Abstract
The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s “mahat-buddhi” appears to be riddled with obscurity. Standard realist interpreters struggle to explain its cumbersome, textually unsupported bivalence, namely, how the mahat-buddhi can represent both a cosmological entity and a psychological capacity. Idealist readings, meanwhile, neglect the historically deep ontological meaning of this tattva by reducing it to a power of the transcendental ego. This paper moves beyond the impasse of the realism-idealism framework for interpreting the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and examines the mahat-buddhi through the existential phenomenology of José Ortega y Gasset. It begins by re-framing classical Sāṃkhya metaphysics as an existential phenomenology of life, whereby life—as lived reality, not an external physical world or a field of mental experience—conveys the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti. From this, the paper then argues that the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take other-beings-as.
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Notes
Fitzgerald’s works represent the most developed study of adhyātma, which includes classical Sāṃkhya’s inquiry into the nature of the puruṣa. Fitzgerald explains the meaning of “adhyātma”: “The word ‘adhyātma’ signifies ‘to, or over,’ that is, ‘concerning, the self or person’” (2017a: 670).
For this short paper I use the term “Sāṃkhya” to refer just to the doctrine of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. However, I am well aware of the long history and rich diversity of sāṃkhya texts, theories, and existential praxes.
I borrow the characterization, “cosmological-cum-psychological model,” from Burley’s critical review of realist interpretations of the SK (Burley 2007: 108).
Radhakrishnan echoes this confusion when he notes that “[the cosmological buddhi], as the product of prakṛti and the generator of ahaṃkāra, is different from [the psychological] buddhi, which controls the processes of the senses, mind and ahaṃkāra. If the former is identified with the latter, the whole evolution of prakṛti must be regarded as subjective, since the ego and the non-ego are both the products of buddhi. This ambiguity is found in the other products of prakṛti also” (1927, II: 268).
According to standard realist interpretations, cognitive life is possible because there obtains an isomorphism between the cosmos and the psychology of the cognizer—with the already given cosmos having ontological primacy over the knowing ego.
Sāṃkhya’s vyaktaprakṛti is quite unlike the cosmic illusion (māyā) or consciousness (vijñapti) of Indian idealisms such as Advaita Vedānta and Yogācāra, respectively. The buddhi, for its part, generates an actual, concrete reality—indeed, one that includes the first-person perspective, but which is irreducible to an “I.”
In his impressive 1964 historical study of “mahat,” van Buitenen notes that from as early as the first Upaniṣadic creation myths, mahat took on ontological and epistemological significance through its association with a higher, usually divine self or person. This “large self” did not just observe and/or govern a field (kṣetra) of manifold phenomena, it created that very world through a willful expansion of its own body.
van Buitenen draws our attention to a controversy already brewing in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.12.6 and Kaṭha Upaniṣad 2.20: if there is an ātman that “transcends the merely ‘large’ one,” that is, if there is a “‘really great’ ātman,” then does this not imply a division between mahat and the true, i.e., absolutely transcendent self (1964: 106)? van Buitenen translates Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.12.6: “This is the extent of his largeness: but the Person is still larger. One quarter of his is all these beings; three quarters of him are immortal in heaven” (1964: 106). He explains this passage as follows: “The ‘large one’ is no longer great enough, and the mahān ātma speculations now fall in line with other trends that seek to abstract the supreme from the phenomenal world. The ayvakta [unmanifest], avyākṛta [uncreated] condition of the supreme ranks higher than its condition of mahān: mahataḥ paraṃ avyaktam[,] ‘the unmanifest is higher than the large Ātman’” (Kaṭh Up. 3.10011; c.f., 1964: 106).
It bears noting, though, that the abiding purpose of Sāṃkhya is to disclose the soteric freedom (kaivalya) of the puruṣa, not just explain how lived realities come into being. This is in keeping with adhyātma generally. As with other adhyātmikan-s, Īśvarakṛṣṇa holds that what is “best” (śreyas) for the self is final release from the round of birth and rebirth. But having said that, I contend that Sāṃkhya’s understanding of liberation is not pessimistic or life-negating; the SK does not advocate a turning away from life. To the contrary, it views the realization of puruṣa’s liberating aloneness (kaivalya) as the fulfillment of the procreative intentionality of vyaktaprakṛti. The culmination of “procreativity made manifest” (literally, “vyakta-prakṛti”) is the manifestation of puruṣa’s absolute solitude. I explore this theme in greater detail in a larger monograph (in progress).
Larson expresses the realist interpretation of the SK when he explains that “the world in and of itself is simply ‘unmanifest’ (avyakta) apart from the presence of the puruṣa… the [unconscious] world in and of itself, although containing potentially everything in the manifest world, is simply an undifferentiated, unmanifest plenitude of being” (1969: 197–8). Meanwhile, the most developed idealist interpretation of Sāṃkhya is given in Burley’s 2007 study. He explains: “The reorientation that I have in mind here is that which takes place when one ceases to conceive of empirical reality—that is, the world as we experience it—as something that exists outside and independently of our consciousness [puruṣa], and instead conceives of consciousness [puruṣa] as being, in some sense, the field or domain within which empirical reality exists. It is this reorientation that constitutes the first step toward idealism and away from metaphysical realism” (2007: 12–13).
As noted above, this paper is concerned with the meaning of the mahat-buddhi just within the context of Sāṃkhya metaphysics, not its broader soteriology. Interestingly, Ortega’s existential phenomenology has a soteriological component that helps to shed light on the interrelation between the SK’s metaphysics and soteriology. This is evident in the second half of Ortega’s well-known dictum: “I am I and my circumstance. If I do not save it, then I cannot save myself.” I take up this theme in greater detail in a larger monograph (in progress).
For Ortega, the ego is “a nativitate open to the other, to the alien being,” and in the case of Sāṃkhya, the puruṣa is susceptible to being drawn toward mūlaprakṛti (1932: 149–150).
Ortega declares “man does not appear in solitude—although his ultimate truth is solitude (soledad),” while the SK tells us that “it is as if the indifferent one (udāsīnaḥ [i.e., puruṣa]) is an engaged agent,” though in actuality the puruṣa eternally abides in kaivalya (1932: 148; SK 20).
Please note that I do not draw a correlation between Ortega’s first “I” and Sāṃkhya’s first “I,” namely, puruṣa. Rather, I make use of Ortega’s dictum in order to clarify the archetypal form of vyaktaprakṛti (which necessarily includes the puruṣa but is irreducible to it) by correlating it to Ortega’s notion of “life” (as the first “I” in his dictum).
The tattvas that derive from the mahat-buddhi can be theorized according to Ortega’s dictum, “I am I and my circumstance.” The ahaṃkāra, for example, is that mode of being which enacts the claim to life as mine—as in, “the great awakening of my life.”
Note that Burley draws correspondences between mūlaprakṛti and Kantian things (2007).
This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962: 32).
The term “intellect” hardly conveys the mirroring function that characterizes the buddhi. Though not used in the SK itself, this metaphor gets invoked by Sāṃkhya commentators (including Vācaspati Miśra and Vijñānabhikṣu, among others) not to assert that the buddhi is transparent to and gets stimulated by an already given empirical world, but that it reflects the luminosity of puruṣa. (Furthermore, the mirror metaphor only appears in commentarial literature, and hence need not be seen as an essential feature of the SK’s understanding of the mahat-buddhi.)
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Ashton, G. The Great Awakening of Life: an Existential Phenomenological Interpretation of the Mahat-Buddhi in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. DHARM 1, 97–109 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-018-0010-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-018-0010-8