The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c38: Chapter 26. The Beginnings of Vedic Philosophy

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c38

Language: English

Chapter 26. The Beginnings of Vedic Philosophy

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The earliest poetry of India already contains many traces of the essential character of the philosophy of India. In nothing indeed does the continuity of Indian life show itself more strikingly than this: the gods of India change, but the alteration of the higher thought is far less marked.

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Philosophy in India shows its beginnings as often in the expression of scepticism: the normal belief in the gods here and there seems to have been questioned, and it is not unnatural that the questioning should have arisen in the case of the most human of the gods, him whom the seers most closely fashioned in their own likeness, the vehement Indra. We have not indeed any certain case of a seer who himself doubted the truth of Indra's greatness:¹ no open attack on the god would, we may be sure, have been allowed to come down to us in the Saṁhitā. But we are distinctly told that there were men who asked, ‘Who is Indra, who ever saw him?’ or asserted that he did not exist at all.² There were, we learn, faithless men, who did not believe in the gods of the Brahmans and did not—perhaps a worse thing—give the priests their fees for sacrifice, men who did not believe in Indra, *anindrāḥ*. The pious poets denounce these men and assert in opposition the truth³ of the greatness of the god, but it is improbable that their hymns had the effect of convincing the impious.

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¹ Radhakrishnan (*Ind. Phil.* i. 87 f.) finds in RV. viii. 96. 13–15 traces of conflict between Indra and Kṛṣṇa, the prototype of the god of the Gītā.

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² ii. 12. 5; viii. 103. 3. A fetish of Indra alone of gods is mentioned (RV. iv. 24. 10). Hardy (*Ved.-brahm. Periode*, pp. 175, 176) seeks to show a much wider knowledge as probable (e. g. ii. 33. 9; iii. 4. 4; v. 52. 15), but this is untenable, especially as actual references to idols (PGS. iii. 14. 8) or Caityas (AGS. i. 12. 1) are found only at the very close of the Vedic period; cf. pp. 30 f.

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³ Indra's deeds are often declared true; cf. RV. ii. 15. 1; 22. 1–3; i. 84. 17; vi. 27. 1, 2.

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It might, however, have been expected that in the moral law of Varuṇa, which is the counterpart of the physical law recognized by the religion of the Veda as prevailing in the universe, the Ṛta, and in Varuṇa himself as the great guardian of that law, there might have been found a deity in whom the mind of the sceptic might find peace and satisfaction. The case of Iran proves that the nature of the great Asura could easily give rise to the conception of a moral ruler and a deep ethical view of the world. But, whatever the cause, it is beyond possibility of doubt that in India from the first philosophy is intellectual, not moral, in interest and outlook. The conception of Varuṇa, which reaches a high level and is majestic enough both in its cosmical and moral aspect, has attained by the time of the Rigveda its highest development: it falls rapidly into unimportance, until the Brāhmaṇa¹ can assert that an ugly deformed man, who is used as a scapegoat at the final bath of the horse sacrifice, is said to be a symbol of Varuṇa. With this decline of the great and noble god goes hand in hand the decline of the interest of Indian philosophy or religion in morality as such: numerous as are the moral precepts which can be found here and there in Vedic literature, it must be admitted that it is quite impossible to find any real or vital principle of ethics.

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¹ ÇB. xiii. 3. 5. 5; TB. iii. 9. 15. 3.

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The tendency to treat Indra as a doubtful personality is paralleled by the somewhat cynical tone which is certainly shown in speaking of him here and there. In one hymn² a number of human occupations and desires is mentioned and the refrain is ‘O Soma, flow for Indra’: the humorous tone of the poem seems obvious, and the refrain alone may have preserved it from oblivion. Another hymn³ in which Indra expresses his feelings of exhilaration, as the result of the Soma drink, may be considered to be the natural expression of the poet’s mind, in describing the splendid results of the glorious drink; it seems to be very doubtful whether the assumption of covert satire is not more natural and probable. The famous frog hymn⁴ also presents difficulties; it would be wrong to deny that it is intended as a rain spell,⁵ but there is improbability in the attempt to deny that there is some humour intended in the comparison of the frogs to priests: the idea that the hymn is a mere satire on the Brahmans will not do, for such a hymn would not have been preserved if composed, but a hymn may, like those to Indra, be preserved with incidental satire if it contains a religious or magic basis. The Vṛṣākapi hymn⁶ which shows Indra and Indrāṇī in dispute over a male ape may be adduced in this connexion, but in the absence of any surety as to its meaning it is difficult to rely upon it.

