The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.49

v2.c40.s7.t3.49

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.