Of the literature of the early philosophical schools of the Sāṅkhya tradition only the fragments of Vṛṣagaṇa or Vārṣagaṇya (ca. 300 CE) have been preserved to a more substantial extent. His work, the long lost Ṣaṣṭitantra, introduced the earliest elaborated epistemology in the history of Indian philosophy, with emphasis on inference as the means for establishing the basic concepts of the dualistic system of Sāṅkhya, in partic-ular the concept of Primordial matter (pradhāna).
To Erich Frauwallner we owe the first collection of fragments of this epistemological tradition of Sāṅkhya, which was published in 1958. He identified these fragments in Jinendrabuddhi’s commentary on the Pramāṇasamuccaya, then available only in its Tibetan translation, and in Siṃhasūri’s Nyāyāgamānusāriṇī, whose edition he had re-ceived from the Muni Jambuvijaya before its publication in 1966 and 1976. Since the Sanskrit text of Jinendrabuddhi’s commentary became available in the late 1990s, with its chapters 1, 2 and 6 already published, and chapters 3 and 4 in preparation, it is now possible to present the most probably original text of these fragments of the Ṣaṣṭitantra. They contain the explanations of inference in much detail, and the presentation of the direct (avīta) and, less well attested, indirect (āvīta) proofs of Primordial matter. The edition of the fragments offered in this paper is followed by a tentative translation.