The Sānkhya Kārikā, with the Bhāshya of Gauḍapāda — trans. H. T. Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson (1837)

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be rudimental body; according to later refinement, vehicular. It is the latter which, as Mr. Colebrooke mentions (Tr. R. As. Soc. I. 33) in Paransatt'’s Yoga sdstra, is conceived to extend, like the flame of a lamp over its wick, to a small distance above the skull; and which, according to M. Cousin, is “la fameuse pense intracranienne, dont on a cru faire récemment une découverte merveilleuse.” Hist. de la Philosophie, 1. 195.

The notion of some corporeal, however subtile, envelopment of soul— the cidwror, umbra, manes, simulacrum, spirit, or ghost—giving to invisible and intangible soul some visible and tangible materiality, “ such,” as Good (Translation of Lucretius) observes, “as will at least enable the soul to assume some degree of material configuration, and to be capable of corporeal feelings, however spiritualized and refined, even after its separation from the body”—has prevailed in all times and in all ages. Nor was the doctrine confined to the people or the poets: such of the philosophers as maintained the immateriality of soul, attaching to it, until its final purification, some portion of corporeal substance, or some substantial, though subtile investure, or éxjua, or vehicle. Thus Cudworth (vol. III. 517) states, that ‘ the ancient assertors of the soul's immortality did not suppose human souls, after death, to be quite stripped stark naked from all body, but that the generality of souls had then a certain spirituous, vaporous, or airy body accompanying them; as also they conceived this spirituous body to hang about the soul also here in this life, before death, as its interior indument or vestment, which also then sticks to it when that other gross earthly part of the body is by death put off as an outer garment.” It also appears, that “ besides the terrestrial body, and this spirituous body, the ancients held that there is a third kind, of a higher rank, peculiarly belonging to such souls, after death, as are purged and cleansed from corporeal affections, called by them céua ai-yoeides, or a luciform body.” The authorities quoted by Cudworth for these opinions are new Platonists, or Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries; and it seems not unlikely that they borrowed some of their notions from the doctrines of Christianity. They profess, however, to repeat the tenets of Pythagoras and Plato; and Cudworth asserts, that the distinction of two interior vehicles or tunicles of the soul, besides that outer vestment of the

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terrestrial body, is not a mere figment of the latter Platonists, but a tradition derived down from antiquity. Mosheim, in his translation of Cudworth, has entered, in a note, very fully into an inquiry as to the origin of the opinion of a subtile body investing soul, and concludes, “Vetus hec opinio aut si mavis superstitio, ab ipsis fere Grecorum heroicis temporibus ducta:” and Brucker, in reference to his observations on this subject, remarks, ‘Hoc vero magna doctrina et ingenio demonstravit Mosheimius hanc de vehiculo opinionem non demum in juniorum Platonicorum cerebro enatam esse sed fuisse dogma cane antiquitatis.” Hist. Philos. 1.714. Although, therefore, less clearly expressed than by the Hindu writers, the early Greek philosophers entertained similar notions of the nature of the subtile body, which was inseparable from soul until the period of its final exemption from transmigration.

XLIL

For the sake of soul’s wish, that subtile person exhibits (before it), like a dramatic actor, through relation of means and consequence, with the aid of nature’s influence.

BHASHYA.