The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hindusim vol 2

Samkhya
588
sattva tends toward the good, rajas
towards activity or passion, and tamas
towards darkness and decay. In the primal
prakrti these three forces are in perfect
equilibrium, each perfectly balancing
the others. The two principles of
purusha and prakrti are distinct, separate,
and alone.
When prakrti’s initial equilibrium is
disturbed, it sets in motion a pattern of
evolution that creates both the exterior
physical world and the interior psychological
world. From prakrti emerges
mahat (“the great one”), which has as its
psychological counterpart the subtlest
form of mental activity (buddhi). From
buddhi evolves ahamkar, which contains
the first real ideas of individual
identity. From ahamkar evolves the
mind (manas), the sense organs (jnanendriyas),
the organs of action (karmendriyas),
and the subtle elements
(tanmatras); from the last evolve the
gross elements that actually make up
the material world. All of these evolutes—material
or psychic—have a differing
balance of the three gunas, which
ultimately determines their character as
wholesome, active, or unwholesome.
Throughout this process of evolution,
purusha remains unchanged, a mere
witness to prakrti’s unceasing transformations.
Their mutual functioning is
described using the metaphor of the
lame man (purusha) being carried by
the blind man (prakrti).
The ultimate source of bondage,
according to the Samkhya school,
comes because people do not recognize
the difference between these two principles.
Through this lack of discrimination
between the two, the Self (purusha)
appears as if it is an agent, and the evolutes
(from prakrti) as if they are conscious.
The Samkhyas illustrate this misunderstanding
using the example of the
rose behind the crystal, in which the latter
appears to be colored but is in fact
unchanged. Although for the Samkhyas
prakrti undergoes real transformations,
the primary problem is epistemological—that
is, how one comes to know
things—rather than ontological, or rooted
in the nature of things themselves. Since
the purusha never changes, there is no
question of making it into anything else
or regaining the way that it used to be;
the real problem is making the distinction
between the differing realities of
these two principles. Once this has been
done, the evolution of prakrti is said to
reverse, leaving the purusha again in its
state of magnificent isolation (kaivalya).
Of course, once one has a developed (if
erroneous) idea of (conventional) personality,
this discrimination becomes all
the more difficult. This mistaken idea
becomes the basis for one’s volitional
actions (karma) and one’s emotional
dispositions. One’s actions and dispositions
reinforce each other, and both of
these are undergirded by the notion of a
Self.
The Samkhya metaphysics were
adopted wholesale by the yoga philosophical
school, and the two schools are
usually mentioned together—Samkhya
as the theoretical foundation, and Yoga
as the practical component. One of
Samkhya’s lasting contributions to
Indian thought is the idea of the gunas, a
basic concept running through Hindu
culture. Another influential but less pervasive
idea is their model of evolution,
which has been adapted by other
schools but often subsumed under theistic
assumptions in which God is the
source of both consciousness and the
material world. The one philosophical
problem that the Samkhya could never
surmount was to explain the source of
bondage, given their starting assumptions.
If purusha and prakrti are completely
separate, how could the two of
them interact—much less mistake one
for the other—and how did the process
of evolution begin? Although their contributions
remain significant, they were
largely eclipsed by Vedanta, which
claimed that the problem is ignorance of
the Self and not-Self, and that the world
around us is not an actual evolution, but
only an illusory transformation (vivarta).
This philosophical model is called
Vivartavada. For further information
see Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and