From the beginning of our era down to recent times the Sankhya doctrines have exercised considerable influence on the religious and philosophical life of India, though to a much less extent than the Vedanta. Some of its individual teachings, such as that of the three gunas, have become the common property of the whole of Sanskrit literature. At the time of the great Vedantist, Çankara (800 A.D.), the Sankhya system was held in high honour. The law book of Manu followed this doctrine, though with an admixture of the theistic notions of the Mimamsa and Vedanta systems as well as of popular mythology. The Mahabharata, especially Book XII., is full of Sankhya doctrines; indeed almost every detail of the teachings of this system is to be found somewhere in the great epic. Its numerous deviations from the regular Sankhya text-books are only secondary, as Professor Garbe thinks, even though the Mahabharata is our oldest actual source for the system. Nearly half the Puranas follow the cosmogony of the Sankhya, and even those which are Vedantic are largely influenced by its doctrines. The purity of the Sankhya notions are, however, everywhere in the Puranas obscured by Vedanta doctrines, especially that of cosmical illusion. A peculiarity of the Puranic Sankhya is the conception of Spirit or Purusha as the male, and Matter or Prakriti as the female, principle in creation. On the Sankhya system are based the two philosophical religions of Buddhism and Jainism in all their main outlines. Their fundamental doctrine is that life is nothing but suffering. The cause of suffering is the desire, based on ignorance, to live and enjoy the world. The aim of both is to redeem mankind from the misery of mundane existence by the annihilation of desire, with the aid of renunciation of the world and the practice of unbounded kindness towards all creatures. These two pessimistic religions are so extremely similar that the Jainas, or adherents of Jina, were long looked upon as a Buddhist sect. Research has, however, led to the discovery that the founders of both systems were contemporaries, the most eminent of the many teachers who in the sixth century opposed the Brahman ceremonial and caste pretensions in Northern Central India. Both religions, while acknowledging the lower and ephemeral gods of Brahmanism, deny, like the Sankhya, the existence of an eternal supreme Deity. As they developed, they diverged in various respects from the system to which they owed their philosophical notions. Hence it came about that Sankhya writers stoutly opposed some of their teachings, particularly the Buddhist denial of soul, the doctrine that all things have only a momentary existence, and that salvation is an annihilation of self. Here, however, it should be noted that Buddha himself refused to decide the question whether nirvana is complete extinction or an unending state of unconscious bliss. The latter view was doubtless a concession to