Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 39

To take the purushas as an independently existing part of a dual

system was itself a compromise with Vedanta spiritualism. But it was

still not a sufficient compromise, and in the Svetasvatara Upanisad

a creator god-supreme deity is postulated as a third principle over

and above the dual prakriti–purusha:

Primal matter is perishable; the taker is the immortal, imperishable;

One god has power over both perishable and self.

Through meditation on him, through practice,

Through his being (tattva) and more, in the end the whole artifice

(maya) ceases (1,10).

This translation by Valerie Roebuck shows a triple attack on

Sankhya: primal matter, in contrast to the immortal self, is declared

perishable; the plurality of selves is ignored; and a supreme being is

declared superior to both.

Buddhism, Jainism, Lokayata and Sankhya were all evidently

strong philosophical–religious traditions at the time of the writing of

most of the Upanishads as well as the Brahmanical social literature

(Manusmriti, Arthashastra) and the epics. Lokayata and Sankhya,

though, had no long-surviving independent organisational existence

and none of their own writings is available. The difficulty in under-

standing what Lokayata and Sankhya actually taught, or who sages

like Brhaspati and Kapila actually were, can be seen if we imagine try-

ing to understand Buddhism from the references in Sanskrit literature.

Sankhya could be distorted and absorbed by turning it into dualism

and stressing the spiritual purusha; and Lokayata could be distorted

and cast into the dustbin of historical memory, Brhaspati could be

taken as a historical progenitor of Brahmanism simply because he was

distant enough in time and had left no independent records. This

could not be done with Mahavir and the Buddha, who generated long

lasting schools with exponents who preserved their literature.

The Jains are the only non-Buddhist religious trend among the

samanas to survive today. They were extreme anti-fatalists,

kriyavadiin their own terms, seeing the individual soul as primary

and emphasising its moral responsibility. They were also atheists,

denying the existence of an oversoul or supreme being. Like most

others, they began with the notion of karma and some form of

rebirth which went on and on; like the Buddhists they moralised

principle (often called prakriti, identified as female) representing
energy which is active with the principle of consciousness or spirit
or self (purusha, or male) taken as passive. In the ‘classic’ presen-
tations of Sankhya (in a form acceptable to the Brahmanic tradition)
a dualism between the empirical-sensual world and its knower, the
purusha, was postulated and the goal was said to be the liberation
of the purushaor spirit from the bonds of the world; (Encyclopaedia
Britannica2001; see also Natarajan 2001, for a discussion of
the classic text, Sankhyakarika). Even the ‘orthodoxy’ of this was
limited because, while the purusharepresented an equivalent to the
Brahmanic atman, they were still conceived of as multiple and not
as one overriding spirit; and they were seen as unable to affect
the world of matter. What saved the final orthodoxy of the system
was a rather nominal acceptance of the authority of the Vedas
and Brahmans.
However, Chattopadhyaya has argued that the original form of
Sankhya was fully materialistic. The other term for prakritior the
material principle is pradhan,which means ‘primary’. According
to him, it was prakriti or matter that was primary and the system
postulated a ‘material first cause’ which evolved according to its
own swabhavaor inherent characteristics (which he identifies as
‘natural laws’). The purushaswere originally multiple and not
causally effective and were thus irrelevant. At points the evolution
of the prakritifrom avyaktato vyakta (latent and undifferentiated
or ‘unexpressed’ to ‘manifest’ or ‘expressed’) could be seen as also
giving birth to consciousness, or the purushas. In almost all the
elaborations of the system, the three gunas(satva, rajasand tamas)
were described as aspects of the original primordial matter, and a
series of 24 classified elements were involved, including the four
aspects of the world, as well as objects of the various senses. Purusha
was added to these as the 25th, and later an oversoul or Supreme
Being was added as the 26th element (Chattopadhyaya 1981:
376–400). The version of the system with 24 elements, then, would
be materialistic. Thus it may well have been that the form of Sankhya
dominant at the time of the Buddha was fully materialistic; it was
centuries later that the Buddhist philosopher-writer Asvaghosh
described it as a more classic Samkhya (Asvaghosh1936: 166–79).
Both Ajita Keshkambali and Pakudha Kaccayana deny a ‘self’ that
is separate from the material world.

38 Buddhism in India