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Tier 2 · Vedic system 3

Sāṅkhya

साङ्ख्यदर्शनम्

Two things exist that cannot be reduced to each other: an unconscious nature that does everything, and a conscious witness that does nothing. Everything else — matter, mind, intellect, the sense of being someone — is nature evolving, and the whole of it is happening in front of a spectator who has never been involved and does not know it.

The oldest systematic philosophy in India, and the one whose vocabulary is most widely borrowed. It is also, on principle, atheistic.

The name
saṅkhyā सङ्ख्या means both “number” and “discernment”. Both senses apply: the system enumerates twenty-five principles, and liberation consists in discriminating two of them
Root text
Sāṅkhya-kārikā साङ्ख्यकारिका of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, c. 350–450 CE — 72 verses. The older sūtra literature is lost
Dating anchor
Paramārtha translated the Kārikā with a commentary into Chinese in the mid-sixth century, which fixes an upper bound independent of the Indian tradition
Commentaries
Yuktidīpikā (the richest, and anonymous) · Gauḍapāda's Bhāṣya · Vācaspati Miśra's Tattva-kaumudī · Māṭhara-vṛtti · Jayamaṅgalā
Later revival
Sāṅkhya-sūtra, c. 14th century, attributed to Kapila, with Vijñānabhikṣu's Sāṅkhya-pravacana-bhāṣya
Means of knowledge
Three: perception, inference, reliable testimony
Goal
kaivalya कैवल्य — aloneness: the witness left standing apart, with nothing happening to it
God
None. The absence is argued for, not merely left out — §12

1Three kinds of sufferingदुःखत्रयम्

The Kārikā opens not with a metaphysical claim but with a complaint, and then with an argument about why the obvious remedies will not do.

दुःखत्रयाभिघातात् जिज्ञासा तदपघातके हेतौ ।
दृष्टे सापार्था चेन्नैकान्तात्यन्ततोऽभावात् ॥

duḥkha-trayābhighātāt jijñāsā tad-apaghātake hetau |
dṛṣṭe sāpārthā cen naikāntātyantato'bhāvāt ||

Sāṅkhya-kārikā 1

The three sufferings and why ordinary and Vedic remedies fail Internal, external and cosmic suffering; the objection that visible remedies exist; and the reply that they are neither certain nor final. ādhyātmikaआध्यात्मिक from oneself Bodily: disease, injury, age. Mental: desire, anger, grief,envy, and being parted from what one wants. ādhibhautikaआधिभौतिक from other beings People, animals, insects, plants, inanimate things. Everything that can be blamed on something. ādhidaivikaआधिदैविक from the powers Cold, heat, wind, rain, lightning, and whateverhas no one to blame. The objection, raised in the verse itself “Visible remedies exist — medicine, wealth, shelter — so the enquiry is pointless.” The reply, in four words na ekāntātyantataḥ — not certainly, and not finally. The medicine may not work; and if it does, the disease returns. Verse 2 applies the same test to scripture — and fails it The Vedic remedy, says the Kārikā, is like the visible one: it is impure (rites involve killing), liable to decay (heaven is not permanent), and unequal (some get more than others). A better method is discriminative knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest and the knower. This is a Vedic school saying so.
Sāṅkhya is āstika because it accepts the Veda as a means of knowledge, not because it approves of what the Veda prescribes. Its opening move is to rule ritual out as a solution to the problem it cares about — which is exactly the move Vedānta will later make against Mīmāṃsā.

2The effect is already thereसत्कार्यवादः

Everything downstream depends on this. If the effect pre-exists in the cause, then the whole world can be a transformation of one thing — and Sāṅkhya can get away with only two principles instead of Vaiśeṣika's seven categories.

The five arguments for satkaryavada Kārikā 9's five reasons that the effect exists before its production. 1 · asad-akaraṇātअसदकरणात् what does not exist cannot be made to exist No amount of pressing turns sand into oil. Production of the sheerly non-existent is not something anyone has ever done. 2 · upādāna-grahaṇātउपादानग्रहणात् a particular material is taken up To get curd you fetch milk. If the curd were not already in the milk, any material would do as well. 3 · sarva-sambhava-abhāvātसर्वसम्भवाभावात् not everything comes from everything Gold comes from gold-bearing ore and from nowhere else. Restriction in what produces what needs an explanation, and this is it. 4 · śaktasya śakya-karaṇātशक्तस्य शक्यकरणात् a capable cause makes only what it is capable of And a capacity for something is a relation to that something — so the something must be there to be related to. 5 · kāraṇa-bhāvātकारणभावात् the effect is of the very nature of the cause — cloth is thread, and nothing more
Sāṅkhya-kārikā 9. The fourth is the strongest and the fifth is the most consequential: if an effect is nothing but its cause in another arrangement, then tracing effects back far enough must arrive at a single stuff — which is §3.
What it costs

