The Great Awakening of Life: an Existential Phenomenological Interpretation of the Mahat-Buddhi in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā

Abstract

The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s “mahat-buddhi” appears to be riddled with obscurity. Standard realist interpreters struggle to explain its cumbersome, textually unsupported bivalence, namely, how the mahat-buddhi can represent both a cosmological entity and a psychological capacity. Idealist readings, meanwhile, neglect the historically deep ontological meaning of this tattva by reducing it to a power of the transcendental ego. This paper moves beyond the impasse of the realism-idealism framework for interpreting the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and examines the mahat-buddhi through the existential phenomenology of José Ortega y Gasset. It begins by re-framing classical Sāṃkhya metaphysics as an existential phenomenology of life, whereby life—as lived reality, not an external physical world or a field of mental experience—conveys the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti. From this, the paper then argues that the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take other-beings-as.

The Puzzle of the Mahat-Buddhi in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā: a Brief Philosophical and Intellectual Historical Introduction

The Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s formulation of “mahat,” “buddhi,” and their interrelation represents not just an intellectual offshoot of adhyātma discourse, James Fitzgerald tells us, but in some respects its culmination (2015). Stemming from old Upaniṣadic concerns with selfhood, phenomenal experience, and liberation, adhyātma writings are “deliberately formulated, clearly ‘philosophical’ discussions of persons (ātman-s, ‘embodied-souls’)—their make-up, general situation in the world, and what is good, or best (śreyas), for them, in ultimate terms” (Fitzgerald 2017a: 670).¹ Included in this genre are texts of the Mahābhārata, purāṇa-s, and the classical Yoga and Sāṃkhya darśana-s. The buddhi (together with mahat) is a category of critical importance in this discourse. But in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā (henceforth: SK), it attained a “scope and clarity… [that] reached a high-water mark of epistemological, ethical, and even ontological importance” (Fitzgerald 2015: 101–102). Nevertheless, the Sāṃkhya system is riddled with puzzles that seemingly defy explanation, and the mahat-buddhi rests at the heart of one of them.² Standard interpretations of the SK (including those of Gerald Larson, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and J. A. B. van Buitenen) hold that the mahat-buddhi serves as both a principle of world-creation and an instrument of cognition. This first tattva of vyaktaprakṛti operates on two levels that just happen to match up: it simultaneously represents (a) a cosmological entity that exists independent of anyone’s experience, and (b) a mental power that comprises part of a human being’s subjectivity. But even the leading voices of this widely held “realist” view—namely, the view that a real world persists separate from and prior to conscious subjects—recognize the oddity of this “cosmological-cum-psychological model.”³ For example, Larson (perhaps the most influential of realist interpreters) writes that “the [Sāṃkhya] Karika leaves many questions and issues unanswered… It is not clear whether Īśvarakṛṣṇa understands buddhi cosmologically or psychologically or both” (1969: 47–8).⁴

Common realist translations of “buddhi” as “intellect” and “will” further obscure the issue. Playing the role of intellect, the buddhi seems to passively mirror extra-mental entities to varying degrees of accuracy.⁵ But this presupposes that a world of ready-made, extra-mental objects pre-exist the buddhi, though the split between empirical ego and its world only occurs with the ahaṃkāra, which derives from mahat-buddhi. Moreover, the buddhi is not some kind of tabula rasa devoid of its own structures of knowledge, volition, and emotional response. It actively contributes to the manifestation of life through its housing karmic residues, bhāva-s, and vṛtti-s that regulate the determinations, discriminations, and modifications of the buddhi. Interpreters often accommodate these functions by translating “buddhi” as “will.” However, the role of the buddhi as a passive intellect stands in direct tension with its position as an active will.

