eeds and Karma.

All the Darsanas have as a common principle this idea of Karma with
the attendant doctrines that rebirth is a consequence of action and
that salvation is an escape from rebirth. They all treat more or less
of the sources and standards of knowledge, and all recognize the Veda
as one of them. There is not much more that can be said of them all in
common, for the Vedanta ignores matter and the Sankhya ignores God,
but they all share a conviction which presents difficulties to
Europeans. It is that the state in which the mind ceases to think
discursively and is concentrated on itself is not only desirable but
the _summum bonum_. The European is inclined to say that such a
state is distinguished from non-existence only by not being permanent.
But the Hindu will have none of this. He holds that mind and thought
are material though composed of the subtlest matter, and that when
thought ceases, the immaterial soul (purusha or atman) far from being
practically non-existent is more truly existent than before and enjoys
untroubled its own existence and its own nature.

Of the three most important systems, the Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta,
the first and last are on most points opposed: both are ancient, but
perhaps the products of different intellectual centres. In one sense
the Yoga may be described as a theistic modification of the Sankhya:
from another and perhaps juster point of view it appears rather as a
very ancient science of asceticism and contemplation, susceptible of
combination with various metaphysical theories.

2

We may consider first of all the Sankhya.[740] Tradition ascribes its
invention to Kapila, but he is a mere name unconnected with any date
or other circumstance. It is probable that the principal ideas of the
Sankhya germinated several centuries before our era but we have no
evidence whatever as to when they were first formulated in Sutras. The
name was current as the designation of a philosophical system fairly
early[741] but the accepted text-books are all late. The most
respected is the Sankhya-pravacana,[742] attributed to Kapila but
generally assigned by European critics to the fourteenth century A.D.
Considerably more ancient, but still clearly a metrical epitome of a
system already existing, is the Sankhya-Karika, a poem of seventy
verses which was translated into Chinese about 560 A.D. and may be a
few centuries older. Max Mueller regarded the Tattva-samasa, a short
tract cons