Open almost any yoga philosophy book and you will meet the gunas, the three qualities. Sattva, rajas, tamas. Clarity, activity, inertia. They turn up in discussions of diet, of temperament, of practice, of time of day.
Almost nobody mentions where they come from, which is a text of seventy-two verses composed around the fourth century CE by a man called Ishvara Krishna.
The Samkhya Karika is the oldest surviving systematic statement of Samkhya, and Samkhya is the metaphysical framework that the Yoga Sutras assume without explaining. Reading Patanjali without it is like reading a technical manual for a machine whose parts you have never seen.
One idea, stated plainly
Samkhya’s foundational move is a hard division of everything that exists into exactly two categories.
Purusha is consciousness. Not a mind, not a personality, not a soul with attributes. Pure awareness, without content, which does nothing and changes not at all. Samkhya holds that there are many purushas, not one, which distinguishes it sharply from Advaita Vedanta and is a point beginners frequently get wrong.
Prakriti is everything else. Not just matter in the physical sense but mind, intellect, ego, the senses, emotion, memory. Everything that has content, everything that changes, everything that can be observed.
Note where the line falls. Your thoughts are on the prakriti side. Your sense of being a person is on the prakriti side. What you actually are, on this account, is the awareness in which all of that appears, and it is not any of it.
The whole problem, and the whole solution, follows from that. Suffering exists because awareness has mistaken itself for the apparatus it observes through. Liberation is the recognition that it never was that apparatus.
The gunas, properly understood
Prakriti is not uniform. It is constituted by three gunas, which are better understood as strands or constituent forces than as qualities in the ordinary sense.
Sattva is lucidity, lightness, the tendency toward illumination. Rajas is movement, energy, the tendency toward activity and craving. Tamas is mass, obstruction, the tendency toward inertia and concealment.
The crucial point that popular treatments miss is that these are not three things that combine like ingredients. Everything in prakriti is all three, always, in shifting proportion. Nothing is purely sattvic. There is no such thing as a tamasic object and a sattvic object as separate categories. There are only ratios, changing continuously.
Before manifestation, the three are in perfect equilibrium and nothing happens. Manifestation begins when the balance is disturbed, and the world is the ongoing disturbance.
The twenty-five categories
Samkhya enumerates. The name itself means something like enumeration or reckoning, and the system counts twenty-five tattvas, principles.
Purusha is the first and stands apart. From prakriti unfolds a sequence: mahat or buddhi, the intellect; ahamkara, the ego principle that produces the sense of I; then from ahamkara, manas the coordinating mind, five sense capacities, five action capacities, five subtle elements, and from those the five gross elements of space, air, fire, water and earth.
The order matters and is often reversed by people summarising it. Intellect comes before ego, and ego before mind and senses. The self-sense is not the origin of experience but a relatively early product of it.
The famous image
The Karika explains the relationship between purusha and prakriti with an analogy that is worth knowing because later texts keep reusing it.
Prakriti is a dancer. Purusha is the audience. The dancer performs only to be seen, and once she has been seen fully and understood, she stops. The performance was never for its own sake.
There is a second image, of a lame man carried by a blind man: purusha sees but cannot act, prakriti acts but cannot see, and their apparent conjunction produces the world of experience.
Both images do something important. They make liberation a matter of recognition rather than of achievement. Nothing has to be acquired. The confusion simply ends.
Why this matters for yoga
Patanjali’s second sutra defines yoga as the stilling of the movements of consciousness. That definition is only coherent within Samkhya. The movements belong to prakriti. When they still, what remains is purusha resting in its own nature, which is the third sutra.
Kaivalya, the goal named in the fourth book of the Sutras, means isolation or aloneness, and it means the isolation of consciousness from prakriti. That is a Samkhya term, doing Samkhya work.
Where yoga differs is on practice and on ishvara. Samkhya proposes that discriminative knowledge alone produces liberation, and classical Samkhya is generally atheistic, offering no creator. Yoga adds a graded programme of practice and admits ishvara. The metaphysics is shared, the method is not.
Reading it
The Karika is short and unusually clear for a text of its kind. Verse eight through twelve set out the gunas. Verses twenty through twenty-two give the evolution of the categories. Verse fifty-nine has the dancer.
Gerald Larson’s translation and study is the standard scholarly entry point in English. The Gaudapada commentary is the traditional companion, and Vachaspati Mishra’s Tattva Kaumudi is the more elaborate classical treatment. A first-time reader should take a translation with a running commentary, because the verses are compressed and assume familiarity with debates that are no longer live.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Samkhya Karika? A text of about seventy-two verses by Ishvara Krishna, dated around the fourth century CE, and the oldest surviving systematic exposition of the Samkhya school.
What are purusha and prakriti? Purusha is pure consciousness, unchanging and without content. Prakriti is everything else, including mind, intellect, ego and matter. Samkhya holds them to be fundamentally distinct.
What are the three gunas? Sattva, rajas and tamas: lucidity, activity and inertia. They are constituent strands of prakriti, always present together in shifting proportion rather than as separate categories.
How is Samkhya related to yoga? Yoga adopts Samkhya’s metaphysics, including purusha, prakriti and the gunas, and adds a system of practice and the concept of ishvara. Patanjali’s definition of yoga only makes sense in Samkhya terms.
Is Samkhya atheistic? Classical Samkhya as presented in the Karika does not posit a creator god and explains manifestation through the disturbance of the gunas. Yoga departs from it on this point.
How many purushas does Samkhya accept? Many. It holds that there is a plurality of individual consciousnesses, which distinguishes it from Advaita Vedanta’s single undifferentiated reality.
Sources
Primary: the Samkhya Karika of Ishvara Krishna. Gerald James Larson, Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of its History and Meaning (second edition, 1979), contains a translation and the standard study. The Gaudapada Bhashya and Vachaspati Mishra’s Tattva Kaumudi are the classical commentaries and are available in English.
Modern scholarship: Gerald James Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds., Samkhya: A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy, volume 4 of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies (1987), which is the comprehensive reference. Mikel Burley, Classical Samkhya and Yoga (2007), for the relationship between the two systems.
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