Mikel Burley critiques the standard, i.e., realist, approach and posits an alternative reading (2007). First, he contends that positing an isomorphic correspondence between cosmological and psychological orders is cumbersome and textually unwarranted: the SK does not concern itself with a world that exists out there, as it were, and evolves diachronically independent of the knower. He then situates Sāṃkhya in the context of Kantian and Husserlian idealisms, claiming that the SK examines just the nature of mental experience, wherein the tattvas manifest simultaneously as necessary conditions for the appearance of phenomena (2007: 6–7). Finally, he provides an Husserlian translation for “buddhi”: “intentional consciousness” (2007: 182). This discloses key features of the buddhi not captured by realist models, including its recognition of the intentional (i.e., volitional) activity of ego-consciousness (though Burley does not link this to the karma doctrine), the buddhi’s other-directedness, and the deep interconnectedness of consciousness and its objectual content. However, this interpretation misconstrues the buddhi (and Sāṃkhya metaphysics generally) in some key respects. Foremost among these is that vyaktaprakṛti is irreducible to noetic activity and noematic content, while “buddhi” entails much more than just a principle of awareness or discernment.⁶ But Burley makes another interpretive error—a mistake of which his realist interlocutors are also guilty: he neglects the place of mahat in the Sāṃkhya system, and certainly overlooks (or just misconstrues) the significance of its merging with the buddhi.

“Buddhi” has a deep and rich history, and it consistently was associated with mental processes. But Indian philosophers also examined the buddhi in terms of ontological themes concerning the greater universe (Fitzgerald 2017b: 768–9). This line of inquiry advanced significantly through fusing the buddhi with other related categories, most notably, mahat. One reason for this was onto-theological: “mahat” could well-articulate the ontological meaning of a world-generating “firstborn” or “original creator who… embodied himself in creation,” and the buddhi (not the ahaṃkāra, sattva, or any other “firstborn” candidates) became connected to the deity’s primal creativity (van Buitenen 1964: 104).⁷ A united mahat-buddhi thus came to engender the self-manifestation of god in the form of a “great” (mahat), all-encompassing, primordial “awakening” (buddhi), which perpetuated the genealogy of a divine “knowledge-ātman” (“whose knowledge is creative of this [manifest] universe”) and the universe itself (“which is manifestly available”) (van Buitenen 1964: 112). Importantly, this lineage determined that the mahat should be “subordinated to a higher overarching conception of a primordial unmanifest”—that is, a purely unmanifest, uncreated “I”—and reassigned to the hierarchically ordered series of produced “evolutes” (van Buitenen 1964: 112, 107).⁸ From here, mahat continued its role as creator, retaining its primacy over other manifest, created principles of being. But it would henceforth assume a relationship of correlation, not subservience, with the buddhi, which had previously ranked beneath mahat.

For our purposes here, it bears noting that the SK represents an important part of this development. In keeping with adhyātma texts generally, the SK presents the mahat-buddhi as (1) a living, concrete body; (2) “the large one,” which is both the first tattva created (vikṛti) and the first tattva endowed with creative capacities (prakṛti); and (3) other than the authentic, unmanifest, “higher than the great” self (puruṣa), who is an utterly detached witness consciousness (i.e., not a governor of the field of experience). But the SK equally represents an intervention in the growing body of adhyātma literature, which was typically concerned with developing brahmanic intellectualism. I briefly highlight three distinguishing features of the SK’s inquiry into the self (puruṣa). (1) Sāṃkhya is non-theistic: the organism that grows from the mahat-buddhi is not the extension of a super-person, divine body, or an “I” (since the ahaṃkāra has been subordinated to the mahat-buddhi), but an impersonal power that is compelled by karmic actions. (2) Sāṃkhya is a pluralism of life, not a cosmology: the SK asserts not a single cosmic mahat-buddhi that is the material source of inert things, but a vision of how living organisms are born and in turn procreate other be-ings or lived realities.⁹ (3) Sāṃkhya is boldly dualistic, with the mahat-buddhi showing itself to be neither purely material nor mere consciousness: contrary to Vedāntic monism, Sāṃkhya derives the mahat-buddhi from two avyakta-s—mūlaprakṛti and puruṣa—that are situated in a relation of dialectical compresence (samyoga) with each other.

