The Role of Prana in Sa?khya Discipline for Freedom

Classical Sa?khya has usually been interpreted as an intellectualist school. Its presumed method for the attainment of liberation is essentially characterized by rational inquiry into reality, which involves the intellectual understanding of the distinction between two principles: the conscious and the material. Some have argued that this liberating process is not only theoretical, but that it entails yogic practice, or that it is the natural outcome of existential forces that tend toward freedom. However, recent studies in Sa?khya involving detailed analysis of an anonymous commentary of the Sa?khyakarika, the Yuktidipika, suggest a more complex picture. The external functions of the five vital winds (pranas) in relation to the sources of action (karmayonis) and dispositions of being (bhavas) seem to play an important role in the liberating path. In this paper, I review the relation between bhavas, karmayonis, and the five pranas by considering the social, moral, and interpersonal aspects of the five vital winds as described in the Yuktidipika. It will be shown how the external functions of prana are related to the moral cultivation of vitality, leading to the enactment and manifestation of dispositions of being (bhavas) that bring about the realization of oneself as a knower in the ethical engagement with others. It is this unique way of understanding prana in the Yuktidipika that makes the Sa?khya path for liberation something more than a theoretical cognitive method or a spontaneous and predetermined realization of one's self.