If nothing new ever comes into being, nothing is ever destroyed either — destruction is only a return to the unmanifest. So the world has always existed in prakṛti and always will. There is no creation, no first moment and nothing to explain by an agent. Sāṅkhya's atheism (§12) is not an add-on; it falls out of verse 9.

3Proving prakṛtiप्रकृतिसिद्धिः

Nature itself is unmanifest and never perceived. It is established by five inferences, and they run backwards from features of the world we do see.

Five arguments for an unmanifest root nature Finitude, homogeneity, the requirement of a capable cause, the distinction of cause from effect, and the reintegration of the world. 1 · bhedānāṃ parimāṇāt Every particular thing is limited and measured. Limited things depend on something to limit them; the series cannot go on for ever, so it rests on something unlimited. 2 · samanvayāt All things share the same three characters: they please, they agitate, they dull. A common character across everything implies a common source. 3 · śaktitaḥ pravṛtteḥ An effect proceeds only from a cause with the capacity for it. The world has the capacity to be what it is; the root is what has that capacity. 4 · kāraṇa-kārya-vibhāgāt Cause and effect are distinguishable: the pot is not the clay, though it is of the clay. Follow the distinction upward and it must terminate. 5 · avibhāgād vaiśvarūpyasya The manifold world resolves back into undividedness. At dissolution, effects merge into their causes and those into theirs, and what remains at the end of the series is the undifferentiated root. Not observed, but required: if satkāryavāda is right, disappearance must be reabsorption, and reabsorption must have somewhere to go.
Sāṅkhya-kārikā 15. Note the method: prakṛti is not posited as an explanation and then defended — it is derived, five separate times, from features of the observed world plus the causal doctrine of §2.

4The three strandsत्रिगुणम्

Guṇa here does not mean “quality” as it does in Vaiśeṣika. It means a strand or a rope — three constituents twisted together, of which everything material is made, and whose changing proportions account for every difference between things.

The three gunas with their characters and functions Sattva as light and illuminating, rajas as mobile and stimulating, tamas as heavy and enveloping, always found together. sattva सत्त्व feels likeprīti — pleasure islaghu — light doesprakāśa — illuminates The strand by which anything is known at all. Predominant in intellect, clarity, and calm. rajas रजस् feels likeaprīti — pain iscala — mobile doespravṛtti — sets going The strand of activity. Nothing moves without it, and nothing rests while it dominates. tamas तमस् feels likeviṣāda — dejection isguru — heavy doesniyama — restrains The strand of mass and inertia. Without it nothing would hold its shape or stay put. Three things to hold on to · They are never found apart. Every material thing has all three; what differs is the proportion, and which one is currently dominant. · They are substances, not properties. Prakṛti does not have the guṇas; it is them, in equilibrium. Evolution begins when the equilibrium is disturbed. · They are both physical and psychological. The same tamas makes a stone heavy and a mind dull. Sāṅkhya draws no line between the two, because mind is material — which is the doctrine's most surprising consequence, and §5 spells it out.
The scheme is borrowed by almost everyone: the Gītā organises three chapters around it, Āyurveda uses it for temperament (chapter 13), and Purāṇic cosmology assumes it throughout. It is Sāṅkhya's most successful export.

5The twenty-five principlesपञ्चविंशतितत्त्वानि

The evolution runs in one direction, from subtle to gross, and the order is not decorative — each stage is argued for from what the next one needs.

