American Journal of Philology (Volume 35) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.?THE SAMKHYA TEACHINGS IN THE MAITRI UPANISAD. A study of the text of the Maitri Upanisad, belonging to a school of the Yajur-Veda, shows a large number of passages, in which may be seen distinct traces of Samkhya influence.1 The work seems to be a reflex of this system of philosophy. Garbe in his Samkhya Philosophie, p. 22, gives the following partial list of passages in the Maitrl, where Samkhya teachings occur: II. 5; III. 2-5; IV. 3; V. 2; VI. 5, 10, 19, 28, 30, 34; VII. 1. Deussen's Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie,2 contains six quotations, the phraseology of which corresponds or is identical with that of the Samkhya Karikas of Ifvara-Krsna. The prapathakas where these are to be found, follow:'II. 7; III. 2; III. 3; V. 1; VI. 10; VI. 19. The philosophical conceptions, as set forth in the Upanisad however differ in many respects radically from the doctrines of the systematic Samkhya treatises. Not only are they at variance with the views of the later Samkhya-Sutras and the commentaries but in several cases they are at least divergent from, if not opposed to, the teachings of the earlier masters, Ifvara-Krsna and Gaudapada. This fact however does not by any means warrant the assertion that the author of the Maitrl Upanisad was an opponent of the Samkhya doctrines, although tendencies toward the strict monism of the Vedanta and the theism of the Yoga are scattered throughout the work. The Samkhya teachers themselves within the school held widely divergent theories, though the general scheme of their systems was the same. It would be difficult to reconcile the viewpoints of Vijnana-Bhiksu in the Samkhya-Pravacana- Bhasya, and Vacaspati Mlfra in the Tattva-Kaumudl. Even the Sutras and Karikas differ in quite a few essentials, and 1 Weber. History of Sanskrit Lit...