Sāṅkhyakārikā

Every life is struck by suffering of three kinds, and the first verse of this short Sanskrit poem asks why anyone should look further than the obvious remedies. The second verse answers that the remedies of the Vedas, the sacrifices, are no better than ordinary ones: they are impure, they wear off, and they reward some more than others. Release comes only from telling three things apart — the world as it appears, the unseen source it unfolds from, and the one who knows them. That is the teaching of Sāṃkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy, set out here in its earliest surviving textbook by Īśvarakṛṣṇa, whom many historians place around 350 CE, though some reference works put him earlier. The text here gives the verses alone, without a commentary. Everything that changes, the verses argue, is prakṛti, nature or matter, active but unconscious, unfolding through twenty-three products from the intellect down to the physical elements. Against it stands puruṣa, the conscious self: there are many such selves, and each does nothing but watch. Effects already exist in their causes before they appear. Nature works for the self's release the way milk flows for a calf without knowing why, and the two are joined like a lame man carried on the shoulders of a blind one; once the self has seen what nature is, nature stops, as a dancer leaves the stage after the performance. The verses neither affirm nor deny God. The closing verses trace the teaching from 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", leaving out only its stories and its disputes with rivals. Paramārtha, an Indian Buddhist monk working in China, translated the poem with a commentary into Chinese between 557 and 569, and that translation is its oldest surviving version. In 1837 the Oriental Translation Fund printed the first English translation at Oxford, by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, together with Horace Hayman Wilson's translation of the commentary ascribed to Gauḍapāda.