The Principles of What Is Real

Then, out of love for his mother, Kapila taught her the Sāṃkhya. The Self, the Person, he said, has no beginning and no strands of nature; it is beyond nature, turned inward, shining by its own light, and it holds all things together. Nature, which has the three strands and is unmanifest and without end, is the ground of all things; and from it come the principles counted as twenty-four: the five great elements, earth, water, fire, wind and space; the five subtle elements, smell and the rest; the ten senses of knowing and acting; and the four of the inner instrument, the mind, the understanding, the sense of I and thought. Time, he said, is counted as the twenty-fifth. When the Person, seeing nature bring forth creatures by her strands, takes her doing for his own and thinks that he is the doer, he is bound and goes round in birth; when he knows himself apart from nature, he is free.

He taught her the yoga that gives the mind something to rest on: doing one's own duty, being content, serving one who knows the Self, eating measured and clean food in a quiet place; doing no harm, telling the truth, not stealing, taking only what is needed, keeping chaste, practising austerity and purity and study and worship; mastering the seat and the breath, drawing the senses back into the heart, and meditating on the Lord's form limb by limb, from his feet to his smiling face.

He taught her the many kinds of devotion, and that he dwells in every being as its Self: whoever slights any creature and worships an image is pouring his offering on ashes. He taught her how a creature enters the womb by its deeds and grows there month by month, and is born, and how a man bound to his house suffers, and who comes back to birth and who does not.