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A Dualism the Gita Absorbs into Devotion

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A Dualism the Gita Absorbs into Devotion

Classical Samkhya's dualism is unusual in the history of Indian philosophy for having no place for a creator God, its explanatory work done entirely by the interaction of purusha and prakriti, and later Samkhya-influenced systems, including the theistic Yoga school and the Bhagavad Gita itself, add a personal God without abandoning the underlying dualist structure, treating Krishna as the supreme purusha among purushas or as standing beyond the purusha-prakriti split altogether.

Advaita Vedanta's objection to the system is direct: if consciousness, purusha, is genuinely one thing and unconscious nature, prakriti, another, Advaita asks how a plurality of purushas, which Samkhya affirms, are to be distinguished from one another at all, since a purusha with no qualities, no activity, and no content should be indistinguishable from any other, an argument monists take as evidence that consciousness must ultimately be one, not many. Samkhya's defenders reply that this plurality is exactly what experience shows, since one person's bondage and liberation are not another's, a genuinely contested point that has kept the dispute between Vedantic monism and Samkhya-Yoga dualism alive within Hindu philosophy for well over a thousand years.

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