I would suggest looking at the Manu-Bṛhaspati saṃvāda of the Mokṣadharmaparvan (MBh 12.194-199) if you would like to see one of the early “epic” attempts to articulate and use a doctrine of “evolution” in the service of attaining the summum bonum. The text brings into the foreground the matter of your question regarding the progression in the vikṛti-s of the mūlaprakṛti from subtle to gross. The text poses many terminological difficulties, and (to quote a recent paper I wrote on this piece) “Though hardly perfectly smooth reading, the Manu-Bṛhaspati is not as structurally problematic as some of the other texts of its Mokṣadharmaparvan cohort. Frauwallner overstated matters when he wrote of the Manu-Bṛhaspati:

‘Regrettably the text has been highly deformed. It displays no obvious

structure, nor any effective elaboration of its ideas. Thus it was particularly

vulnerable to insertions and deformations. Nonetheless the main ideas can be

ascertained with certainty (Frauwallner, Geschichte, 1953, vol. 1, p. 103).’

"As we will see below, the text does display a clear structure overall, though it is one that does fade about two-thirds of the way through, until it is re-instated in several framing stanzas at the end. The Manu-Bṛhaspati is a basically unified text, but one which I suspect had an interesting compositional history . . .” (Fitzgerald, “The Buddhi in Early Epic Adhyātma Discourse (the Dialog of Manu and Bṛhaspati), JIP (2017) 45:767–816.

The ManuB text is not “Sāṃkhya,” but it is one contributing to what I call the “Sāṃkhya” revolution against yoga that seems to have taken place sometime around 100-200 CE and which is implied by 12.289-90 of the Mokṣadharma (regarding which see my “The Sāṃkhya-Yoga ‘Manifesto’ at MBh 12.289-290,” in Battle, Bards, and Brāhmins, John Brockington, ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2012): 259-300; for light remarks on “the Sāṃkhya revolution” see too the end of my introduction to my selection “A Prescription for yoga and Power in the Mahābhārata,” in Yoga in Practice, David White, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011): 43-57).

Possibly directly relevant to the concern you raise, Matthew, are the concluding remarks of my JIP discussion of the Manu-Bṛhaspati text (pp. 813-14): [Begin Quotation]

Intimations of the Mythic Past and the Philosophical Future

If these last remarks have been trying to suggest that the buddhi has a more complicated career in the mokṣadharmas than might appear on the surface, I turn now to an idea pertinent to the buddhi that comes from a mythic past much earlier than the Manu-Bṛhaspati and which will form part of its even more complicated philosophical future after not very long. Let us briefly revisit the passage at 195.23, where Manu described the fateful mis-taking [sic] of the psychological self for the true Self. Manu’s language in that passage deliberately brings the buddhi into alignment with the old stories of God’s (Prajāpati’s) recognizing himself as the ‘Great Self’ that is the totality of his new world-creation (mahat ātman; van Buitenen’s paper “The Large Ātman;” (1964)¹³³ explicated these connections). This self-recognition by a being who stands on the limen between the phenomenal world and the unmanifested transcendent principle of all things is the reason that many other adhyātma listings of fundamental principles (tattvas) identify the principle buddhi as the mahat ātman. In a number of adhyātma texts besides the Manu-Bṛhaspati, and in later Sāṃkhya philosophy, the mahat ātman is spoken of as both an abstract, comprehensive reality that is impersonal, a neuter noun, “mahat” (“The Whole,” “The Universal,” “The Large,” or “Extensive and Comprehensive [Reality]”) and as a male personal being, “mahān ātmā” [in the nominative singular] (“The Whole,” or “The Universal,” or “The Large,” or “The Extensive and Comprehensive [Being, Self, or Person]”). At 195.23, when the buddhi’s mistake that culminates the process of the embodied soul’s calling into being a new embodiment is described, it is spoken of in terms of a perceptual error in which a “large,” mahat, form was substituted for something that is not really large, but small (sūkṣma).

calaṃ yathā dṛṣṭipathaṃ paraiti sūkṣmaṃ mahad rūpam ivābhipāti /

svarūpam ālocayate ca rūpaṃ paraṃ tathā buddhipathaṃ paraiti // 12.195.23 //

As when a moving object is passing out of the range of vision and yet one preserves that now tiny object as if it were still large, so too does the highest reality go beyond the purview of the intellect (buddhipatha) and one intuits his phenomenal form to be his essential form.

The visual object moving out of sight, and now sūkṣma, is retained in the buddhi as a “large rūpa,” and similarly the sūkṣma svarūpa, the true Self, is intuited as a mahat rūpa. This opposition of the true sūkṣma soul and the mahat rūpa of the newly (re-)constituted phenomenal self is described here in language directly parallel to God’s recognizing his newly fashioned “Whole” or “Great” world as himself. I suspect we have here an echo of other texts and accounts that stood in the back of the mind of the author of the Manu-Bṛhaspati. Or perhaps it is a deliberately subtle inter-textual allusion to other adhyātma accounts. Either way, the buddhi’s error in Manu’s teaching is directly linked to the verbal and doctrinal parallelism of the buddhi and the mahat or the “mahān ātmā” of other philosophical texts. It also aligns it with being the source (in later adhyātma texts and in Sāṃkhya) of the new principle (tattva) yet to come, the ahaṃkāra, “ego.”¹³⁴ The truly remarkable “depth” of the buddhi was going to grow much greater before long.

Foot note 133: One of van Buitenen’s truly inspired insights was his tracing the broad  background of later adhyātma ontologies back to Upaniṣadic narratives in which the creation of the world is accomplished by a transcendent being’s willing itself to become many and then recognizing the resultant creation to be himself. “This self-recognition, this self-consciousness could be singled out as the first phase of a creation process… completing itself through a number of phases each of which could be identified as a station and later as a principle or a rubric” (van Buitenen 1964, p. 108). Van Buitenen made an apt suggestion here that the word buddhi’s basic sense of “awareness” suits it particularly well to this critical node of cosmic and individual being (ibid., p. 114).

Footnote 134: It is important to note, however, that Manu’s notion of the buddhi does not contain within its being any seeds of the physical world, though the later developed theories of the mahat and the ahaṃkāra do. [End Quotation]