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² ix. 112.

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³ RV. x. 119.

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⁴ vii. 103. Cf. Bender, JAOS. xxxvii. 186 ff.

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⁵ Bloomfield, JAOS. xvii. 173–9; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 68; but see Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 101, 102; Hardy *Ved.-brahm. Periode*, p. 146. Cf. von Schroeder, *Mysterium und Mimus*, pp. 396 ff.; Hauer, *Die Anfänge der Yogapraxis*, pp. 68 ff.

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⁶ x. 86.

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The positive side of the tendency of the Rigveda to dissatisfaction with the gods of tradition is to be seen in the assertion of the unity of the gods and of the world. When all is said and done this is the one important contribution of the Rigveda to the philosophy of India. It asserts as a norm for the future development of that thought the effort to grasp more concretely and definitely the unity, which it asserts as a fact, but which it does not justify or explain in detail. The assertion is made with emphasis in a hymn⁷ attributed to a quite mythical author Dīrghatamas, who develops at much length the riddle of the universe. The form of the long hymn of fifty-two verses is remarkable and characteristic. It is a feature of the Vedic sacrifice that at certain points are found Brahmodyas, discussions about the Brahman, the holy power in the universe. Such theosophical riddles are especially common at the horse sacrifice and are often of simple enough kind: the one priest asks, ‘What is it that doth move alone? What is ever born again? What is the remedy of cold? and what the great pile?’ The answers here are obvious enough, and are given as the sun, the moon, the fire, and the earth respectively.¹ In this long hymn of Dīrghatamas we have a great series of riddles, but there is to be seen in them some degree of cohesion, the influence of the doctrine of the unity of the world. It is frankly expressed as regards the gods in one verse: ‘They call it Indra, Varuṇa, Mitra, Agni, and the winged bird (the sun): the one they call by many names, Agni, Yama, and Mātariçvan.’ The same idea appears more expressly still in another verse, where the poet asks the wiser to tell him what supported the six regions of the universe, who was the first unborn being. The hymn is of special further value in that it foreshadows one of the most common ideas of the philosophy of the Veda, the identity of the sacrifice and the world: the seven priests of earth are paralleled by seven in the heaven, the speech on earth by that in the heaven; there are also the earthly and the heavenly metres, the earthly Pravargya rite and the rain from heaven, the animal offering and the bull sacrifice of the gods, the altar and the end of the earth, the sacrifice itself and the navel of the world, and the Soma on earth and the sun and rain.

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⁷ i. 164, with Oldenberg’s notes and references.

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¹ VS. xxiii. 9 and 10. See Haug, *Vedische Räthselfragen und Räthselsprüche* (1875); Ludwig, RV. iii. 390 ff.; Bloomfield, JAOS. xv. 172; JB. ii. 158.

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The idea of unity is more fully developed and explained in a hymn,² which with all its defects is the most important in the history of the philosophy of India. It is the hymn of creation, and exhibits not merely the putting of the question of the nature of the universe, but an effort to enter into detail, followed by confession of doubt as to the value of the result achieved. The hymn is specially interesting for this latter point: it is true that it may be censured with justice for the fact that its conceptions are full of vagueness, and crudely seek to unite opposites, but the admission of difficulties is a point which must evoke admiration, not so much for the achievement, but for the thinker who had endeavoured to realize, and had failed to satisfy himself. While much of its content is repeated in the later philosophy, its spirit of doubt is wholly alien to the classical philosophical systems of India.

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² x. 129: the most often translated hymn of the RV. Cf. Whitney, JAOS. xi. p. cxi; ÇB. x. 5. 3. 1; JB. iii. 359 f. That it is a Brahmodya is not probable

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The poem commences with an assertion: in the beginning there was neither being nor not-being:³ there was no atmosphere nor sky: the question is asked what covering there was, and was there a fathomless abyss of the waters. There was neither death nor immortality, nor night nor day. There was nothing else in the world save the one which breathed, but without wind, of its own power. There was, however, darkness, and a moving ocean without light: through the might of fervour, Tapas, was born a living force enveloped in a shell. Then there developed desire, Kāma, the first seed of mind: the sages found the root of not-being in being, searching for it in the heart. Thus far the first four verses: the fifth is a puzzle: it may be referred to the sages who drove a division through the universe and distinguished the upper and the lower, the world of nature above, the principle of nature below: but this version is wholly problematical. The next two verses end with a deep expression of doubt: the gods are later than the creation and cannot know of its origin: whether the creation was made by itself or not, the overseer of it in the highest space of heaven he knows of it, or perhaps he knows not.

