School

Sāṃkhya

The Indian school that distinguishes pure consciousness from nature, and finds liberation in knowing the difference.

Also called Samkhya, Sankhya

Introduction

Sāṃkhya, “enumeration” or “discrimination”, is one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy, and one of the six schools later counted as orthodox. It is closely paired with Yoga, which takes over its account of reality and adds a discipline of meditation. Its ideas run through the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavad Gītā, and its vocabulary became common to much of Indian thought.

Sāṃkhya holds that there are two kinds of reality. Puruṣa is pure consciousness: there are many puruṣas, each a witness that neither acts nor changes. Prakṛti, nature, is one, unconscious and always active, made of three strands, the guṇas. From prakṛti, when the balance of the guṇas is disturbed, unfold intellect, the sense of “I”, the mind, the senses and organs of action, and the subtle and gross elements: with puruṣa, twenty-five principles in all. The striking feature of the scheme is that the mind belongs to nature; only the witness of it is consciousness.

Suffering arises because consciousness seems to be entangled with the workings of nature, and takes the movements of the mind for its own. Liberation, called isolation (kaivalya), comes through the discriminating knowledge that the witness was never bound. Classical Sāṃkhya admits no creator God; nature unfolds of itself, for the sake of the puruṣa’s experience and release.

History

Historical

Sāṃkhya ideas appear in the later Upaniṣads, such as the Kaṭha and the Śvetāśvatara, and in the philosophical sections of the Mahābhārata, where “sāṃkhya” is often a name for the path of knowledge in general, as in the second chapter of the Gītā. Tradition names the sage Kapila as the founder, followed by Āsuri and Pañcaśikha; an early treatise, the Ṣaṣṭitantra, is lost.

The classical text is the Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, about seventy verses composed around the fourth or fifth century CE. It was translated into Chinese by Paramārtha in the sixth century and drew many commentaries, among them one attributed to a Gauḍapāda, the Yuktidīpikā, and the Tattvakaumudī of Vācaspati Miśra. In the sixteenth century Vijñānabhikṣu commented on the late Sāṃkhya Sūtras and sought to reconcile Sāṃkhya with Vedānta.

Śaṅkara treated Sāṃkhya as the chief rival of Vedānta, and argued at length in his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras that unconscious nature cannot by itself produce an ordered world. As an independent school Sāṃkhya declined, but its analysis of the mind, its guṇas and its distinction between the witness and the witnessed passed into Yoga, Vedānta, the Purāṇas, medicine and the language of everyday religion.

late 1st millennium BCESāṃkhya ideas in the Upaniṣads and the Mahābhārata
4th–5th c. CEĪśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā
6th c.Paramārtha translates the Kārikā into Chinese
9th–10th c.Vācaspati Miśra’s Tattvakaumudī
16th c.Vijñānabhikṣu reconciles Sāṃkhya and Vedānta

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

Puruṣa, with Yoga
Historical
Classical Yoga adopts Sāṃkhya’s two principles and its twenty-five categories, adding a supreme puruṣa, Īśvara, and a method of meditation by which discrimination is realized.

Areas of divergence

Ātman, with Advaita Vedānta
Scholarship
Sāṃkhya holds that there are many conscious selves and that nature is fully real; Advaita holds that consciousness is one, and that the world of nature is an appearance of Brahman.

Cite this entry

Chicago (bibliography): “Sāṃkhya.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/samkhya.
Chicago (note): “Sāṃkhya,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/samkhya.
MLA: “Sāṃkhya.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/samkhya.
BibTeX: @misc{traditions-samkhya, title = {{Sāṃkhya}}, howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society}, note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/samkhya} }

Reading lists

Consciousness and Nature