Kapila

Kapila is the legendary founder of Samkhya, which counts among the oldest schools of Indian thought. It divides everything into two: purusha, pure witnessing consciousness, and prakriti, the active matter out of which mind and world unfold through the play of three strands. Suffering comes from confusing the witness with the spectacle, and liberation from seeing them apart. Samkhya was atheistic in its classical form, explaining the cosmos without a creator, and it supplied the metaphysical skeleton that Yoga, and much of later Hindu philosophy, would clothe.