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The System of the Vedanta according to Badarayana's Brahma-Sutras and Cankara's Commentary c7.s7.t3: 3. The Moral Problem

The System of the Vedânta according to Bâdarâyana's Brahma-Sûtras and Çankara's Commentary c7.s7.t3

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3. The Moral Problem

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Sûtras 2, 1, 34—36. 22—23.

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That empirical theism (for which the world is real and different from God) is untenable appears nowhere so clearly as in the region of morals. For however the matter be turned, in a real creation, which is seriously taken, the responsibility for evil, and for the sin of the world finally falls on God. This consequence does not trouble the morally undeveloped conscience. Therefore it is said in *Isaiah* XLV, 7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil; I the LORD do all these things.” And in the *Kaushîtaki-Up.* 3, 8: it is expressed even more strongly: “For he makes those do good works whom he will guide out from this world, and he makes those do evil, whom he will guide downwards; he is the guardian of the world, he is the ruler of the world, he is the lord of the world.”—The Hebrews gained a solution of the question more apparent than real by adopting (or rather adapting) Satan from the mythology of Persia, and thereby satisfying themselves. The Indians in a more philosophical spirit recognised the fact that there are only two ways out of this: either by referring the constitution (essentia), and also the creation (existentia) of the world not to God but to an immanent principle, or (idealistically) by denying the existence of the world altogether. We find Ṣaṅkara taking both ways, by bringing forward, as he always does, both empirical and metaphysical arguments for the solution of the problem.

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(a) The Creator of the World as the Author of Evil.—To the argument that God, as Creator of the world, is responsible for the evil in it, the answer is first made that God, in the creation of creatures, does not act arbitrarily (nirapekṣa), but is bound by a certain regard, namely, the regard for the good and evil works of each creature in an earlier birth (p. 492, 6). By this conception, for which, as we saw before (above p. 267), the world is nothing but the scene of atonement for the works of an earlier existence, the rôle of God as Creator sinks into a secondary, and purely instrumental one. The Body may be compared to a plant (p. 492, 10), which springs up from seed, grows, expands, and finally dies; yet not altogether, but so that something remains,—the seed, which, strewn in the kingdom of Ignorance, brings forth a new plant according to its kind. This seed of man (so far as individual determination is conditioned by it), is his works. In exact correspondence to their moral quality, is the form of the new life, because all happiness and unhappiness depend on it under an inflexible necessity, and also, as we shall see, all virtue and vice of the new existence. In this growth of the present out of the seed of works, the task of the Creator can only be a secondary one: he is to be compared to the rain (the chief condition of growth in India), which causes the plants to shoot. That they grow, is the work of outward circumstances (water, soil, air, light, or, as the Indians say, rain), but what they shall grow to be, does not depend upon those conditions which come from God, but upon the nature of the seed: only rice can come from rice, only barley from barley (p. 492, 9).—This concept requires as its unavoidable consequence, the assumption that *Saṃsāra* is without beginning, for, as far as we go back, each existence draws its conditions from some prior existence (p. 494, 1).—This consequence is as yet absent from the older Upanishads; it contradicts their teaching, certainly intended seriously at first, of the Creation of the world from "the One without a Second" (above p. 230), and of the predestination which necessarily follows (above p. 278) from this. In the desire to do away with this contradiction, we must recognise the real motive of the periodicity of creation, already mentioned above (p. 227) the alternating evolution of the world from, and its re-absorption into Brahman, which is not mentioned in the older Upanishads. Çankara certainly manages to indicate it as already in them, when (p. 495, 1) out of the words: "I will enter into these three divinities with my living Self" (Chând. 6, 3, 2, see above p. 231) he drags the meaning that the "living Self" (the individual soul) must therefore have existed before the creation. But this argument is as little admissible as is his reference to the verse (Rigveda X, 190, 3):

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*Sûryâ-candramasau dhâtâ yathâpûrvam akalpayat,*

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which, according to the context, can only mean: "the creator created the sun and moon"—*yathâpûrvam*—"according to their order," not, as Çankara says, "as before" (p. 495, 7).

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(b) The Creator of the World as the Cause of Evil.—We have two answers to the arguments marshalled under this heading, an empirical answer, 2, 1, 23, and one which amounts to the doctrine of identity 2, 1, 22, and, remarkable to say, the former stands second. Even if these two parts were written down by the same hand, it is hardly thinkable that they were originated in the same head. We shall reverse their order, and examine the empirical answer first.—Just as, it is said, 2, 1, 23, the same earth brings forth many kinds of stones, the most costly jewels, as well as the most common stones of the fields; as the same earth produces plants which vary in leaves, flowers, fruits, smell and taste, or as in men from the same essence of food (*annarasa*) spring blood, hair, and nails, all quite different; in the same way, from the one Brahman proceeds the division into the individual and highest souls, and the variety of [good and evil] effects.—Quite another character than that of this empirical comparison is borne by the directly preceding section, 2, 1, 22. It is true that here also our author starts from the separation (only indicated by the Sûtram) of God and the soul, in order to transfer all moral guilt from the former to the latter. Brahman is omniscient and omnipotent, everlasting, pure, wise and free. Because he is free, he can do what he wills; for him, there is neither command nor prohibition, and therefore neither good nor evil.¹⁰⁷ The individual soul, on the contrary, is affected by good and evil (reading *ca* instead of *na*, p. 473, 4), and of it we do not at all maintain that it is the creator of the world.—Without committing himself to the question, unavoidable from this standpoint, "Whence then springs the individual soul, with its good and evil?" our author at once passes on to the metaphysical explanation: "But how is this? Are not God and the soul the same, according to the words: *tat tvam asi*?"—To this it is replied: "When, by the teaching of non-separateness, through sentences like *tat tvam asi*, the consciousness of non-separateness is awakened, then the wanderings of the soul and the creative function of Brahman cease; for the whole tendency of the world of division springs from false knowledge, and is removed by perfect knowledge. Whence, then, the creation? and whence the responsibility for not having brought forth good only? For *Saṃsāra*, which has as its characteristics the doing of good and evil, is an illusion produced by non-discrimination of the determinations (which, produced by Ignorance, consist in the aggregate of the instruments of activity formed by names and forms), and this illusion just as the error (*abhimāna*) of division and separation by birth and death, does not exist in the sense of the highest reality" (p. 472, 14—475, 4).

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¹⁰⁷ For our author, every good thing (*hitam*) is a command (*kartavyam*) and every evil thing (*ahitam*) is a prohibition (*parihartavyam*); therefore the freedom of God excludes both. He knows, therefore, like the Old Testament, only a hypothetical imperative, not, like the philosophy of Kant, a categorical, which only becomes possible through freedom.

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