[Advaita-l] Patanjali Yoga Sutra. I.3

[Sunil Bhattacharjya]

Sankhyskarika at the end says that it has all the concepts of the Sastitantra except (a) the Parables and( b) the Refutatons of the rival views. The Sankhya Sutra contains six chapters, which include the two chapters dealing with what has beem omitted by Sankhyakarika. Moreover the Sankhyakarika as we see today has lost its 62nd Karika as Tilak had shown that Gaudapadacharya calls the 69th Karika as the 70 th Karika.and Dr. Radhakrishnan calls it the greatest contribition of Tilak to Indian philosophy. It appears  that Vacaspati could have omitted the 62nd  verse. The late appearances of the commentaries on Sakhyasutra does not prove the late appearance of Sankhyasutra itself. Some scholars believe that Varshaganya wrote a book on Sankhya based which his disciple Isvarakrishna made the shortened  version called "Sankhyakarika". If that is true then Varshaganya's work was called Sastitantra, which itself was based on  the Sankhyasutra of Kapila.
 Then we have the verses of Panchasikha, which are still available in the Vyasabhashya. The historical aspect of development of Sankhya itself is very interesting and lengthy. 
 
Sunil K. Bhattacharjya
 

--- On Fri, 5/1/09, Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com> wrote:


From: Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Patanjali Yoga Sutra. I.3
To: "A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta" <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Date: Friday, May 1, 2009, 7:33 AM


On Fri, 1 May 2009, Sunil Bhattacharjya wrote:

> Sankhya sutra says that the existence of God cannot be proved. So Sankhya is Godless but not atheistic. Most of the Hindu scholars do not know this thing about Sankhya. Sankhyakarika is the shortened version of Sankhya sutra.  

The Samkhya darshana was founded by Maharshi Kapila.  The canonical text of Samkhya was the Shashtitantra either by him or his successor Panchashikha.  Or perhaps Shashtitantra refers to 60 topics covered by this school.  Asuri and Vodhu were also two early acharyas of Samkhya. All four may be legendary rather than historical as they are mentioned during the nitya tarpana and other vidhis.  However some quotes attributed to them can be found in later commentaries.

The oldest extent work on Samkhya is the samkhyakarikas of Ishvarakrishna. It claims to be an epitome of the Shashtitantra. It's importance is shown in that it is one of the few non-Buddhist works found in the mahayana tripithaka.  Indeed one of the earliest commentaries on the karikas is known only from a Chinese translation.  The great Vachaspati Mishra, though he commented on the sutras of other darshanas commented on the karikas only for samkhya.

The work called Samkhyasutra is actually comparatively late.  All the commentaries on it date from the 15th century or later and reflect an already Vedantized orientation.

-- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>
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