Samkhya's Parallel Claim, Reached by a Different Metaphysics

Samkhya reaches a strikingly similar conclusion, that liberation comes through knowledge rather than through ritual action or devotion, while starting from a metaphysics that Advaita would reject outright, since Samkhya holds purusha, pure consciousness, and prakriti, the material principle from which the entire observable world unfolds, to be two genuinely distinct and irreducible realities rather than treating the world as ultimately identical with a single undivided Brahman. Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and Meaning explains that on this account bondage consists in purusha's mistaken identification with the workings of prakriti, mistaking the activities of mind and body for its own nature, and liberation, kaivalya, comes when discriminating knowledge, viveka, correctly distinguishes the two and purusha recognizes itself as never having truly been entangled at all. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism notes that despite this sharply different metaphysical starting point, Samkhya's insistence that only discriminating knowledge, not ritual, devotion or moral effort as such, actually accomplishes liberation runs parallel to Advaita's own claim closely enough that the two schools are regularly read alongside one another on this specific point, two systems that disagree about what ultimately exists agreeing all the same about what liberates a person from bondage to it.