Īśvarakṛṣṇa

Of the early books of Sāṃkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy, only stray quotations survive. The school's ideas run through the Upanishads and the Mahābhārata, and around the beginning of the common era it was the leading philosophy of Hindu thought. What displaced its older literature was a short teaching poem of seventy-odd verses, the Sāṅkhyakārikā, and that poem is the oldest Sāṃkhya textbook that survives.

Almost nothing is known of its author, Īśvarakṛṣṇa. Historians usually place him around 350 CE, after the root text of the Nyāya school and before the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu; Gerald Larson, a historian of Sāṃkhya, allows the whole Gupta period, from 320 to 540, and some reference works put him earlier. The years on this page stand for the usual estimate. A Chinese translation of the poem, made between 557 and 569, fixes the latest possible date. Tradition says he came from the Kauśika family. His own closing verses place him in a line of teachers reaching back to a supreme sage — Kapila, in the tradition — through Āsuri and Pañcaśikha, and claim to hold the whole substance of the Ṣaṣṭitantra, "the system of sixty topics", minus its stories and its disputes with rivals.

The poem opens on suffering. Suffering of three kinds strikes every life, and the second verse asks what help the Vedas offer. It answers that the sacrifices are no better than ordinary remedies: they are impure, their effects wear off, and they reward some more than others. Release, the verse goes on, comes only from telling three things apart — the world as it appears, the unseen source it unfolds from, and the one who knows them both.

That distinction is the claim Sāṃkhya is remembered for. Everything that changes, from the intellect down to the physical elements, is prakṛti, nature, active but unconscious and woven from three strands, the guṇas: light, restless energy and inertia. Against it stand the puruṣas, conscious selves, many in number, which do nothing and only watch. Bondage is the watcher taking nature's activity for its own. The verses hold that effects already exist in their causes before they appear, and they neither affirm nor deny God. Nature serves the self's release the way milk flows for a calf without knowing why, and the two work together like a lame man riding on the shoulders of a blind one. Once the self has seen what nature is, nature withdraws, as a dancer leaves the stage when the performance is over.

The poem reached China within two centuries. Paramārtha, an Indian Buddhist monk working there, translated it with a commentary, and his version is the oldest that survives. Buddhist sources in Chinese also tell of a Sāṃkhya teacher, Vindhyavāsin, who defeated Vasubandhu's teacher in debate, and of Vasubandhu's treatise against Sāṃkhya written in reply; a few scholars once took Vindhyavāsin and Īśvarakṛṣṇa to be the same man, and others reject the identification. Yoga took over Sāṃkhya's division of self and nature and added a God. Vedānta took over the three strands. Within the school, the anonymous Yuktidīpikā, of around 700, and Vācaspati Miśra's Tattvakaumudī, of the tenth century, became the most studied commentaries on the poem.