This brief intellectual historical interlude corroborates what the above philosophical analysis of the SK reveals: realist and idealist models distort the nature of the mahat-buddhi (and Sāṃkhya overall). In order to move beyond this impasse, this essay proceeds with an existential phenomenological inquiry into the meaning of the SK’s mahat-buddhi. It frames this with a summary of an existential phenomenological interpretation of Sāṃkhya metaphysics generally—wherein vyaktaprakṛti means “life” or “lived reality,” and life represents the self-manifestation of the samyoga of mūlaprakṛti and puruṣa, not either of these two unmanifest principles in themselves. The essay then argues that the mahat-buddhi be understood as “the great awakening of life,” which is characterized by at least these 5 key features: (1) purposive procreativity; (2) a power of illuminating discernment; (3) a principle of disclosure; (4) an existentially unitary, concentrated vitality; and (5) a capacity to take-other-beings-as.

Vyaktaprakṛti as Life, Life as the Self-Manifestation of Samyoga

José Ortega y Gasset’s existential phenomenology can be deployed as an interpretive paradigm that reframes Sāṃkhya metaphysics in some crucial ways. At a basic level, it offers a corrective to realist and idealist formulations of Sāṃkhya metaphysics that respectively take vyaktaprakṛti to represent the self-manifestation of mūlaprakṛti (“fundamental matter”) or reduce it to a set of mental categories enacted by the puruṣa qua transcendental ego.¹⁰ But just as neither co-fundamental duad (mūlaprakṛti or puruṣa) can stand as the ground of manifest reality (vyaktaprakṛti), so too is the SK not so concerned with the cosmological origins of a material world-in-itself or the abstract structure of mental experience. Rather, Sāṃkhya concerns itself radically with lived reality and its vital foundation. It grounds vyaktaprakṛti on a dialogical compresence between two unmanifest principles (mūlaprakṛti and puruṣa), and looks to establish a standpoint primordial to the world, the ego, and the interrelation between the two, from which to explore the meaning of vyaktaprakṛti as life.¹¹

Ortega viewed his existential phenomenology as encapsulated in his early dictum, “I am I and my circumstance” (1914: 45). He saw himself presenting a middle ground between, at one end, the epistemology of the natural sciences (in particular, biology, which reduces “life” to an external phenomenon that proceeds according to fixed patterns beyond our experience and control), and at the other end, the subjective idealist views of Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology (which subordinate life to the mental activities of the individual subject). In lieu of either extreme, he developed a phenomenology that envisions the ultimate “I” as life or lived reality—as expressed by the first “I” in the dictum, “I am I and my circumstance.” I qua life consist in an alternation between the two poles of the empirical ego (the second “I”) and the ego’s circumstance. The ego is defined largely by its intentionality, and circumstance is understood as “world.” But this is not a merely external world. It is rather a kind of Heideggerian world of social others with whom the ego finds itself in reciprocal interrelation, but in relation to whom the ego and its alter-ego retain their mutual transcendence. Life (or “lived reality”) thereby becomes defined by one’s feeling pulled in two directions: falling inward into the solitude of the ego and reaching out into the horizons of the other.

On the surface, Sāṃkhya metaphysics bears a similar dualist framework to that of Ortega, particularly when their fundamental relata are considered in relation to each other. Both Ortega and Sāṃkhya acknowledge multiple conscious subjects (Ortega’s second “I” and Sāṃkhya’s puruṣa) who abide in compresence with an other (circumstance, mūlaprakṛti) that transcends and in some sense stands opposed to the subject. Ortega’s empirical ego exists in relation with and yet juxtaposed against alter-egos (other I’s), and it typically encounters circumstance (which is populated by alter-egos) as limiting its freedom. According to Sāṃkhya, meanwhile, puruṣa is characterized by its simultaneous compresence with (samyoga) and ontological distinction from mūlaprakṛti, whose overflowing power is often represented as pulling the self into suffering (duḥkha).¹² Consequently, the self as identified with Ortega’s second “I” or Sāṃkhya’s puruṣa tends toward retreat from the other and self-enclosure as its essential condition (“I am only I, and not my circumstance,” as it were).¹³

