Prakriti

Prakriti is nature or materiality in the Samkhya system: the single unconscious principle from which the entire manifest world evolves, including much of what would ordinarily be called mind. It is one half of Samkhya's fundamental dualism, the other being purusha, pure consciousness, and the scheme is striking because it draws the line in an unfamiliar place, intellect, ego and mind all fall on the material side, and only bare awareness falls on the other.

In its unmanifest state prakriti is the equilibrium of the three gunas. Evolution begins when that equilibrium is disturbed in the presence of purusha, and proceeds through twenty-three further principles: mahat or buddhi, intellect; ahamkara, the I-maker; manas, mind; the five capacities of sense and the five of action; the five subtle elements; and the five gross elements. The classical exposition is Ishvarakrishna's Samkhya Karika, the school's foundational surviving text, from about the fourth century CE.

What prakriti explains, and why the scheme mattered far beyond Samkhya, is that the whole of experience can be accounted for without making consciousness the producer of anything. The school's images are memorable: the lame man carried on the shoulders of the blind man, since purusha sees but cannot act while prakriti acts but cannot see; and the dancer who withdraws once she has been seen, prakriti performing for the sake of purusha's liberation and ceasing when the discrimination has been made. Liberation is accordingly not achieved but recognised, viveka, the discrimination of the witness from what it witnesses.

Samkhya's categories were absorbed far beyond the school. Patanjali's Yoga takes over the metaphysics almost entire, adding Ishvara. Vedanta uses the vocabulary while rejecting the dualism, treating prakriti as dependent on Brahman rather than as a second independent principle. Ayurveda, aesthetics and much of classical Indian medicine and psychology use the guna analysis, and prakriti survives in modern Indian languages as the ordinary word for nature.

Ecological and feminist readings have made a good deal of prakriti's grammatically feminine gender and its pairing with a passive masculine principle, and the pairing has been used both to argue for a positive valuation of the material and the feminine and to criticise the tradition for associating the feminine with unconsciousness. Scholars differ over how much weight the classical texts will carry here, since the school deploys the images for a soteriological purpose and shows little interest in what modern readers ask of them.

Beyond its technical role in Samkhya metaphysics, the word prakriti survives in Ayurvedic medicine with a related but practical meaning: an individual's inborn constitutional type, determined at conception and held fixed throughout life, that Ayurvedic diagnosis is organized around identifying.

Ayurveda classifies individual prakriti according to the relative predominance of three doshas, vata, pitta and kapha, built from combinations of the five gross elements Samkhya catalogues, air and space for vata, fire and water for pitta, water and earth for kapha, so a person's prakriti is described as vata-dominant, pitta-dominant, kapha-dominant or a combination, each associated with characteristic build, temperament, digestive strength and susceptibility to particular illness. A vata constitution is traditionally light, quick and prone to anxiety; pitta intense and prone to inflammatory conditions; kapha heavy and prone to congestive slowness. Physicians assess prakriti through pulse examination and observation, and treatment is calibrated to a patient's specific type rather than applied uniformly.

The connection to the Samkhya sense is genuine rather than a shared word alone: both treat prakriti as the material substrate whose configuration determines a being's characteristics, with the Ayurvedic sense simply applying the principle, that matter organizes into a describable configuration of qualities, to an individual patient's constitution, a continuity classical Ayurvedic texts, which draw explicitly on Samkhya categories, treat as self-evident.