ABSTRACT
The model of the development of SaÅkhya and Yoga that was adopted in Chapter 1 – and which I have called the gestation or ontogenic model – is one that is commonly accepted by scholars, although the acceptance, one suspects, may often be due more to the unavailability of a more satisfactory account than to any positive features that the model possesses. The model, it should be noted, radically contravenes the view of the systems’ origins that is taken by the traditions themselves. On the most prevalent of traditional understandings, the SaÅkhya teachings – of which Patañjala Yoga (i.e. the Yoga of Patañjali) is merely a restatement with an especially practical emphasis – were conceived in the mind of a great seer named Kapila, who subsequently dictated them to his disciple, Asuri, from whom a strict pedagogical lineage developed. The last few verses of the SaÅkhyakarika testify to this origination story, with Ifvarakrsja himself being portrayed, not as an innovator, but as a faithful transmitter of an already existing body of knowledge. The ontogenic model undermines this origination story by dispensing with the notion of a spiritual master’s revelatory intuition and replacing it with a tale of the incremental formalization of disparate ideas. This formalization is supposed to have taken place over a period of several hundreds of years, during which period what began as vague and often mythologically encumbered pronouncements acquired increased definition and philosophical acuity. If Kapila has any place at all in this latter version of events, then it is as a man who – at some unspecified moment in history – made a significant contribution to the formalization process.
