II
The Emergence of Philosophical Debate
1. VEDIC SCHOLARSHIP
The attack on the Brahmanic tradition of sacrifice moved the Brahman caste to its defense, of course,
since the preservation of its privileged position at the apex of society depended on the preservation of the
sacrificial tradition and the old practices of dharma and caste. In the course of the 5th century bce the situation
became serious, for although the Upanishadic movement had been brought under control by finding a place
for it within the existing system, a number of other movements associated with a critical, proto-scientific
viewpoint, namely Buddhism, Carvakan skepticism and materialism, Ajivika, and Jainism, resisted this sort of
domestication. Buddhism, the greatest threat, rejected the Caste system, replaced the eternal dharma of the
sacrifice and caste duties with a rationalized ethical system, and permitted, even urged, laymen of whatever
caste to join the celibate Buddhist order, which was designed to replace the Brahmanic priesthood. It was worse
than that. The Brahmans reserved the child-rearing years for the duty of producing and educating the next
generation of Brahmin experts in the sacrifice, and permitted renunciation and withdrawal on the Upanishadic
pattern only after that duty was fulfilled. The Buddhist not only permitted it early, so that one was not required
to raise and train children in his inherited caste duties, but substituted the monk for the Brahmin, and allowed
anyone of any caste to become a monk. Had Buddhism become universal, it would have meant the end of the
Brahmanic tradition, and the end of the sacrifices—that is, for a believing Brahman, it would have meant the
breakdown of the entire world order.
One reaction to the situation was the codification of the tradition, so that one would at least have the
security of understanding exactly what was to be done. Specialists in the phonetics, metrics, grammar, and
etymology of Sanskrit arose, as well as specialists in astronomy (they determine the precise time when a
sacrifice is to be performed) and the ritual procedures themselves. In the 4th century bce Panini wrote his great
Sanskrit grammar, which became the authority on the matter, and froze the language in place. The view came
to be generally held that it was the precise sounds of the formulae uttered that brought about the effects of the
sacrifices, so that Sanskrit was a language of magic, whose words, when uttered, produced the things they
named. In the 2nd century bce Patanjali and Katyayana, commenting on Panini, codified techniques for
interpreting non-standard Sanskrit. Their procedures allowed not only the expansion of an ellipsis into a full
sentence with all the necessary grammatical pieces in place, but also for non-literal interpretations of difficult
passages. In effect they allowed for the detection of the underlying logical form of the utterances in the Vedas,
and, of course, the scripture was only committed to the logical sense of what it said, not to misleading surface
readings.
But the development of the scholarship of the text was not enough, of course, if only because it raised
new problems of its own, quite aside from the Upanishadic criticism of the tradition. Close attention to the
Vedas invited historic scholarship, with the recognition that the tradition had an author, or, more likely and even
more troublesome, a number of authors, and had arisen through a series of revisions and compilations. This
naturally posed difficulties with taking the text as the infallible guide it was supposed to be, particularly in view
of the variety of views, many of them contradictory to one another, that seemed to be offered in it if the sacred
literature was taken, as it was, to include the Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads. Indeed, various apparently
historical persons were mentioned in the texts as the authors of various views. So, about this same time, we
find Jaimimi attempting to deal with this problem in his Mimamsa (“exegesis”) Sutra. Jaimimi pressed the
strategy of Patanjali and Katyayana to its limit, insisting that the Vedas were to be understood as consisting
entirely of injunctions to act or refrain from actions, and whatever peripheral remarks are required to make
these injunctions clear. Since every injunction in the Vedas must be carried out, and so can be carried out,
whatever things or states of affairs are referred to in a Vedic injunction are guaranteed to exist. Thus a kind of
naive realism concerning the external world in which the sacrifices are performed results. But every apparent
statement of plain historic fact was interpreted as meaningful only insofar as it contributed to the understanding
of the injunctions, which all concerned the performance of the sacrifices. Jaimimi was a pluralist, and took the
various texts that might seem to refer to a unity lying behind the world, or the selves in it, as metaphorical
constructions. There was an injunction to know oneself as the sacrificer who was maintaining the world through
his sacrifice—that is the burden of the suggestion that we should come to know ourselves. Each needs to come
to know himself as an agent. Jaimimi’s work went far beyond the problem of scriptural interpretation, though,
attempting as well to craft a response to the critical proto-scientific metaphysics and epistemology that lay
behind the later Upanishads, as well as plain skeptical materialism, that challenged the Vedic truth. We shall
examine his thought more closely below in this chapter.
The traditional Brahmanic tradition was forced to an intellectual response to the Upanishadic
challenges, then, but within mainstream traditional thought, the Upanishadic claims to non-sensory perception
of the self (and a good deal else besides) had to find a way of living with Vedic fundamentalism as well. The
yogis argued that the Vedas were authoritative, but provided a lower knowledge, which may even be necessary
if one is to make progress toward the higher knowledge provided in meditation. The higher knowledge was
called “Vedanta,” which emphasizes the continuity of the tradition.
So, in contradistinction to Jaimimi,
Badarayana’s Vedanta Sutras took the Upanishads to be the key to understanding Vedic literature, and accepted
a monistic view, that all things are Brahman, and we are enjoined to know him. They even rejected Jaimimi’s
naive realism, and insisted that the injunctions involved in the descriptions of the sacrifices cannot be taken to
imply the actual existence as ultimate realities of the implements of sacrifice and the like. A number of different
schools of Vedanta arose later rooted in his work, for the Vedantic tradition, unlike Jaimimi, postulated a
religiously relevant metaphysics, which was subject to modification and capable of absorbing external
influences. We will examine the various Vedantic schools in later chapters.
2. LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION
By the period of the later Upanishads we find three views among the Brahmins as to the sources of
saving religious knowledge. Some identify strict adherence to the Vedic tradition as the only source, others take
the approach of the early Upanishads, relying on reasoning from premisses that seem self-evident or have
empirical support, while yet others take the approach of the middle and later Upanishads, relying on direct
non-sensory cognition of the self achieved by withdrawal from the senses in meditation.
