Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

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SANKHYA PSYCHOLOGY
truth from two points of view. In fact, the protagonists of the two schools have collaborated in India for centuries, borrowing major conceptions from each other for the purpose of expounding the mysteries of the way to their common goal of mokṣa."9
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It would hardly have been possible for the masters of the orthodox Brahman tradition to accept and assimilate the teachings of the non-Vedic aboriginal lore without this Sankhya-Yoga spiritualization of the conception of the relationship between life-matter and the life-monads. Jainism, as we have seen, viewed the interaction of the two principles in terms of a kind of subtle chemistry, as a material process of pervasion and suffusion, a tingeing of the crystal of the life-monad by contamination with a subtle karmic substance; but in the Yoga-sutras no such concrete process is described. Here, rather, is a kind of optical effect-a psychological illusion-which makes it appear that the life-monad is in bondage, trapped in karmic meshes, caught in the unceasing activities of the various aspects of matter (the gunas), whereas, actually, it is ever free. Bondage is but an illusion, which our limited and limiting minds entertain concerning the condition of our transcendent, changeless, and untainted Self.
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Sankhya and Yoga, however, in contrast to the orthodox Brāhman view, regard the activity of the gunas as no less real, no less self-sustaining, than the transcendent repose of the life-monad. Matter (prakṛti, which is composed of the gunas) really shrouds the life-monad; it is no mere illusory, miragelike superimposition. The activities of the gunas are transitory in so far as their changing details are concerned, but enduring in their continuous passage itself. Nevertheless, within the sphere of each individual, the effects of the gunas can be brought to a state of "cessation"
30 The principal link between the two traditions, at least from the period of the Upanisads and Bhagavad Gita, has been the doctrine that self-surrender (bhakti), should be practiced as a preliminary step to selfdetachment.
40 Cf. supra, pp. 295-297.
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