Sāṃkhya
A grouping recorded within Hinduism. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Sāṃkhya is recorded within Hinduism. The sources read do not establish whether it is extant. Also written Sankhya, Samkhya.
Origin
Founders named in the sources: Kapila (legendary), Āsuri. No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. IEP: tradition credits Kapila and his disciple Āsuri as 'the first masters of Sāṅkhya', though both 'belong to antiquity (and sometimes, prehistory) and are known only through ancient legends'. The classical formulation is the Sāṅkhya-Kārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, c. 350 CE (IEP's Hindu Philosophy survey says 4th century CE). IEP notes the Sāṅkhya-Sūtra 'appears first in the 15th century' and that the Tattva-Samāsa-Sūtra, though old in parts, 'is not mentioned before 14th century'. A darśana, not a sect.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Sāṃkhya.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-samkhya.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-samkhya-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Sāṃkhya},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-samkhya},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.