Reliance on the Vedas was no doubt the key to maintaining the old views, something that became clear
enough after a while, but in the period of the Upanishads and after, many Brahmins were attracted to debate
and rational argument. It seems to have begun trivially enough. Here and there in the Rig Veda and
Atharva-Veda, and then fairly frequently in the Brahmanas, one finds a dialogue, with formal questions and
answers, often of a riddling sort, or involving the explanation of some odd fact. Such contests occurred during
sacrifices to enliven the otherwise dull proceedings, and perhaps to instruct the audience. Originally, it seems,
these dialogues were memorized, but they developed into extempore discussions after awhile, and one would
study a formally developed set of techniques so he could do well in what had become a competitive game. The
Brahmanas include formal contests of this sort outside the context of sacrifice, and some scholars prided
themselves on their ability to do well at them.
During the Upanishadic period these techniques may have included some study of topics, and the
general forms of reasoning to be found in the Upanishads to refute an opponent and establish one’s own view.
The riddle contests of earlier times had evolved, and the resulting debates had become an institution. They
were held not only at sacrifices, but before kings, and some kings prided themselves on their skill and would
reward successful challengers, or provide patronage for accomplished debaters. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
informs us of a debate at a sacrifice in which King Janaka offered a prize to the wisest Brahmin,
and in the
Mahabharata we are told, “as the sacrifice progressed eloquent reasoners put forward many theories based on
reasoning with the intention of defeating one another.”
In early Buddhist texts lokayata is said to be one of the subjects studied by the Brahmins, and is
described as the “art of casuistry.”
In one passage two Brahmins learned in this art approach the Buddha. The
doctrines advanced are, (1) that everything exists (the oldest doctrine), (2) that nothing exists, (3) that
everything is a unity, and (4) that everything is a plurality. The first and third are supposed to be “eternalist”
views, the second and fourth “materialist” views.
We can identify a number of schools of thought here. One
is a Materialist school which we shall see held that material things can be known to exist through perception,
though it rejects anything beyond the material world. It might be said to hold that everything is a plurality, that
is, a mere collection of the four material elements, over against those who base the unity of a thing on some
unitary component in it, as did the more orthodox, “eternalist” Samkhyan and Vaisesikan schools, the former
making the unities Material Nature and the Person, the latter identifying Substantial Forms in particular things.
The other school, which claims that nothing exists, rather than everything, perhaps represents an extreme
skepticism that rejects even perception as a source of knowledge, and like the later skeptical writer, Jayasri,
claims that it is only pragmatic reasons that justify accepting the existence of a material world.
These early
practitioners of debate, then, included an empiricist, materialist school and a school of extreme skeptics, both
of which rejected the religious search for salvation from death entirely.
We shall see that the empiricist bent
of the materialists was shared by the founder of Buddhism, and that the earliest Buddhist theories of causation
and perception seem framed in part to respond to their skepticism.
These schools must have been in place in
the Buddha’s lifetime, then, and can be dated back at least to the 5th century bce.
If it was not already, after the rise of Buddhism in the 5th century bce the drawback to dependence on
argumentation rather than scripture became quite clear to the more conservative. The Maitri Upanishad (3rd
century bce) refers to what can only be the early Buddhist order, speaking of a sect that wears a red robe,
converts their opponents by rational argument and examples, denies the doctrine of the soul, teach a dharma
destructive of the Vedas and orthodox scriptures, and take as their goal the attainment of pleasure.
The Laws
of Manu (2nd century ce) lays it down that “the Brahmin who despises the roots because of his dependence on
the science of inference should be cast out by the good as a nihilist, who scorns the Vedas.” At this time, no
doubt, the word lokayata came to have its later signification of “materialism,” that is, the denial that there is any
good reason to engage in spiritual practices, and the identification of the highest aim as a pleasant life.
3. SKEPTICISM AND MATERIALISM
Once I visited Ajita Keskambali, and asked him about the fruits of the
homeless life. Ajita Kesakambali said: “Your majesty, there is nothing given,
bestowed, offered in sacrifice, there is no fruit or result of good or bad
deeds, there is no mother or father, there are no spontaneously arising
beings, there are in the world no ascetics or Brahmins who have attained,
who have perfectly practiced, who proclaim this world and the next having
realized them by their own super-knowledge. This human beingh is
composed of the four great elements, and when one dies the earth part
reverts to the earth, the water part to water, the fire part to fire, the air part
to air, and faculties pass away into space. . . Fools and wise, at the breaking-up of the body, are destroyed and perish, they do not exist after death.”
Samannaphala Sutta, Digha Nikaya I.22-23
At the time when Buddhism was founded there existed, then, at least two schools of thought which
rejected both the Vedas and the typical Indian goal of salvation through meditative attainments, basing their
secular world view on materialism, and arguing along skeptical and empiricist lines. These schools, lumped
together by later reporters and called the Carvaka school, enjoyed a terrible reputation, somewhat like that
of the Epicureans in the Roman world, and very little survives of their literature.
The etymology of the word “Carvaka” is not known, though it may be that it derives from the word
for “chew” (i.e., these are fellows that eat, drink, and are merry), or from caru and vak, “pleasant word.” It has
also been proposed that one Carvaka was the legendary founder of the sect, but if this is so nothing is known
of him. Carvakans were also called “lokayatamata,” because it was supposed that they were spawned by of the
logical debaters of the Brahmins in the Upanishadic period. We know the views of the Carvaka thinkers almost
entirely from their critics, and since Carvaka denies the validity of any religious goal, their critics in India are
legion, including the heterodox Buddhists as much as the Orthodox Brahmins. Perhaps the earliest known
Carvakan thinker was Brihaspati, to whom some free-thinking Vedic hymns are attributed, and who is
represented espousing materialist views in the Mahabharata and elsewhere. A lost Sutra is attributed to him (ca.
