The Karika, the Lost Book, and the Question of God

Almost everything the classical school taught reaches us through one short text. The Samkhyakarika of Ishvarakrishna, about seventy verses, is the earliest complete Samkhya work that survives, and its closing verses say plainly that it is a summary of a larger work, the Shashtitantra, which is lost. What came before the Karika is therefore reconstructed from quotations, from the doxographies written by rivals, and from the older layers of the epics and the Upanishads, where Samkhya ideas appear without the finished system around them.

The most discussed feature of classical Samkhya is that there is no God in it. Prakriti unfolds without a designer because unfolding is what it does, and liberation requires no grace. Whether this was always so is genuinely open. The material in the Mahabharata that scholars call epic Samkhya is not obviously atheistic, and the classical position may be a hardening rather than an origin. Later Vedanta commentators attacked the system at exactly this point, and the Brahma Sutras take up arguments against it early.

Classical Yoga took the same twenty-five principles, added a twenty-sixth in Ishvara, and added a practice, which is why Indian doxography treats the two as a pair. Samkhya itself stopped producing new schools early and never built the monasteries and teaching successions that carried Vedanta forward. It survives as the metaphysics other systems assume rather than as a living lineage with an address of its own.