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publish an Introduction to the text. Prof. Satkari Mookerji, both in his Foreword to the edition and elsewhere, has drawn our attention to the importance of this work, its early date, which he puts as the 6th century A.D., and the light which the work throws on early Sāmkhya thought and history.
The Yuktidīpikā is indeed a precious discovery. We know from Paramartha that in early Sāmkhya there were as many as eighteen schools. Unfortunately, not only the texts of the early Ācāryas of the School, Kapila, Asuri, Pancaśikha, Vārşaganya, Jaigīşavya, and Vindhyavāsin have been lost, but even early commentaries on the text of the only surviving compendium of this school, the Samkhya Kärikäs of Iśvarakrsna have not come down. The Yuktidīpikä on the Sāmkhya Karikās is thus valuable to us not only as an old gloss on the Kārikās, but as the source of our knowledge of some hitherto unknown Sāṁkhya teachers and their views, and the hitherto unknown views of some early Sáňkhya authorities whom we have known to some extent already. In fact, it is from here that we learn of a wide variety of views held by early writers within the framework of the Samkhya tenets, a variety of views on even such fundamental concepts as the Prakrti which some held to be as many as the Puruşas. Here is also to be seen an author who was in live contact with Buddhist
I. This was issued under the title Origin and Development of the Samkhya System of Thought, No. 30 of the Calcutta Qriental Series 1952, a copy of which I could secure only recently after writing this paper.
2. On one of the early exegetists and his dubious service to Samkhya, see my Note Madhava, an early unfaithful exponent of the Samkhya' in the Sarupa Bharati.