[Advaita-l] Sankhya & Yoga

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Fri, 8 May 2009, Michael Shepherd wrote:

> Would the implication be, that 'sankya' and 'yoga' were used as general
> terms for 'knowledge' and 'practice' before being codified (in a later view
> ?) as 'systems' ? Thus their terms would be well known without yet such a
> codification, as a darshana ?
>

The standard explanation I like to give is the United States is a 
democracy and also has a political party called Democrats.  All Democrats 
are democrats but all democrats are not Democrats.  In other words, a 
"capital-D" Democrat belongs to a particular darshana of "small-d" 
democrats.

That Samkhya/Yoga shares vocabulary and concepts with Vedanta is not 
surprising as they do have a common root in Vedic tradition. 
Shankaracharya does not deny this, he only says that their reading of 
tradition is incorrect.

That "capital-S" Samkhyas share vocabulary and concepts with Gita, 
Puranas, Ayurveda, Arthashastra etc. is not surprising as they have a 
common root is a particular type of philosophical praxis we can call 
"small-s" samkhya.

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>