Pani names the hands in Sanskrit, and among Samkhya's five Karmendriyas it is the one whose gross seat is the least ambiguous: unlike touch, which the skin registers across the whole body, grasping is functionally centred on the hands in a way most readers find intuitive even without the philosophical apparatus. What the classical system adds to that intuition is the now-familiar move of distinguishing the tattva from its gross instrument: pani, philosophically, is the capacity for grasping and manipulation, of which the physical hands are only the visible expression, produced from the sattvic aspect of ahamkara rather than being reducible to anatomy.
Pani's inclusion as a fundamental principle, on equal standing with the twenty-four other tattvas, reflects Samkhya's general willingness to treat ordinary bodily capacities as metaphysically basic rather than as derivative or accidental features of an organism. Grasping is not analysed, in this system, as a complex behaviour built up from simpler physical or mental components; it is one of the world's twenty-five fundamental categories, exactly as basic, in the system's own terms, as space or consciousness.
As with vak, pani's classification among the Karmendriyas rather than the Jnanendriyas marks it firmly as an active rather than a receptive tattva, one of the organs through which buddhi's judgments and ahamkara's claims of ownership are actually carried out in the physical world, downstream of perception rather than a form of it.