(“principal”), in the Sāṃkhya school of Indian philosophy, material nature in its germinal state, eternal and beyond perception. Prakriti, when it comes into contact with the “soul” ( purusha), starts on a process of evolution that leads through several stages to the creation of the existing material world. Prakriti is made up of three gunas (“strands,” or constituent cosmic factors) that characterize all nature. In the Sāṃkhya view, only prakriti is active, while the self is incarcerated in it and only observes and experiences. Release (moksha) consists in the self's extrication from prakriti by the recognition of its total difference from it and noninvolvement in it. In early Indian philosophical texts the term svabhāva (Sanskrit: “own being”) was used in a similar sense to mean material nature.