Samkhya System e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. On the other hand, it is impossible to find in the Upanisads any real basis for the Samkhya system. The Upanisadsf are essentially devoted to the discovery of an absolute, and,diverse as are the forms which the absolute may take, they do not abandon the search, nor do they allow that no such absolute exists. There are, however, elements here and there which mark the growth of ideas which later were thrown into systematic form in the Samkhya, but it is impossible to see in these fragmentary hints any indication that the Samkhya philosophy was then in process of formation. It is, of course, possible, as a matter of abstract argument, to insist that the elements in the Upanisads which suggest the later Samkhya views are really borrowings by the Upanisads of doctrines already extant in a Samkhya system, but, in the absense of the slightest evidence for the existence of such a system in the Vedic literature, it is methodologically unsound to take this hypothesis as possessing any value, in face of the natural conclusion that we have in the Upanisads scattered hints which were later amalgamated into one system. Just like the Vedanta of Samkara, or the Vedanta of Badarayana, the Samkhya is a system built on the Upanisads: from both of these it differs in that it goes radically and essentially beyond the teaching of the Upanisads.