The Sánkhya Káriká, or Memorial Verses on the Sánkhya Philosophy

Tradition ascribes this commentary to Gauḍapāda, and most scholars doubt that he is the Gauḍapāda of the Māṇḍūkya-kārikā, the oldest surviving treatise of Advaita Vedānta, the non-dualist school. It is a bhāṣya, a line-by-line commentary, on the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the seventy-odd verses in which Īśvarakṛṣṇa set out the teaching of Sāṃkhya: many conscious selves that only watch, and one unconscious nature that acts. Each verse is given before its explanation. The commentary stops at the sixty-ninth verse, and the last three stand without it. The doubt has a plain basis. The Advaita verses argue that nothing has ever come into being and turn an endless regress against Sāṃkhya's account of causes; this commentary expounds that account without reservation. Karl Potter, editor of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, contrasted its simplicity with the depth of the Advaita verses and judged a shared author unlikely, and Otto Strauss, a German Indologist, wrote in 1925 that its author could scarcely be that monist. Others leave the question open. The commentary teaches by example. The threefold suffering of the first verse becomes fever and dysentery from an imbalance of the body's humours, the grief of losing what one loves, harm from other creatures, and cold, heat, wind and rain. A bystander arrested along with a gang of thieves is taken for a thief, and so the self, which does nothing, seems to act. Two travellers, one lame and one blind, are left behind in a forest when robbers scatter their caravan and their kin abandon them, and the blind man carries the lame one, who shows the way: so nature and the self join. Against those who make God the cause of the world, it asks how creatures with qualities could come from a God without any. Between 557 and 569 Paramārtha, an Indian Buddhist monk, translated into Chinese a commentary closely related to this one, and Strauss took this commentary for a reworking of that one. In 1837 Horace Hayman Wilson, Oxford's first professor of Sanskrit, published it in English beside Henry Thomas Colebrooke's translation of the verses.