arly Brahmanic schools but in the intellectual atmosphere
non-theistic, non-sacerdotal, but audaciously speculative which
prevailed in the central and eastern part of northern India in the
sixth century B.C. The Sankhya recognizes no merit in sacrifices or
indeed in good works of any kind, even as a preliminary discipline,
and in many details is un-Brahmanic. Unlike the Vedanta Sutras, it
does not exclude Sudras from higher studies, but states that there are
eight classes of gods and five of animals but only one of men. A
teacher must have himself attained emancipation, but there is no
provision that he must be a Brahman. Perhaps the fables and parables
which form the basis of the fourth book of the Sankhya Sutras point
to some more popular form of instruction similar to the discourses of
the Buddha. We may suppose that this ancient un-Brahmanic school took
shape in several sects, especially Jainism and Buddhism, and used the
Yoga discipline. But the value and efficacy of that discipline were
admitted almost universally and several centuries later it was
formulated in the Sutras which bear the name of Patanjali in a shape
acceptable to Brahmans, not to Buddhists. If, as some scholars think,
the Yoga sutras are not earlier than 450 A.D.[760] it seems probable
that it was Buddhism which stimulated the Brahmans to codify the
principles and practice of Yoga, for the Yogacara school of Buddhism
arose before the fifth century. The Sankhya is perhaps a somewhat
similar brahmanization of the purely speculative ideas which may have
prevailed in Magadha and Kosala.[761] Though these districts were not
strongholds of Brahmanism, yet it is clear from the Pitakas that they
contained a considerable Brahman population who must have been
influenced by the ideas current around them but also must have wished
to keep in touch with other Brahmans. The Sankhya of our manuals
represents such an attempt at conciliation. It is an elaboration in a
different shape of some of the ideas out of which Buddhism sprung but
in its later history it is connected with Brahmanism rather than
Buddhism. When it is set forth in Sutras in a succinct and isolated
form, its divergence from ordinary Brahmanic thought is striking and
in this form it does not seem to have ever been influential and now is
professed by only a few Pandits, but, when combined in a literary and
eclectic spirit with other ideas which may be incompatible with it in
strict logic, it has bee