Sāṃkhya philosophy and Yoga practice: how are they related? (Webinar

Dr Mikel Burley

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Sāṃkhya and Yoga are two important Indian philosophies whose central themes are pervasive in Indian religion, mythology and other aspects of culture. Their ‘classical’ texts are the Sāṃkhya Kārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and the Yoga Sūtra (or Yoga Śāstra ) of Patañjali, and it is generally agreed that the two philosophies are intimately related. Indeed, Sāṃkhya and Yoga are often described as, respectively, the theoretical and practical sides of the same system. But interpretations frequently struggle to explain how the ‘theory’ relates to the ‘practice’. Some scholars have even questioned whether Sāṃkhya philosophy has any coherent relation to Yoga practice at all – or to the goal of spiritual liberation towards which Sāṃkhya and Yoga both ostensibly aspire.

This talk by Dr Mikel Burley will summarise key components of the interpretation of Sāṃkhya and Yoga that were first put forward in his book Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience (Routledge, 2007). After outlining salient elements of the two philosophies, Burley will highlight the difficulty of understanding how the ontological system presented by Sāṃkhya relates to Yoga meditation and to the shared goal of liberation from suffering and from false identification. The author’s own interpretive approach will then be explained, focusing upon aspects that involve comparison with ideas from Abhidharma Buddhism, European phenomenology and Kantian transcendental philosophy. The resulting interpretation is one that construes Sāṃkhya’s ontology as an analysis of the constitutive conditions of possible experience – or, in other words, an analysis of precisely the components of reality that one must dissociate oneself from in order to achieve liberation.

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Speaker Biography

Mikel (Mik) Burley is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, UK. His publications include A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion: Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary (Bloomsbury, 2020), Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience (Routledge, 2007).