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410 Speculations in the Medical Schools [CH. violence (abhighāta), fear, sorrow and anxiety. Thus in the Tretā age dharma diminished by a quarter, and so the earthly production of harvest, etc. also diminished by a quarter, and the bodies of living beings lost their vitality accordingly; their length of life diminished, and diseases began to grow. So in the Dvāpara age there was a further diminution of the quantities of earthly productions and a further weakening of human constitution and shortening of the length of life.
It may be remembered that in Suśruta, III. 1, it is said that many persons of the medical school of thought had conceived this world to have come into being either through time (kāla), in the natural process by a blind destiny (niyati), or through a mere nature (svabhāva), accidental concourse of things (yadycchā), or through evolution (pariņāma) by the will of God; and they called each of these alternatives the prakrti, or the origin of the world1. But the notion of the Sāmkhya prakrti holds within it all these concepts, and it is therefore more appropriate to admit one prakrti as the evolving cause of the world. Gayi, in interpreting this, holds that prakyti is to be regarded as the evolving material cause, whereas time, natural process, etc. are to be regarded as instrumental causes for the world-manifestation. According to Suśruta the selves (kşetra-jña) are not in the medical school regarded as allpervasive (a-sarva-gata), as they are in the Sāmkhya system of thought. These selves, on account of their virtues or vices, transmigrate from one life to another as men or as different animals; for, though not all-pervasive, they are eternal and are not destroyed by death. The selves are not to be regarded as self-revealing, as in Sāmkhya or the Vedānta; but they can be inferred, as the substance or entity to which the feelings of pleasure and pain belong, and they are always endowed with consciousness, though they may not themselves be regarded as of the nature of pure consciousness. They are cetanāvantaḥ (endowed with con
1 The primary use of prakrti may have been due to the idea of an enquiry regarding the source and origin of the world. Prakyti literally means "source" or "origin.” So the term was probably used in reference to other speculations regarding the origin of the world before it was technically applied as a Sămkhya term. The ideas of svabhāva, kāla, etc. seem to have been combined to form the technical Samkhya concept of prakrti, and two schools of Samkhya, the Kapila and the Patañjali schools, arose in connection with the dispute as to the starting of the evolution of prakrti accidentally (yadrcchā) or by the will of God. The idea of prakrti was reached by combining all the alternative sources of world-manifestation that were current before, and so they are all conserved in the notion of prakrti.
