25 Facts About Samkhya

Samkhya's epistemology accepts three of six pramanas as the only reliable means of gaining knowledge, as does yoga.

Samkhya is strongly related to the Yoga school of Hinduism, for which it forms the theoretical foundation, and it was influential on other schools of Indian philosophy.

Samkhya or sankhya, transliterated as samkhya and sankhya, respectively, is a Sanskrit word that, depending on the context, means 'to reckon, count, enumerate, calculate, deliberate, reason, reasoning by numeric enumeration, relating to number, rational'.

The Samkhya system is called so because 'it "enumerates'" twenty five Tattvas or true principles; and its chief object is to effect the final emancipation of the twenty-fifth Tattva, i e the purusa or soul'.

Samkhya makes a distinction between two "irreducible, innate and independent realities, " purusha, the witness-consciousness, and prakrti, "matter, " the activities of mind and perception.

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Samkhya believes that the purusa cannot be regarded as the source of inanimate world, because an intelligent principle cannot transform itself into the unconscious world.

In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind.

Samkhya school considers moksha as a natural quest of every jiva.

Samkhya considered Pratyaksa or Drstam, Anumana, and Sabda or Aptavacana to be the only valid means of knowledge or pramana.

Unlike some other schools, Samkhya did not consider the following three pramanas to be epistemically proper: Upamana, Arthapatti or Anupalabdi.

Samkhya system is based on Sat-karya-vada or the theory of causation.

The Samkhya system is therefore an exponent of an evolutionary theory of matter beginning with primordial matter.

The cause and effect theory of Samkhya is called Satkarya-vada, and holds that nothing can really be created from or destroyed into nothingness – all evolution is simply the transformation of primal Nature from one form to another.

Samkhya cosmology describes how life emerges in the universe; the relationship between Purusha and prakrti is crucial to Patanjali's yoga system.

The strands of Samkhya thought can be traced back to the Vedic speculation of creation.

Samkhya first said, "This is I", therefore he became I by name.

However, these early speculations and proto-Samkhya ideas had not distilled and congealed into a distinct, complete philosophy.

Samkhya is only seen by the keenest thought, by the sublest of those thinkers who see into the subtle.

The Gita integrates Samkhya thought with the devotion of theistic schools and the impersonal Brahman of Vedanta.

Larson, Bhattacharya and Potter state it to be likely that early Samkhya doctrines found in oldest Upanishads provided the contextual foundations and influenced Buddhist and Jaina doctrines, and these became contemporaneous, sibling intellectual movements with Samkhya and other schools of Hindu philosophy.

Yuktidipika suggests that many more ancient scholars contributed to the origins of Samkhya in ancient India than were previously known and that Samkhya was a polemical philosophical system.

Samkhya theorists argue that an unchanging God cannot be the source of an ever-changing world and that God was only a necessary metaphysical assumption demanded by circumstances.

Samkhya did accept the concept of an emergent Isvara previously absorbed into Prakriti.

Therefore, Samkhya maintained that the various cosmological, ontological and teleological arguments could not prove God.

Samkhya criticized the Samkhya view that the cause of the universe is the unintelligent Prakruti.

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