<p>Contemporary theories of consciousness that treat consciousness as ontologically fundamental face a challenge to specify the primitives without reintroducing functional or material assumptions. This paper critically analyses Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Realism and Conscious Agent Theory (CAT) in light of this difficulty. I argue that although these frameworks reject physicalist orthodoxy of matter being fundamental, they still rely on perception, decision, and action as unexplained primitives, thereby undermining the aim of establishing consciousness on its own terms. This paper turns to <i>Sāṃkhya</i> philosophy which maintains an ontologically dualistic framework distinguishing pure, non-agentic witness consciousness (<i>Puruṣa</i>) and matter (<i>Prakṛti</i>) to address the tension. This paper offers a cross-traditional philosophical comparison by placing Hoffman’s consciousness framework in dialogue with <i>Sāṃkhya</i> metaphysics and proposes that embracing the ontological framework of <i>Sāṃkhya</i> provides a promising way to resolve key conceptual difficulties in conscious realism such as importing functional primitives and subject-unity problem along with fulfilling the aim of establishing consciousness on its own terms.</p>