600 bce), but the attribution seems improbable. He is a legendary figure, a philosophical type rather than an
historical individual. The references to him tell us how materialism was viewed later, not what some actual
person thought early on. Our chief knowledge of the school rests on summaries of its doctrines by Sankara in
his Sarva-siddhanta-samgraha of the 8th century ce, Madhava Acarya in his Sarva-darsana-samgraha in the 14th
century ce, and the only extant treatise from the school itself, the Tattvopaplava-simha of Jayarishi Bhatta, The
Lion that Devours All the Categories, of the 7th century ce.
Carvaka is generally called “materialism” by students of Indian philosophy. The school embodies three
separate tendencies found in the 6th and 5th centuries bce. (1) The adherents of the school did believe that
everything real is material, and in addition, that the characteristics of a whole can always be explained in terms
of its material parts. They regarded the stuffs making up the whole as the reality, the whole being nothing in
itself, merely a composite made out of those stuffs arranged in a certain manner. This view probably arose, just
as it did in the Atomists in 5th century Greece, from the treatment of mechanistic explanation in physical
science as the paradigm for all explanation, and an insistence that nothing be posited in one’s theories that
cannot be observed by the senses. (2) A subtly related tendency is revealed in Carvakan ethical thought, which
explains what makes a man’s life a good one not by relating it to a larger whole, or to an external ideal of
life-style or behavior to which it is to conform, but rather by looking at its parts, and assessing, for instance,
how much pleasure the man enjoys and how much pain he suffers, or what desires of his are satisfied, and what
desires are frustrated. This implies very much a worldly approach to life, and a rejection of the religious aims
typical of Orthodox, Vedic thought. The life of the ascetic was rejected both on the ground that it involved
inflicting pain and avoiding pleasure, and on the ground that its aims could only be justified, or even stated,
only by reference to metaphysical views concerning an unobservable self. Only the material, observable self,
the body, was admitted as real by Carvaka. (3) Carvakan epistemology is skeptical and empiricist, allowing only
sense experience to provide any sure evidence for a belief, and denying that knowledge of ultimate reality, in
particular, knowledge of fundamental causal laws, could be obtained. Thus it undermines any attempt to
establish an a priori metaphysics.
The origins of materialism can be traced back to the Upanishads, in particular, the question of
Yajnavalkya—when a mortal is cut down, what root remains from which he can spring up again?
The same
question is raised in the Mahabharata: “if the root of a tree that is cut down does not grow up again, though its
seeds germinate, where is the person who having died comes back again?”
Madhava Acarya’s materialists
support their position with Yajnavalkya’s assertion that upon death one vanishes into the elements from which
one arose, so that after death there is no consciousness.
The Katha Upanishad mentions a group of people who
hold that this is the world and there is no other, and deny that anything survives death.
Also in the Svetasvatara
Upanishad, a reference to the “doctrine of the elements” is surely a reference either to the materialist theory
mentioned in Buddhist texts, which held that only the four elements, earth, wind, fire and water, were real,
or that mentioned in Jain texts, adding air as a fifth element.
According to Madhava, the Carvaka argued that the body and its intelligence arise from the four
elements, earth, air, fire and water, alone, and adds that this occurs “just as the inebriating power is developed
from the mixture of certain ingredients.” No one supposes that the inebriating power of an alcoholic beverage
is due to anything over and above the mixture of the ingredients making it up, which somehow, when they are
allowed to ferment together, give rise to this power. In the same way, the power of intelligence seems at first
inexplicable in physical terms, but it in fact arises from an appropriate mixture of the elements, just as the
power of inebriation does in wine. Even if we cannot explain how this is so, intelligence must nonetheless be
due to natural powers and arrangement of the stuff making up the body. It certainly seems to disappear when
the parts are rearranged or taken apart. Thus the only self we have any right to postulate is the natural self of
the body, the material self, and we can assume no non-physical mind or soul, Atman or Brahman that might
survive the death of the body.
According to our sources, the argument that there is nothing non-physical hinges on the position that
the unperceivable either does not exist, or at least ought not to be assumed to exist. Now the Carvaka did not
hold that the unperceived, such as the unperceived conditions for the efficacy of a cause, which figures in their
arguments concerning causation, does not exist, but only that what cannot be perceived does not. What they
had in mind was what cannot be perceived in principle, due to its nature, such as the underlying self in the
Samkhya school and many of the Upanishads.
In the Payasi Sutta in the Digha Nikaya Kassapa argues with the Kshatriya Payasi, who claims that since
he does not perceive the other worlds in which gods and demons live, and has carried out all sorts of
experiments in order to perceive them, they do not exist. It seems he wants to argue that this world we go to
after death cannot be perceived, else he would have managed to perceive it by now, given all his attempts along
that line. Kassapa counters that a man blind from birth does not see black and white bodies, and yet they do
exist. The suggestion is clearly that we might lack some sense modality that would, if we had it, reveal things
to us we never suspected existed. Payasi asks Kassapa whose testimony he has for the existence of the other
world, and the reply is that one can attain to “clear, paranormal, clairvoyant vision” of the world of the gods
through meditation, and so one who has attained to such vision would provide the testimony. The materialist
remains unimpressed, presumably since he does not believe such non-sensory perception possible, and Kassapa
abandons that line of argument to try something else.
It seems likely that the doctrine of the non-sensory
perceptual powers of yogis, which appears in the later Upanishads, was developed in response to the empiricism
of such skeptics.
Payasi’s error, in Kassapa’s view, is that he thinks that one’s acts do not produce any reward or
punishment, which is tied to rebirth in heavens or hells. So Payasi argues that there is no soul that leaves the
body when it dies, and Kassapa argues that there is. Now some of Payasi’s experiments involve a degree of
inference, for instance, when he assumes that the soul has weight, and infers its absence from the lack of
detectable change in weight when a person dies. Indeed, the line between perception and inference based on
perception is rather a hard one to draw in any case. Moreover, some Buddhist texts actually say that materialists
use inference based on perception as well as perception itself. One Purandara, an author of a book on
materialism, distinguished between inference within the limits of sense perception, in which what is inferred
is sensible, from transcendental inference to things that cannot be sensed, denying that any basis could be found
for the latter.
