Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

The System of the Vedanta according to Badarayana's Brahma-Sutras and Cankara's Commentary c8.s1.t4: 4. On the Doctrine of Immortality in general

The System of the Vedânta according to Bâdarâyana's Brahma-Sûtras and Çankara's Commentary c8.s1.t4

Language
English

4. On the Doctrine of Immortality in general

c8.s1.t4.1

If human thought were what it is not and perhaps never will be—completely logical, there would probably be only two philosophical standpoints: Idealism which holds the world which surrounds us as not real in the strict sense, and Realism which regards it as real. If these standpoints are logically adhered to, there is place in neither system, as it seems to us, for the immortality of the soul. For it is essential to Idealism to reach by one of the ways indicated by us in chap. II, 1, above p. 47 ff. the conviction of the unreality of all plurality as well as of all origination and dissolution and to grasp as the sole certainty the existence of the Self (*ego*): the logical consequence of this standpoint is the consciousness of the identity of the Ego with “Being-in-itself” and of the identification with it as soon as the dream of this existence is past—an identification which is not to be conceived so much as an absorption of the Self in the All, but rather (if we may speak spatially of the spaceless) as an absorption of the all into the Self, as a generalised realisation of what is in detail realised in every moral action. From this point of view the doctrine of immortality is superfluous; for it says us only what is self-evident. From the point of view of Realism on the other hand it is logically impossible. If nature is real, its dicta are real; and they tell us unmistakably that we arise out of nothing by procreation and at death return to nothing.—These considerations seem to show that the doctrine of immortality is a compromise between Idealism and Realism; it is an attempt to maintain from the realistic standpoint which is the natural one for the human intellect the idealistic certainty, rooted in self-consciousness, of the unchangeableness of the Self—a vain effort as the history of the doctrine of immortality sufficiently demonstrates.

c8.s1.t4.2

In the Vedânta system Idealism is represented by the esoteric view of the doctrine of identity, Realism by the exoteric doctrine of the Creation of the world. For the esoteric view the soul is identical with the Brahman and to grasp this only the right knowledge of the Self is needed, and no proof of immortality. The exoteric view makes us emerge from and return to Brahman; with this conception no doctrine of immortality can be reconciled but only the view of the Upanishads, expressed in the words (Mund. 2, 1, 1).

c8.s1.t4.3

"Just as the sparks from out the glowing flame
"In thousand forms, all glowing skywards mount,
"All creatures from the changeless one emerge,
"And thus, dear friend, return unto their fount."

c8.s1.t4.4

According to this doubtless original view the soul had an origin, and is as a necessary consequence, perishable. For what is so constituted that it can originate, is so constituted that it can perish. Τὸ μηδὲν εἰς οὐδὲν ῥέπει.—

c8.s1.t4.5

But the soul is the point in the universe where the veil (woven of time, space, and causality) that covers "Being-in-itself" becomes so transparent that we perceive facts through it, which protest against the cosmic laws of Realism and oppose themselves to a logical elaboration of it. Such a fact is above all the metaphysical significance of human action, reaching as it does beyond the grave. When a human being dies and his body is scattered to the elements, there is something in him which does not leave him; that is his works, as the Veda (Brih. 3, 2, 13) says; and this conviction of the indestructibility of the moral part of man by death compels the Vedânta to maintain inconsistently instead of the absorption into Brahman demanded by the exoteric view a persistence of the soul in its individual character beyond the Brahman into whom it enters at death.

c8.s1.t4.6

We shall return later to these questions of exoteric Psychology. The first question is not as to the empirical soul affected by Upâdhis and therefore wandering, acting and suffering, but as to the definition of the metaphysical nature of the soul free from all this; we shall however often enough have occasion to refer beforehand to this disguising of the soul by the Upâdhis.

Cites (2)