in one essential from the Sāṁkhya: it abolishes, as does that system, the principle of an absolute, with which the individual souls are identified, and it goes further than that system in seeking to deny the existence of soul. The latter aberration need not, however, be taken very seriously: the Buddhists, being determined believers in transmigration, had to produce an entity⁴ which would transmigrate; the entity provided does not differ, in any very essential way, from the ordinary view in India of a transmigrating soul, and certainly is philosophically inferior to the ordinary conception, unsatisfactory as that in itself is.

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³ Cf. Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, pp. 202 ff.; *GN.* 1917, pp. 218 ff.; Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, chap. vii.

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⁴ Walleser, *Die philosophische Grundlage des älteren Buddhismus*, pp. 77 ff.; Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, chap. ix.

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No Upaniṣad attains the point of view of the Sāṁkhya system, and it is therefore only possible to indicate the mode in which the conception of the absolute tended to fade away and to leave the individual spirits confronted with nature. The essential feature of the Sāṁkhya is the evolutionary series, and the name Sāṁkhya, ‘examination’, ‘calculation’, or ‘description by enumeration of constituents’,⁵ rather than a mere counting, suggests that the philosophy owed its importance to its insistence on the principle of careful examination of the elements of the process of development from the absolute. Now in the Upaniṣads the first case in which the order of evolution from the absolute is stated with precision—even then incomplete—is in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,⁶ where we find that in the carrying out of meditation, Yoga, in order to reach the absolute, the objects are merged in the senses, the senses in the mind, the mind in the intellect, Buddhi, the intellect in the great self, which is also then merged in the undiscriminated, Avyakta, described as the calm self, and that again in the spirit, Puruṣa, which is the absolute. The similitude of these views to the series of development of the Sāṁkhya is obvious: the separation of the Mahān Ātmā, the great self, and Buddhi is a distinction which it is difficult to appreciate in the Kaṭha and would naturally disappear on further reflection, with the abandonment of a cosmic Ātman, while the interposition of the undiscriminated, which corresponds to the position of the old primitive material or waters of the Brāhmaṇas, between the spirit and the intellect, corresponds also precisely to the position of Prakṛti in the Sāṁkhya system, except for the fact that the Kaṭha is still monistic, and still regards the spirit as an absolute, whence nature is derived, the individual spirit being identified more or less clearly with the highest spirit. But it must have been an obvious, if no less a very important, step when it was decided by some thinker that there was no necessity to imagine the unity of all the spirits in one. *Ex hypothesi* the spirits were all identical with the one spirit, and, therefore, each must have the same creative power to produce the undiscriminated as the supreme spirit. To what end then to feign a supreme spirit? Moreover, from another point of view the postulating of a supreme spirit would appear unsound: the enormous variety of individual experience of life, the plain facts of every-day existence, show that there is not one spirit merely but many.¹ The theory of unity of all spirits is difficult and confusing, and the obvious refuge from these difficulties is to admit that each spirit is a separate entity. The relation of the spirits and Prakṛti would follow at once, when this was accepted: the doctrine of Yājñavalkya was clear that the self was merely the knowing subject: clearly, therefore, as the self was the subject only, Prakṛti cannot be produced from the spirit in any material sense: it is the independent object merely of spirit.²

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⁵ Accepted by Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 351, n. 129.

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⁶ iii. 10–13; vi. 7–11. The alternative view that the Sāṁkhya is of independent origin, based on an independent analysis of consciousness, and that the Kaṭha represents a compromise may be mentioned (cf. Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 221 ff., for a critique of Garbe's view on this point). But it is not possible to ignore the obvious fact that the Puruṣa of the Sāṁkhya is merely the Ātman made many.

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¹ Cf. Sāṁkhya Kārikā 18.

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² The Ātman in KU. iii. 3 f. is the lord of the chariot, who is essentially a mere spectator, for intellect is the driver, mind the reins, and the senses the horses. The absence of the Ahaṁkāra in KU. can hardly be accidental as Oldenberg (*op. cit.*, p. 231) suggests. For its frequent omission in the epic, see Hopkins, *Great Epic of India*, p. 133.

