Kapila

The Bhagavata Purana holds Kapila as son of the sage Kardama and Devahuti, teaching his own mother the path of Samkhya as an act of filial devotion — one of the tradition's few stories of a sage instructing a parent rather than the reverse.

Samkhya's framework of purusha and prakriti, consciousness and matter as two distinct realities, underlies much of classical Indian philosophy, including the metaphysics Patanjali later built the Yoga Sutras upon. The Bhagavad Gita names Kapila directly among the 'perfected beings,' a rare honor for a philosopher in a devotional text.