lieved to possess a mind of pure
sattva alone. But sattva, rajas and tamas were accepted in
Vedanta in the sense of tendencies and not as reals as Sa@mkhya
held it. Moreover, in spite of all modifications that maya was
believed to pass through as the stuff of the world-appearance, it
was indefinable and indefinite, and in its nature different from
what we understand as positive or negative. It was an unsubstantial
nothing, a magic entity which had its being only so long
as it appeared. Prak@rti also was indefinable or rather undemonstrable
as regards its own essential nature apart from its manifestation,
but even then it was believed to be a combination of
positive reals. It was undefinable because so long as the reals
composing it did not combine, no demonstrable qualities belonged
to it with which it could be defined. Maya however was undemonstrable,
indefinite, and indefinable in all forms; it was a
separate category of the indefinite. Sa@mkhya believed in the
personal individuality of souls, while for Vedanta there was only
one soul or self, which appeared as many by virtue of the maya
transformations. There was an adhyasa or illusion in Sa@mkhya
as well as in Vedanta; but in the former the illusion was due
to a mere non-distinction between prak@rti and puru@sa or mere
misattribution of characters or identities, but in Vedanta there
was not only misattribution, but a false and altogether indefinable
creation. Causation with Sa@mkhya meant real transformation,
but with Vedanta all transformation was mere appearance.
Though there were so many differences, it is however easy to
see that probably at the time of the origin of the two systems
during the Upani@sad period each was built up from very similar
ideas which differed only in tendencies that gradually manifested
themselves into the present divergences of the two systems.
Though S'a@nkara laboured hard to prove that the Sa@mkhya
view could not be found in the Upani@sads, we can hardly be
convinced by his interpretations and arguments. The more
he argues, the more we are led to suspect that the Sa@mkhya
thought had its origin in the Upani@sads. Sa'a@nkara and his
followers borrowed much of their dialectic form of criticism from
the Buddhists. His Brahman was very much like the s'unya
of Nagarjuna. It is difficult indeed to distinguish between
pure being and pure non-being as a category. The debts of
S`a@nkara to the self-luminosity of the Vijnanavada Buddhism

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