Of course, important differences lie beneath these similarities. Certainly, the puruṣa is not an experiencing ego, and mūlaprakṛti is not equivalent to a “circumstance” or “world.” Nevertheless, these correlated terms display enough association that imputing Ortega’s “empirical I-circumstance” framework upon Sāṃkhya metaphysics merits further exploration. Accordingly, let us shift the focus away from the equivalencies and incongruities between individual terms and toward the relation between the respective pairs of duads. I am most interested to deploy Ortega’s dictum in order to illustrate the closely interrelated meanings of vyaktaprakṛti and samyoga: “I [vyaktaprakṛti] am [the samyoga of] I [puruṣa] and my circumstance [mūlaprakṛti].”¹⁴ Translations such as “contact” and “conjunction” (often deployed by Larson and Burley, respectively) capture the “with”-ness (“sam”) and “union” (“yoga”) of samyoga. However, they cancel the system’s dualism: recall that mūlaprakṛti and puruṣa never actually link together. Translating “samyoga” as “compresence” articulates not only their togetherness but also their insoluble separation. Going further, rendering samyoga as “dialectical compresence” highlights the series of reversals that unfurl throughout samyoga’s self-manifestation across the manifest tattvas. Transcending time, space, and teloi, neither puruṣa nor mūlaprakṛti can be directly presented. Rather, what gets made manifest (“vyakta”) is a vital, life-giving power or procreativity (“prakṛti”) generated from a dialectical exchange involving the reluctant presence of puruṣa and the overflowing creative urge of mūlaprakṛti.

In the context of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, “logos” implies “discourse,” “a making manifest,” “unconcealment” (aletheia), or “letting something be seen” in its togetherness with something else. The SK may anticipate something like this in its formulation of vyaktaprakṛti as uncovering itself out of hiddenness by way of the logos or primordial synthesis structure of samyoga. Instead of turning to Heidegger’s phenomenology, though, I interpret the meaning of “samyoga” and Sāṃkhya dualism through the dialectical compresence underlying Ortega’s existential phenomenology. Through this, “vyaktaprakṛti” gets understood as “life” or “lived reality” (the first “I” in his dictum), and “logos” implies a “dia-logos” between self and other. Not unlike the SK, Ortega highlights the questions of being (namely, “what does it mean to exist?”) and procreativity (“what does it mean to live reality, and hence generate life?”) while paving a middle path between the subject-object duality of realism and the subjectivism of idealism. Life and vyaktaprakṛti contain a bi-directional movement of extroversion (openness to the other, or pravṛtti) and introversion (withdrawal into the inwardness of the I, or nivṛtti). Emerging in the betweenness of puruṣa and mulaprakti and their two-way pull, vyaktaprakṛti exhibits this interplay as a vital clash that engenders lived reality.

Mahat-Buddhi as “The Great Awakening of Life”

Please note that in forthcoming works (including a monograph on the philosophy of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā), I take up the ideas explored here.

An existential phenomenological interpretation of the SK has significant implications for a reformulation of the mahat-buddhi. In Sāṃkhya metaphysics, there exists a multitude of buddhi-s, with each buddhi pertaining to an individual vyaktaprakṛti, and each vyaktaprakṛti corresponding to a numerically distinct puruṣa in dialectical compresence (samyoga) with mūlaprakṛti. If vyaktaprakṛti represents a particular lived reality, then mahat-buddhi—as the first self-manifestation of samyoga—represents the concentrated vitality of that life. Construed etymologically with a view to capturing the philosophical meaning of this vital power, I take “mahat-buddhi” to mean “the great awakening of life.”¹⁶ This rendering accommodates the epistemological and ontological meanings often associated with the SK’s mahat-buddhi without suggesting a world-in-itself (à la realist studies of Sāṃkhya) or consciousness as the ground of manifest reality (per idealist renditions of the system). This gets articulated through consideration of five key features of mahat-buddhi.

