If Vacaspati’s interpretation of the classification of anumana in his Tattvakaumudi be considered to be a correct explanation of Sa@mkhya karika then Is’varak@r@s@na must be a different person from Vindhyavasin whose views on anumana as referred to in S’lokavarttika, p. 393, are altogether different.  But Vacaspati’s own statement in the Tatparyya@tika (pp. 109 and 131) shows that his treatment there was not faithful.]

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Mahabhasya of Patanjali the grammarian (147 B.C.) [Footnote ref 1].  The subject of the two passages are the enumeration of reasons which frustrate visual perception.  This however is not a doctrine concerned with the strictly technical part of Sa@mkhya, and it is just possible that the book from which Patanjali quoted the passage, and which was probably paraphrased in the Arya metre by Is’varak@r@s@na was not a Sa@mkhya book at all.  But though the subject of the verse is not one of the strictly technical parts of Sa@mkhya, yet since such an enumeration is not seen in any other system of Indian philosophy, and as it has some special bearing as a safeguard against certain objections against the Sa@mkhya doctrine of prak@rti, the natural and plausible supposition is that it was the verse of a Sa@mkhya book which was paraphrased by Is’varak@r@s@na.

The earliest descriptions of a Sa@mkhya which agrees with Is’varak@r@s@na’s Sa@mkhya (but with an addition of Is’vara) are to be found in Patanjali’s Yoga sutras and in the Mahabharata; but we are pretty certain that the Sa@mkhya of Caraka we have sketched here was known to Patanjali, for in Yoga sutra I. 19 a reference is made to a view of Sa@mkhya similar to this.

From the point of view of history of philosophy the Sa@mkhya of Caraka and Pancas’ikha is very important; for it shows a transitional stage of thought between the Upani@sad ideas and the orthodox Sa@mkhya doctrine as represented by Is’varak@r@s@na.  On the one hand its doctrine that the senses are material, and that effects are produced only as a result of collocations, and that the puru@sa is unconscious, brings it in close relation with Nyaya, and on the other its connections with Buddhism seem to be nearer than the orthodox Sa@mkhya.

We hear of a Sa@s@titantras’astra as being one of the oldest Sa@mkhya works.  This is described in the Ahirbudhnya Sa@mhita as containing two books of thirty-two and twenty-eight chapters [Footnote ref 2].  A quotation from Rajavarttika (a work about which there is no definite information) in Vacaspati Mis’ra’s commentary on the Sa@mkhya karika_(72) says that it was called the _@Sa@s@titantra because it dealt with the existence of prak@rti, its oneness, its difference from puru@sas, its purposefulness for puru@sas, the multiplicity of puru@sas, connection and separation from puru@sas, the evolution of

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[Footnote 1:  Patanjali’s Mahabha@sya, IV.  I. 3. Atisannikar@sadativiprakar@sat murttyantaravyavadhanat tamasav@rtatvat indriyadaurvalyadatipramadat, etc. (Benares edition.)]