The twenty-five tattvas of Sankhya Purusa apart; prakrti evolving into intellect, then ego, then from ego the mind and ten organs on one side and the five subtle elements and five gross elements on the other. puruṣa पुरुष consciousness — the witness produces nothing, is produced by nothing, does nothing. Present, and separate. mūla-prakṛti मूलप्रकृति the unmanifest root — the three guṇas at rest mahat / buddhi महत् · बुद्धि intellect — determination, decision ahaṃkāra अहंकार the I-maker — “this concerns me” when sattva dominates when tamas dominates · rajas supplies the energy for both ELEVEN ORGANS · 11 manas मनस् the inner organ that co-ordinates the rest five organs of knowing ear · skin · eye · tongue · nose five organs of action speech · hands · feet · excretion · generation Note: the “organs” are capacities, not the physical parts. The eye can be intact and the organ of seeing absent. FIVE SUBTLE ELEMENTS · 5 tanmātra तन्मात्र sound · touch · form · taste · smell “only that” — the bare sensible qualities, before they are anything's qualities. FIVE GROSS ELEMENTS · 5 mahābhūta महाभूत ether · air · fire · water · earth Each carries the tanmātras of all those before it. The order is the argument Intellect comes before ego, and ego before mind and the senses. That is deliberate and counter-intuitive: the capacity to determine is prior to the sense of being a self, which is prior to having senses at all. And all three are material. Intellect, ego and mind are evolutes of prakṛti, made of the guṇas, and unconscious in themselves. The one thing that is not material is the witness — and it is not doing any of the thinking. looks on throughout, and is untouched
Twenty-five in total: prakṛti, its twenty-three evolutes, and puruṣa. Reading the diagram from the top down gives cosmology; reading it from the bottom up gives the practice, since release is the reverse journey.

6What produces whatचतुर्विधतत्त्वम्

Kārikā 3 sorts the twenty-five by their productive role, and the sort is exhaustive.

The fourfold classification of the principles Root only, both root and product, product only, and neither. Root only prakṛti, avikṛti mūla-prakṛti Produces, and isproduced by nothing. count: 1 Both prakṛti-vikṛti buddhi ahaṃkāra the five tanmātras Produced, andthemselves productive. count: 7 Product only vikāra manas five organs of knowing five organs of action five gross elements The end of every line. count: 16 Neither na prakṛtir na vikṛtiḥ puruṣa Outside the wholecausal order. Not afirst cause; not aneffect; not a link. count: 1
1 + 7 + 16 + 1 = 25. That the classification comes out exactly even is Sāṅkhya's way of claiming the list is complete — the same move Vaiśeṣika makes with its six contacts.

7Proving puruṣaपुरुषसिद्धिः

Everything so far is unconscious. Sāṅkhya now has to show that something else exists, and it offers five arguments.

Five arguments for the existence of a conscious witness Aggregates exist for another, there must be something beyond the three strands, a supervisor, an experiencer, and the fact of striving for release. 1 · saṅghāta-parārthatvātसङ्घातपरार्थत्वात् an assemblage exists for the sake of something other than itself A bed is an assemblage of parts, and it exists for a sleeper who is not a part of it. The body-mind is an assemblage. For whom? 2 · triguṇādi-viparyayātत्रिगुणादिविपर्ययात् there must be what is other than the three strands Everything made of guṇas is unconscious. That there is knowing at all requires something not so made. 3 · adhiṣṭhānātअधिष्ठानात् there must be a ground the whole thing rests on A chariot moves for a charioteer. Unconscious machinery does not organise itself around ends. 4 · bhoktṛ-bhāvātभोक्तृभावात् there must be an experiencer Pleasure and pain are states of the intellect, and the intellect is unconscious. Something has to be enjoying and suffering them. 5 · kaivalyārthaṃ pravṛtteḥकैवल्यार्थं प्रवृत्तेः people strive for isolation — so there is something to be isolated
Sāṅkhya-kārikā 17. Every one of the five is an argument from insufficiency: the material order, however elaborated, does not add up to a knower — so a knower must be supplied from outside it. Whether that inference is legitimate is the question the whole subsequent tradition asks.
The reflection, and where consciousness seems to be

If puruṣa does nothing and buddhi is unconscious, why does it seem that I think? Sāṅkhya's answer is a metaphor made technical: the intellect, being predominantly sattva, is transparent like a still pool, and the witness is reflected in it. The reflection is not the witness, and the pool is not conscious — but the compound behaves exactly as if a single conscious thinker were present.

Everything you take yourself to be is on the intellect's side of this arrangement. Liberation is not the witness getting free of something holding it, since nothing ever held it. It is the intellect finally seeing that the two are two.

8Why there are manyपुरुषबहुत्वम्

Advaita will say there is one consciousness. Sāṅkhya says many, and gives three reasons — all of them empirical.