So it seems that inference of the ordinary sort, by which one might infer that a child lives in a
house from the toys lying about, is admitted by the Carvaka, but not inference to entities that are not otherwise
perceivable.
That mental activity of which one can be aware is recognized by the Carvaka, but, though the school
admits that this mental activity is real enough, they hold it arises from the body. It does not arise from any
unperceivable source, because, as we now see, such an unperceivable cannot exist, and we have no reason to
suppose that there is some psychic, non-physical realm merely because we cannot explain how observable
matter could give rise to thought, awareness, and the like. We are often faced with inexplicable powers in a
compound thing, and we usually do the reasonable thing, and simply accept that there must be some
explanation of them rooted in the arrangement and the unknown natural powers of the observable constituents
of the compound. But here wishful thinking and a desire for profit leads the Brahman to make up an
unknowable explanation whole cloth.
Carvaka did argue, however, in a positive way for the materiality of the self, or at least for the common
assumption of its materiality, by pointing out that we say, without any sense of speaking metaphorically, “I am
thin” or “I am black,” not “My body is thin,” etc. This manner of speaking need not be regarded as metaphorical
(and it does not feel metaphorical) if the body is in fact oneself. Indeed, to say “My body” is a metaphor, like
saying “The head of Rahu” (for Rahu is all head).
It seems fairly clear that materialism arose from the line of thought represented by Yajnavalkya, then.
Once it was accepted that death is the end of the individual’s life, the goal of release makes no sense unless it
is radically reinterpreted, and though it was reinterpreted in the needed way in some of the Upanishads and in
Buddhism, the more obvious move was simply to give over the aim of release as misguided, and turn to the
consideration how to make this life as successful, that is, as full of pleasure and free from pain, as possible.
4. MATERIALIST ETHICAL VIEWS
The only end of man is enjoyment produced by sensual pleasures. Nor may
you say that such cannot be called the end of man as they are always mixed
with some kind of pain, because it is our wisdom to enjoy the pure pleasure
as far as we can, and to avoid the pain which inevitably accompanies it. . . It
is not therefore for us, through a fear of pain, to reject the pleasure which
our nature instinctively recognizes as congenial.
From the account of the Carvakan school in
Acarya’s Sarvadarsanasamgraha
The chief tenets of the Carvaka, from the standpoint of its critics, are its rejection of any religious aim
outside the present life, and of any survival after the death of the body. From these facts Carvaka is said to draw
a hedonistic conclusion, that pleasure is the only reasonable aim, to be pursued as long as we live. To the
commonplace argument that pleasure inevitably involves pain, it is rejoined that one must then seek pleasure
as free from pain as possible, but it is a waste of time to seek some impossible state of mind in which no pain
threatens. This position may not have pressed a selfish pursuit of pleasure, for the Carvakans recommended
their doctrine for its kindness to living things in general, and seem to have argued for vegetarianism. It seems
very likely that Carvaka accepted a kind of utilitarianism, assessing the worth of an act or policy by its effects
on the happiness of all the creatures affected by it. The Vedas are criticized as inconsistent and incoherent, and
a means of livelihood for priestly knaves, so that it makes no sense to adhere to the Vedas, the duties of one’s
caste, and the like, as though they set absolute laws that made actions right or wrong.
One offspring of this line of thought is the Artha-Sastra of Kautilya, a book written 321-296 bce as a
compendium of political science. Kautilya was the chief minister of the first Mauryan emperor. The Mauryan
Empire was established after a prolonged period of military struggle among a multitude of states. It was the
Indian equivalent of the Roman Empire, for Indian philosophy had arisen, just as Greek philosophical thought
did, during a confused period of perpetual warfare and political experimentation, incident on new technology
and expanded commerce and population, a period that ended with an empire dominating the entire area subject
to the culture. We will find a similar pattern in China. In any case, as a practicing minister of state, Kautilya
is not given to transcendental religious justifications for his polity. Rather, he points out in a perfectly
this-worldly way that wealth is a prerequisite for the pursuit, not only of pleasure and security, but of any other
“higher” aim, be it spiritual, artistic, scientific, or whatever, and so he examines the science of governing with
a view to determining the way in which wealth can best be acquired. He argues, like some of the Greek
Sophists, that the state is established by the weak as a protection against the strong, and it keeps order by
imposing punishments of appropriate severity for violations of the laws laid down in the Vedas, that is, for not
keeping to one’s assigned role in life and fulfilling its duties. Only when people keep to dharma can wealth be
attained. He favors a monarchy over a republic, but argues that the king must set the welfare of his subjects
(that is, the wealth of the society, presupposing a very uneven distribution of that wealth in favor of the upper
classes) as his first aim. His book is often treated as a kind of Indian Macchiavelli because of its thoroughly
practical (not to say, cynical) approach to governing. It tells the would be King, for instance, that first he must
establish his power, and to do that he might have to kill a lot of people, and only afterwards should he consider
how he might do good. To the Orthodox practitioner of dharma, this represents unacceptable advice to violate
the eternal law against murder. Of course, someone who thinks of ethics along utilitarian lines, as the Carvaka
did, might take the matter differently. It may be good advice, for one must consider what happens in a state
when a weak king is unwilling to kill his enemies, and revolution, external attacks against the weakened
regime, and anarchy all result. Given that alternative, ruthlessness in the sovereign, leading to a stable and
secure state, especially if the king uses that stability to further the prosperity of his people, would seem to be
the best choice.
