Samkhyakarika

The Samkhyakarika is the foundational surviving text of the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy, traditionally attributed to Isvarakrsna, who is understood to have systematized older Samkhya teaching into this concise verse form rather than to have invented the school himself. As the earliest complete Samkhya text to survive, it is the primary source for the school's dualist metaphysics of purusa and prakrti, cited here as content rather than through one particular modern edition, so it carries no publisher or fixed year the way a printed book would. Its limit is that, like other terse philosophical verse texts of the period, its extremely compressed style was traditionally read alongside commentary, so a specific difficult point of interpretation should be checked against a named commentarial or scholarly translation rather than the verses alone.