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It is important to note the real similarity between the self in the view of the Yājñavalkya of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and that of the Sāṁkhya; both are absolutely without quality or activity, completely inactive, the capacity of knowing without content; both, we may fairly say, represent bare abstractions which could never as such be real. If the self of Yājñavalkya is wholly apart from empirical existence and knowledge, the same thing really applies to the spirit of the Sāṁkhya, for it is not really in contact with matter. In the Buddhism of the Sarvāstivādins³ we find the same view of Vijñāna, which remains wholly apart from real connexion with the object, being, like it, merely a momentary flashing wholly transitory and uncaused. Naturally in all three cases some effort must be made to explain the connexion of this subjectivity and the object which makes its potentiality concrete knowledge, and equally naturally at this point in all three systems we have a lacuna, which is filled up by unintelligible assertions, the Buddhists resorting to a relation of Sārūpya, ‘co-ordination’ or ‘co-relation’, which is found also in the Yogabhāṣya¹ of Vyāsa as the mode of bridging over the gulf between knower and knowledge.

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³ Cf. Stcherbatsky, *The Central Conception of Buddhism*, pp. 63 f.; Garbe, *Sâṁkhya-Philosophie*², pp. 358 ff.

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¹ i. 4; ii. 23.

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If we seek to find in the older Upaniṣads a more direct connexion with the doctrines of the Sāṁkhya than the conception of the self in Yājñavalkya, then the most obvious parallel, in addition to the scheme of evolution in the Kaṭha, is the passage in the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad² in which a list of ten senses is opposed to a corresponding number of objects, and the presence of intellect, Prajñā, is said to be essential for every kind of sense-knowledge, including the activity of mind in respect of thought and desire. We have here the prototype of the curious feature in the Sāṁkhya of the senses and mind as alike only potential until reflected in some manner in Puruṣa. The more common idea of the senses being powerless without mind lies doubtless at the back of this more advanced conception, a fact which illustrates the remarkable dependence of the Sāṁkhya on older ideas.

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² iii. 5 ff. See below, § 8.

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A certain degree of parallelism to the Kaṭha evolution series is present in doctrine of the mode in which on death according to the Chāndogya Upaniṣad speech (the eye, the ear, and the other organs are presumably here typified by speech) enters the mind, the mind the breath, the breath the brilliance of fire (the other two elements of the Chāndogya, water and earth, may be included), and that the supreme deity. In deep sleep, again, we have a series in the Praçna Upaniṣad³ where we may understand that the five gross, the five subtle, elements, the organs of sense, all enter the mind, it the intellect, it individuation,⁴ it thought, it brilliance, it breath, and it the self, but this latter passage is too vague to be of much importance save as showing how prevalent were these efforts to find the order of evolution.

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³ iv. 7.

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⁴ According to Oldenberg (*Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 226, n. 1) it means ‘ “das Ichmachen,” d. h. das Ichsagen und Betätigen der Ichheit,’ rather than ‘der Ichmacher’. The genesis of this entity may be connected with the speculations of the Upaniṣads on deep sleep, in which individuality disappears; Heimann, *Die Tiefschlafspekulation der alten Upaniṣaden* (1922), pp. 13 f.