The form of government recommended by Kautilya is specified in great part by the fear of uprisings
and the attacks of foreign states. He advises, in particular, the creation of spies of all sorts within the state, and
continuous surveillance of possible hostile factions by the secret service, as well as the use of spies and secret
interventions in other states, to strengthen parties that are favorable to oneself and undermine or destroy those
that are unfavorable, and a foreign policy geared entirely to the welfare of one’s own state, so that one honors
treaties and alliances only as long as they are advantageous, freely intervenes in the internal affairs even of allied
states when it seems useful, and so on. In brief, he recommends the policies of realpolitik that in fact govern a
sovereign’s actions in most states.
5. PROTOSCIENCE AND THE YOGIC SCHOOLS
How did the orthodox defend themselves from these materialist criticisms? Rather different approaches
were taken by the Upanishadic, yogic practitioners, and the Brahmins engaging in traditional sacrifices. The
yogic thinkers had already gone some distance toward demythologizing their tradition, and the basis for their
practice was to be found in an account of the nature of human consciousness rather than Vedic scriptures. They
claimed to know that this account was true somehow through observation and experience, and they did without
traditional talk about the gods. Their defense, then, relied on validation of the senses and of arguments from
what can be observed to its causes, its necessary explanations. They were committed to the scientific approach.
We have little direct knowledge of the early stages of the development of science in India, but later
evidence indicates that it must have followed a path similar to that in Greece. Beginning with a rational
reconstruction of the mythological background, it eliminated the stories of the gods in favor of an account of
the origin and structure of the cosmos from the great masses of elemental stuff. There is considerable reason
to think that the new science served ideological functions, supporting new governmental and societal structures
associated with the commercial classes, as it did in Greece. The evidence for these traditions early is relatively
thin, depending chiefly on the preservation of standardized, highly abbreviated, doctrinal statements for the
classical “schools” of thought, Samkhya, the earliest tradition, Vaishesika, a later atomistic system which
established itself in the universities, and Nyaya, an epistemological tradition associated with Vaishesika. These
outlines of doctrine each spawned a large number of commentaries, which helps the situation, but nonetheless
our earliest documents generally occur half a millennium or more after the views they report first developed,
so that some care needs to be taken to reconstruct the original views, and sort them out from later
developments, assuming they have been preserved at all.
The earliest non-mythological account of the world, reflected in the Gita and the later Upanishads as
well as early medical theory, held that the universe consisted of an irreducible plurality of souls and a real
physical world, without any supernatural source or creator, and that release from karma was to be obtained,
without loss of individuality, through ascetic and meditative practice. It differed from the earlier Upanishadic
tradition in that it did not read the escape from this world order as a matter of merging with a primeval god,
but rather as a matter of an individual soul’s isolating itself from the natural world. Probably early scientific
speculation had come to treat the primeval gods existing before this world order as nothing more than masses
of elemental matter, and the gods of the present world order as simply one class of souls, those who have
attained to the heavens, within it.
Souls were viewed in this tradition as non–material, immutable, eternal
subjects of experience, and certainly not portions of some primal divine world–stuff. The soul as subject of
experience replaces the breath–soul entirely, so the tradition seems rooted in one form of Upanishadic
speculation concerning the ultimate self. The Samkhya tradition, which reports arguments in detail in support
of these views, provides the clearest window to this nascent scientific tradition.
This scientific tradition took a rather different direction of development than did the Greek. In Greece,
early successes in mathematics and astronomy established these disciplines as models of successful science, with
medicine, biology and natural history taking a place in the background of the movement. In India the Greek
breakthrough in mathematical reasoning and astronomical theory never occurred. Moreover, the notion that
the soul travels to different worlds, as we have seen, corresponding to what it can in fact perceive under
different conditions, whether in the natural waking body, a dream state, or one of the heavens, seems to have
moved the question how the world arose to a question how consciousness of this world arose, that is, how the
self came to be trapped in this natural world. As a result, the scientific tradition takes the development of a
conscious human being as the central story in the development of the world, and we have seen that the
materialists took it that explaining the development of consciousness was the chief difficulty they had to face.
What is explained then, in this science, is how the world became a residence of biological organisms with
sensory powers and consciousness, and, since this seems to have little bearing on the issue, little interest is
taken in physical science, astronomy and mathematics. Derailed by a premature obsession with the mind-body
problem, theoretical science never got a proper start in India, taking on problems that might be solved and
developing theories accounting in detail for the phenomena where that could be done. Nor was there the
fruitful interaction of the theorist and the craftsman that lies behind so many Greek developments, in
mechanics, for instance. The Greek thinker was very likely also a man of practical affairs, a merchant, perhaps,
who was interested in things like navigation and machinery. The Indian thinker was almost always an isolated
priest or religious practitioner, who would not have mixed with craftsmen, or seen much utility in their
knowledge. So, the groundwork was never laid for the sort of scientific revolution that occurred in the 16th
century in the West, and science, as opposed to religious metaphysics, did not become a proper object of study
for its own sake. Philosophy in India established itself in relation to the religious world view and religious aims,
and never, even after the 4th century ce, when a real scientific tradition began to establish itself, stimulated by
contact with Greek and Islamic work, it never became associated with a philosophy of science or a metaphysics
responsive to scientific discoveries. It attained a considerable level of sophistication, but Indian philosophy
remained tied to religious concerns, or else, like the materialists, tried to work out what way of life could be
justified from a common sense, empiricist and above all, skeptical view of the world. Samkhya, in particular,
centers on epistemology and the psychology of meditation. Despite a profession to give a general theory of the
world, no attempt at all is made to derive from it an understanding of anything other than the human organism
and its consciousness, or with an eye to anything other than the attainment of release from suffering.
According to tradition, Samkhya was founded by Kapila, a half–mythical holy man. Our direct sources
for the school are late. (1) Above all, we depend on the Samkhya–karika of Isvarakrishna, which dates to the
mid–5th century ce. This is a work of seventy stanzas that was translated into Chinese by one Paramartha, a
Brahmin who immigrated to China in the 6th century.
There are several commentaries on this work, including
one in the 9th century by the Advaitic scholar, Vacaspati.
