Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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. r^ofold,. says Krishna, is _the seltapplication of the soul by which it enters into the Brahmic condition: ‘'that of the Sankhyas by the^Yog^ of knowledge, that of the Yogins by the Yoga of works.” This identification of &nkhya with Jnanayoga and of Yoga with the way of wofEF is interesting ; for it shows that quite a different order of ideas prevailed at that time from those we now possess as the result of the great Vedantic development of Indian thought^ subsequent evidently to the composition of the Gita, by which the other Vedic philosophies fell into desuetude as practical methods of liberation.^ To justify the language of the Gita we must suppose that at that time it was the Sankhya method which SANKHYA, YOGA AND VEDANTA was very commonly’*^ adopted by those who followed the path of knowledge. Subsequently, with the spread of Buddhism, the Sankhya method of know- ledge must have been much overshadowed by the Buddhistic. Buddhism, like the Sankhya non- Theistic and anti-Monistic, laid stress on the impermanence of the results of the cosmic energy, which it presented not as Prakriti but as Karma because the Buddhists admitted neither the Vedantic Brahman nor the inactive Soul of the Sankhyas, and it made the recognition of this impermanence by the discriminating mind its means of liberation. When the reaction against Buddhism arrived, it took up not the old Sankhya notion, but the Vedantic form popularised by Shankara who replaced the Buddhis- tic impermanence by the cognate Vedantic idea of illusion, Maya, and the Buddhistic idea of Non- Being, indefinable Nirvana, a negative Absolute, by the opposite and yet cognate Vedantic idea of the indefinable Being, Brahman, an ineffably positive Abiolute in which all feature and action and energy cease because in That they never really existed and are mere illusions of the mind. It is the method of Shankara based upon these concepts of his philo- sophy, it is the renunciation of life as an illusion of which we ordinarily think when we speak now of the Yoga of knowledge. But in the time of the Gita Maya was evidently not yet quite the master word
• The systems of the Puranas and Tantras are full of tlte ideas of the Sankhya, though subordinated to the Vedantic idea and mingled vnth many others. of the Vedantic philosophy, nor had it, at least with any decisive clearness, the connotation which Shankara brought out of it with such a luminous force and distinctness ; for injiiejGita,tbere^isL little talk of Maya and much JPrakriti and, even, the former word is used as little more than an equi- valent of the latter but only in its inferior status ; jt ilihe_Jpwr three guna^S, traigunyor mayi imt-^illusiye^Maya, in the teaching of the Gita the effective jcause of cosq^ exwtence. ^ 7™
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