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The Investigative Science

Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, the treatise on statecraft, counts four sciences for a ruler: investigation (ānvīkṣikī), the three Vedas, economics and government. Investigation, it says, is made up of Sāṃkhya, Yoga and Lokāyata, and it examines with reasons what is right and wrong in the other sciences (1.2.10–11). Which school Kauṭilya meant by yoga is uncertain, since the word was also used for disciplines of reasoning; the three appear below as the later tradition knew them.

Sāṃkhya’s root text, the Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, from around 350 CE, opens on the desire to know and on why it arises: “The inquiry is into the means of precluding the three sorts of pain; for pain is embarrassment: nor is the inquiry superfluous because obvious means of alleviation exist, for absolute and final relief is not thereby accomplished” (1, tr. Colebrooke). The word for the inquiry is jijñāsā, and it starts “from the blow of the threefold suffering”. Ritual does not help: “the revealed mode is like the temporal one, ineffectual”. What helps is “a discriminative knowledge of perceptible principles, and of the imperceptible one, and of the thinking soul” (2): knowing apart the manifest world, its unmanifest source and the conscious self.

The Yogasūtra, compiled around 400 CE and ascribed to Patañjali, names itself in each chapter’s closing line, in Woods’s rendering, “Patañjali’s Yoga-treatise entitled Exposition of Sāṃkhya (Sāṃkhya-pravacana)”. It opens: “Now the exposition of yoga. Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of mind-stuff. Then the Seer abides in himself” (1.1–3, tr. Woods). The means of right knowledge, perception, inference and testimony (1.7), are listed among those fluctuations: knowing by them is itself an activity of the mind that the practice brings to rest. The restriction comes “by practice and passionlessness” (1.12), through eight limbs, from the restraints and observances through posture, breath and the withdrawal of the senses to fixed attention, contemplation and concentration (2.29), and it works “up to discriminative discernment” (2.28). The explanation that accompanies the sūtras gives the plan of the whole: “Just as a system of medicine has four divisions, Disease, Cause of Disease, Health and Remedy, so this system also has four divisions, the Round-of-Rebirth, the Cause of the Round-of-Rebirth, Release and the Way to Release” (on 2.15). The last sūtra names the end kaivalya, from kevala, “alone” (4.34); Woods translates it “Isolation”.

The materialists, the Lokāyata or Cārvāka, are known almost only through their opponents. In Mādhava’s fourteenth-century survey of the schools, they hold “that perception is the only source of knowledge” and do not allow inference; “the only Liberation is the dissolution of the body”, and “the only end of man is enjoyment produced by sensual pleasures” (tr. Cowell and Gough). A verse he ascribes to Bṛhaspati: “There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world.” The one complete work that survives from anyone counted among them is the Tattvopaplavasiṃha, “The Lion of the Dissolution of [all] Categories”, by Jayarāśi, of around 800–840, who is classed variously as a materialist, a sceptic, or both. He takes up the materialists’ own opening, “now we shall explain the principles: earth, water, fire and air”, and turns it against every school: “The principles, earth and the rest, are well known in the world; even these, when examined, do not hold. How much less the others?” His target is the means of knowing themselves: “the establishing of a means of knowledge depends on a sound definition, and the standing of what is known depends on the means of knowledge”, and he finds none of the definitions sound, beginning with Nyāya’s definition of perception.