Classical Sāṅkhya and Yoga
Kapila by traditional attribution; the classical text is Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṅkhya-kārikā, with Patañjali's Yoga-sūtra beside it · kārikās c. 4th to 5th century CE; roots far older
Sāṅkhya looks at experience and counts what is truly there. It finds exactly two kinds of being: puruṣa, consciousness itself, the silent witness, and prakṛti, one unconscious nature whose three guṇas weave every body, every thought, every world. Suffering arises when the witness mistakes the weave for itself. So the school asks one discipline of the seeker: discriminate. Watch until you can tell the seer from the seen, the light from what it lights. Yoga stands beside it with the practice: still the turnings of the mind until nothing remains to be mistaken for you. Then prakṛti, having been truly seen, withdraws, and the seer rests in its own form.
No commentary from this school is on the site yet; it stands in the Hall for the family of readings to be complete.
Sāṅkhya is older than its books. Tradition names the sage Kapila as its first teacher, with Āsuri and Pañcaśikha after him; historians can confirm none of them, but they find the school's fingerprints everywhere in the centuries around the turn of the common era: in the Kaṭha and Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣads, in the Mokṣadharma chapters of the Mahābhārata, in Aśvaghoṣa's life of the Buddha, and in the Bhagavad Gītā itself, which uses sāṅkhya as a name for the path of discriminating knowledge. What circulated in those texts was a fluid proto-Sāṅkhya, often theistic, not yet a fixed system.
The system arrived with Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṅkhya-kārikā, seventy-odd verses that scholars place between roughly 200 and 450 CE. The kārikās answer one question: why beings suffer, and how suffering ends. Their answer is an enumeration, which is what the word sāṅkhya means: count what exists, and you find two irreducible kinds, conscious puruṣa and unconscious prakṛti, with the whole world as prakṛti's unfolding. The classical text names no God. Patañjali's Yoga-sūtra took over the same map of reality, added Īśvara as an object of devotion, and supplied the meditative discipline the kārikās only gesture toward; the two were counted ever after as paired darśanas, theory and practice.
As an independent school Sāṅkhya thinned out; by the sixteenth century Vijñānabhikṣu could describe it as a tradition largely lost, and he reread it theistically to revive it. But its vocabulary never died. Guṇas, tattvas, puruṣa, prakṛti became the common grammar of Hindu thought, of Āyurveda, of tantra, and of every Vedāntic Gītā commentary. There is no living Sāṅkhya sampradāya commenting on the Gītā, and this site carries no Sāṅkhya bhāṣya; the school stands in this hall as context, the language the Gītā speaks even while bending it toward Kṛṣṇa.
The date of Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṅkhya-kārikā is unsettled: some scholars place it around 200 CE, others between 350 and 450 CE, with Paramārtha's sixth-century Chinese translation as the firm outer limit.
Whether early Sāṅkhya was theistic is debated: some scholars find a God-affirming Sāṅkhya in the Upaniṣads and the epic that the classical school later shed, while others treat the atheism of the kārikās as original.
Tradition identifies the Yoga-sūtra's Patañjali with the famous grammarian of the same name, a claim many modern scholars doubt; the sūtras themselves are dated anywhere from the first centuries CE to no later than the fifth.
Classical Sāṅkhya names no Brahman and no creator. Reality is two from beginningless time: countless puruṣas, each pure consciousness, and one prakṛti, unconscious nature. Yoga admits Īśvara, a special puruṣa untouched by affliction, as an object of devotion, not a maker of worlds. When the Gītā speaks of sāṅkhya it bends this frame toward God; the classical school itself stands without one.
What other schools call the jīva appears here as puruṣa: pure, contentless witness consciousness, countless in number, one for every being. It never acts. Thought, feeling, and deed belong to prakṛti's instruments, the intellect, the ego sense, the mind. Bondage is a confusion of reflection, consciousness taking the mind's movements as its own; nothing in the puruṣa was ever truly bound.
The world is real, not illusion. It is prakṛti unfolding: from the unmanifest come intellect, ego sense, mind, the ten capacities, the subtle and gross elements, twenty-three tattvas in all, woven throughout of sattva, rajas, and tamas. The effect pre-exists in its cause; nothing comes from nothing. And the whole display unfolds for another, for the puruṣa's experience and eventual release.
Liberation is kaivalya, the aloneness of the seer. It comes through viveka-khyāti, the steady discrimination that consciousness is not nature, the seer not the seen. Sāṅkhya reaches it by enumeration and reasoning; Yoga by the eight limbs, stilling the turnings of the mind until the witness rests in its own form. Once truly seen, prakṛti ceases her dance for that puruṣa and does not return.
This school hears the Gītā's second and third chapters as its own voice. The embodied one is never slain; weapons do not cut it; what is real never ceases to be. All action is performed by the guṇas of prakṛti, and only one confused by the ego sense believes himself the doer. The thirteenth chapter speaks the same grammar: the field and the knower of the field, both beginningless, and freedom in telling them apart. Where the Gītā places both puruṣa and prakṛti within a supreme Person, the school notes the difference quietly; what it recognizes everywhere is its own central act, discrimination between the seer and the seen, taught on a battlefield.