(2) The Tattva–samasa is a very brief summary of
doctrine, providing little more than headings. (3) The Samkhya–sutras, despite their ascription to Kapila and
their status as the defining document of the school, date to 1380–1450 ce. They have six chapters, four laying
out the doctrine, one criticizing rival systems, and one providing parables to illustrate the points made. They
diverge in doctrine from earlier Samkhya works. Several commentaries on these Sutras exist.
(4) Associated
with the Samkhya school, the Yoga–sutras of Patanjali may go back to the 2nd century bce, if its author is the
grammarian named Patanjali known to have lived then, though the fourth and last book refers to late Buddhist
thought, and must be dated to the 5th century ce. It consists of four chapters on the nature of samadhi, that is,
the state of perfect bliss, the path to it, the supernormal powers gained through it, and the final goal, the
isolation of the self from the material world. The classic commentary on Patanjali’s work is the Yoga–Bhashya,
attributed to the legendary Byasa, a figure in the Mahabharata.
It is likely, but not certain, that the association
of Yoga with Samkhya doctrine was present from the beginning, given its role in the Upanishads.
6. THE WORLD VIEW OF SAMKHYA
Samkhya postulated a single underlying material, prakriti, from which was made everything that is in
the natural world, and an indefinite number of immaterial souls, purusha. At the beginning of a world-cycle the
initially undifferentiated nature was supposed to contain three continuously active forces or qualities of equal
power, the gunas. It contained the gunas in the sense that the gunas were located in the same place that prakriti
was. The activity of these gunas eventually became unbalanced, so that one or another predominates in a given
parcel of matter (though all three are present in every part of prakriti). Before the imbalance the three were
so intermixed and so equal that the only result of their activity is the reproduction of nature by itself, so that
it continues to exist. It was a widespread assumption in Indian thought that if activity actually ceased, then it
could not resume again, for it would have no cause. Activity can only be caused by other activity. Activity and
force, like the underlying elements making up the world, can neither be created nor be destroyed. With the
imbalance the brightness–strand (sattva–guna), the force–strand (rajas–guna), and the mass–strand (tamas–guna)
became evident in the three different sorts of matter. The first is lucid, and adapts to other things, enabling
knowledge. It is the basis of mind and awareness, and provides form to a thing, as the Stoic tonos or fire does
in Greek thought. The second is the source of energy for natural transactions, and, in its psychological
manifestation, is attachment and aversion. The third is dull and heavy, non-adaptive, the opposite of the
brightness–strand, and forms the substance of heavy material objects, and the stuff of ignorance and inactivity
for the mind. These three are such that whenever one is active, the other endures the action (i.e. sattva and
tamas), and they only occur together, form must be in some matter, matter requires form to be anything actual,
and both require force to be active, while force can only act within matter and form. Each produces its
characteristic effect only in dependence on the other two. (The traditional Indian medical theory of human
temperament makes use of these three strands.)
In the later Samkhya of the Samkhya-Sutra each of the strands is said to consist of an indefinite number
of different sorts of stuff, which perhaps moves the doctrine closer to the Vaishesika notion of an indefinite
number of kinds of atoms qualitatively distinct from one another. No doubt under the pressure of Vaishesika
criticism, the later thinkers gave up the expectation that they could account for all the variations in material
qualities and mental states with three principles alone. According to the later view, any difference in quality
at all makes for a difference in the species of stuff we are dealing with. It was not allowed that a single kind of
stuff could take on different qualities, but only different levels of activity.
The initial imbalance occurred when the brightness–strand became dominant throughout nature, so
that awareness arose in prakriti, this due to the mere presence of purusha. Purusha does not causally interact with
things. The possibility of such an influence is illustrated by a magnet’s influence on iron, its mere presence
causing the iron to move. (Vaishesikan thinkers questioned if this could make any sense, and pointed out that
the case of iron should move us to postulate a special kind of cause there, not to decide that no causation was
operative at all.) The initial dominance of the brightness-strand led first to the differentiation of the infinite
number of intellects, belonging to the various souls that remained in a state of bondage at the end of the
previous world cycle. Each intellect has within it the basic character and all the possibilities acquired by it in
its beginningless series of previous lives. This differentiation of the intellects, and the return of just those
intellects that remained at the end of the previous world cycle, attached to their souls, is a natural activity from
which nature was hindered, due to the lack of awareness, before the brightness–strand became dominant. The
differentiation of the brightness–strand releases the force–strand’s energy (awareness gives rise to desire and
the inclination to action), and this energy by its nature gives a boost to the natural tendencies of the other
strands, thereby furthering the differentiation of intellect, but also activating the mass–strand, so that a physical
universe differentiates itself (one adopts a body to act to satisfy desire). As a result, the intellects become aware
of themselves, and mistake themselves for the true self, the soul which provides awareness to them, and so
acquire ego-consciousness, shankara. Shankara is dominated by the force–strand, being essentially involved with
action and emotional states leading to action (that is, karma), but the action of the force–strand here is prepared
by the brightness–strand, since the emotional states leading to action are engendered by awareness of various
sorts. After acquiring ego, the intellects gain the five senses, or receptive faculties, the mind organ (manas),
which is atomic, and serves as a common or inner sense, receiving images from the five senses, and the five
faculties of action, namely speech, manipulation, locomotion, waste ejection, and generation. The mind–organ,
ego and intellect form the “inner organ”, the central processor that receives information from the senses, and
issues orders to the active faculties. The ten outer faculties are made of subtle matter, and cannot be perceived,
but only inferred, though they have their seats in gross matter that is perceptible. The faculties of perception
are dominated by the brightness-strand, those of action by the force-strand. From the inner organ, there
proceeds five vital breath souls (of special interest to the yogic practitioner of breath control). These are (1)
the exhaling air, which pervades the whole body; (2) the inhaling air, which prevails in the throat back ribs,
intestines, sex organs, and legs; (3) the equalizing breath, which digests and assimilates, being centered in the
joints, the heart, navel, and digestive organs; (4) the ascending breath, found in the heart, throat, palate and
skull, and between the eyebrows; and (5) the pervading breath, effective in perspiration, circulation, and
distribution of life fluids, and pervading the whole body. The effectiveness of these breaths, which organize and
maintain the body, depends on the presence of the soul.
