3. The Sankhya System
Its high repute—Metaphysics—Evolution—Atheism—Idealism—Spirit—Body, mind and soul—The goal of philosophy—Influence of the Sankhya
This, says a Hindu historian, “is the most significant system of philosophy that India has produced.”67 Professor Garbe, who devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that “in Kapila’s doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited.”68 It is the oldest of the six systems,69 and perhaps the oldest philosophical system of all.* Of Kapila himself nothing is known, except that Hindu tradition, which has a schoolboy’s scorn for dates, credits him with founding the Sankhya philosophy in the sixth century B.C.71
Kapila is at once a realist and a scholastic. He begins almost medically by laying it down, in his first aphorism, that “the complete cessation of pain . . . is the complete goal of man.” He rejects as inadequate the attempt to elude suffering by physical means; he refutes, with much logical prestidigitation, the views of all and sundry on the matter, and then proceeds to construct, in one unintelligibly abbreviated sutra after another, his own metaphysical system. It derives its name from his enumeration (for this is the meaning of sankhya) of the twenty-five Realities (Tattwas, “Thatnesses”) which, in Kapila’s judgment, make up the world. He arranges these Realities in a complex relationship that may possibly be clarified by the following scheme:
(1) A. SUBSTANCE (Prakriti, “Producer”), a universal physical principle which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces
(2) I. Intellect (Buddhi), the power of perception; which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces
(3) i. The Five Subtle Elements, or Sensory Powers of the Internal World:
(4) 1. Sight,
(5) 2. Hearing,
(6) 3. Smell,
(7) 4. Taste, and
(8) 5. Touch; (Realities (1) to (8) cooperate to produce (10) to (24))
(9) ii. Mind (Manas), the power of conception;
iii. The Five Organs of Sense (corresponding with Realities (4) to (8)):
(10) 1. Eye,
(11) 2. Ear,
(12) 3. Nose,
(13) 4. Tongue, and
(14) 5. Skin;
iv. The Five Organs of Action:
(15) 1. Larynx,
(16) 2. Hands,
(17) 3. Feet,
(18) 4. Excretory organs, and
(19) 5. Generative organs;
v. The Five Gross Elements of the External World:
(20) 1. Ether,
(21) 2. Air,
(22) 3. Fire and light,
(23) 4. Water, and
(24) 5. Earth.
(25) B. SPIRIT (Purusha, “Person”), a universal psychical principle which, though unable to do anything of itself, animates and vitalizes Prakriti, and stirs its evolutionary powers to all their activities.
At its outset this seems to be a purely materialistic system: the world of mind and self as well as of body and matter appears entirely as an evolution by natural means, a unity and continuity of elements in perpetual development and decay from the lowest to the highest and back again. There is a premonition of Lamarck in Kapila’s thought: the need of the organism (the “Self”) generates the function (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), and the function produces the organ (eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin). There is no gap in the system, and no vital distinction in any Hindu philosophy, between the inorganic and the organic, between the vegetable and the animal, or between the animal and the human, world; these are all links in one chain of life, spokes on the wheel of evolution and dissolution, birth and death and birth. The course of evolution is determined fatalistically by the three active qualities or powers (Gunas) of Substance: purity, activity, and blind ignorance. These powers are not prejudiced in favor of development against decay; they produce the one after the other in an endless cycle, like some stupid magician drawing an infinity of contents from a hat, putting them back again, and repeating the process forever. Every state of evolution contains in itself, as Herbert Spencer was to say some time later, a tendency to lapse into dissolution as its fated counterpart and end.
Kapila, like Laplace, saw no need of calling in a deity to explain creation or evolution;72 in this most religious and philosophical of nations it is nothing unusual to find religions and philosophies without a god. Many of the Sankhya texts explicitly deny the existence of a personal creator; creation is inconceivable, for “a thing is not made out of nothing”;73 creator and created are one.74 Kapila contents himself with writing (precisely as if he were Immanuel Kant) that a personal creator can never be demonstrated by human reason. For whatever exists, says this subtle sceptic, must be either bound or free, and God cannot be either. If God is perfect, he had no need to create a world; if he is imperfect he is not God. If God were good, and had divine powers, he could not possibly have created so imperfect a world, so rich in suffering, so certain in death.75 It is instructive to see with what calmness the Hindu thinkers discuss these questions, seldom resorting to persecution or abuse, and keeping the debate upon a plane reached in our time only by the controversies of the maturest scientists. Kapila protects himself by recognizing the authority of theVedas: “The Vedas” he says, simply, “are an authority, since the author of them knew the established truth.”76 After which he proceeds without paying any attention to the Vedas.