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In the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad⁵ we find an expression of the order of development commencing from the absolute, as all-knowing, the second element being food, an expression perhaps for the undiscriminated, the coming breath, which may correspond with Hiraṇyagarbha, mind, truth, the worlds, and actions. The more precise similarity of the doctrine of the Muṇḍaka⁶ to that of the Kaṭha is maintained by Hertel,⁷ who has endeavoured to reconstruct an original text of this Upaniṣad by conjecture from that which, as he holds, based on a single manuscript which was far from correct, has been preserved to us by Çaṅkara. Reconstructions of this kind seldom permit of any satisfactory result to others than their author, and there is always the fundamental difficulty, apart from minor points, whether the incoherence of thought which gives rise to the reconstruction is not, as most probably in the case of the Bhagavadgītā, due to the author, and not the result of interpolation. If, however, we omit the whole of ii. 2, and iii. 1. 4–10 and 2. 3 and 9, we obtain the doctrine that, as in the Skambha hymn of the Atharvaveda,¹ which affords part of the material of the Upaniṣad, the highest thing in the world is regarded as personal, from which there emanates the Brahman and whatever else exists. On this view the ultimate fate of the soul on its return is not absorption in the Brahman but union with Puruṣa, the world of Brahman serving merely as the place of those who fully perform the sacrificial ritual in the mode approved by the Muṇḍaka. The other portions, however, of the text, which cannot with any assurance be ascribed to working over, definitely identify the highest principle with the Brahman, adopting the regular identification of the Brahman and the Ātman, and treating the final result to be aimed at as the recognition of the identity of the Brahman and the Ātman. Moreover, even in the verses which are spared by Hertel, we find hints contradicting his theory of a simple doctrine; thus in i. 1. 7 all is stated to arise from the imperishable (*akṣara*), while in ii. 1. 2 we find the personal highest being declared to be above the imperishable, and in ii. 1. 10 the Brahman and Puruṣa are directly identified, unless we hold with Hertel that there is a lacuna in the text for which we have no other ground. It is significant also that the interpolator has to be credited with iii. 2. 3, which adopts the Kaṭha² doctrine of salvation by the favour of the lord, so that we have to assume that, on the one hand, he altered the personal aspect of the Upaniṣad by insisting on the primacy of the impersonal Brahman, while, on the other, he deliberately added one of the most personal touches in the shape of the doctrine of grace. This is plainly incredible, and we may safely assume that, while the author worked on an older idea of a personal *prius* as in the Atharvaveda, and accepted the doctrine of grace from the Kaṭha, he himself adopted the Brahman standpoint.³

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⁵ i. 1. 8, 9; ii. 1. 2, 3.

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⁶ vi. 10.

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⁷ *Muṇḍaka-Upaniṣad* (1924).

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¹ x. 7.

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² ii. 23.

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³ To certain of Hertel’s metrical views the strongest exception must be taken. To carry out his rule that the first syllable of a dissyllabic, and the second of a trisyllabic, middle part of the Triṣṭubh is short he has to argue for *oṣădhyaḥ*, *purăstād*, *paramam* (*sāmyam*) as two shorts, *sŭriasya*, *kavayŏ yānti*, and *agrăhyam*; he turns *-āni* and *-eṣu* into single final syllables, and postulates a great number of quite impossible elisions of short vowels. These, added to text alterations, enable him to reform the metre, but they do not justify his severe censure of Deussen for his perfectly just strictures on the metre of the text as we have it. Every metrical irregularity could thus be removed from any text, and Hertel’s procedure is specially inconsistent, since he objects to alteration of Prākritic irregularities in grammar, which might equally well be changed, if the Upaniṣad is to be rewritten. But metre may be excused in a philosopher.

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The resemblance of the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad⁴ to the Sāṁkhya is of a different character from that of the Kaṭha; it is due in all likelihood to direct Sāṁkhya influence at a much later date. In this Upaniṣad we find an answer attempted to the question why and how the absolute self enters the world and appears in individual form. Prajāpati, existing alone, had no joy; therefore he created offspring as inanimate, and to enjoy them he enters with the breaths into them, thus animating them, and then by means of the organs of sense and action and the mind he has joy of them. But the absolute self, Prajāpati, remains wholly unaffected, though an apparent actor; action actually belongs to the Bhūtātman, or elemental soul, which overcome by the fruits of action passes to a good or evil birth, and is merged in existence, while the true self remains unaffected like the drop of water on a lotus leaf. The elemental soul is overcome by the qualities or factors of nature, Prakṛti, and thus conceives the erroneous impression of individuality; thinking ‘This is I’ and ‘That is mine’ he binds himself as a bird with a snare.¹ But the pure self is not without responsibility for this evil state, for a definite though obscure statement attributes it to the fact that the elemental self is overpowered by the inner Puruṣa.² The composite character of the text reveals itself in the further conception of the self as the enjoyer, while the elemental soul is made out to be the body, which it enjoys.³ We find also the three factors named and described at length, essentially as psychic, and Prajāpati as affected by Sattva, goodness, as a factor is equated with Viṣṇu, as affected by Rajas, activity, with Brahman, and as affected with Tamas, dullness, with Rudra. It is characteristic that the Upaniṣad shows equally knowledge of the development of Yoga doctrine, though its scheme of stages of exercises has six in lieu of the classical eight.⁴ Further, it is markedly pessimistic, the evils of empirical existence being set out with an elaboration of comparison and detail such as is only to be paralleled in the Buddhist texts, which it doubtless knew in some early form. It shows an advanced psychology, for it recognizes the function of individuation, though not as in the Sāṁkhya in its classical form, as placed between intellect and mind and as the source of the latter, but as following on mind and intellect, without any assertion of derivation, and it conceives of the existence of the subtle body, or Liṅga, though it is not clear whether it actually asserts that the Liṅga possesses not merely the fine elements but also the gross elements as part of its composition.⁵ Moreover, the question is actually posed whether it is merely the factors that are really subject to bondage, or the self; the classical Sāṁkhya asserts definitely, though not always consistently, that the self is not really bound, but this is not the view accepted by the Upaniṣad, which insists on the bondage of the self, exhibited in the actions of intellect, mind, and individuation, and promises release when the sense organs, mind, and intellect have ceased to function.⁶

