The Sāṅkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa

The course will introduce you to the fascinating world view of Sāṅkhya as it was codified in the Sāṅkhyakārikā. This enigmatic Sanskrit text, consisting of about 70 stanzas (depending on which version you read), is the foundational work of Classical Sāṅkhya philosophy. It was composed probably at some time in the fifth century CE by an author named Īśvarakṛṣṇa, about whom virtually nothing specific is known except that he summarized a much more comprehensive and nowadays lost text with the title Ṣaṣṭitantra, the “Authoritative Exposition on Sixty Topics” that influenced Patañjali when he composed the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e. Yogasūtra and its oldest commentary, the so-called Yogabhāṣya).

In his Sāṅkhyakārikā, which became the starting point of a long commentarial tradition among the followers of Sāṅkhya and Yoga philosophy, Īśvarakṛṣṇa explains why human existence abounds in suffering and how it is possible to ultimately and invariably overcome this unsatisfactory condition by realizing the ontological difference between consciousness and its contents (i.e. puruṣa and prakṛti).

Since the philosophical traditions of Sāṅkhya developed numerous key conceptions that were later adopted in various philosophical and religious traditions of Yoga and Tantra, scholars have convincingly argued that Sāṅkhya is not merely one of India’s philosophical systems, but Indian philosophy par excellence. Knowledge of Sāṅkhya is thus of central importance for everybody interested in the history of Yoga theory and practice, as well as many other systems of Indian philosophy and religion.

In this online course, together we’ll read closely the entire text, line by line—based on the original Sanskrit and an accessible English translation.