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after effect, both in this life and in the lives to come. This is one of the unalterable convictions in the Hindu mind. There is, besides the admission of virtue and vice, the dispraise of passion and the praise of dispassion. These are represented as forms of Buddhi, as Rûpas or Bhâvas, forms or states, inhering in Buddhi, and therefore following the Linga-sarîra from birth to birth. Nay, it is distinctly added that going upward is due to virtue, going downward to vice, so that virtue, as a preliminary, is really indispensable to final liberation. It may be true that in this way morality is reduced to mere calculation of consequences, but even such a calculation, which is only another name for reasoning, would serve as a strong incentive to morality. Anyhow there is no ground for saying that Kapila's system ignores ordinary morality, still less that it encourages vice.

Samkhya Parables.

There is one more feature of the Sâmkhya that deserves to be mentioned, because it is not found in

the other Indian philosophies, but may be supposed to have suggested to the Buddhists their method of teaching by parables. A whole chapter of the Sûtras, the fourth, is assigned to a collection of stories, each of which is meant to illustrate some doctrine of Kapila's. Some are very much to the point, and they can be appealed to by one word, so as to recall the whole lesson which they were meant to teach. The first is meant to illustrate the complete change that comes over a man when he has been taught his true nature by means of the Sâmkhya. 'As in the case of the son of a king.' The story which follows is that a young prince who was born

under an unlucky star, was taken out of his capital and brought up by a Sabara, a kind of wild man of the woods. When he grew up he naturally thought that he himself was a Sabara, and lived accordingly. But a minister, who had found out that the prince was alive, went to him seeretly and told him that he was the son of the king, and not a Sabara. At once the prince gave up the idea that he was a savage, believed that he was a prince, and assumed a truly royal bearing. In the same manner a man who has been told his true character by his teacher, surrenders the idea that he is a material and mortal being, and recovers his true nature, saying ‘As a son of Brahman I am nothing but Brahman, and not a being different from him in this phenomenal world.'

The commentator adds an extract from the Garuda-Purâna which must have been borrowed from a Sâmkhya source:—

'As everything that is made of gold is known as gold, if even from one small piece of gold one has learnt to know what gold is, in the same way from knowing God the whole world becomes known.

As a Brahman possessed by an evil spirit, imagines that he is a Sûdra, but, when the possession is over, knows that he is a Brâhman, thus the soul, possessed by Mâyâ, imagines that it is the body, but after Mâyâ has come to an end, it knows its own true being again, and says, I am a Brâhman.'

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The seventh illustration is like a cut-off hand,' and is meant to teach that, as no one takes his hand again after it has once been cut off, no one should identify himself with anything objective, after once having surrendered the illusion of the objective. The

sixteenth, to which I called attention many years ago as connected with old Aryan folklore, is meant to teach that even an accidental negligence may be fatal to our reaching the highest goal, as in the case of the frog-wife.'

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The story is that of a king who, while hunting, had seen a beautiful girl in a forest. She became his wife on condition that he should never let her see water. He gave the promise, but once when the queen, tired after playing, asked him for some water, he forgot his promise, and brought her some, whereupon the daughter of the frog-king became a frog (Bhekî), and disappeared in the lake. Neither nets nor anything else was of any avail for bringing her back, the king had lost her for ever. Thus true knowledge also will disappear by one act of negligence, and will never return.

This system of teaching by parables was very popular with the Buddhists, and it is just possible that the first impulse may have come from the followers of Kapila, who are so often called Kryptobuddhists or Prakkhanna-Bauddhas.

I have called attention already to the fact that these illustrative parables, though they do not occur in the Kârikâs and in the Tattva-samâsa, must have existed all the time in the Paramparâ of the Brâhmans, because they appear in the modern Sûtras, that is in the sixteenth century. Like the Sûtras referring to these stories, other Sûtras also may occur in our modern collection of Sâmkhya-Sutras, which existed for centuries, as handed down by tradition, but were omitted in the Kârikâs and even in the Tattva-samâsa.

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CHAPTER VII.

Yoga and Sâmkhya.

THE relation of the Yoga to the Sâmkhya-philosophy is not easy to determine, but the Bhagavad-gîtâ V, 4, goes so far as to say that children only, not learned people, distinguish between Sâmkhya and Yoga at all, as it were between faith (knowledge) and works. We find the Sâmkhya and Yoga represented, each in its own Sûtras, which are ascribed to different authors, Kapila and Patañgali', and they are spoken of in the dual as the two old systems (Mahâbh. XII, 104, 67); but we also find a philosophy called Sâmkhya-yoga (Svetâsv. Up. II, 13), and this not as a Dvandva, as it were, Sâmkhya and Yoga, but as one philosophy, as a neuter sing., representing Yoga and Sâmkhya together as one, or possibly as Yoga belonging to the Sâmkhya. Thus we read again in the Bhagavad-gîtâ V, 5, that he who understands Sâmkhya and Yoga to be one, understands aright. Yoga, in the sense of ascetic practices and meditations, may no doubt have existed in India in very

1 The identification of these two names with the name of one person Kâpya Patankala, who is mentioned in the Satapatha-brahmana, once proposed by Professor Weber, has probably long been given up by him. See also Garbe, SamkhyaPhilosophie, p. 26.

ancient times. It is called Purâtana (old), (B. G. IV, 3), and this is probably what the author of the Bhagavad-gîtâ (IV, 1) meant, when he made the Bhagavat say to Arguna :

'I declared this imperishable Yoga to Vivasvat, Vivasvat told it to Manu, Manu to Ikshvâku. Thus royal sages came to know it, having received it through tradition; but this Yoga was lost here by long lapse of time.'

A similar oral tradition descending from Pragâpati to Manu, and from Manu to the people (to Ikshvâku, according to Samkara) is mentioned already in the Khandogya Upanishad (III, 11; VIII, 15).

It is much the same with the other philosophies, and we are left in doubt as to whether the three couples, Sâmkhya and Yoga, Nyâya and Vaiseshika, nay even Purva- and Uttara-Mîmâmsâ, were amalgamations of systems which had originally an independent existence, or whether they were differentiations of former systems. Sâmkhya and Yoga might easily have formed one comprehensive system, because their divergence with regard to the existence of an Îsvara, or Lord, was not so essential a point to them as it seems to us. Those who wanted an Îsvara might have him as a first and super-eminent Purusha; while those who had gone beyond this want, need not have quarrelled with those who still felt it. The Nyâya and Vaiseshika show clear traces of a common origin; while the two Mîmâmsâs, which in character are more remote from one another than the other systems, seem to sanction, by their names at least, the suspicion of their former unity. But the deplorable scarcity of any historical documents does not enable us to go beyond mere conjectures; and

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