An objective survey of what can strictly be considered as the philosophical heritage of India shows that the admission of God has a precariously limited place in it. Of all our major philosophies, only the Vedanta (with some reservation), and specifically the later version of the Nyaya-Vaisesika were theistic. By contrast, Budhism, Jainism, Mimansa, Sankhya, Charvaka/Lokayata, and Nyaya-Vaisesika in its original form were philosophies of committed atheism. Thus the stupendous importance of atheism in Indian wisdom can be questioned only by disallowing the largest majority of the significant Indian philosophers representing it.

 

It will be objected that I have am not taking note of the Yoga philosophy associated with Patanjali (which Udayana has mentioned in the quote i gave); this is true but this has been deliberately done. There is no ground to take this Yoga as a really serious and independent philosophical view. Besides, the admission of God in it is not of much philosophical significance.

 

Garbe, writing in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics xii.831-2, observes:

 

The object of the Yoga system in inserting the conception of a personal God in the Sankhya is merely to satisfy the theists, and to faciliate the propagation of the theory of the universe expounded in the Sankhya. The idea of God, far from being organically interwoven in the Yoga system, is only loosely inserted. In the Yoga-sutra the passages that treat of God stand disconnected and are indeed in direct contradiction to the contents and aim of the system. God neither creates the universe not does He rule it. He does not reward or punish the actions of men, and the latter do not regard union with Him as the supreme object of their endeavour. God is only a 'particular soul', not essentially different from the other individual souls which are co-eternal with him...It is evident that this is no God in our sense of the term, and that we have to do wit h perplexing speculations the aim of which is to conceal the originally atheistic character of the system, and to bring the assumption of God into bare accord with its fundamental teaching. Assuredly, these speculations prove, were there any need at all to prove, that in the real Sankhya-Yoga system there is no room for a personal God.

It should be noted moreover that just as God is quite arbitrary and extrinsic to the fundamentals of the Sankhya philosophy borrowed by Patanjali, so also is the Sankhya philosophy itself to Yoga, which simply means certain practices of psycho-physical exercises believed to be conducive to physical and mental powers (and according to all ancient and medieval practitioners-- and also some modern practitioners--, even super-natural powers).

 

The practices are in fact immensely old. Concrete material evidences of the Harappa culture (see S.N. Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 1, pg 228-9)--the statues and pictures depicted on the Harappan seals--prove that these practices were prevalent in India about three thousand years before Christ. In other words, they were originally non-Vedic and pre-Aryan. In the course of time, these Yogic practices became the floating possession as it were of a large number of heterogenous sects and acquired prestige even among a large number of philosophies. Patanjali tried to effect some sort of connection between these practices and the Sankhya philosophy, though the connection remained a palpably thin one. As Dasgupta writes:

 

"The Yoga practices had undergone diverse changes in diverse schools, but none of these show any predilection for the Sankhya...Vachaspati and Vijnana Bhiksu [two traditional Indian philosophers] agree with us in holding that Patanjali was not the founder of the Yoga, but an editor."