What I feel is, that it is not enough simply to repeat the watchwords of any ancient philosophy, which are easily accessible in the Sûtras, but that we must at least make an attempt to bring those ancient problems near to us, to make them our own, and try to follow the ancient thinkers along the few footsteps which they left behind.

There is an illustration in the Sâmkhya-tattvaKaumudî 36, which suggests a very different view of the process of knowing, and deserves to be taken into consideration: As the seniors of a village,' they say, 'collect taxes from the householders and hand them over to the governor of the district, who again remits them to the treasurer, and the treasurer to the king, thus do the outer senses, when they have perceived anything, hand it on to the inner sense, the Manas, the organ which determines what there is and then hands it over to Ahamkâra, and the Ahamkâra, after appropriating it, to the Buddhi, the supreme Lord.' Here Buddhi, though supreme, is decidedly different from the cosmic Buddhi that springs from the Avyakta and leads to Ahamkâra; nor is it easy to see how these two Buddhis, or rather that one Buddhi in its two functions, could have been admitted by one and the same philosopher.

Is Sâmkhya Idealism ?

There is another point on which it is difficult to come to a clear understanding. We are asked whether the Hindus fully realised the fact that we are conscious of our sensations only, and that all we call bodies, or the outside or objective world, is no more than the result of an irresistible inference of our mind, which may be called Avidyâ. We are

conscious, no doubt, that we are not ourselves the cause of our sensations, that we do not make the sky, but that it is given us. But beyond that, our world is only an inductive world, it is, so to say, our creation; we make the sky concave or blue, and all that remains, after deducting both the primary and secondary qualities, is Prakriti as looked at by Purusha, or, as we should say, das Ding an sich, which we can never know directly. It is within us, or under our sway, that this Prakriti has grown to all that it is, not excluding our own bodies, our senses, our Manas, our Tanmâtras, our Ahamkâra, our Buddhi. Was this the view taken by the Sâmkhyas? Did they see that the Sankara, the development of the world, takes place within us, is our growth, though not our work, that the light which, as Buddhi emerges from Prakriti, is the light within us that has the power of perceiving by its light; that both the Aham, the Ego, and the Tvam, the Non-Ego, determine not only ourselves, but the whole world, and that what we call the real, the sensuously perceiving and perceived world, is no more than the development of thoughtless nature as reflected through the senses on our enchanted Self? The riddle of the world which the Sâmkhyaphilosophy has to solve would then be no more than to account for the mistaken interest which the Self takes in that reflex, the consciousness which he assumes of it, the fundamental error by which, for a time at least, he actually identifies himself with those images. This identifying process would, from this point of view, really take the place of what we call creation. The closing of the mental eyelids would be the dropping of the curtain and the close

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of the drama of the world; and this final recognition of our cosmic misconception would lead the Self back from the stage of the world to himself, would undo all creation, and put an end to that suffering which is the result of bondage or finiteness.

It sometimes seems to me as if such views had been at the bottom of all Hindu philosophy, though forgotten again or obscured by a belief in that reality which determines our practical life (Vyavahâra). By admitting this blending of cosmic and psychological views, much in the Sâmkhya-philosophy would cease to be obscure, the Buddhi of the world and the Buddhi of ourselves would indeed become one, and the belief in the reality of things, both objective and subjective, might truly be explained as due to Aviveka, the absence of discrimination between the Self and the imagery of nature. It would become intelligible why Prakriti should be supposed to play her part so long only as it was noticed by Purusha ; it would explain why Prakriti, by itself, was taken as Aketana, objective, thoughtless, and the Purusha only as subjective, conscious and thinking; why in its solitude Purusha was conceived as not active, but Prakriti as always active; why Purusha should sometimes mean the eternal Self, and sometimes man such as he is or imagines himself to be, while interested in the world, believing in the world, and yet with a constant longing after a higher and truer state, freedom from the world, freedom from pain, freedom from all cosmic being, freedom as alone with himself.

Purusha and Prakriti.

But if we may credit the founders of the Sâmkhya, whether Kapila or Âsuri or Pañkasikha, with such

advanced views, if they really had made it quite clear to themselves that human beings cannot have anything but their own knowledge, we can understand why they should have represented the whole process of perception and combination, all joy and pain, and, in consequence, all willing also, as belonging, not to the Purusha or the Self, but to a stranger, to the Manas, and indirectly to Prakriti, while the Purusha, when he seems to see, to combine, to rejoice, to suffer, and to will, does so by misapprehension only, like a spectator who is carried away by his sympathies for Hecuba, but who in the end. dries his tears and stops his sighs, leaves the theatre of the world, and breathes the fresh air of a bright night. The Sâmkhya uses this very simile. The whole development of Prakriti, it is said, takes place only when Purusha is looking on the dancer, that is, on Prakriti, in all her disguises. If he does not look, she does not dance for him, and as soon as he turns his eyes entirely away from her, she altogether ceases to try to please him. She may please others who are still looking at her, and so far it may be said that she is never annihilated, because there will always be new Purushas to be enchanted and enchained for awhile, but at last to be set free by her.

State of Purusha, when Free.

Often has the question been asked, What then becomes of the Purusha, after the spell of Prakriti has been broken, and he has ceased to take any interest in the phantasmagoria of the world, thrown on him by the Manas and all the products of Prakriti that support the Manas. But this is a question

which no philosophy can be expected to answer. All that can be said is that Purusha, freed from all Prakritic bonds, whether ignorance or knowledge, joy or sorrow, would remain himself, would be what he alone can be, unrestricted, not interfered with, free and independent, and hence, in the highest sense of the word, perfect and happy in himself. This ineffable state of bliss has naturally shared the fate of similar conceptions, such as the oneness with Brahman, the Nihsreyasa or Non plus ultra, and the Nirvana of the Buddhists. In the eyes of less advanced thinkers, this unfathomable bliss assumed naturally the character of paradisiacal happiness painted in the most brilliant and even sensuous colours, while to the truly enlightened it represented tranquillity (Sânti), perfect rest, and selfsatisfaction. While I agree with Dr. Dahlmann 1 that the Buddhist idea of Nirvâna was the same, originally, as that of the higher bliss of the Vedanta and Sâmkhya-philosophy, I cannot believe that it was borrowed by the Buddhists from either of those systems. Nirvâna was one of the ideas that were in the air in India, and it was worked out by Buddha as well as by Kapila and Bâdarâyana, but by each in his own fashion. The name itself, like many technical terms of Buddha's teaching, was no doubt Brahmanic. It occurs in the Vedânta, though it is absent in the Sâmkhya-Sûtras. We see in the Buddhist Suttas how it was used by the Buddhists, at first, in the simple sense of freedom from passion, but was developed developed higher and higher, till in the

1 Nirvana, eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des Buddhismus von Joseph Dahlmann, S.J. Berlin, 1896.