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⁴ Cf. E. A. Welden, AJP. xxxv. 32 ff.

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¹ ii. 3 ff.; iii. 1 f.

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² iii. 3.

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³ vi. 10.

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⁴ vi. 18.

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⁵ Cf. above, p. 533, n. 3. Deussen (*Sechzig Upanishad’s*², p. 337, n. 2) amends; Oldenberg (*op. cit.*, p. 355) prefers to see in Viçeṣa in Maitr. vi. 10 a designation of the subtle elements, not as in the epic (Strauss, VOJ. xxvii. 265), where it applies to the effects of the gross elements.

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⁶ vi. 30.

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For the doctrine of the Guṇas or factors there is obvious a parallel in the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad,¹ which has on the ground of its content often been needlessly supposed to postdate the Sāṁkhya system, a view which cannot be supported on any cogent ground.² In it, we are told, that one she-goat, red, white, and black in hue, produces many young like herself: one he-goat leaps on her in love, the other abandons her, after associating with her. The idea of the relation of nature to the many spirits seems obviously expressed in this metaphor. But it is clear that the red, white, and black colours carry us beyond doubt to the Chāndogya Upaniṣad,³ where everything in the universe is declared to be connected with the three elements, the red of fire, the white of water, and the black of food, probably an allusion to earth, this being the order of creation when the absolute first produced heat, thence water, then earth, in the shape of food. It is not necessary to suppose that in the Çvetāçvatara there is anything more meant than the three elements: the transformation of these to psychic forces, which is prominent in the Sāṁkhya, though the other conception is implied in the ascription of the three to Prakṛti, would then be a later development, which in the Upaniṣads occurs first in the Maitrāyaṇīya.⁴

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¹ iv. 5.

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² Hopkins (JAOS. xxii. 380–7) insists that *sāṁkhyayogādhigamyam* in vi. 13 must refer to the system of the epic Sāṁkhya-Yoga, but this is *not* in the least proved; see Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii. 15. Moreover it is difficult to reconcile Hopkins' view with his date of the 4th cent. (ibid. p. 336) for this Upaniṣad. Kapila in v. 2 is clearly mythical (cf. iv. 12), not the teacher.

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³ vi. 4.

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⁴ iii. 5; v. 2.

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It is clear, therefore, that the seeds of the Sāṁkhya lie in the philosophy of the Upaniṣads: the conception of the deliverance from the round of rebirth and misery is wholly absurd on the Sāṁkhya theory of the universe, which denies any real connexion of spirit and nature,⁵ and, therefore, makes any suffering impossible, since without connexion there is no illumination, and without illumination of nature by spirit no suffering of any kind. In the doctrine of Māyā there is an illusion which is perfectly real though an illusion, and knowledge can dispel it and its products. But the ignorance which must be dispelled in the Sāṁkhya is the belief in a connexion which does not exist, and the Sāṁkhya philosophy never suggests that the misery of the universe is due to the belief: it is only possible because of the connexion: ignorance does not produce the connexion: therefore logically there is no misery. The mere fact of this illogicality alone and the marked pessimism of the system would testify to its derivative character.

