History of Shaktism - Philosophical Development - Samkhya and Vedanta

Samkhya and Vedanta

As the first millennium wound to an end, "religious movements of the South began to exert tremendous influence on the North" – and the Southern contribution to Shaktism's emergence was significant:

"Korravai, the Tamil goddess of war and victory, was easily identified with Durga, was also identified with the Bhagavati of Kerala and the eternal virgin enshrined in Kanyakumari. She was invoked in one or another of her nine forms, Navadurga, or as Bhadrakali. The Tamil tradition also associates her with Saraswati or Vāc, as also with Srī and Lakshmi. Thus in Durga the devotee visualised the triple aspects of power, beneficence and wisdom. In addition, many southern temples included shrines to the Sapta Matrika and "from the earliest period the South had a rich tradition of the cult of the village mothers, concerned with the facts of daily life."

The dualistic metaphysics of Tantric traditions indicates the influence of Samkhya on Tantra. Dasgupta speculates that the Tantric image of a wild Kali standing on a slumbering Shiva was inspired from the Samkhyan conception of Prakriti as a dynamic agent and Purusha as a passive witness. Shakta philosophy also elaborated Samkhya theory on the phases of cosmic evolution (tattvas) by expanding the number of phases from 25 to 36 tattvas. "It is worthy of note that this scheme of tattvas enables the Shakta philosophy to solve the conundrum ... as to how the changeless Brahman becomes the changing universe, and how the One can become the Many. In the Shakta cosmogony the central idea is that Shakti issues out of the Absolute and is not different from Brahman, being the kinetic aspect of Brahman."