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³ So Oldenberg; contrast Geldner, *Zur Kosmogonie des RV.*, p. 16.

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The hymn is clearly difficult to understand: the part of the seers, which appears merely as a statement of what their reflections have arrived at, is even understood by Bloomfield¹ to be a cosmical action, indicating that they took part in the creation of the universe. This seems, however, unnatural and strained, but not more so than the interpretation of verse 5 adopted by Deussen,² which would make it into an assertion that the sages were able to discriminate between the thing in itself and the phenomenal world, between *natura naturans* and *natura naturata*. What is clear is that there is conceived as first existing one thing, which is described as breathing without wind,³ an effort to express a primitive nature different in essence from anything known to the priest, conceived perhaps metaphorically only as a dark ocean or chaos. In this through Tapas, which here must rather be cosmic than refer to the activity of seers or other human powers, by inward fervour, springs up the being enveloped in a shell, which in the later conception is the golden world egg. The next step in development is the appearance of desire, unless that it is to be taken as born of mind, when it is described as the first seed of mind. If so, the mind must be deemed to be an attribute of the one which develops in the shell, whence springs desire: in the alternative the phrase may be taken as the source which produces mind, and desire, unconscious will, may be held to produce conscious will or mind. The latter view, however, is unnatural in point of language and has the additional disadvantage that in the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka⁴ we already find that mind is given as prior to desire in a passage which is based on the hymn. Nor can we hold—and this is much more important—that Kāma was conceived as unconscious will: it is rather the natural expression for conscious desire, which would rise from the existence of mind as a substratum. The later philosophy makes the knowledge of desires depend on the existence of mind, and this idea may be foreshadowed here, where mind is made a cosmic *prius* of desire.¹ Beyond this the poet does not go: he ends with the suggestion of a supreme deity as distinct from the gods who are created, and ends with a doubt whether such a deity has power of knowledge, that is, whether it has consciousness at all. We cannot, therefore, really say whether or not the first cause of the world is deemed a conscious entity at all: the assertion that it was not-being, and yet not not-being, which is in words a little inconsistent with the assertion that the sages found the root of being in not-being, searching in the heart, is in effect an assertion that it was a peculiar sort of being, different from ordinary being. The reference to the heart, however, as the place of search reminds us that the heart even in the Rigveda seems the abode of mind,² and suggests that in the ultimate issue the final entity might be deemed to be possessed of mind, for consciousness, without an object, is the nature in the Vedānta of the Brahman and even of Puruṣa in the Sāṁkhya.

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¹ *Rel. of Veda*, p. 237. Cf. the claims of the Druids.

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² *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 124, 125. He compares the Eros of Hesiod (*Theog.* 120) and Parmenides (Aristotle, *Met.* 984 b 25).

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³ To compare (Radhakrishnan, *Ind. Phil.* i. 101) Aristotle’s deity, the unmoved mover, is to falsify entirely primitive thought.

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⁴ i. 23. 1.

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¹ In the Sāṁkhya it is from Buddhi ‘intellect’ that Ahaṁkāra, the principle of individuality which expresses itself in conscious will, springs.

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² Above, Part IV, Chap. 23, § 1.

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This hymn is the finest effort of the imagination of the Vedic poet, and nothing else equals it. The conceptions of unity, of fervour as the cause of development, of the power in the shell, of the primeval chaos of waters, are all familiar in the Brāhmaṇas and on the whole degraded in their development. In the Rigveda itself the other efforts to attain the conception of the unity of the universe are directed in the main to setting up personal deities, who are credited with the creation and government of the whole of the universe. Of these the most famous and enduring is Prajāpati.³ He it is who later at least is the god who is first born, the golden germ, Hiraṇyagarbha, who creates the whole universe, who gives life, whose commands the gods obey, whose shadow is death and immortality, who is lord of man and beast, of the mountain and the sea. Thus in the one god are summed up the duties of creator, of ruler, and preserver of the universe.

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³ x. 121.

