5. Parisaṅkhyāna: A Second Avenue

There is a second avenue through which we may approach the understanding of parisaṅkhyāna: it is the Mahābhārata. The term itself or the absolutive form parisaṅkhyāya is used several times in the Mokṣa-Dharma section of Mahābhārata’s Śānti-Parvan, and in all cases, it is related to sāṅkhya as a discipline that is explicitly paired with and distinguished from yoga. We will focus on two such cases. First, the relation of parisaṅkhyāna to sāṅkhya and its distinction from yoga is stated in verse 26 of chapter 306, in the dialogue between Vasiṣṭha and Karālajanaka that is nested in Yudhiṣṭhira’s questioning of Bhīṣma: “So far I have accurately described the vison of yoga. Now I will speak the knowledge of sāṅkhya, which provides vision through parisaṅkhyāna.”^[1] Nīlakaṇṭha glosses this parisaṅkhyāna vision as “direct experience by means of full exclusion, dissolving every product into its immediate cause, in the manner of the snake and the serpent.”^[2]

Vasiṣṭha proceeds to delineate a sāṅkhya system in which the twenty-four categories of creation, including the non-manifest prakṛti, emanate from and dissolve back into the inner Self.^[3] The Self is called the twenty-fifth principle, from which the other principles emanate but which, really, does not contain them at all (nistattva). Verse 42 says that the Sāṅkhyas “perform a vision that is consequent on parisaṅkhyā” and is a sāṅkhya vision. Nīlakaṇṭha’s glosses this as “the direct experience that is consequent on the dissolving of phenomenal manifestation in the conscious Self through pursuing the gross-to-subtle causal sequence.”^[4] Elsewhere he gives a similar gloss to the absolutive parisaṅkhyāya: “Defeating every preceding error with subsequent knowledge.”^[5] It seems fairly obvious that the idea involves making a full count of the categories of experience until one arrives at the Self, from which it all comes and to which it all resolves, not unlike the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya.

Second, in chapter 315 we read about another account of sāṅkhya, in which Yājñavalkya instructs Janaka in a teaching that is very much amenable to Śaṅkara’s doctrine of mutual superimposition of the Self and the non-Self—here puruṣa and prakṛti—through ignorance. The important knowledge here concerns the fact that qualities or characteristics (guṇa) that belong to prakṛti cannot be ascribed to the sentient puruṣa, which is, for this reason, nirguṇa, and does not come in touch with prakṛti. Yājñavalkya concludes: “This is the vision of sāṅkhya, the best full enumeration for you. Having thus fully enumerated, Sāṅkhyas attain isolation.”^[6] Yājñavalkya proceeds in the next chapter with yoga that is the meditational, aṣṭāṅga-yoga, and the two are clearly presented as alternatives for liberation.

Parisaṅkhyāna in the Mahābhārata, then, is sāṅkhya, whose purpose is to enumerate everything under the sun so as to facilitate, to refer to James Fitzgerald’s apt characterization of the context in which parisaṅkhyāna is equated with sāṅkhya,

Disaffection from the world, a radical purging of egocentrism and desire from one’s taken for granted understanding of the world with oneself in it. This disaffection, called vairagya (a dissociation from life’s motivating stimuli at the visceral level of a person’s being), is effected by the systematic, enumerative contemplation of the entire system of the world. The word Sāṃkhya signifies comprehensive intuition,” or “all-gnosis,” and its cognates signify “enumerate, know the whole of some complex entity by itemizing and totaling every component of it.^[7]

We should add: know it all so as to reduce it to what is further irreducible and know it as different from yourself.

Back to the third prose chapter of UŚ, we cannot fail to notice that Śaṅkara is doing somewhat of that parisaṅkhyāna that the Mahābhārata and Nīlakaṇṭha are describing. The knower of Brahman who is troubled by things pertaining to the body, mind and words should cognitively reduce whatever is troubling him to the basic sense objects—sound and the rest—with the understanding that he as their knower is unrelated to them. Śaṅkara’s parisaṅkhyāna, then, being a meditation, is a device that employs the pertinent categories of sāṅkhya to map all possible identification points for the Self in such a way that they are reducible to the basic sense objects, from which he is different because they are not attributable to the Self. It is a meditation not on the Self, but on its difference from whatever is not the Self, such that when full dissociation is achieved, one cannot but be the Self and have that direct experience that makes all experience possible, but is essentially non-transitive. Parisaṅkhyāna, this, is a structured reflection on neti neti, in which the full scope of identification points is mapped in a cause-effect chain.

Both entry points, thus, lead to the same conclusion: parisaṅkhyāna is sāṅkhya, in which the point is not to focus on the Self, but to eliminate everything that the Self is not. The two are, evidently, related through etymology, and the core meaning is “making the full count.” Kumārila’s account, however, is more informative, as he makes clear that the purpose behind the full enumeration is not to affirm what is stated, but to communicate what is not stated yet is intended.

Be that as it may, we can now say the obvious: whereas prasaṅkhyāna meditation was yoga, parisaṅkhyāna reflection was sāṅkhya.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

yoga-darśanam etāvad uktaṃ te tattvato mayā |
sāṅkhya-jñānaṃ pravakṣyāmi parisaṅkhyāna-darśanam ||—MBh 12.306.26, V.622 [12.294.26].—
All references are to the “vulgate” text as commented by Nīlakaṇṭha in his Bhārata-Bhāva-Dīpa, with cross-references to the critical edition in the square brackets.

[2]:

parisaṅkhyānaṃ parivarjanaṃ rajjūraga-vat. uttarottarasya kāryasya pūrvasmin pūrvasmin pravilāpanaṃ tena darśanaṃ sākṣāt-kāro yasmiṃs tathā. V.622.

[3]:

Cf., especially, verses 31-32:—
yasmād yad abhijāyeta tat tatraiva pralīyate |
līyante pratilomāni sṛjyante cāntarātmanā ||
anulomena jāyante līyante pratilomataḥ |
guṇā guṇeṣu satataṃ sāgarasyormayo yathā.

[4]:

parisaṅkhyā sthūla-sūkṣma-krameṇa cid-ātmani prapañca-pravilāpanaṃ tāṃ anudarśanaṃ sākṣātkāraṃ sampādayantīty arthaḥ. V.623.

[5]:

tatra uttarottara-jñānena pūrva-pūrva-bhramān parisakhyāya bādhitvā. On 12.301.5, V.602 [12.294.5]: jñānena parisaṅkhyāya sadoṣān viṣayān nṛpaḥ.

[6]:

sāṅkhya-darśanaṃ etat te parisaṅkhyānam uttamam |
evaṃ hi parisaṅkhyāya sāṅkhyāḥ kevalatāṃ gatāḥ ||—12.315.19, V.640 [12.303.19].

[7]:

Fitzgerald 2012:49.