The University of Nalanda c7.73

c7.73

The Sāṃkhya system may be taken as forming a second landmark in the history of education. Its founder Kapila flourished somewhere about the 7th century B.C.,¹ i.e., about a century or two before Buddha. It was he, who for the first time put purely athejstic ideas before a people steeped in ritualism and who believed in a host of gods and goddesses. He propounded a theory of the Universe in which God had no place. He instead put forward a duality; Nature (Prakṛti) and Spirit (Puruṣa). The whole Universe except the Puruṣa originated from this Prakṛti; and the Puruṣa was only linked with the Prakṛti. Moreover, he said that the Puruṣa was different in every individual, and had separate existence after its emancipation—from the bonds of Prakṛti. Kapila, thus, ran counter in his views to the Upaniṣadic ones, both in his theory of the creation of the Universe and in his theory of the Spirit. This new philosophy drew many students. Some were attracted by it because they found in it an escape from the Vedic ritualism; some, because they could not be convinced by the Upaniṣadic doctrines about the existence of God and the creation and destruction of the Universe; some, because of its close reasoning; others, because they wanted to study the new philosophy in order to compare and criticise it. That the new philosophy was the centre of attraction for the types of students aforesaid, can be seen from the number of champions and opponents the Sāṃkhya system had, from its very inception till the end of the 14th century. If Īśwara Kṛṣṇa and Vārṣagaṇya wrote works in favour of it, in the fifth century A.D., Vasubandhu and other prominent Buddhist scholars wrote its refutation in the same century (A.D. 400).¹ Even it had its share of attack from the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsiang, who according to the biographer² silenced and converted the opponent. Śaṅkara’s, Rāmānuja’s and Vallabha’s refutations of the system are too well-known even to need a mention.