Kinship to Mūlaprakṛti: Mahat-Buddhi as Purposive Procreativity

As noted earlier, Sāṃkhya scholars (Burley, in particular) tend to disregard the meaning of the buddhi’s fusion with mahat. But this is misguided. With a view to the rich history of their interrelation, note that “mahat” appears four times in the SK (at kārikās 3, 8, 22, and 56), while “buddhi” has five occurrences (at SK 23, 35–37, and 49). The passages including “mahat” highlight the ontological and life-begetting meaning of mahat-buddhi—usually through a comparison with mūlaprakṛti. Though “root-procreativity” and mahat-buddhi are not co-original—only mūlaprakṛti and puruṣa transcend space and time, while mahat-buddhi derives from their samyoga and is spatio-temporal—the two nevertheless have priority over the manifest tattvas. Moreover, as “the great one,” mahat-buddhi participates most fully in the procreative nature (prakṛti-sarūpam [SK 8]) of mūlaprakṛti—a feature that does not get emphasized in those passages that use “buddhi,” and which the SK specifies as that which extends the manifest order in space and time. SK 22 explains: “Of [the nature of] procreativity (prakṛteḥ) there is the great one (mahāṃs), from that [mahat-buddhi] there is the ahaṃkāra, from that there is the body of sixteen, while from five of those sixteen [i.e., from the five subtle elements] there are the five gross elements” (own translation).

But we should not understand mahat simply in terms of a deficiency when juxtaposed with mūlaprakṛti. As a raw, unprocessed urge to produce, mūlaprakṛti cannot actually create anything because its procreativity lacks direction and objectivity. Though more akin to Schopenhauer’s blind will to life than Kant’s things-in-themselves (which bear the mere potential to be passively revealed), mūlaprakṛti is not a “will” in the proper sense.¹⁷ It lacks the volitional drive or teleology that characterizes mahat-buddhi.¹⁸ This “great” manifestation of samyoga holds the design and capacity for producing actual vyaktaprakṛti-s (lived realities). Hearkening back to the cosmological speculations of the early Veda-s, Upaniṣad-s, and adhyātma texts (e.g., the “cosmic man” of the Puruṣa Sūkta or the mahān ātman of Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.17), it is the mahat-buddhi—not mūlaprakṛti, and certainly not the puruṣa of the SK—that gives body (liṅgam), creative power (via the bhāvas), and an architecture (via the tattvas) to manifest reality. Indeed, vyaktaprakṛti inherits its procreative powers from mūlaprakṛti, but it is the “great buddhi” that generates actual lived reality and infuses it with purposiveness.

Kinship to Puruṣa: Mahat-Buddhi and the Powers of Illumination and Discernment

A second respect in which the mahat-buddhi represents “the great awakening of life” concerns the buddhi’s role as a lamp (pradīpa). This metaphor points to two operations that are commonly thematized in Indian epistemology: illumination (prakāśa) and discernment (adhyavasāya). “Prakāśa” appears five times in the SK: kārikā-s 13 and 36 (the only two passages that use “pradīpa”), as well as 12, 32, and 59. Taken together, these kārikā-s locate the power of illumination in prakṛti at large (SK 59), the instrument (SK 32), and more specifically, the buddhi owing to its uniquely high concentration of the sattva guṇa (SK 12, 13, 36). This marks an important corrective in Sāṃkhya scholarship, wherein prakāśa is often misattributed to puruṣa. This error is not without some justification. For one, Indian philosophy frequently associates the liberated self with pure translucent light (prakāśa); from the Upaniṣad-s to the classical darśana-s, luminosity and witnessing regularly appear as powers of the self. Classical Sāṃkhya commentators such as Vācaspati Miśra and Vijñānabhikṣu help to perpetuate this misunderstanding. They tell us that the buddhi makes the subtle body (liṅgam) appear “as if conscious” (cetanāvad iva, SK 20) by reflecting the light (prakāśa) of puruṣa. However, the SK positively denies that puruṣa bears any aptitudes, per se (since puruṣa is paṅgu, or “lame”). Puruṣa is an utterly passive witness-consciousness, and its witnesshood (sākṣitvam) is associated with inactivity (akārtṛbhāvaḥ), not a capacity for assertion—not even shining (prakāśa) (SK 19). Furthermore, Īśvarakṛṣṇa himself, in contrast with later commentators, never mentions together “prakāśa” and “puruṣa,” and even implies that the illuminatory potencies of the buddhi stem from its relation with mūlaprakṛti. Consider that sattva is that which enables the buddhi to shine a light (like a lamp). But the sattva guṇa, along with rajas and tamas, derives from mūlaprakṛti, not puruṣa. This represents an important deviation from the more Vedāntic leaning texts of adhyātma (and a distinction from classical schools such as Nyāya), wherein the buddhi participates in the reality of the self. According to Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s less orthodox view, the buddhi cannot represent an attribute or stage in the evolution of the self (puruṣa).

