ABSTRACT
SaÅkhya is renowned for its metaphysical schema of twenty-five categories and for the careful – some would say obsessive1 – attention it gives to the enumeration of the individual components of that schema. Yoga is widely held to have added a twenty-sixth principle, namely ifvara, but to have otherwise adopted the SaÅkhya model, at the heart of which is the claim that the whole of reality can be reduced ultimately to two co-fundamental principles, typically referred to as purusa and prakrti. The other twenty-three principles derive in some way from the ‘combination’ or ‘conjunction’ (saÅyoga) of these two co-fundamentals. The twenty-three derivates are generally described as ‘products’ or ‘evolutes’ of prakrti, which ‘emerge’ or ‘arise’ when the equilibrium of the three gujas (the threefold constitution of prakrti) is disturbed by the presence (saÅnidhi) of purusa.
