Sambodhi 1975 Vol 04

Author(s): Dalsukh Malvania, H C Bhayani
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 25

Vedic Origins of the Sankhya Dialectic
23
(6) "villue'12 The last four meanings are found actually attested in Sanskrit.13 Disagreeing with Rice, Keith suggests that 'guna' must have the same origin as the Avestan word 'gaono', meaning hair, and if this is accepted as the earliest sense of guna, it is easy to see how from the practice of plaiting the hair the meaning "strand”' might easily come to be that of guna '14
The earliest texts in which guna' figures with a thore or less clear sense are the Taittiriya-Samhita of the Black Yajur-Veda, where it means strand' as constituent of rope 15 and the Saunaka-Samhita of the AtharvaVeda, where it means constituent.'16 According to Keith, the Iranian term also assumes the sense of quality' and 'colour. According to Walde, both the Avestan word and the Vedic 'gāvini (groin) are derived from the root 'geu-(Avestan), 'biegen, krümmen, wolben’.1?
In the Sārikhya system, 'guna retains its original (or almost original) sense of strand or constituent, whereas, in the Vaisesika system, it assumes the later sense of quality (or rather attribute). By the time of Patanjali the grammarian, it assumed a great variety of meanings.19 In the Mahabharata, monad (manas) intellect (buddhi), quantity, (sattva) 'I am the doer another is the doer 'this is mine and this is not mine,' the matrix (praktii), the manifestation (vyakti) time (kāla), etc. etc. are also termed 'guna-8.'*.
From these considerations, it is evident that guna' has, from the first, signified an objective fact and not just a psychological one as Dasgupta, Burrow, and Johnston take it to have signified originally.
In fact, on the basis of certain clear indications in the Mahabhārata the author is inclined to believe that, at first, the three mental states with which these writers identify the three guna-s were treated as dependent upon the guna-s (tadašritaḥ) and christened bhāva' or 'vedana '18
The Saunaka-Samahita of the Atharva Veda is the first extant text to refer to the three guna-s', 20 where the optological import of the expression is clear. It also bappens to be the first to mention "rajas' and 'tamas' together, by name, once, where, too, the objectivity of the concepts is unmistakable. 21 It is no less significant a fact that the trilogy of guna-s appears to have been used in the sense of the objective constituents of the Potentiality (prakrti) even in the oldest known Sankhya treatise, ŞastiTantra, no longer extant.22
Now, quite a number of triads are found scattered in the Vedic texts, 28 some of which are bound to interest us here. Besides the triads found therein elsewhere, a full hymn of the Saisiriya-Sakala-Samhita of the RgVeda, comprising a dozen stanzas, is denoted to triads of various sorts.'24 As is well known, a recurrent phenomenon in this text is the trilogies pertaining to fire (agni).25 Fire is spoken of as having three forms: the fire, of the waters, the fire of the firmament, and the fire of the sun,38 Correspondingly, the Vedas divide existence or the cosmos into three worlds