But he is no materialist; on the contrary, he is an idealist and a spiritualist, after his own unconventional fashion. He derives reality entirely from perception; our sense organs and our thought give to the world all the reality, form and significance which it can ever have for us; what the world might be independently of them is an idle question that has no meaning, and can never have an answer.77 Again, after listing twenty-four Tattwas which belong, in his system, under physical evolution, he upsets all his incipient materialism by introducing, as the last Reality, the strangest and perhaps the most important of them all—Purusha, “Person” or Soul. It is not, like twenty-three other Tattwas, produced by Prakriti or physical force; it is an independent psychical principle, omnipresent and everlasting, incapable of acting by itself, but indispensable to every action. For Prakriti never develops, the Gunas never act, except through the inspiration of Purusha; the physical is animated, vitalized and stimulated to evolve by the psychical principle everywhere.78 Here Kapila speaks like Aristotle: “There is a ruling influence of the Spirit” (over Prakriti, or the evolving world), “caused by their proximity, just as the loadstone (draws iron to itself). That is, the proximity of Purusha to Prakriti impels the latter to go through the steps of production. This sort of attraction between the two leads to creation, but in no other sense is Spirit an agent, or concerned in creation at all.”79*
Spirit is plural in the sense that it exists in each organism; but in all it is alike, and does not share in individuality. Individuality is physical; we are what we are, not because of our Spirit, but because of the origin, evolution and experiences of our bodies and minds. In Sankhya the mind is as much a part of the body as any other organ is. The secluded and untouched Spirit within us is free, while the mind and body are bound by the laws and Gunas or qualities of the physical world;81 it is not the Spirit that acts and is determined, it is the body-mind. Nor is Spirit affected by the decay and passing of the body and the personality; it is untouched by the stream of birth and death. “Mind is perishable,” says Kapila, “but not Spirit”;82 only the individual self, bound up with matter and body, is born, dies, and is born again, in that tireless fluctuation of physical forms which constitutes the history of the external world.83 Kapila, capable of doubting everything else, never doubts transmigration.
Like most Hindu thinkers, he looks upon life as a very doubtful good, if a good at all. “Few are these days of joy, few are these days of sorrow; wealth is like a swollen river, youth is like the crumbling bank of a swollen river, life is like a tree on the crumbling bank.”84 Suffering is the result of the fact that the individual self and mind are bound up with matter, caught in the blind forces of evolution. What escape is there from this suffering? Only through philosophy, answers our philosopher; only through understanding that all these pains and griefs, all this division and turbulence of striving egos, are Maya, illusion, the insubstantial pageantry of life and time. “Bondage arises from the error of not discriminating”85—between the self that suffers and the Spirit that is immune, between the surface that is disturbed and the basis that remains unvexed and unchanged. To rise above these sufferings it is only necessary to realize that the essence of us, which is Spirit, is safe beyond good and evil, joy and pain, birth and death. These acts and struggles, these successes and defeats, distress us only so long as we fail to see that they do not affect, or come from, the Spirit; the enlightened man will look upon them as from outside them, like an impartial spectator witnessing a play. Let the soul recognize its independence of things, and it will at once be free; by that very act of understanding it will escape from the prison of space and time, of pain and reincarnation.86 “Liberation obtained through knowledge of the twenty-five Realities,” says Kapila, “teaches the one only knowledge—that neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist;”87 that is to say, personal separateness is an illusion; all that exists is the vast evolving and dissolving froth of matter and mind, of bodies and selves, on the one side, and on the other the quiet eternity of the immutable and imperturbable soul.
Such a philosophy will bring no comfort to one who may find some difficulty in separating himself from his aching flesh and his grieving memory; but it seems to have well expressed the mood of speculative India. No other body of philosophic thought, barring the Vedanta, has so profoundly affected the Hindu mind. In the atheism and epistemological idealism of Buddha, and his conception of Nirvana, we see the influence of Kapila; we see it in the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu, in the Puranas* and theTantras—which transform Purusha and Prakriti into the male and female principles of creation;88 above all in the system of Yoga, which is merely a practical development of Sankhya, built upon its theories and couched in its phrases. Kapila has few explicit adherents today, since Shankara and the Vedanta have captured the Hindu mind; but an old proverb still raises its voice occasionally in India: “There is no knowledge equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the Yoga.”89