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SANKHYA AND YOGA
right. Though he plays no such conspicuous role in Indian myth and legend as do many of the other great philosophers, nevertheless, his miraculous power is recognized in a celebrated episode of the Mahābhārata. There we read that the sixty thousand sons of a certain Cakravartin named "Occan" (sagara) were riding as the armed guard of their father's sacrificial horse while it wandered over the kingdoms of the land, during its symbolical solar year of victorious freedom. Suddenly, to their profound distress, the animal vanished from before their very eyes. They set to work digging where it had disappeared and came upon it, finally, deep in the earth, down in the underworld, with a saint sitting beside it in meditation. Over-eager to recapture their sacred charge, the young warriors disregarded the saint-who was none other than Kapila-and omitted to pay him the homage traditionally due to a holy man. Whereupon, with a flash of his eye, he burnt them all to ashes.
The solar power of the sage is evident in this adventure. His name, Kapila, meaning the “Red One," is an epithet of the sun, as well as of Vişnu. Judging from his influence in the period of Mahāvīra and the Buddha, he must have lived before the sixth century B.C., and yet the classic texts of the philosophical system that he is said to have founded belong to a much later date. The important sänkhya-kārikā of Isvarakrsna was composed in the middle of the fifth century A.D., while the Sänkhya-sūtras, the work ascribed traditionally to the hand of Kapila himself, cannot be dated earlier than 1380-1450 A.D.
As for Yoga, the dating of the classic Yoga-sūtras of Patañjali is extremely controversial. Though the first three books of this basic treatise may belong to the second century B.C., the fourth is apparently later; for it contains material that seems to refer
Mahābhārata g. 107. * Cf. supra, pp. 134-135.
*Cf. Richard Garbe, Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie, 2nd edition, Leipzig, 1917, pp. 83-84, 95-100.
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