Parallel to this line of evolution in nature is the differentiation of an inert material substratum in the
mass-strand, which corresponds to the individuating factor in consciousness, since it provides the basis for
differentiating material entities. It possesses quantitative properties and is divisible, but has no other properties.
Continued stimulation from the force-strand brings five types of matter out of this substrate, corresponding
to the five senses, but none them in themselves sensible. They are only potentially perceptible until they have
become combined into atoms, little indivisible particles. The potentials arise in order, starting with sound,
which has space as its medium, and proceeding through touch, color, taste, and smell, which have as mediums
air, fire, water, and earth. Each of these potentials arises from the previous one in order through combination
with a quantum of the mass–strand. After this, atoms of space (sound), air (touch), fire (color), water (taste)
and earth arise (the burning of incense probably suggested that smoke, the earthy element, conveys smell), due
to combinations of the first potential with the remaining mass-strand quanta, in the case of space, of the first
two potentials with the remaining mass-strand quanta in the case of air, and so on, until all the potentials are
involved in earth. The idea behind this rather elaborate scheme is that space is sensible to the hearing, but not
to any of the other senses, whereas air can be felt and conveys sound, but is not visible, and has no taste or
odor, fire is visible in addition, but has no taste or odor, water has taste, but no odor, and earth affects all the
senses. (Note, too, that the original stuff in the old stories is always thin, and must thicken to acquire new
qualities and generate the world.) It is apparent, of course, that a close parallel is maintained between the
psychic and physical evolution of nature, and it seems to be intended that sense qualities are directly perceived
as they really are. Once the atoms have been accounted for, all material entities are built up from them.
One or two notes on this cosmological scheme: For one thing, everything that emerges later is already
contained in undifferentiated nature in the beginning. Before its development it is ‘unmanifest,’ and in
becoming actual it becomes ‘manifest.’ So existence is tantamount to perceivability, and the purusha, which
does not perceive itself, remains outside the scheme of manifest and not yet manifest things. Prakriti no doubt
goes back to a mythological antecedent, the original deep of water from which all arose, and the notion that
nothing actually new is created through causation, but what comes to be was concealed there in the waters
from the start, was present in original myth. This is the “identity” theory of causation, holding that the effect
is either the cause transformed, or something that had a real potential existence in the cause all along, a
potential with a natural tendency to self–actualization.
Thus natural laws simply specify the conditions under
which the natural development of these potentials are fostered or hindered.
Manifest, as opposed to unmanifest things, have causes, and are finite (limited by actual boundaries)
because their causes stand outside themselves. The universe as a whole is not part of the causal order, and has
no. Thus prakriti has no cause. Manifest, existing things do not pervade all things (are not found in the same
places as all things), as does the uncaused prakriti. Indeed, manifest things are not present even in all the places
where a suitable cause for them is present, since they are only present when the conditions enabling their
production by their cause are present. Unmanifest things other than prakriti pervade every suitable cause.
Manifest things are not only caused, but also able to cause other things. Indeed, only what is manifest can cause
other things. This means that primordial nature, prakrti, cannot itself cause other things. In fact, it is only
because for any time at all there is always a past further back, in which various actual things other than prakrti
existed, that we can explain why the things actual at this time exist, and not other things. From the assumption
The Structure of the Conscious Natural Being
Mahat (“Great one,” cosmic) = Buddhi (individual will or intellect—connected to the universe)
Sattva guna — virtue, knowledge, non-attachment, power
Tamas guna — vice, ignorance, attachment, weakness
Ahamkara (self-awareness) = Abhimana (self-conceit)
Introduces particular bodies as centers of awareness
Bhutadi (aware of body-self) Taijasa (aware of action-self) Vaikrta (aware of conscious-self)
Tamas Guna (matter) Rajas Guna (force) Sattva Guna (form)
Five subtle elements The Eleven (Sattva elements)
Five senses Eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin
Mind (manas) (processes sense awareness)
Function is awareness
Five gross elements Five organs of action
the perceptible elements of the par- Function = speech, grasping, walking,
ticular body, do not transmigrate. excretion, orgasm
Caused by parents.
Double underscored are the elements of The thirteenfold instrument, which presents being to purusha).
The subtle elements, which support the thirteenfold instrument, transmigrate, due to its dispositions (bhavas).
Virtue leads it upwards in the scale of beings, vice downward. Knowledge, non-attachment and power lead
it toward release from bondage, while ignorance, attachment and inability to overcome obstacles leads it
toward further transmigration.
of prakriti alone we can never explain why the things that are actual are in fact actual. Actual things are plural
because they are limited by other actual things, and so there is more than one of a given kind, each occurring
in its own differently delimited chunk of similar material. Manifest things are supported, that is, they continue
to exist because their supporting causes, including the material from which they are made, are present. They
are also mergent, that is, capable of mixing with other things, since they are necessarily material, and material
things can be mixed. For the same reason, they are composite, with parts, since, having a material basis, they
occupy space. Finally, they are dependent, that is, dependent on their causes for their actual existence (and
even potential existence, for that matter), of course.
These characteristics do not any of them belong to the unmanifest, to prakriti or whatever is merely
a potential being hidden in its cause. In particular, mere potential beings are not plural, for there is not some
definite number of them, though there is an indefinite number, as it were, since there is certainly more than
one.
A second note: a resolution of some version of the mind-body problem seems intended. The mass-strand and brightness-strand, after all, are aspects of a single thing, nature, and the force-strand seems to
represent a common natural law that brings about parallel developments in the physical and mental worlds,
and guarantees the possibility of knowledge of the physical world.
