The verse and its meaning · Tattva · Tattva — Samkhya — Consciousness and Matter

Complete, Minus Tales and Quarrels

Samkhya Karika 72

सप्तत्यां किल येऽर्थास्तेऽर्थाः कृत्स्नस्य षष्टितन्त्रस्य । आख्यायिकाविरहिताः परवादविवर्जिताश्चापि ॥

Meaning · English

Whatever subjects are found in the seventy verses are, it is said, the subjects of the entire Shashtitantra, only without its illustrative stories and without its arguments against the views of others.

The question is whether a short text can carry a whole system. Samkhya's answer, in the verse that closes the Karika in most editions, is yes. The Shashtitantra, the 'system of sixty', was an older and larger Samkhya treatise. It is now lost, and later tradition reads its name as a count of sixty topics. The claim is that every subject in that work also appears in these seventy verses. 'Seventy' is a round number, since the text runs a little past it. Only two kinds of material were left out. The first is akhyayika, the stories and illustrative tales a teacher uses to make a point vivid. The second is paravada, the refutation of rival schools. Nothing that belongs to the doctrine itself is said to be missing. The small word kila, 'it is said', may be a note of modesty, or it may point back to the tradition as the witness. No commentary is printed for this verse, so this reading rests on the verse alone. It follows that a reader of the Karika has, by its own claim, every subject of the system, though not its stories or its debates.

Picture a grandmother's thick cookbook. Its recipes are buried among stories about who first cooked each dish and long complaints about how the neighbours get it wrong. A grandchild copies every recipe onto a few index cards. Every dish can still be made from the cards. The stories and the quarrels stay in the old book, and the cards hold the whole of the cooking.

Today this would be called a claim about lossless summary, and it is a reasonable claim within limits. A system can often be stated through its core principles, much as a formal theory can be set out from a few axioms. But two things are open. Psychology of learning broadly agrees that concrete examples and stories help people understand and remember abstract ideas, so leaving them out has a cost for the learner even if the content is intact. Philosophers also find that a position's meaning is often sharpened by what it rejects. Arguing against rivals shows where its edges lie. The claim cannot be checked directly, since the Shashtitantra does not survive. Historians weigh it as the author's own account, alongside quotations of older Samkhya preserved in other works.

अर्थ · हिन्दी

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• Before: A Doctrine Condensed · Samkhya Karika 71
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