Samkhya: Consciousness and Matter
The Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy: the dualism of purusha and prakriti, the three gunas, the 25 principles of reality and Samkhya's influence on yoga and the Bhagavad Gita.
Samkhya is one of the oldest schools of Hindu philosophy. It teaches that reality consists of two fundamentally different principles: pure consciousness (purusha) and matter or nature (prakriti). Suffering arises because consciousness mistakenly identifies itself with the workings of matter, including the body and mind. Liberation comes from discriminating knowledge that separates the two. Samkhya ideas run through Hindu thought, from the Bhagavad Gita to yoga and Ayurvedic medicine.
The name samkhya means “enumeration” or “reckoning”, reflecting the school's method of listing the principles of reality.
Origins
Samkhya is traditionally said to have been founded by the sage Kapila, whom the Bhagavata Purana counts among the avatars of Vishnu. Samkhya-like ideas appear in the Upanishads and the Mahabharata. The classic text of the school is the Samkhya Karika of Ishvarakrishna, a short work of about seventy verses, usually dated to around the 4th or 5th century CE.
Purusha and prakriti
- Purusha is pure consciousness: the witness, unchanging and inactive. Unlike Advaita's single self, Samkhya holds that there are countless purushas, one for each living being.
- Prakriti is primordial matter: unconscious, but active and constantly changing. Everything we experience, including thoughts, emotions and the sense of “I”, belongs to prakriti.
A classic image compares their relationship to a lame man who can see, riding on the shoulders of a blind man who can walk: together they can move, though each lacks what the other has.
The three gunas
Prakriti is made up of three qualities, or gunas, which combine in different proportions in everything that exists:
| Guna | Nature |
|---|---|
| Sattva | Lightness, clarity, goodness, harmony |
| Rajas | Energy, activity, passion, restlessness |
| Tamas | Heaviness, inertia, darkness, dullness |
The gunas are used throughout Hindu thought to classify foods, personalities, actions and even gods; the Bhagavad Gita devotes chapters 14 and 17 to them.
The 25 principles
When the balance of the gunas is disturbed by the presence of purusha, prakriti evolves into the world in a fixed order of principles (tattvas):
- purusha (consciousness) and prakriti (matter);
- buddhi or mahat, the intellect;
- ahamkara, the sense of “I”;
- manas, the mind;
- the five senses (hearing, touch, sight, taste, smell);
- the five organs of action (speech, hands, feet, excretion, reproduction);
- the five subtle elements (sound, touch, form, taste, smell);
- the five gross elements (space, air, fire, water, earth).
Strikingly, Samkhya places the intellect and the ego on the side of matter: they are subtle instruments, not the true self.
Cause and effect
Samkhya holds that an effect already exists in its cause before it appears (satkaryavada), as oil exists in sesame seeds before it is pressed out. The world is thus a transformation of prakriti, not a creation from nothing.
God and liberation
Classical Samkhya does not require a creator God: prakriti evolves of its own accord. Liberation, called kaivalya (“isolation”), comes when the intellect realises the difference between purusha and prakriti; prakriti then ceases to act for that purusha, like a dancer who stops once the audience has seen the performance. The Yoga school adopted Samkhya's framework while adding devotion to God.
Sources and further reading
- Gerald James Larson, Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and Meaning, 2nd edn (Motilal Banarsidass, 1979).
- Gerald James Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya (eds), Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 4: Samkhya (Princeton University Press, 1987).