ABSTRACT
Sāṃkhya, one of India’s oldest philosophical systems, has had a pervasive influence on Indic mythology and religion as well as philosophy. Its earliest comprehensive treatise is the Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. 350–450 CE) and it is closely allied with the classical Yoga of Patañjali. This chapter explicates Sāṃkhya’s textual history and its central concepts and doctrines. These include the ontological dualism comprising puruṣa and prakṛti, whose beginningless conjunction generates the constitutive conditions of all possible experience, as well as the conception of a soteriological goal consisting in the eradication of distress and the liberation of the ‘self’.