This simultaneously likens the buddhi to puruṣa (the buddhi is quasi-conscious) and differentiates the two (puruṣa is devoid of the guṇas and is passively aware; the buddhi is predominantly sattvic and actively shines). The apposition of the buddhi with the power of judgment (adhyavasāya) at SK 23 helps to sharpen this distinction. Puruṣa cannot anticipate, disclose, or discern objects; as sheer, unstructured awareness, it does not exhibit intentionality. The buddhi, though, is characterized by adhyavasāya, the guṇa-nature of which underlies the buddhi’s bhāva-configuration, namely, its respective sattvic and tamasic forms. The buddhi bears certain proto-compositions (the bhāvas) in terms of which it is other-directed and attentive-to. As a lamp, then, the mahat-buddhi represents not just illumination, it signifies illumination of something.

The Ontogenesis of Samyoga: Mahat-Buddhi as Principle of Disclosure

If this analysis of the mahat-buddhi were to stop here, then the reader might be tempted toward the realist conclusion: mahat is a macro-cosmic creativity that produces an extra-mental world, and buddhi is the psyche (of the micro-cosmic experience of the individual) that awakens to and makes sense of the world by illuminating it. But as noted above, the SK does not offer a cosmological explanation of how a singular world-in-itself unfolds, nor is the buddhi an originally pure, blank slate that gets conditioned through experience of that world. In order to move beyond this view, I recommend that by “illumination” we mean “disclosure” or “revelation,” and that we understand “disclosure” or “revelation” in terms of neither materialism (since the SK does not recognize an already-given world of physical phenomena) nor theism (since what gets revealed in the SK is not a divine will). Rather, the disclosure (or revelation) enacted by the mahat-buddhi amounts to procreation itself. Vyakta-prakṛti is nothing other than “procreation made manifest,” i.e., revealing the production of offspring. That which the mahat-buddhi manifests is the self-transformation of a life-begetting, dialectical compresence (samyoga) involving two parents, as it were: puruṣa and mūlaprakṛti.

To draw a parallel with chemistry, just as neither hydrogen nor oxygen exhibits agency in the reaction of water or H₂O—since H₂O results from the reaction itself, not from some design or intentionality for water already inherent within hydrogen or oxygen—so too does vyaktaprakṛti manifest as the samyoga of the two gendered, life-begetting partners, puruṣa and mūlaprakṛti. Neither puruṣa nor mūlaprakṛti displays agency. Rather, what transpires is just a procession or turning forward of a depersonalized samyoga devoid of any agent. “Pradīpa” articulates the illuminatory mode of the mahat-buddhi: what the mahat-buddhi reveals is neither some world-design (a logos of the cosmos-itself) that exists already there (well-formed and all) nor a field of phenomena that magically appear to be real to a subject (but in fact are not real). Rather, this “lamp” enacts an ontological disclosure of copulation. It reveals the transubstantiation of the samyoga of puruṣa and mūlaprakṛti at the very moment that it delivers a given life into being. As the first self-manifestation of this samyoga, mahat-buddhi represents a concentrated vitality or procreative power not unlike what gets symbolized by the golden womb of the Hiraṇyagarbha Sūkta (Ṛg Veda 10.121). However, the mahat-buddhi of the SK derives from the dialectical compresence of two unmanifest (avyakta) principles, not a single creator god. Moreover, the SK deciphers the archetypal form of this life force not as existing external to or independent of consciousness, but as necessarily including it. Indeed depersonalized, the mahat-buddhi (as inchoate living organism) is not devoid of consciousness and certainly not bereft of vital power (contrary to merely physical objects). This concentrated vitality is rather that which discloses (or awakens) manifest reality as invariably lived. Life comes into being (bhavati, per SK 20) is born, or is conceived, (qua procreation as homolog to conscious awakening) at the very moment that it gets revealed, and vice versa.