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⁵ This leads Speyer (*Indische Theosophie*, p. 113) to the conjecture that an originally materialistic system has been transformed in an external method idealistically. But this theory rests on no solid basis and ignores the essential link of connexion with the Upaniṣads. So with Jacobi, *Festschrift Kuhn*, pp. 37 ff., and Berndl, *Über das Sāṁkhya*. For a later view of Jacobi, *see below*.

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A somewhat divergent view of the development of the Sāṁkhya is suggested by Dahlmann, who in several works⁶ has insisted on the view that the epic reveals to us the oldest stage of the Sāṁkhya philosophy and not as maintained by Hopkins,¹ and in some degree² Deussen among others, an eclectic philosophical view. Dahlmann’s position is obscured by its connexion with his ingenious but unsuccessful effort to prove that the epic is in itself a unity consciously produced at a period before Pāṇini, a thesis which rests on absolutely no cogent or even plausible evidence.³ Nor have we any tolerable ground for the view that the system of Sāṁkhya as first evolved under that name was other than atheistic, in the sense not merely of denying an Īçvara which in a degree Dahlmann would admit, but also of denying an absolute. Further, it is most natural to hold that the Sāṁkhya-Yoga of the epic is a definite theistic modification of the Sāṁkhya, which is more really theistic and absolutist than the later Yoga, in which as a system attention is directed towards the Yoga practices and not so largely to the theistic aspect.⁴ But the rejection of Dahlmann’s theories in these respects does not deprive of value his theory of the development of Indian philosophy. He argues that the first stage must be looked for in a view which is in close touch with the expressions of the Brāhmaṇas as to the process of creation, in which there is more or less consciously assumed to be some material beyond the actual creator, and he points out that in the early speculations of the Upaniṣads we learn of the Ātman on the one hand, but also of what is not the Ātman, which is full of misery. In more philosophic form this appears as the doctrine of the Brahman, beside which stands Prakṛti, into which is emptied the whole of the ordinary world of thought and action, while the Brahman remains outside all contact with thought, affording the end, Nirvāṇa, which is to be attained by the extinguishing of all kinds of feeling, by the negation of everything empirical. From this dualistic basis he deduces on the one hand the Sāṁkhya and on the other the Vedānta of the illusionist school. The former view is arrived at by a determined effort to make logical the process of development in final release: it became intolerable to contemplate that there was really only one Ātman, which, by connexion in some unexplained way with Prakṛti, produced the innumerable separate spirits through the action of Buddhi and of Ahaṁkāra, since release became meaningless, and it, therefore, assumed that there were innumerable Ātmans, whose derivation from the primitive Ātman was proved by the fact that they retained the characteristics of omnipresence and infinity, which belong properly only to the one Ātman and which, applied to all, lead to absurdity. On the other hand, the Vedāntins laid such stress on the unity of the universe that they denied the existence as real of Prakṛti, contenting themselves with the idle doctrine of illusion, which was clearly inconsistent with their own principle of unity. Moreover, he argues, materialism was a natural product of the early view, since it really emptied the Ātman of all empirical reality, and gave such reality to Prakṛti, and thus encouraged the view that matter by itself was able to produce the universe, while on the other hand by its subjectivism in the doctrine of the Ātman encouragement was given to scepticism, and finally to the philosophic indifference of early Buddhism.

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⁶ *Das Mahābhārata als Epos und Rechtsbuch*; *Nirvāṇa*; *Genesis des Mahābhārata*; *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie* (1895–1902).

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¹ *Great Epic of India*, pp. 97 ff.

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² *Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii. 21 ff.; cf. Jacobi, *SBA.* 1911, p. 738; Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* i. 376, n. 1.

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³ See references in Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* i. 263.

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⁴ Tuxen, *Yoga*, pp. 56 ff.

