Indian psychology scholars have primarily focused on developing triguṇa-based personality models. However, triguṇa-based personality models are not epistemologically consistent with Sāṁkhya. This article offers a bhāva-based conception of personality that is epistemologically consistent with Sāṁkhya. It proposes svabhāva as a personality-like construct that refers to individual-specific arrangements of prākṛtika and vaikṛtika bhava. This article contributes to both Indian psychology and Sāṁkhya scholarship.

The word buddhi is an important term of Indian philosophical discourse, but some aspects of its use have caused confusion and continue to occasion difficulties. This paper undertakes a survey of the usage of the word buddhi in general Sanskrit literature from its earliest late Vedic occurrences up to the middle of the first millennium CE. Signifying fundamentally “awareness,” the word “buddhi” is shown to refer often to a being’s persisting capacity or faculty of awareness and also, often, to the (...) content of a being’s awareness. There are also instances where it is hard to determine which of these two kinds of reference are intended in our written sources, and there are other instances where both senses seem present simultaneously. Various examples attest to the use of the word to refer to an affective and volitional capacity in a being—and to affective and volitional content—as well as to a cognitive faculty and cognitive content. One feature that occurs frequently in the word’s use is that this faculty and, or, its content, regularly describe alterations of a subject’s knowledge of the surrounding situation, the transformation of surrounding complexity or multiplicity into a simpler and more manageable mental construct—an understanding, an interpretation, a decision, a plan, etc. As the word buddhi is related to the primary Sanskrit word-family used to describe the concrete experience of awakening—moving from no awareness to clear awareness—it is not surprising that its more abstract usage would often incorporate a similar dynamic, a transition from less clear to more clear knowledge, a rendering of early knowledge to better and more useful knowledge, in short, a faculty of “intellect” that produces refined decisions, resolutions, and determinations. It is suggested that this element of its semantic profile contributed to the word’s eventually becoming the preferred word for the most important of the mental functions of beings in one of the most widespread philosophical psychologies of ancient India, that which ultimately became formally enshrined in the philosophical system “Sāṃkhya.”. (shrink)

Classical Sāṃkhya has usually been interpreted as an intellectualist school. Its presumed method for the attainment of liberation is essentially characterized by rational inquiry into reality, which involves the intellectual understanding of the distinction between two principles: the conscious and the material. Some have argued that this liberating process is not only theoretical, but that it entails yogic practice, or that it is the natural outcome of existential forces that tend toward freedom. However, recent studies in Sāṃkhya involving detailed analysis (...) of an anonymous commentary of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā, suggest a more complex picture. The external functions of the five vital winds in relation to the sources of action and dispositions of being seem to play an important role in the liberating path. In this paper, I review the relation between bhāvas, karmayonis, and the five prāṇas by considering the social, moral, and interpersonal aspects of the five vital winds as described in the Yuktidīpikā. It will be shown how the external functions of prāṇa are related to the moral cultivation of vitality, leading to the enactment and manifestation of dispositions of being that bring about the realization of oneself as a knower in the ethical engagement with others. It is this unique way of understanding prāṇa in the Yuktidīpikā that makes the Sāṃkhya path for liberation something more than a theoretical cognitive method or a spontaneous and predetermined realization of one’s self. (shrink)