Separate allotments

Birth, death and sense-organs are distributed individually. If there were one puruṣa, everyone would be born and die together, and one person's blindness would be everyone's.

Non-simultaneous action

People act at different times and at cross purposes. One consciousness could not be doing this and its opposite at once.

Different mixtures

The three strands are differently proportioned in different people — some calm, some driven, some dull. A single witness would not present this variety.

The Advaitin objects

Every one of your three reasons describes a difference in prakṛti — in bodies, in activity, in the proportion of the strands. None of them touches the witness, which on your own account has no qualities and does nothing. Where there are no properties there can be no differences, so there can be no plurality. You have inferred many witnesses from many mirrors.

Sāṅkhya replies

Then explain why one person's liberation is not everyone's. If the witness is one, the first release ends the world. It plainly did not.

And is answered

Because bondage was never in the witness either. On our account the whole question — whose liberation? — arises only from within the appearance, and dissolves with it.

9The lame man and the blind manपङ्ग्वन्धन्यायः

If puruṣa does nothing and prakṛti is unconscious, how does anything happen? Sāṅkhya's answer is the most famous image in the system.

पुरुषस्य दर्शनार्थं कैवल्यार्थं तथा प्रधानस्य ।
पङ्ग्वन्धवद् उभयोरपि संयोगस्तत्कृतः सर्गः ॥

puruṣasya darśanārthaṃ kaivalyārthaṃ tathā pradhānasya |
paṅgv-andhavad ubhayor api saṃyogas tat-kṛtaḥ sargaḥ ||

Sāṅkhya-kārikā 21

The lame man and the blind man A lame man who can see rides on the shoulders of a blind man who can walk; together they cross the forest, though neither could alone. The lame man — puruṣa Can see. Cannot move. Consciousness without activity. It knows, and does nothing whatever about what it knows. Wants: to see what is there — darśana. The blind man — prakṛti Can move. Cannot see. Activity without consciousness. It does everything, and there is nobody home doing it. Wants: to be seen, and so released — kaivalya. sees the way walks it What the image is doing It explains apparent agency without giving either party a capacity it does not have. Neither is transformed by the association. When the forest is crossed they part, exactly as they were. Creation is the walk, and it is undertaken for both. Where it strains Both men in the story want something and agree to co-operate. Puruṣa cannot want, and prakṛti cannot agree. Sāṅkhya's answer is that the “conjunction” is beginningless and needs no first agreement.
Sāṅkhya offers a second image for the same relation: iron filings move near a magnet, though the magnet does nothing. Mere proximity to consciousness is enough to set unconscious nature in motion.

10Nobody is boundकैवल्यम्

तस्मान्न बध्यतेऽद्धा न मुच्यते नापि संसरति कश्चित् ।
संसरति बध्यते मुच्यते च नानाश्रया प्रकृतिः ॥

tasmān na badhyate 'ddhā na mucyate nāpi saṃsarati kaścit |
saṃsarati badhyate mucyate ca nānāśrayā prakṛtiḥ ||

Sāṅkhya-kārikā 62 — “Therefore nothing whatever is bound, nothing is released, nothing transmigrates. It is nature, in her various supports, that transmigrates, is bound, and is released.”

The dancer withdrawing, and the potter's wheel Nature displays herself and withdraws once seen; the body continues after knowledge as a wheel keeps turning after the potter stops. The dancer · Kārikā 59 “As a dancer, having shown herself to the audience, withdraws from the dance — so nature, having shown herself to the witness, withdraws.” And Kārikā 61 adds the most human line in the text: nothing is more modest than nature — once she knows she has been seen, she never appears before the witness again. The potter's wheel · Kārikā 67 Knowledge arises, and the causes of further embodiment stop. But the body already in motion continues — as the wheel spins on after the pot is finished and the potter's hand is lifted. This is liberation-while-living, and Advaita will take the same image. What liberation is not, in this system · Not a change in the witness. It was never bound, so there is nothing to undo. Kārikā 62 says this in as many words. · Not union with anything. Kaivalya means aloneness — the exact opposite of the union that yoga, as a word, suggests. · Not bliss. The witness has no qualities, so it cannot acquire a pleasant one. Pleasure is a state of the intellect, and the intellect is left behind. Sāṅkhya's release, like Nyāya's, is a cessation rather than an attainment — and its opponents raised the same objection: who would want it?