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Apart from the fact that there is really no good ground for calling the first stage Sāṁkhya,¹ and that the denial of illusionism cannot be accepted as absolutely true of the Upaniṣads, Dahlmann’s theory has the merit of directing attention to a real aspect of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads and the epic: there is a real affinity between the process by which Buddhi and Ahaṁkāra are deemed to produce the world of experience and the older myths of Prajāpati and his desire, Kāma, as playing their parts in the creation of the world, while still further back we have the picture of Puruṣa as at once the material and the spiritual source of the world. But it would be a mistake to accept the view that the aspect insisted upon by Dahlmann was really either the sole aspect or the chief aspect of philosophy in the period of the later Upaniṣads. In particular Dahlman goes clearly too far in stressing the independent character of the evolution of Prakṛti, and in his insistence on the nature of Īçvara as the world soul arising from Prakṛti alone, thus placing Prakṛti beside the Ātman as in itself accounting for the whole of the empirical world. It must never be forgotten, as Dahlmann himself elsewhere² recognizes, that the spiritual side of existence is essentially conditioned by the fact that in Prakṛti the Ātman is present as the observer, a fact which in the Sāṁkhya is preserved and emphasized in the insistence on the doctrine that but for the connexion of Puruṣa and Prakṛti there would be no cognition or feeling of any kind. When due weight is accorded to this fact, we reach fairly closely to a conception which is not far different from that of Bādarāyaṇa as the normal, not unique, doctrine of the Upaniṣads: there is an absolute on which matter is dependent indeed, but not illusory, and individual souls which in the Upaniṣads, but not in the Brahma Sūtra, at the end are resolved into the absolute, but which are not in themselves illusory, being, we may assume, the necessary result of the coexistence of the absolute and matter, and therefore endowed, until united with the absolute through knowledge, with a certain relative but real independence.³

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¹ Oldenberg (*Die Kultur der Gegenwart*², I. v. 34) does not deny the possibility of this view; cf. *Buddha*⁵, p. 68, n. 1.

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² *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, pp. 80 ff., where he tends to exaggerate, as usual, the Prakṛti side of the compound Jīva.

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³ Cf. also Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. iii. 259 ff.

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The real question is in a sense whether we can legitimately call Sāṁkhya a system which accepts an absolute, and differs from the normal Upaniṣad doctrine essentially in the attention given to derivation from the absolute of Prakṛti and individuals. The best defence of this suggestion is that of Oldenberg,⁴ who faces the fundamental difficulty that a system with an absolute in the epic is not normally Sāṁkhya, and that the twenty-five principles of the Sāṁkhya of the epic seem in their correspondence with the classical school to negate the presence among them of the absolute. Oldenberg’s suggestion, that the twenty-fifth principle includes both the absolute and its manifestations as individual, is ingenious, but hardly convincing, and as a matter of terminology and historic fact it seems unwise to employ the term Sāṁkhya as applicable to any system which acknowledges an absolute. The facts of the derivation of the Sāṁkhya above accepted are, of course, not affected by the question of terminology, and in view of the extremely composite nature of epic philosophy we need not be in the least surprised to find a conglomerate of this side of Aupaniṣada views with genuine Sāṁkhya, and the blend which the epic knows as Sāṁkhya-Yoga, and which has the somewhat unfortunate appearance of an effort to reconcile the Upaniṣads and the Sāṁkhya.

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⁴ Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, pp. 206–58, who accepts an epic Sāṁkhya with an absolute as explaining Buddhism (GN. 1917, pp. 218 ff.).

