Sankhya Darshana

Sankhya means enumeration, or inventory. This darśana, or philosophical school, lays out a list of the fundamental elements of existence, or tattwas. The essential elements out of which all the rest arise are purusha, or spirit, and prakriti, matter. Purusha and prakriti are understood to be distinctly separate, neither one evolving from the other. The ultimate aim in the Sankhya darśana is to realize and merge with purusha, leaving behind the delusion of identification with prakriti, implying that moksha, or liberation from suffering, can be attained through jñana, or knowledge. When we know our true selves as pure spirit, we are free from the pain of identifying with the body and the environment that it relies upon.

The oldest known text of the Sankhya darśana is called the Sankhya Kārikā. The text itself refers to older Sankhya texts, so it's understood not to be the root text of the tradition, but a summary that was compiled probably during the first few centuries BCE. The Sankhya Kārikā is a collection of seventy-two metrical verses, and it begins by stating its purpose in the first Kārikā: “This is an inquiry into the prevention of suffering.”

And then it essentially says: “If you think that this effort to prevent pain is unnecessary because we already have the Vedas and they explain everything, then just look around and see if our understanding of the Vedas have permanently erased suffering. It might go away for a little while, but then it comes back. And the reason for that is that our relationship to the Vedas has become all tangled up with impurity, decay, and excess. What we need to do is to try to understand these three: the manifest reality, the unmanifest reality, and the knower.”

Sankhya asserts that everything in the visible universe evolves from prakriti. It is the uncaused cause that must exist, because something cannot evolve from nothing. There must be a root, a primary essence out of which all we can see and touch evolves. Prakriti is a kind of logical necessity, but not something that our senses can experience. And since it does not evolve from anything, it is eternal and indestructible.

All we can see or touch or hear, on the other hand, is not eternal or indestructible. When we look around, we see that everything around us is time-bound, finite, moving, manifold, dependent on its environment, always swirling and combining with other things, and subordinate to something else. Prakriti itself is the opposite of these: it is eternal, infinite and pervasive, still and peaceful, one, independent, unmixed, and inferior to nothing. It is also unconscious, inanimate, insentient. This inert, limitless, stable prakriti is what gives rise to everything in the manifest cosmos.

Purusha is spirit, which like prakriti is eternal, infinite and pervasive. But unlike prakriti, purusha is conscious, awake. Purusha does not evolve from anything else, and nothing evolves from it. It is the witness and controller of all creation that is not limited by creation, but causes all and enjoys all. All existence is for the enjoyment of purusha, and purushacontains the promise of release, freedom, and liberation.

Alone, purusha cannot act because it has no field of action, nothing to act upon. And prakriti cannot act alone because it is inanimate, unconscious. The manifestation of the universe of form depends on purusha and prakriti coming into contact with each other – they are the primal knower and known, the essential subject and object. Their coming together is, as the text says in Kārikā 21, like the coming together of a person who is blind and a person who is lame. They rely on each other for functions that each are incapable of on their own. And everything that we know and love and fear and crave and despise and enjoy and cringe away from depends on their union (yoga).

Purusha and prakriti are like polar opposites, and all of existence, all that is carācara, moving or still, depends on their joining. One is awake and free, the other asleep and self-imprisoned. Purusha is "passively luminous" and prakriti is "mechanically active". When we divide the cosmos like this, into two simultaneously interdependent and mutually exclusive poles, we set up a conflict that can only be resolved by denying one or the other.

We can either flee in disgust from the "sterile procession of...images" that reflect on the screen of prakriti, retiring "into the immutable Repose" of purusha, or we can deny our own immortality and take our "orientation away from God and towards the animal". The great 9th century Indian mystic Adi Shankara built upon the fundamental dichotomy between purusha and prakriti in his teachings, leading the student toward the still, ineffable, primal spirit and away from the world of delusion that imposes its illusion upon us. His nondual teaching rested on the foundation of duality, and simply elevated one of the poles above the other.

Sri Aurobindo suggests that this need to choose one pole and reject the other is the inevitable result of the dichotomy itself. As soon as we conceive of these two poles of existence, we will gravitate toward one and away from the other. We will reach either toward spirit and away from life, as many spiritual philosophers of all traditions and religions have done, or away from spirit and toward life, as many materialist philosophers of all traditions and religions have done (including the proponents of the modern scientific religion). 

"If we assert only pure Spirit and a mechanical unintelligent substance or energy, calling one God or Soul and the other Nature, the inevitable end will be that we shall either deny God or else turn from Nature. For both Thought and Life, a choice then becomes imperative. Thought comes to deny the one as an illusion of the imagination or the other as an illusion of the senses; Life comes to fix on the immaterial and flee from itself in a disgust or a self-forgetting ecstasy, or else to deny its own immortality and take its orientation away from God and towards the animal. Purusha and Prakriti, the passively luminous Soul of the Sankhyas and their mechanically active Energy, have nothing in common, not even their opposite modes of inertia; their antinomies can only be resolved by the cessation of the inertly driven Activity into the immutable Repose upon which it has been casting in vain the sterile procession of its images. Shankara’s wordless, inactive Self and his Maya of many names and forms are equally disparate and irreconcilable entities; their rigid antagonism can terminate only by the dissolution of the multitudinous illusion into the sole Truth of an eternal Silence." - Sri Aurobindo The Life Divine, 'The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial'

- Matthew Andrews (AVI USA)