Kapila

Key ideas

1. Two ultimate realities. Sāṃkhya, the school ascribed to Kapila, holds that there are two independent principles. Puruṣa is consciousness, the free and passive witness; prakṛti is nature, active but unconscious, and includes not only matter but the mind and the emotions.
2. The guṇas and the twenty-five principles. Prakṛti is a balance of three constituents: sattva (light, intelligence), rajas (energy, change) and tamas (inertia, heaviness). When the balance is disturbed it evolves into intellect, ego, mind, the senses and the elements, twenty-three principles that with prakṛti and puruṣa make the twenty-five the school enumerates.
3. The effect exists in its cause. Satkāryavāda is the theory that an effect is already present in its material cause before it is produced. Among the reasons given: what does not exist cannot be produced, a given effect needs a specific material cause, and otherwise anything could come from anything.
4. Many puruṣas. There is a plurality of puruṣas, one for each conscious being. Births, deaths and personal histories differ, and if there were only one puruṣa everyone would act alike at once.
5. Liberation as isolation. Bondage is the failure to tell puruṣa from prakṛti, and liberation, kaivalya (“aloneness”), is discriminating knowledge of the difference. Puruṣa is never really bound: it is an enchanted observer, and when it loses interest nature stops, as a dancer stops when the performance is over.
6. Means of knowledge and God. Sāṃkhya accepts three means of knowledge: perception, inference and reliable testimony. The classical school explains the world without a creator, and the later Sāṃkhya Sūtra argues against God.

Kapila is the sage whom Indian tradition names as the founder of Sāṃkhya (also written Sāṅkhya or Sankhya; sāṃkhya means “enumeration”), the school that divides reality into consciousness and nature. He is a figure of legend. No work that can be shown to be his survives, and the texts that carry his name were composed long after any historical Kapila could have lived. What can be said with confidence concerns the school he stands for.

Was Kapila a real person?

Nobody can say. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Sāṃkhya reports that on the Indian tradition the first masters of the school are Kapila and his disciple Āsuri, that they belong to antiquity or even prehistory, and that they are known only through ancient legends. Some reference works place Kapila in the seventh or sixth century BCE, but scholars have also argued that he is entirely mythological, so the date is a convention and not a finding.

He appears in several traditions. In Edwin Arnold’s verse translation of the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa lists himself as the foremost of each kind of being, and among sages he is “Kapila of Munis” (chapter X). Two of the Purāṇas make him a divine teacher: the Bhāgavata Purāṇa calls him an incarnation of Viṣṇu, born to Kardama and Devahūti, who teaches Sāṃkhya to his mother, and the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa also calls him an incarnation. These are the stories of a tradition, not records.

Which works are his?

None can be shown to be. The text most closely tied to his name is the Sāṃkhya Sūtra, which the Internet Encyclopedia says first appears in the fifteenth century and is probably not much older; Wikipedia gives the fourteenth. The Tattvasamāsa, a half-page list of the principles of the system, may be old in parts, but no Sāṃkhya author mentions it before the fourteenth century.

The classical statement of the system is the Sāṃkhyakārikā, seventy-two verses by Īśvarakṛṣṇa, dated to about 350 CE by the Internet Encyclopedia and to about 200 CE or 350–450 CE in other accounts. Between the legend and the Kārikā stand figures such as Pañcaśikha, who may have written an older text, the Ṣaṣṭitantra. When writers speak of “the system of Kapila”, they mean the school that these texts set out.

What does Sāṃkhya teach?

Two realities. Puruṣa and prakṛti are the ultimate principles. Puruṣa is the witness, conscious and free but passive. Prakṛti is nature: active, unconscious, and including the mind and the emotions as well as matter. That the mind belongs to nature and not to the self matters for philosophy of mind.

Three constituents. Prakṛti is a balance of the guṇas: sattva, the principle of light and intelligence; rajas, of energy and change; tamas, of inertia and heaviness. When the balance is disturbed it evolves into intellect, the sense of “I”, mind, the senses and the elements, twenty-three principles in all, and with prakṛti and puruṣa the twenty-five of the school’s name. The evolution follows satkāryavāda: an effect already exists in its material cause.

Why a witness? Composite things serve a purpose beyond themselves, as a bed serves someone else. Body and mind are such a composite of prakṛti, so they serve a conscious being that is not part of them. Puruṣas are many, the Kārikā argues, since births, deaths and histories differ.

What is liberation? The first aphorism of the Sāṃkhya Sūtra, in Ballantyne’s translation, names the aim: “the complete cessation of pain [which is] of three kinds is the complete end of man”. The Kārikā, as quoted in the Cowell and Gough translation of Mādhava’s Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha, likens the union of nature and soul to that of “the lame man and the blind man”, and nature, once it has shown herself to soul, to an actress who “desists from the dance”. The puruṣa was never truly bound; liberation, kaivalya, is seeing that.

What was Kapila’s influence?

Early Sāṃkhya ideas are found in the Gītā, whose second chapter Arnold titles “Sankhya-Yog”. The Yoga of Patañjali takes over its dualism and adds God. Vedānta argued against it: in his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, Rāmānuja argues that the system of the Sāṃkhyas is untenable.

How should you start reading about Kapila?

Start from the school: the page on Sāṃkhya and the second chapter of the Gītā. The Yoga Sūtras show the same dualism put to work in practice. The Sāṃkhya chapter of the Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha, Chapter XIV of the Cowell and Gough translation, is a short medieval summary. Then try the Kārikā itself, in Colebrooke and Wilson’s translation.