11Fifty ways to be stuckप्रत्ययसर्गः

Between the metaphysics and the release, the Kārikā inserts a psychology: fifty states of the intellect, exhaustively classified. It is an unusual thing to find in a metaphysical treatise, and it reads like a field guide to failure.

The pratyaya-sarga, the intellectual creation — Sāṅkhya-kārikā 46–51
ClassCountWhat it covers
Viparyaya — misconception5Darkness, delusion, great delusion, gloom and blind gloom. Subdivided further into 62 varieties, and identified by the commentators with the five afflictions of Yoga.
Aśakti — incapacity28Eleven defects of the organs — deafness, blindness and so on — plus seventeen failures of the intellect itself, being the negations of the nine contentments and the eight attainments.
Tuṣṭi — contentment9Nine ways of being satisfied short of the goal: four internal (resting in nature, in the means, in time, in luck) and five external (giving up on acquisition, preservation, waste, enjoyment and injury). Complacency, taxonomised.
Siddhi — attainment8Reasoning, oral instruction, study, the three suppressions of suffering, and friendship. The only class that gets you anywhere.

The nine contentments repay a second look. They are not vices. They are perfectly reasonable states — “nature will take care of it”, “I have the method, that is enough”, “the time is not right”, “I have given up wanting things” — and Sāṅkhya's point is that each is a comfortable place to stop, and that stopping is the failure. Eight things work; five delude you; twenty-eight incapacitate you; and nine make you feel fine about it.

12The case against Godईश्वरासिद्धिः

Sāṅkhya is not silent about God. It argues, and the arguments are pointed.

Sankhya's arguments against a creator God A dilemma about motive, the redundancy of a creator given karma, the problem of evil, and the sufficiency of prakrti. The dilemma of motive Is God free of desire, or not? If free — he has no reason to create anything, since creating is acting, and acting is for an end. If not free — he is bound like the rest of us, and is not God. The redundancy argument You say God allots fortunes according to karma. Then karma is doing the work, and God is an official who rubber-stamps it. Remove him and nothing changes. And if he allots against karma, he is unjust. If it were compassion A compassionate creator would have made only happy beings. He did not. And before creation there were no beings to be compassionate towards, so the motive is unavailable at the only moment it would be needed. And prakṛti suffices Unconscious things act purposively all the time. Milk turns to curd and flows for the calf without deliberating. Nature's activity for the sake of the witness needs no more explanation than that does. The later Sāṅkhya-sūtra puts it in two words: īśvarāsiddheḥ — “because God is not established”. Not denied on principle; simply not proved, and not needed.
The milk-and-calf example is doing heavy lifting. Nyāya's argument from design says purposive arrangement requires a designer; Sāṅkhya's counterexample says it does not, and points at lactation. The Naiyāyika reply is that milk flows by God's arrangement too — at which point the argument has become unfalsifiable, and both sides know it.

13The attacksआक्षेपाः

Vedānta — the Brahma-sūtra's principal target

An unconscious pradhāna cannot be the cause of a world so evidently ordered. Milk flows for the calf, you say — but milk flows within a living body governed by an intelligence, so your example proves the opposite. Unconscious things arrange themselves only where something conscious has arranged them.

And your two principles cannot come into relation. They have nothing in common: one is inert and one is inactive; one has parts and one has none. What is the conjunction made of?

Sāṅkhya

The conjunction is beginningless, and the demand for its cause is the demand for a first moment, which satkāryavāda has already ruled out.

Nyāya, on the guṇas

You say pleasure and pain are objective constituents of things — that a garland is pleasant in itself. Then why is the same garland pleasant to the lover, painful to his rival, and a matter of indifference to the ascetic? Pleasure is a quality of a soul, not of a flower.

The Buddhist, briefly

You have an eternal, unchanging, action-less, quality-less witness that also somehow experiences. Say what work the word “witness” is doing that could not be done by the sequence of cognitions itself.

The internal problem nobody solved

Sāṅkhya's own commentators worried at it: if prakṛti evolves for the sake of puruṣa's liberation, and prakṛti is unconscious, then an unconscious thing is acting for an end it cannot conceive on behalf of a being it cannot know about. Vijñānabhikṣu, in the sixteenth century, resolved it by quietly reintroducing God — and was no longer writing Sāṅkhya.

