The Golden Verses of Pythagoras: A 19th-Century Manuscript Mystery

A palm-leaf manuscript in the Royal Asiatic Society bears a curious English label: “SĀṄKHYA-SAPTATI or golden verses of Pythagoras.” This label preserves a fascinating moment in intellectual history—when British scholars believed they had found the “Indian Pythagoras.”

The Manuscript: Whish No. 147

Folio 1: Opening invocation

Folio 2: Verses 5-10

Folio 7: Final verses

Charles Whish was a British civil servant in the Madras Presidency who collected Sanskrit manuscripts from Kerala. He is best known for discovering that Indian mathematicians had developed infinite series for trigonometric functions centuries before Newton and Leibniz. His manuscript collection, now at the Royal Asiatic Society, contains hundreds of palm-leaf texts from Kerala's scholarly traditions.

The “Pythagoras” Connection

Whish's table of contents on the cover board lists the manuscript's contents:

This reflects a specific 18th/19th-century Orientalist theory. Early British scholars like Sir William Jones noticed striking parallels between Indian Sāṃkhya philosophy and the Greek Pythagorean tradition:

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras was a famous Greek compendium of moral maxims attributed to Pythagoras. For Whish and his contemporaries, the Sāṃkhyakārikā(72 verses) seemed like its Indian counterpart—a systematic enumeration of cosmic principles that taught liberation through knowledge.

What is the Sāṃkhyakārikā?

The Sāṃkhyakārikā (“Verses on Enumeration”) is the foundational text of the Sāṃkhya school of Indian philosophy, composed by Īśvarakṛṣṇaaround the 4th century CE. It systematically enumerates 25 cosmic principles (tattvas) and explains how liberation is achieved through discriminative knowledge.

The 25 Principles

Key Doctrines

Satkāryavāda (Effect Pre-exists in Cause)

“Nothing can come from nothing; a specific cause produces a specific effect.” (Verse 9)

The Three Guṇas (Qualities)

Sattva (light/pleasure), Rajas (motion/pain), Tamas (heaviness/delusion) — “They function together like a lamp (wick, oil, and fire cooperating for light).” (Verses 12–13)

The Lame Man and the Blind Man

“The Spirit (conscious but inactive) rides on Matter (active but unconscious) like a lame man riding a blind man.” (Verses 19–21)

The Dancing Girl

“Just as a dancer stops dancing after she has been seen by the audience, Nature stops her activity once the Spirit realizes 'I am not this.'” (Verse 59)

The Transmission Lineage

The text itself records its transmission (Verses 70–72):

Sample Transcription

Here are the opening verses from the manuscript in Malayalam script with romanization:

The Colonial Mirror

The manuscript label's equation of Sāṃkhya with the Golden Verses of Pythagoras reveals less about the Indian text itself and more about how 19th-century British intellectuals tried to make sense of the East.

1. The Numerical Link

The most obvious bridge is etymological. Sāṃkhya means “Enumeration” (categorizing the 25 realities). Pythagoras is famous for the doctrine “All is Number.” For a colonial collector like Whish, this was likely the “smoking gun” of a historical connection.

2. The Dualistic Soul

Both systems are rigorously dualistic. They strictly separate the eternal, witness-soul (Puruṣa/Monad) from the changing, material world (Prakṛti/Dyad). The goal in both systems is to purify the soul from the contamination of matter.

3. Transmigration

The specific doctrine of metempsychosis (the soul moving from human to animal to plant based on conduct) is central to both Sāṃkhya (verses 53–54) and Pythagoreanism. In an era when Christianity dominated Western thought, finding two ancient, non-Christian systems sharing this specific belief suggested a shared ancient lineage to Orientalist scholars.

Modern Perspective

While modern scholarship views these as parallel developments rather than direct historical connections, the label on Whish No. 147 preserves a specific moment in history where theSāṃkhyakārikā was read not just as Indian philosophy, but as the “missing link” to Western antiquity.

This manuscript reminds us that every text exists in layers of interpretation. TheSāṃkhyakārikā is simultaneously:

• A 4th-century Indian philosophical treatise
• A Kerala scholarly tradition preserved on palm leaves
• A 19th-century Orientalist artifact labeled as “Pythagoras”
• A 21st-century digitized resource available worldwide

The “Golden Verses” label was wrong in its historical claim but revealing in its intellectual ambition: to find unity in the ancient wisdom of East and West.

Complete Transcription

The following transcription was made directly from the palm-leaf folios of Whish No. 147. The text is written in Malayalam script, the standard script for Sanskrit in Kerala.

Complete Translation

I. Introduction: The Problem of Suffering (Verses 1–2)

II. The 25 Principles & Epistemology (Verses 3–8)

III. Metaphysics: Cause & Effect (Verses 9–11)

IV. The Three Guṇas (Verses 12–16)

V. The Spirit—Puruṣa (Verses 17–21)

VI. Evolution & Psychology (Verses 22–40)

VII. Karma & Transmigration (Verses 41–52)

VIII. Teleology: Why Does the Universe Exist? (Verses 56–59)

IX. Liberation & Conclusion (Verses 60–72)

॥ सांख्यसप्ततिः समाप्ता ॥
Thus concludes the Sāṃkhyasaptati

Further Reading

• Larson, G.J. & Bhattacharya, R.S. (1987).Sāṃkhya: A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy(Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. IV)
• Whish, C.M. (1835). “On the Hindú Quadrature of the Circle”Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society 3(3): 509–523
• Whish Collection at Internet Archive