Samkhya Karika: A Yoga Practitioner’s Guide to Overcoming the Three Causes of Suffering
Samkhya Karika: A Yoga Practitioner’s Guide to Overcoming the Three Causes of Suffering
Srivatsa Ramaswami
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2025. 206 pp., hardcover, $25.
Six principal schools of Hindu thought are reckoned as orthodox in that they acknowledge the scriptural authority of the Vedas.
Three of these schools—the Nyaya, Mimamsa, and Vaisheshika—deal with subjects such as logic and natural philosophy and are virtually unknown in the West. Two of them—yoga and Vedanta—are comparatively well known here. The third is the Samkhya, which may be the oldest of them all.
The Bhagavad Gita would appear to differ with this distinction between yoga and Samkhya when it says, “Children, not the wise, speak of Samkhya and yoga as distinct; he who is truly established in one obtains the fruit of both” (5.4). Indeed much of the Gita consists of an intertwining of the teachings of Samkhya and yoga, which are extremely similar. The title of the second chapter of the Gita is “Samkhya Yoga.”
Samkhya is usually translated as “enumeration”; yoga, as “union.” Much of the obscurity is dispelled if we translate these terms more idiomatically: samkhya as “analysis” and yoga as “integration.” We can then see that these two are different aspects of an identical process.
As with many other aspects of Hinduism, the origins of the Samkhya are remote and obscure. But it is frequently cited, even by Buddhists, as an influence on the Buddha. Since the Buddha lived in the sixth century BC, the Samkhya must go back at least to the seventh century BC, making it the oldest philosophical school known today.
The principal text of the Samkhya is the Samkhya Karika, a collection of aphorisms that set out the main body of the doctrine. It is much more recent than the Samkhya philosophy as such and is usually dated to the fourth century AD; its author is the otherwise unknown Ishwarakrishna.
The fundamental doctrine of the Samkhya is the distinction between purusha and prakriti—terms which have been translated in a variety of ways. To understand the distinction simply, we can think of purusha as that which perceives and prakriti as that which is perceived.
Purusha, as we learn in this new translation of the Samkhya Karika, is “the Self . . . pure, unvarying consciousness.” It is the primordial witness and may be identified with what other Hindu schools call atman. Prakriti is manifest reality at all levels. In its primordial, undisturbed, unmanifest state, it is called mulaprakriti.
In this state, the three gunas—or primal principles, which we may define as the active, passive, and equilibrating forces respectively—exist undisturbed and in perfect balance. “Mulaprakriti does not change; it has existed forever,” writes Srivatsa Ramaswami in his commentary on the Samkhya Karika.
But in the manifest state of prakriti, the three gunas—rajas, tamas, and sattva—are no longer in balance, and their disequilibrium gives rise to existence as we know it.
Herein lies the problem. In ordinary existence, the purusha, forgetting its own incorruptible nature, identifies with prakriti—the ever-shifting contents of its own experience. This causes duhkha, or suffering. The Samkhya sets out the path of liberation, which it calls kaivalya or “isolation.” In this perfect state, the purusha is fully freed from identification with its own experience and exists in eternal and uninterrupted bliss.
The Samkhya enumerates twenty-five tattvas or principles of reality. The first two are purusha and prakriti. The third is mahat (“greatness”) or buddhi, which is both “cosmic intelligence” and “universal intellect.” From this proceeds ahamkara, “I-ness,” or egohood, and from this, manas, or “mind.” From manas in turn arise the five sense organs; the five motor organs; the tanmatras or “subtle elements or sensations”: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch; and finally the five gross elements: fire, air, water, earth, and akasha, or “space.”
In the Samkhya, kaivalya is achieved when one thoroughly comprehends these twenty-five tattvas, not only theoretically, but through experience and insight. Ramaswami, citing an ancient text, says: “The one who thoroughly knows all the twenty-five tattvas, the aspects of human reality, becomes free.”
Ramaswami continues: “Samkhya is a thorough and unique evidence-based philosophical system, and Yoga further develops on the Samkhya framework to accomplish the goal of liberation.” Indeed, as he repeatedly shows, the analogies between the teachings of the Samkhya Karika and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are many and exact. Knowledge of the Samkhya philosophy can be construed as a kind of jnana yoga, or yoga of knowledge.
In the present time, yoga has proliferated throughout the Western world, but practically all of its familiar forms fall under the rubric of hatha yoga, with its asanas or postures. Yet the postures, however beneficial, are mere preliminaries to the real point of yoga, which as Patanjali wrote, is the “cessation of the oscillations of the mental substance”—the perfect equilibrium of the mind, which parallels the state of mulaprakriti and leads to liberation.
It is strange that the Samkhya and the yoga philosophy are so blatantly neglected in the West. Although they have been praised by some of the highest luminaries of Western philosophy, the mainstream of that philosophy has degenerated into a colorless secular materialism, which can give no real or lasting answers and as a result is increasingly ignored. It may be past time to revisit the knowledge of the Samkhya.
This fine new edition of the Samkhya Karika, accompanied by Ramaswami’s able translation and commentary, may open up the window of jnana yoga to at least a few people in the West who are capable of grasping its true depth and wisdom.
Richard Smoley