The Ontological Question of Being: Mahat-Buddhi as Unitary Phenomenon

But the SK’s understanding of the mahat-buddhi as the concentrated vitality of life (i.e., vyaktaprakṛti) is better captured through the lens of existential phenomenology, which deliberately goes beyond the ontogenetic model. As an intermediary toward this, again consider the language of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Though the mahat-buddhi is a kind of ur-phenomenon of the human being, we must keep in view the ontological undertones of Sāṃkhya metaphysics. Human be-ing implies an underlying archetypal form that exhibits life’s real self-manifestation as a unitary phenomenon. Recall that Ortega examines humans neither as biological organisms whose objective behaviors are categorizable into regular patterns (he is not engaged in a scientific study of the object as existing in-itself separate from the knower), nor as disembodied minds whose deliberations occur in isolation of their circumstance (or world). Rather, human beings—not just human organisms—display the unified ontological structure of life as “I am I and my circumstance.” Humans are self-reflective beings who reflect upon the question “what does it mean to be?”¹⁹ Of those modes of being through which life exhibits itself, “being-in-the-world” is primary: “to be” is “to be in the world” (or “in a circumstance”).

Ortega’s model, of course, highlights (more so than Heidegger’s) that our mode of being in the world is vital and dialogical. Seen in this context, mahat-buddhi represents the first mode of the dialectical compresence (samyoga) of puruṣa and mūlaprakṛti. This is not to say that the SK asserts the metaphysical claim that puruṣa is wrapped up with mūlaprakṛti. Rather, what the SK describes is how our lived reality (as fundamentally dialogical) gets revealed, and it posits the mahat-buddhi as that which performs life—as if on a stage whereupon a drama plays out (per SK 42, 59–61, 65–66). And according to this life-drama, the mahat-buddhi discloses our being in the world as containing not the sum of a self-reflective subject and its circumstance, but the primary, dialogical integrity between the two—since neither a subject nor an object has yet manifested. This “vast,” “extensive,” “great” (mahat) mode of being shows no division between the “I” and its world, as they are held in an organic totality. Subjective and objective worlds are hermeneutically interrelated; one relata does not get reduced to the other (the knower does not get reduced to the known, as per realist models, nor does the known get reduced to the knower, as per idealist models). As such, the mahat-buddhi represents the aboriginal principle of disclosing life as an undifferentiated, unitary phenomenon, holding in abeyance the architectural design of life as a dialectical unfolding of “I and my circumstance.”

Manifesting Life with Others: Mahat-Buddhi and the Taking-as Capacity

Continuing to draw upon the close parallels between Heideggerian and Ortegan phenomenologies helps to spotlight a fifth way in which the mahat-buddhi enacts “the great awakening of life”: namely, as a basic capacity to disclose the taking-as structure of lived reality. In a Heideggerian context, this taking-as ability is rooted in dasein and care. Dasein represents that most basic a priori structure of our existential constitution; it involves recognizing the primacy of our being-in-the-world over the empirical subject. “Care” denotes the being of dasein; it entails a way of being authentically engaged with the world. The taking-as structure manifests care, and it does so prior to the individuation of the “I” or the world’s having a sense of belonging to me. Ortega’s analysis of empathy (or “Einfühlung”) resembles Heideggerian care insofar as it discloses our primordial condition to be one of co-relation and concernful engagement with the other. Rather than encountering the other by happenstance or from points of separation, empathy manifests a primordial union with and fundamental openness toward the other. Empathic identification with the other, in short, reveals that life (including social life) is a unitary phenomenon (being in the world entails being with others) and that this proceeds by way of a power to take-other-beings-as.

