Samkhya Karika

Ishvarakrishna composed the Samkhya Karika in the terse verse form, karika, meant to be memorized and expanded through a teacher's oral commentary rather than read as a self-contained exposition, a common format for early Indian philosophical texts. Most scholars place its composition around the fourth or fifth century CE, though the system it summarizes is considerably older. Its doctrine holds that reality consists of exactly two independent kinds of principle: purusha, pure consciousness, present as a distinct instance for every individual being rather than as a single shared consciousness, and prakriti, primordial undifferentiated matter, which alone is active and productive. Their proximity, on this account, sets prakriti evolving, unfolding through a fixed sequence into the twenty five tattvas, principles, that make up the entire manifest world, including mind, ego and the senses, all classed as products of prakriti rather than of consciousness itself. Liberation in this system comes not from any external salvation but from purusha correctly recognizing its own total separateness from prakriti and everything prakriti produces, ending its mistaken identification with a body and mind that were never truly its own.

Ishvarakrishna's own verses refer back to earlier Samkhya teaching he did not originate, attributed by tradition to a teacher named Kapila and transmitted through a compiler named Pancasikha, but none of that earlier material survives as an independent text today. That makes the Samkhya Karika the earliest complete Samkhya work to come down intact, effectively the foundation the entire later tradition of commentary was built on rather than one voice among several equally preserved ones.

Later commentators, most influentially Gaudapada and, centuries afterward, Vacaspati Misra, wrote extended explanations that fixed the standard classical interpretation of the Karika's compressed verses, since the text's brevity leaves real interpretive gaps a commentary is needed to fill. Samkhya's dualist metaphysics also shaped the philosophy of Yoga directly: classical Yoga, as systematized in the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali, adopts the Samkhya framework of purusha and prakriti nearly whole, differing chiefly by adding a personal god, Ishvara, as an aid to practice, a figure classical Samkhya itself, true to its own logic, does not require.

Modern scholarship on Indian philosophy, including Gerald James Larson's study of the school's history, treats the Karika as the essential primary source for reconstructing classical Samkhya on its own terms, independent of how later Yoga and Vedanta writers subsequently absorbed or argued against its dualist framework.