Kapila founded a school of Indian philosophy, but which Kapila?
Hindu tradition honours Kapila as the sage who founded Samkhya, one of India's oldest philosophical systems, sometime before the Buddha. Yet the name crops up across so many texts, with so many different parents and roles, from ascetic lawgiver to incarnation of Vishnu, that it almost certainly points to more than one person.
Scholars cannot pin down when the founding Kapila lived; some suggest the sixth century BCE, others the seventh, which would put him in the late Vedic period. Tradition pairs him with a pupil, Āsuri, as the first teachers of Samkhya, a dualistic philosophy. An aphoristic text called the Samkhya-sutra is attributed to him, and its ideas were unpacked in the widely studied Samkhyakarika. How far Samkhya shaped early Buddhism has been a long-running research question, and some orthodox Buddhists accused the Sarvastivada school of borrowing heavily from it.
Attempts to find him in the oldest scripture run into trouble. A verse of the Rigveda contains the word kapilam, which the fourteenth-century commentator Sayana read as a sage. Later scholars such as Larson think it simply means tawny or reddish-brown, while Chakravarti linked it to one of the storm deities called Maruts. Other Vedic-era works mention a Yajurveda branch and clans named after a Kapila without saying who he was.
The later literature multiplies him. One legal text makes him a son of Prahlada and credits him with defining the four stages of life, from student to renouncer, and urging ascetics never to harm any creature in word, thought or deed. The Bhagavata Purana makes him the son of Kardama and Devahuti and has him teach Samkhya to his own mother in a celebrated dialogue about escaping attachment to body and mind. The Matsya Purana names him one of the hundred sons of Danu, and the Narada Purana counts two separate Kapilas. Several Puranas and the Valmiki Ramayana treat him as an incarnation of Vishnu. In the Mahabharata he defends the principle of non-violence.
The historian George Williams argues that Kapila lived well before the epics and Puranas were composed, and that later mythmakers borrowed his name. Pilgrimage sites, figures in Hinduism and Jainism and even an ancient breed of cow share it. Temple images show him bearded, eyes closed in meditation, seated in the lotus posture and wrapped in deer skin.
Source: Kapila
