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Reading the Past: Texts and History
Bronkhorst: Systematic Philosophy between the Empires
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the Common Era and before, systematic philosophy had far more Buddhist than Brahmanical practitioners.
For the early history of Buddhist systematic philosophy we have access to a large number of surviving texts. In the case of the Brahmanical schools we depend on what might be called textual archeology. In order to reestablish at least some degree of equilibrium between the two currents, it may be useful here to summarize some of its findings with regard to Brahmanical philosophy.
The systematic exploration of quotations of Samkhya material in texts belonging to other traditions of thought allowed Erich Frauwallner (1958) to reconstitute passages presumably belonging to the Saspitantra of Vårsaganya, a lost Samkhya work that may have belonged to around 300 CE. The passages reconstituted by Frauwallner deal with epistemology. To recover these, Frauwallner based himself primarily on the Pramanasamuccaya of the Buddhist Digniga along with Jinendrabuddhi's commentary, and on the Dvadasarangyacakra of the Jaina Mallavadin along with Simhasuri's commentary Nydyāgamănusdrini. Frauwallner argued that some of the material contained in these texts had been quoted from Virxaganya's composition, some of it from commentaries thereon. Frauwallner's exploration of Jinendrabuddhi's Pramanasamuccayatika for fragments from the Sastitantra has been continued by Emst Steinkellner (1999).
Other quoted passages in the works of non-Samkhya authors bring to light further features of the system of thought that appears to have been presented in Varsaganya's Sasritantra. Various early authors-most notablo among them Bharthari, Dharmapala, and Mallavidin attribute to Sankhya a position which differs from the one which finds expression in the surviving Simkhya works. According to them, Samkhya looked upon substances as being collections of qualities. Nothing in the surviving Samkhya literature supports this point of view, but the early testimonies are clear in this regard. What is more, there are indications that the qualities once figured among the twenty-five tattvas of Särkhya, contrary to the list preserved in the surviving texts, which does not mention them. There are also indications that the five tanmatras, which in classical Samkhya would seem to make up for the five qualities of preclassical Samkhya, may have undergone a major change in the way they were conceptualized, from atomic to omnipresent. The nature of material nature (pradhana), finally, tums out to be quite different in the Saspitantra from what it became in the classical system. If we are correct in attributing these various preclassical positions to Vårsaganya's $aspitantra, it will be clear that systematic Samkhya went through important changes during the last century or so of the period that interests us.
The frequent occurrence in various early texts, prominent among them the Mahabharata, of the term Samkhye and of ideas that are similar to those of systematic Samkhya, has not so far allowed a plausible reconstruction of the earliest history of systematic Samkhya before the time of Varsaganya.'One of the difficulties is that we do not know in what relation those passages stand to Samkhya as a systematic philosophy. Are they early echoes of a system of philosophy that had been created an
that found its direct expression in texts that are now lost to us? Or do these passages provide glimpses of the nonsystematized predecessors of Samkhya philosophy? The fact that Samkhya-like ideas still appear in much more recent religious texts suggests that nonphilosophical Samkhya largely led a life of its own little influenced by the attempts of systematic thinkers to create a coherent whole out of these floating elements. It also suggests that nonphilosophical Samkhya existed before, as well as beside, philosophical Sāmkhya. Regarding the latter it is difficult to look back further than Varsaganya, even though it is clear that some form of philosophical Samkhya existed already at the time of Aryadeva and therefore most probably before Varşaganya (see Bakker and Bisschop 1999; Brockington 1999).
The situation of Vaibesika is similar to the one of Samkhya in that we have a short exposition of the classical system in the Padārthadharmasarigraha of Prasasta, and various fragments from a more detailed earlier work which appears to have been for some time the main text of this school of thought. This lost earlier text is the katandi, whose author may have been a certain Rävana. The Kafandi was a commentary on the Vaijesika Sera, and was itself commented upon in a Tika by the same Prasasta Who also composed the Padārthadharmasangraha. This commentary by Prasasta, too, is now lost, but fragments of this text, too, have been preserved. Information about the Katandi and Prasasta's Tid can be derived from critical discussions in the works of Mallavadin and Simhastri, as well as from the works of the Vedantin Sankara. The Katandi appears to have been more recent than the Sastitantra: though older than Dignaga, its treatment of fallacious reasons indicates that it is more recent than Vasubandhu the author of the Vädavidhi and Vädavidhāna.
The Vaidesika of the Kafandi was not in all respects identical with that of the Padarthadharmasangraha and its commentaries. A particularly important difference is the acceptance of a creator god in the latter where the former had no place for one. A relatively minor, yet theoretically important, difference concerns the question how many atoms there are in a speck of dust: six in classical Vaiseşika, three in the katandi (Bronkhorst 1993, forthcoming-b).
In order to find out more about Vaiseșika from the period before the katandi, our most important source of information is, of course, the Vaijesika Sutra. Unfortunately this text has reached us in a number of differing versions. What is worse, we know that this text had already undergone changes at an early age. The full extent of those changes can no longer be determined, but the evidence of some early authors among them Bharthari, Digniga, Jinabhadra, and Prasasta himself-permits us to conclude that certain portions have been added to the original text. We know, for example, that the original- Vaišefika Sutra did not look upon sound as a quality, but rather as a substance, a form of wind (Bronkhorst 19936, 1994b).
Since there are serious doubts about the form of the original Vaisesika Sútra, it is difficult to determine its date. Quite independent of the Vaifesika Sürra, however, there is evidence to show that Vaiseșika did exist during the early centuries of the Common Era A Vaišesika position is criticized in the Spitzer manuscript, which presumably dates from the third century at the latest (Franco 2000a, 2000, 2000c, 2001). The voluminous Sarvistivadin Mahavibhāså shows acquaintance with Vaibesika (and with Samkhya), as does perhaps Ašvaghosa, the author of the Buddhacarita. All this shows that Vaiseșika and Samkhya existed in some form from
See Motegi 1986; Bronkhorst 1994a, forthcoming-c, and the Appendix at the end of this chapter.
