Does Purusha will?

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Ferenc Ruzsa <f_ruzsa at ISIS.ELTE.HU> wrote:

>The MBh preserved several widely different "sAMkhya" versions, and clearly
>the conceptual framework in the gItA is far from uniform. It seems that the
>later chapters (after the twelfth) represent a terminology closer to
>classical sAMkhya; and this must have been more familiar for zaGkara. So
>the
>reason why he preferred the list in ch.13 might well be because this was
>the
>standard sAMkhya version.
>

It is not very clear to me that Sankara either preferred or was more
familiar with the standard sAMkhya version. For example, he refers to very
non-standard versions of vaiSeshika and pAncarAtra in his sUtrabhAshya. One
should, in fact, expect that Sankara was more familiar with the various
versions of the one school of thought that he was most interested in
contesting. We require a more thorough analysis of Sankara's undisputed
works, which is best left alone for the purposes of this discussion.

.......

>[On the number of the indriyas:]
> > The kArikAs opt for thirteen.
>No: in the SK there are clearly eleven indriyas, see SK 24-27, 49. Thirteen
>is the number of the components of the antaHkaraNa.

Well, it seems as if the SK leaves one with a choice, but itself prefers
thirteen. The term trayodaSa-karaNa is found in SK 32 and explicated in SK
33-36. See also SK 40 (linga). The yuktidIpikA attributes a view of eleven
organs to vindhyavAsin, who was pre-SK. However, the two numbers, eleven and
thirteen, do not necessarily exclude one another. It is eleven if you count
the antaHkaraNa as one, and thirteen if it is counted as three-fold, as in
SK 33. It is known that other numbers (ten and twelve) were proposed by
other pre-SK thinkers.

Regards,
Vidyasankar


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