Samkhya is the oldest of the classical systems and the most austere in its starting point. It divides everything into two irreducible categories. Purusha is consciousness: it witnesses, and it does nothing else. It does not act, does not change, does not desire. Prakriti is nature: it acts, evolves, produces intelligence, ego, mind, the senses and the elements, and it does all of this without being aware of any of it. Nothing in the system reduces one to the other.
The consequence is counterintuitive and deliberate. Every activity you would normally call yours belongs to Prakriti, including thinking. The mind is a material instrument in this scheme, remarkably subtle but still on the nature side of the line. What Purusha contributes is the fact that any of it is experienced at all. Samkhya uses the image of a lame man with sight riding a blind man with legs: the one who sees cannot walk, and the one who walks cannot see, and their apparent partnership produces everything.
Bondage, in this reading, is a case of mistaken attribution. Purusha, reflected in the most refined part of Prakriti, appears to take on its activity and comes to believe it is the one acting, suffering and achieving. Liberation is not an escape or an accomplishment, since Purusha was never in difficulty and cannot accomplish anything. It is simply the correction of the mix-up, the recognition of which side of the line the witness was always on. The evolutes of Prakriti are catalogued in detail as tattvas, the principles from which the visible world unfolds.
Samkhya matters because much of what followed borrowed its vocabulary, including Patanjali. To see how those principles are mapped further, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 12 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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