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In the Brāhmaṇas Prajāpati is eternally identified with the year, the all-creator with the time in which he exercises his eternal process of creation, but this is not stated in the Rigveda, unless in a short hymn⁴ we are to find the conception of Prajāpati underlying the year. There fervour, Tapas, is made the starting-point of all: from it come order, Ṛta, and truth, the night, and the primeval ocean: from the ocean was born the year which rules over all, and as creator produces the sun and the moon, the heaven and the earth, the atmosphere and the light of the sun. The parallel to Prajāpati is close, but the identity is not to be certainly established.

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⁴ RV. x. 190; Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 134.

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Viçvakarman, ‘all-maker’, is another synonym of Prajāpati, and has two hymns⁵ of the tenth book devoted to his honour: they add, however, comparatively little to our appreciation of the beginnings of Vedic thought: but we find here the tendency which is found in Indian conceptions to insist that the creator, who is self-created, is not merely the material cause, but also the efficient cause of the world. The process, therefore, by which the world emerges from the unity at its base assumes a decidedly curious aspect: there is first the unity, which may be conceived as a creator god: then, derived from it, the waters or other primeval substance: then the god appears in the waters as a spirit to bring about the development of the universe. This triad of first principle, primitive matter, and the first-born of creation, is carried out mythologically in an interesting hymn to Brahmaṇaspati,¹ in which we learn of Dakṣa as father of Aditi and also her son, an absurdity in which the philosophic basis is clearly that of the conception of the three stages of creation.

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⁵ RV. x. 81 and 82.

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¹ RV. x. 72.

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Brahmaṇaspati is of interest, since his personality as the god of prayer is closely connected with the mighty power of the prayer to secure the ends of man. This idea finds expression also in the hymn² which celebrates Vāc, speech, as the supporter of the world, as the companion of the gods, and the foundation of religious activity and all its advantages: she appears as impelling the father in the beginning of things and again as being born in the waters. The idea which has, of course, long ago been compared by Weber with the Greek Logos, is ingenious: the will of the creator is thus considered as expressed in speech, but the idea is merely a secondary and unimportant one in the Rigveda, and even later is never destined to be developed in much detail, the weight being laid on the Brahman, at once the prayer and the holy power in the universe.

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² RV. x. 125; *cf.* 71; Weber, *Ind. Stud.* ix. 473–80; Brunnhofer, *Arische Urzeit*, pp. 390–4.

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Already in the hymn to Viçvakarman there appears the desire to parallel the creation of the universe with a sacrifice. This idea is carried to its fullest extent in the Puruṣasūkta of the Rigveda,³ one of its latest hymns, which has often already been mentioned. The first part of the hymn is a strong expression that the Puruṣa is the universe: the whole of this universe is but a quarter of him, three quarters are immortal; he has a thousand heads, eyes, and feet, and extends ten digits beyond the universe. In comparison with the normal gods he represents the whole of the world, and not one fraction only. The idea of the three stages appears here also: the Virāj springs from Puruṣa, and Puruṣa again from the Virāj, which must denote the waters in their cosmic aspect. The next part of the poem insists that the creation of the universe took the form of a sacrifice at which were present the gods, who could not logically have existed: the offering was a holocaust; from the juice of the burning of the offering sprang the speckled ghee, and from it are derived the animals of the air, the house, and the wild; all the Vedas, Ṛc, Sāman, and Yajus, are assigned to his burning, and further the animals with double incisors and those with a single set. Then by change of idea the four castes⁴ are derived from the cutting up of the body, and again by a further change the gods and the parts of the world are derived from him: the eye gives the sun, the breath the wind, the mind the moon, perhaps because of its clear light which might be compared with mind, the head the heaven, the feet the earth, and the navel the regions between. Time is explained as connected with the means of sacrifice: the rains were the butter, the summer the kindling wood, the autumn the gifts to the priests. The idea is crude and rough and so badly suited to the connexion with its context, that it is difficult not to believe that we have here the adaptation to the needs of a pantheistic view of a primitive and rude legend of the primeval giant, whence the world was born, an idea found in a different form in Norse mythology.¹

Linked texts (8)

Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Śatapathabrāhmaṇa — Yājñavalkya & Śāṇḍilya (Vedic teacher), Sanskrit
Taittirīyabrāhmaṇa — Sanskrit
Pāraskaragṛhyasūtra — Pāraskara, Sanskrit
Vājasaneyisaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Jaiminīyabrāhmaṇa — Sanskrit
Āśvalāyanagṛhyasūtra — Āśvalāyana, Sanskrit
Taittirīyāraṇyaka — Sanskrit