14Legacyपरिणामः

It stopped being a school and became a language

By the medieval period there were few practising Sāṅkhyas. But prakṛti, puruṣa, the three guṇas, the tanmātras and the twenty-five tattvas had been absorbed into almost everything: the Gītā, the Purāṇas, Tantra, Āyurveda, aesthetics and Yoga. It is the most successful failed school in India.

Into Yoga, whole

Yoga takes the metaphysics unchanged and adds a method and an Īśvara. Read the Yoga-sūtra without Sāṅkhya and half of it is unintelligible; read Sāṅkhya without Yoga and it has no practice.

Into medicine

Chapter 13's Āyurveda takes the twenty-four material principles as its account of what a person is made of, and the three guṇas as its account of temperament. The Caraka-saṃhitā's philosophical chapters are Sāṅkhya with adjustments.

What is worth arguing with now

The claim that intellect, ego and mind are material and unconscious, and that consciousness is a distinct thing that merely witnesses them, is a recognisable position in the philosophy of mind — and Sāṅkhya's version of it is unusually clean, because it refuses to let the witness do any explanatory work at all.

15Self-checkपरीक्षा

Check your reading

1 · Why does the Kārikā reject Vedic ritual as a solution?

Sāṅkhya accepts Vedic testimony as a pramāṇa and still rejects what the ritual portion prescribes. Being āstika is about the source of knowledge, not about the programme.

2 · What does satkāryavāda commit Sāṅkhya to?

The atheism of §12 follows from the causal doctrine of §2, not from any independent hostility to religion.

3 · In the twenty-five tattvas, where does the mind sit?

Intellect, ego and mind are all material. The only non-material item is the witness, and it does none of the thinking.

4 · What does Kārikā 62 assert?

The witness was never in trouble. Liberation is the intellect's discovery that the two are two, not a change in the witness.

5 · What is Sāṅkhya's reply to the argument from design?

A counterexample rather than a denial. Nyāya replies that lactation is itself divinely arranged, at which point both sides have stopped being able to lose.

Questions worth arguing about

Can an unconscious nature act for a conscious being's sake?

This is the deepest crack in the system and Sāṅkhya knows it. The milk-for-the-calf example establishes that unconscious processes can serve ends; it does not establish that they can serve an end nobody in the process has any access to. Prakṛti cannot know that puruṣa exists, and puruṣa cannot want anything. Every later commentator patched this differently, and Vijñānabhikṣu's patch was a God.

Are many witnesses better than one?

Sāṅkhya's three arguments all appeal to differences that lie on prakṛti's side, which is the Advaitin's whole point. But Advaita's alternative has its own cost: it must explain why liberation is not universal and instantaneous, and its answer — that the question only arises within the appearance — is either profound or a refusal to answer, depending on where you already stand. The disagreement is a good test of whether you find Advaita's two levels of truth a solution or a manoeuvre.

Is a witness that does nothing worth positing?

The Buddhist question is fair: strip puruṣa of activity, qualities, change and involvement, and ask what is left for it to explain. Sāṅkhya's answer is: the fact that there is experiencing at all rather than merely processing. Whether that is a genuine explanandum or a grammatical illusion produced by the subject-predicate form of the sentence “I see” is a question the two traditions never resolved — and neither has anyone since.

16Glossaryशब्दकोशः

IASTDevanāgarīSense
ahaṃkāraअहंकारThe I-maker: the principle that appropriates experience as one's own.
avyakta / vyaktaअव्यक्त / व्यक्तThe unmanifest root and its manifest evolutes.
buddhi / mahatबुद्धि / महत्Intellect, the first evolute; “the great one”.
guṇaगुणA strand or constituent of nature — sattva, rajas, tamas. Not “quality” in the Vaiśeṣika sense.
kaivalyaकैवल्यAloneness: the witness standing apart, which is release.
paṅgv-andha-nyāyaपङ्ग्वन्धन्यायThe maxim of the lame man and the blind man.
prakṛti / pradhānaप्रकृति / प्रधानNature: the unconscious, active, single material principle.
pratyaya-sargaप्रत्ययसर्गThe intellectual creation: the fifty states of §11.
puruṣaपुरुषThe conscious witness: inactive, plural, unqualified.
satkāryavādaसत्कार्यवादThe doctrine that the effect pre-exists in its cause.
tanmātraतन्मात्र“Only that”: a subtle element, the bare sensible quality.
viveka-khyātiविवेकख्यातिDiscriminative discernment of the witness from nature — the operative insight.
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