Understood in terms of Heideggerian care or Ortegan empathy, the mahat-buddhi is not just a mode of being in the world, but a mode of procreativity (or awakening to life) that includes our being with others. It performs a pre-intellectual openness to being, which is necessary for not just making things intelligible to us, but making things at all (through the “making-be” activity of the bhāvas). As such, the mahat-buddhi represents a basic power to simulate given objects that have yet to come into view. This gives valuable clues to how mahat-buddhi uncovers the archetypal form of lived reality as a unitary phenomenon. SK 35–36 explains:

Since the buddhi, together with the other inner instruments, gets absorbed [avagāhate] in all objects, then the three-fold instrument (trividham karaṇam) is the door-keeper (dvāri) and the remaining ten [the indriyas] are the doors. These defining characteristics of the guṇas, which are distinct from each other, act like a lamp (pradīpakalpaḥ): having revealed the whole [world] for the sake of the puruṣa, they present it in [the space of] the buddhi (italics of English terms for my emphasis).

The most basic operation of the buddhi is immersion in its object. This absorption involves neither the object’s getting superadded onto the buddhi nor the buddhi confusing itself with the object. Rather, such immersion is the primordial condition of the buddhi. It enacts an a priori, taking-as capacity that manifests life as “I am my circumstance” (that is, life as empty of empirical “I”), thereby grounding lived reality in the self-containment or non-duality of intentional consciousness and the world. Furthermore, such absorption in the object is consonant with the disclosure of the object in the arena of the buddhi—as indicated by the direct succession of kārikā 35’s reference to how the buddhi gets immersed in all objects with kārikā 36’s note that objects get illuminated “like a lamp (pradīpakalpaḥ)… in [the space of] the buddhi.” Absorption, in short, is ontological disclosure, and ontological disclosure is absorption. The buddhi assumes the shape or character of the object at the very moment that it emanates the object; there is no succession between these two moments. Importantly, such immersion (not unlike Heideggerian care and Ortegan empathy) is choiceless and necessary. “I” (qua ego) do not choose this object over that one, nor does care manifest incidentally. Rather, such concernful intentionality manifests at the ground of the empirical “I” and its vital connection to others. Empathy is the fundamental condition of life (vyaktaprakṛti), and life includes the ego and its circumstance. The procession of the liṅga-sarga (the creation order of the subtle body) corroborates this: insofar as the ahaṃkāra, which manifests the “I” and its world alongside each other, derives from the mahat-buddhi, care is fundamentally empty of self and other, since there is not yet any “I” who cares or any other (as distinct from an “I”) toward whom the care is directed. Thus, it is more the case that the empirical ego (in correlation with an other) is born of care than that the empirical ego cares—as if the ego were the agential ground of intentionality.

This by no means excludes the buddhi’s functioning elsewhere as something like an intellect that processes information or a will that enacts practical judgments. Moreover, this rendering acknowledges that, for Sāṃkhya, empirical consciousness is always consciousness of; empirical consciousness is never pure with respect to its being independent of context. But the experience of what it’s like to be the other does not belong to the empirical ego. Rather, it gets existentially situated in the mahat-buddhi as that fundamental taking-as capacity that pertains to vyaktaprakṛti as a mode of life’s own great awakening. This represents an important corrective to some deployments of the mirror metaphor for relating the nature of the buddhi.²⁰ Interpreting the meaning of the mirror metaphor through the lens of Ortega’s theory of Einfühlung offers a more accurate (with respect to the SK) and philosophically rich meaning. As a mirror, the mahat-buddhi does not re-present something that exists already there (à la external realism). Rather, it presents the object by enabling a kind of analogical transposition of the “I” upon the other. Surely, this construction happens not by intellectual means (e.g., buddhi as “intellect”), but by means of a primordial sympathetic resonance. The intentionality associated with the cognizing subject always emerges out of the deep co-relation between itself and its world. And just as the taking-as capacity of empathy performs the ego’s referral to the other as an indispensable condition for the constitution of one’s own being-in-the-world, so too does Sāṃkhya’s mahat-buddhi ground the co-existence and hermeneutic interplay of the empirical ego and its circumstance in the disclosure of samyoga. Such a taking-as capacity, which is attributable to neither puruṣa nor mūlaprakṛti, is essential to the mahat-buddhi’s staging the great awakening of life.