Gandha

Gandha closes the sequence of five Tanmatras exactly as ghrana closed the sequence of five Jnanendriyas: last, densest, and distinctive to the single element, prithvi, that requires the fullest possible accumulation of prior qualities before it can appear. By the time gandha is produced, shabda, sparsha, rupa and rasa are all already established, and earth is the only one of the five gross elements able to carry gandha at all, since it is the only element dense enough, in Samkhya's scheme, to have reached the final stage of grossening.

This is why earth carries all five sensory qualities simultaneously, audible, tactile, visible, tasteable and odorous, while akasha, at the opposite end of the sequence, carries only the first. The progression is not arbitrary ornamentation; it is Samkhya's explanation for why solid matter seems, to ordinary observation, to be the most sensorially rich of the classical elements, water second, fire third, air fourth and space, strictly speaking imperceptible except by its sound, last.

Produced from the tamasic aspect of ahamkara, gandha completes that aspect's entire contribution to the twenty-five tattvas: five tanmatras, feeding five gross elements, in a fixed and cumulative order. With gandha in place, only the five gross elements themselves, fire, water, earth, air and ether, remain to complete the enumeration Samkhya calls the twenty-five tattvas.

With gandha and prithvi in place, Samkhya's twenty-five tattvas stand complete: purusha and prakriti as the two uncaused roots; mahat, ahamkara and manas as the antahkarana, the internal instrument; the ten sensory and active organs; the five tanmatras; and the five gross elements, akasha, vayu, tejas, apas and prithvi, each condensed from its matching tanmatra in a fixed and cumulative order. Every tattva after the first two is prakriti in a more differentiated form, and the whole chain, from unmanifest equilibrium to solid earth, is offered as a complete account of everything real apart from the many purushas that witness it.

What the chain explains, on Samkhya's own account, is not merely how many kinds of thing exist but why experience has the structure it does: why sound is the least demanding sense and smell the most, why earth seems denser and more richly textured than fire or air, why an organ of perception and an organ of action, though they may concern the same subject matter as with vak and shrotra, are never the same tattva. Each of these ordinary facts is derived rather than merely asserted, traced back through a specific sequence of evolutes to prakriti's original threefold guna constitution.

The twenty-five tattvas, taken as a set, are Samkhya's answer to the question of what is ultimately real, and the five tanmatras completed in this file are the hinge connecting the system's account of subjective experience, the eleven organs, to its account of the objective physical world, the five gross elements: the point at which what perceives and what is perceived are shown to share a single common origin.