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The Philosophy of the Upanishads c10.s3.t4: 4. On the Origin of the Doctrine of the Dissolution of the Universe in Brahman

The Philosophy of the Upanishads c10.s3.t4

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4. On the Origin of the Doctrine of the Dissolution of the Universe in Brahman

c10.s3.t4.1

Brahman is the womb whence all living beings proceed, and it was very natural to assume that they return at death into Brahman whence they have come forth ; for as Anaximander already says :—" that from which existing things originate, into it they necessarily also disappear." Accordingly we see formulated, as was shown above, in the texts of the oldest Upanishads and even earlier, the doctrine of Brahman as destroyer of individual creatures. Thence has been developed first in later times, from the S'vetâs'vatara Upanishad and onward, the doctrine of the periodical destruction of the universe by Brahman, precisely as the teaching of Heracleitus that all things come forth from fire (ὁδὸς κάτω), and return into it (ὁδὸς ἄνω), signified originally a twofold process linked together everywhere in the universe in the rise and disappearance of individual creatures, which was then however generalised, whether by Heracleitus himself or by his successors the Stoics, into a periodically recurring dissolution of the universe in fire (ἐκπύρωσις) and reconstruction out of it (διακόσμησις). Of the causes which in Greek philosophy may have led to this generalisation we learn nothing more precisely. In India to a great extent it gave support to the doctrine of recompense, inasmuch as the latter, as already shown, was only capable of being reconciled with the doctrine of a creation, if for the single creation taught in the ancient Upanishads there was substituted an eternally recurring process, a re-creation of the universe occurring after each dissolution, and determined by the actions of the souls. On its very first appearance the doctrine of the dissolution of the universe is connected with that of recompense, as is shown by the passages quoted above,¹ and especially S'vet. 6. 4 (" where they are not, there work comes to nought"). Whether however the original motive for the doctrine of the dissolution and periodical reconstruction of the universe lay in the wish to maintain, after the manner of the later Vedânta, the traditional doctrine of creation side by side with the later doctrine of recompense; or only in the natural attempt to generalise the dissolution of objects, which experience showed to be the case, into a universal dissolution, just as the entire doctrine of a creation of the universe originally rested on a generalisation of the observed origin of individuals,—to decide this is perhaps not possible in presence of the partial and ambiguous expressions of the S'vet. Upanishad.

c10.s3.t4.2

¹ p. 224 f.

Cites (1)