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An interesting and ingenious effort, however, has been made by Professor Edgerton¹ to establish the doctrine that the epic knows nothing of a Sāṁkhya which denies the world soul or an Īçvara, and that in it Sāṁkhya and Yoga do not denote philosophical systems but means of realizing that unity with the world soul, which is the aim of all philosophy in this period which is not materialistic. Sāṁkhya denotes simply reflection—doubtless its primary meaning—and Yoga practical exercises tending to produce the unity desired, the details in the Mokṣadharma showing that a sort of self-hypnosis is aimed at, while in the Gītā the method is that of unselfish normal activity in the position of life in which fate has placed a man. Ingenious as this effort is, the denial of a specific Sāṁkhya doctrine appears, on the whole, untenable. It compels us in the passage xii. 11037 ff. to render the words *anīçvaraḥ kathaṁ mucyet* as ‘how the soul may be saved’, and to hold that in this passage no distinction is being drawn between the views of Sāṁkhya and Yoga, which is to put an intolerable strain upon the language.² Nor does it seem possible in xii. 11408 to render *anīçvaram* applied to the twenty-fifth principle merely as ‘supreme’; the term *īçvara* in the preceding verse makes it clear that a contrast is intended.³ Another reference to the distinctive Sāṁkhya insistence on a multitude of spirits must be seen in xii. 11483,⁴ and the whole matter appears clearly from xii. 13713 ff. In this passage we find two very distinct views set out: the Sāṁkhya and the Yoga accept a multiplicity of souls, while Vyāsa insists that all the souls at bottom rest on the world soul. To endeavour⁵ to explain away this obvious distinction by the theory that the real distinction is between a full and a brief exposition, and not between the views of Kapila and others and of Vyāsa, is as unsatisfactory as the suggestion that *adhyātma* in the description of Kapila’s activities means that he took thought on the supreme soul; the reference is clearly to the soul only. Nor is there anything out of place¹ in the allusion to the Yoga, for on the score of the multiplicity of souls Sāṁkhya and Yoga in their classical forms agree. The effort also to remove the significance of the addition of a twenty-sixth principle in the Yoga on the score that, as Oldenberg² suggested, the new head serves merely to distinguish the souls as released, is clearly a *tour de force*; the twenty-sixth is Īçvara, with whom, indeed, the enlightened soul may be identified.³

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¹ AJP. xlv. 1 ff. Contrast Hopkins, *Great Epic of India*, pp. 104 ff.

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² The meaning must be ‘how can one be saved without a creator?’

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³ Hopkins, *op. cit.*, p. 126.

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⁴ The rendering in AJP. xlv. 24 is certainly impossible.

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⁵ AJP. xlv. 27, n. 29.

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¹ AJP. xlv. 29, n. 31.

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² GN. 1917, p. 237.

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³ Hopkins, *op. cit.*, pp. 134 ff.

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In the very different view of Berndl⁴ the Sāṁkhya system, as we have it in the Kārikā of Īçvarakṛṣṇa and later, is a serious deviation from the true views of Kapila, who may have been the first teacher to express his views in prose. The original doctrine which denied any soul has been recast to meet Brahman prejudices, and has thus lost its definite character. Traces of the older view may be found in the assertion of the Mahābhārata⁵ which gives number and matter, Prakṛti, and twenty-four principles as the essence of the Sāṁkhya. Originally the doctrine recognized only three Guṇas, 'Charactere', whose interactions, themselves uncaused, since cause does not affect these things in themselves, produce the whole empirical world, which is ruled by absolute necessity. The Guṇas are not material, but are capable of mutual attraction, repulsion, and experience, and their interaction results in the formation of complexes (Empfindungszentren), which are selves, but which true knowledge shows are not distinct, eternal, metaphysical entities. But each is conscious of its essential relation to the Guṇas, and this is expressed, subjectively, in the consciousness of transcendence, and, objectively, in the will to live and to maintain one's individuality. Space is an abstraction made by the subject from the relations of things *inter se* and to itself, to which there corresponds only a manifold of heterogeneous sensations of quality, which the subject, by reason of the difference from its own homogeneity, experiences as something without. Time is also an abstraction made by the subject, to which alterations of external and internal conditions correspond, the ground for distinguishing them being their different characters, those without being many and cutting across one another, while those which are internal are individualized and unified. The suggestion is ingenious, but it is perfectly clear that it is unhistorical. To eliminate Puruṣas as an essential feature opposed to Prakṛti is to contradict everything we know of the Sāṁkhya, and it is difficult to appreciate why the system should thus have been transformed, nor do the changes in the system of Empedokles made by Anaxagoras⁶ provide an adequate parallel. It is necessary also in Berndl’s view to deny the doctrine of necessary periodical destruction of the universe, since all that is requisite is that, since things have originated, they cannot be permanent, and to question the early character of the marked pessimism of the Kārikā as inconsistent with the date of 700 or 800 B.C. ascribed to Kapila.

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