India, Cont.

As they interpreted the new teachings, a person needed no priests to tap directly into that mysterious inner force. He could accomplish the connection by himself through the not entirely simple expedients of either self-knowledge or self-conquest.

The self-knowledge or discriminating (Samkhya) philosophy was the most intellectual rendition of indigenous religious thought to be given formal expression during the years of theological development. Founded by the legendary sage, Kapila (for whom, as it happens, the city of the Buddha's birth, Kapilavastu, was named), Samkhya called that mysterious inner force or spirit the Purusha and identified it as the one eternal or sacred being. In opposition to this was matter, Prakriti, which was ephemeral and profane. Man's essential problem was that he tended to be ignorant of his true, sacred nature and identified instead with his material incorporation into the impermanent cosmos. The things of the ego and the flesh, falling into this latter category, were the troublesome things; and involvement with them sullied and obscured the Purusha and kept a man in ignorance. Neti! Neti! Not this! Not this! came the philosophical admonition whenever a man foolishly saw his existence in terms of his earth bound, mortal self. Earthly life, being the unsatisfactory and impure experience that it was, had to be relentlessly subjected to the discriminating intellect's scrutiny until all its profane preoccupations were safely culled and discarded.

Raja Yoga, the complementary method of Samkhya salvation, further disenfranchised the ego and the flesh while guiding the gaze inward until, at last, the true self was recognized and liberated from its confining darkness. Then, peace and joy in magnitudes indescribable, would be experienced.

But the Samkhya path to Nirvana was not a boulevard. By knowledge, then as now, the Samkhya meant knowledge of philosophy and logic rigorously applied. A thorough grasp of metaphysics was prerequisite. By discrimination, the Samkhya meant uncompromising search and destroy forays into the terrain of even egoistic whim. And the yogic discipline was not the fifteen minutes twice a day stuff of householders. It was retreat to an ashram and effort expended during every conscious moment. These demands would have been sufficient to narrow the path to single file; but what constricted it and steepened it even more, making it even less usable to the ordinary spiritual soldier, was the Samkhya's atheistic approach to the sacred. There were no gods, no statues, no stirring myths, no hymn-sings for the devoted, no Saviors whose recounted deeds excited the popular mind. There were, in fact, no heroes of any kind to tighten, with evangelical zeal, the spiritually slack.

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