The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s2.t1: 1. Significance of the Doctrine of Emancipation
The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s2.t1
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1. Significance of the Doctrine of Emancipation
c12.s2.t1.1
Love of life is the strongest of all the instincts implanted in human nature. In order to preserve life we make any sacrifice. We desire a long life for ourselves and our friends; we congratulate those who attain it, and commiserate those who are called away before their time. And the reason of our mourning for one so prematurely deceased is (when once we give to ourselves a clear account of it) not so much that he is wanting to us, as rather that we are wanting to him. We pity him because he has been so early deprived of existence, as though this were a supreme good. When we console ourselves over the death of a relative by recalling the sufferings, perils and hardships, from which he has escaped, this is the voice of reflection. A purely natural feeling expresses itself differently. It tells us that the loss of life is the most serious by which a man can be overtaken; that the most severe punishment is always that of death. Indeed, so strong in us is the instinct for life, that our whole existence is nothing more than this desire unfolding itself in space as the body and in time as the life.
c12.s2.t1.2
How is it possible under these circumstances that in the course of development there could arise repeatedly amongst men and become established a disposition to regard that craving for life, upon which our entire empirical existence depends, as something which ought not properly to be? So that man's true duty is conceived to be not the satisfaction of the natural craving, but its suppression, and therefore the highest goal appears as a release (*moksha*), and that not such a release as death brings from a definite existence, but release from existence in general, which as our innate consciousness shows is not to be attained simply through death.
c12.s2.t1.3
This rarest of all changes of inclination may be traced nowhere more clearly than in India, where deliverance, unmodified by the play upon it of the accidental events of history, appears not as a ransom, an atonement, a propitiation, etc., but merely as a release from empirical existence with all its desires, these last being regarded as fetters (*bandha, graha*), as bonds (*granthi*), which bind the soul to the objects of sense. Even in India it was not always so, and a long period of development, a vast interval, separates the poets of the Rigveda, who, filled with a warm desire for life, shrink from death,¹ and wish for themselves and their posterity a life of a hundred years, from the words with which the greatest Indian poet closes his masterpiece :—
c12.s2.t1.4
¹ Rigv. VII. 89.
c12.s2.t1.5
May he, the god, who fashioned me by his almighty power,
Himself avert from me and destroy my re-birth.
c12.s2.t1.6
Yet the philosophy of the future will often turn its glance to India in order to study the doctrine of emancipation in the land of its birth. We propose now to do what we can to render intelligible this most remarkable of all doctrines.
Cites (1)
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit