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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s1: § 1. The General Character of the Brāhmaṇa Philosophy

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s1

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English

§ 1. The General Character of the Brāhmaṇa Philosophy

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THE value of the Brāhmaṇas as sources of philosophy is difficult to determine with any accuracy. They are works in which the imagination of successive generations of priests has been allowed to run riot: there is no moderation in their conception, and no great Brāhmaṇa is, as far as can be judged, the production of a single mind.¹ The one great merit of Greek philosophy, the appearance of clear-cut ideas expressed in works of individual authorship, is wholly wanting for us in the Brāhmaṇas, and the question constantly obtrudes itself to what extent we can believe that the priests by whom these texts were composed and handed down held the views which they wrote down. In many cases it may be taken that they did not; the works abound in their explanations of rites with all sorts of absurdities, which we need not accuse the priests of being so foolish as not to recognize as absurdities; but the question of the dividing line between profoundity and absurdity presents itself with the greatest frequency.

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¹ ÇB. xi. and i. are obviously instances of a later and more comprehensive, and an earlier and more naïve, treatment of the same topic. For the strata in AB. see Keith, HOS. xxv. 40 ff. The Agnicayana rites and speculations are clearly later than most other portions of the ritual discussions; cf. Oldenberg, GN. 1917, p. 16.

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It is, however, another question whether we can acquiesce in the theory of Deussen² that the Brāhmaṇas in various places are conscious of higher philosophical views, which they ignore and turn to ritual purposes. The proofs which he adduces of his theory are far from carrying conviction. In his view the account of the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa³ of the origin of the Naciketas fire is really posterior in order of conception to the account in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. It is there told that Vājaçravasa made an offering, at which he gave to the priests all his goods, retaining, however, his son, Naciketas, as the ritual prescribes; the boy, however, insisted that he should also be given,⁴ and his father in just irritation at his persistence gave him to death. The young man goes, in the true spirit of fairy tale, to the house of Yama, who is away, and who, therefore, for three nights fails in the important duty of the due reception of guests. He must, therefore, on his return make atonement, and he gives the lad three boons. Naciketas chooses the kind reception of him by his father on his return, the imperishableness of his due reward for his sacrifices and gifts to the priests,¹ and the freedom from repeated death—not in this world, in all probability. In the two latter cases the god teaches the boy the way of piling the Naciketas fire. To this Deussen takes exception, and thinks that originally the means to the third wish must have been the knowledge of the eternal redemption from the bonds of death, and he holds, therefore, that in the Brāhmaṇa we have the expression of a polemical attitude to the more philosophical doctrine. The idea appears, however, to be one wholly unjustifiable. The aim of the ritual is simply to assert the value of this fire, and the repetition of the fire as the means of knowledge of the end desired is perfectly natural and simple. That the boy asked for the grant of final release is nowhere hinted at: what he fears, according to the language used, is simply that, as is often threatened in the later Brāhmaṇas, he may fall in due course, even in the next world, under the control of death.

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² *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 172-80. Oltramare (*L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 127 ff.) tacitly rejects this view.

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³ iii. 11. 8.

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⁴ No question of the sacrifice of Naciketas arises; it is all a piece of imagination, parallel to the visit of Bhṛgu to the other world, recounted in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa (xi. 6. 1) and the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa, i. 42-4 (*JAOS.* xv. 234 ff.). Barua's view (*Prebuddh. Ind. Phil.*, p. 265), that the Naciketas legend represents the philosophy of the Gotamakas mentioned in the Aṅguttara, is clearly quite without plausibility.

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¹ Cf. JB. ii. 53; KB. vii. 4.

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Nor is there any happier result to be seen in the second case adduced by Deussen. It is of course later in the Upaniṣads the doctrine that the whole essence of man is contained in the Ātman, ‘self’, that the essence of the world is also an Ātman, and that the two are identical. This idea he finds expressed in a sentence of the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa,² where it is said that the various gods, the plants, and trees are in various parts of man, Indra in his strength, Parjanya in his head, the lord, that is Rudra-Çiva, in his anger, the Ātman in his Ātman, the Ātman in his heart, the heart in him, he in the immortal, the immortal in the Brahman. In this passage he thinks that the assertion of the identity of the Ātman is really a reference to the identity of the self of man and of the universe, an assertion of the fundamental view of the Upaniṣads wrapped up with a different view. The answer to this is clearly that the passage cannot be pressed to yield so much: it is possible that it simply has the sense that the body of the world is in the body of man, but it is probably merely a vague identification of self with self, without any profound meaning being either felt, or, though felt, hidden. The conscious identification of the universal spirit and the individual is a very different thing from such a phrase as that in question, and the theory that the phrase indicates a knowledge, but a degradation, of the higher truth, is too far-fetched.

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² iii. 10. 8.

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The point is of importance, since the Vedic tradition makes a clear distinction between Brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads, though it attaches as we have seen the Upaniṣads to Brāhmaṇas. The distinction corresponds, we may fairly say, in the main to a change of time and still more to a change of view. The Upaniṣads hold in some degree at least the doctrine of transmigration, and, though not in a developed condition, the pessimism which follows on it: these views are not those of the Brāhmaṇas, which, taken all in all, know not transmigration, have no conception of pessimism, and therefore seek no release from the toils of life, for which in reality there is no ending. These are fundamental distinctions, and they give an essentially different aspect to the speculations of the Brāhmaṇas as compared with those of the Upaniṣads. A further distinction lies in the fact that the Brāhmaṇas are essentially connected with the doctrine of the sacrifice. The sacrifice clearly occupied the minds of the priests to the practical exclusion of all else, and their theories were in large measure devoted to the consideration of its relation to the universe, to the gods, and to mèn.¹ In the Upaniṣads this is not the case ; the sacrifice is still here and there the subject of speculation, but the speculation is no longer based on the view that the sacrifice is all in all. Hence it is that so little progress can be seen in the Brāhmaṇas towards the development of a real philosophy. The Rigveda carries us nearly as far as anything excogitated in this period.

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¹ This is the *bandhu* investigated, not the connexion between the rites and the formulae as formerly held by Winternitz (*Gesch. d. ind. Litt.* i. 164, n. 3; see iii. 613). See Oldenberg, *Die Weltanschauung der Brāhmaṇatexte*, p. 5.

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The conception of order is one which is wholly strange to the Brāhmaṇas, and any treatment of the philosophy implied and contained in them must neglect the divisions of these texts, which in the main follow merely the order of the rites performed in the sacrificial ritual. The most important of these conceptions from the point of view of philosophy are (1) the endeavour to state the nature of the highest principle of the universe, (2) the theory of the sacrifice, and (3) the nature of truth and right. On all of these topics there is available much material, but the sameness of the ideas is obvious through a multitude of detailed differences.

Cites (4)