In the third place, the whole scheme strongly suggests that nature has the welfare of the purusha as its
aim. Purusha becomes associated with matter through the individualized intellects (buddhi), though they are
“all–pervading,” that is, have no location. They are individuated, not through location, but because different
things happen to different souls. They learn through natural processes that life is sorrowful. Thus they begin
on the road to release from Karma, eventually become detached from nature, and exist in a satisfactory but
unconscious state thereafter, free from both pleasure and pain, sorrow and bliss, and from all particular
experiences. This state of release is described as self–sufficiency, a self–sufficiency which isolates the purusha
from the empirical personality and every other manifestation of prakriti. Prakriti, it seems, provides the means
for attaining release, by providing the means to knowledge. Later theistic schools argued that Samkhya (and
Vaishesika) had no business assigning such good planning to an unconscious nature, and insisted that it should
postulate a God.
Purusha, though distinct from nature, have always been trapped in it, and are free from the experience
of an individual life only in the periods between world cycles when the three strands are temporarily in balance.
Purusha are necessary for consciousness, despite the existence of the brightness–strand. The intellect is only the
medium of consciousness, consciousness being a kind of light arising from association with purusha, and the
most refined form of the material. The dilemma of the individual purusha is that it mistakes the body and buddhi,
the intellect, the consciousness of things in the world, for itself, and one attains release from the natural world
by coming to be aware of the distinctness of purusha from both matter and mind. The performance of Yogic
practices of the sort encountered in the Upanishads, brings about the necessary realization in the end.
Prakriti and natural things are distinguished from purusha because they are characterized by the three
gunas, and not discriminable from buddhi. They are objective, that is, possible objects of perception or
inference, so the material natural world is really there, and there is only one correct account of it, which is
correct because that is the way it is, not because that is the way we inevitably imagine it. They are common
to the different persons who experience it, so that we all experience the same world. Finally, they are not
conscious, and are productive, though, of course, prakriti does not produce things through causation, but by
underlying them as a material cause.
The purusha have none of these characteristics. They are pure inactive centers of awareness, without
any distinction between themselves other than being different centers of awareness. They are implicit in the
experiencer of the world, since the experiencer must be aware, but are not the experiencer as it occurs within
experience or as it experiences particular things due to its interaction with them. So the purusha is not, for
instance, male or female, nor is it to be characterized as subject to a given experience, sensing the apple, say.
That belongs to buddhi. Rather, it is pure subjective awareness. So purusha are not characterized by the three
gunas, being immaterial, and are discriminable from the intellect. They are not perceivable, and do not
intercommunicate, as it were, so that one purusha is not aware of the others through any kind of perception.
They are conscious, but produce nothing. So what we have here is a recognition of the reality of the subjective
side of experience, and the identification of a thing which is pure subject.
Purusha, like the merely unmanifest, is also uncaused. Note in particular that the purusha is plural, but
not limited by (spatially bounded by) other things, nor plural in the way that such things with boundaries are.
Indeed, it seems that no number can be assigned to number the purusha—their number is indefinite.
7. HOW THE WORLD IS KNOWN IN SAMKHYA, AND HOW IT IS ESCAPED
It is evident that the three gunas do not form the elements of a chemical theory so much as metaphysical
components of things. They have to be present if things are to be understood at all, not to account for any
particular observations. The gunas can be inferred because the operation of causation is necessary to explain
the experienced world. In particular, there must be the same causal operations present everywhere, and the
general picture must be one of opposites interacting, that is, causal powers which are opposed sometimes and
so sometimes do not function. The force-strand and mass-strand, then, meet this requirement, and the mass-strand and brightness-strand meet the requirement that things be made of stuff located in space, and that the
properties of things, the ways in which they act through the force-strand, hang on their internal structure or
form.
The purusha can be inferred because the natural world exists for something not part of the natural
world. Apparently there are things we are aware of that cannot be explained in the naturalistic terms of this
materialist account of things. First of all, the world is experienced (it exists for the sake of being experienced,
and is satisfied once it has been experienced), and the requisite subjectivity cannot be accounted for materially.
So purusha is witness to the world. This experiencer is somehow responsible for consciousness, it seems, though
it is not a cause in the material way, and is isolated from the causal nexus of the natural world. It enjoys things,
that is, values its experience. Value is a subjective phenomena, not to be accounted for within the purely
natural scheme of prakriti. This experiencer seeks an aim, moreover, which is non-natural, namely freedom
from involvement in the material world. Although purusha is supposedly uninvolved in causation, except for
its activation of the brightness-strand, it seems to be viewed as active in its own way, and free in its actions,
so that it is not driven by natural causes (natural occurring desires or preferences), and can control the animal
to which it is attached by its knowledge, that is, by attending to things, calling buddhi to see things, which lead
the natural creature to behave in a new way. It is not merely a witness, but a spectator, that takes an interest
in what it witnesses, and directs by calling attention to one thing or another. Thus it is active, if you will, by
being inactive. It does not do anything, it merely observes.
The greatest difficulty here is putting the apparent activity of purusha together with its metaphysical
inactivity. The desire of prakriti to be experienced seems to do this work. Prakriti presents itself to purusha, as
it were, and in doing so, the imbalance is created in favor of the sattva guna, which leads to the evolution of
things (form becomes active in matter, so that it shapes it). The purusha did not, however, come to be
associated with prakriti at some time. Each purusha was always associated with a subtle body, without beginning.
Every new incarnation must have its cause in the natural world, either in gross bodies, or, if the end of a period
of equilibrium of the three gunas between world-epochs is at issue, then in subtle bodies which retain their
dispositions even in a period of equilibrium.
It can be inferred that there are several purushas because there are several loci of action, that is, several
buddhi or intellects. Interestingly, it is not argued that there are many viewpoints of experience, presumably
because we only know of other viewpoints not by experiencing them, but by observing that other things in the
world act from a different point of view, opposing us.
The great problem, then, is the prakrti-purusha interaction problem, a version of the mind-body
problem. The solution given seems inadequate. It is argued that the two are in the same place, as it were, so
that each appears to have the characteristics of the other. Perhaps the idea is that the purusha, being