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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s11: § 11. The Way of Salvation

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s11

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§ 11. The Way of Salvation

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In the view of the Buddhist the world is misery, and the whole end of man is to remove the misery of existence from himself by the destruction of that desire, which leads ever from birth to birth. But the wholesale pessimism of the Buddhist is by no means characteristic of the Upaniṣads: to find real pessimism in them, as apart from mild expressions of the unsatisfactoriness of the finite compared with the infinite, is impossible. It is also impossible, therefore, to trace to the empirical despair of the world the growth of pessimism; the most that in this regard can be said is that the tendency to take a pessimistic view of life may have been favoured among the upper classes of the Indians by the effect of the climate⁴ and admixture with the aborigines, which was steadily taking place and was weakening the mental character of the race. Of the latter fact there can be no doubt: the genius of the Upaniṣads is different from that of the Rigveda, however many ties may connect the two periods. The emancipation theories of the Upaniṣads must, therefore, be traced to some more intellectual ground.

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⁴ The pressure of the Brahmanical system is a doubtful factor, and is denied by Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, p. 341. He ignores the climate; that is, however, clearly wrong, as shown by the effects on human life of the climate at the present day. Cf. Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 102 ff.; Rhys Davids, *Hibbert Lectures, 1881*, p. 22; H. Güntert, *Der arische Weltkönig*, p. 227, who greatly overestimates the pessimism of the Upaniṣads.

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In the Rigveda and in the Brāhmaṇas the ideal aimed at is length of days on earth and life in the world of heaven in companionship with the gods. In the Brāhmaṇas we find that the reward of community of being, companionship, and fellowship with the gods is promised to the performers of various rites, in the case of diverse gods, Agni most of all, but also Vāyu, Indra, Varuṇa, Āditya, Bṛhaspati, Prajāpati, and finally even with the impersonal Brahman.⁵ The gods are then reduced to the position of being no more than means by which entry to the Brahman can be obtained, and even Agni is placed in this position as well as Indra and Prajāpati. When the Brahman is also regarded as the Ātman, the end becomes unity with the Ātman, and this was the saving mode of emancipation, before transmigration was believed in. The knower of the wise long-emancipated youthful Ātman ceases to fear death;⁶ the finder of the Ātman ceases to be stained by action;⁷ knowledge leads to the place where desire is at rest, where no sacrificial gift reaches, nor the penance of the ignorant.¹ It is clear that what is contemplated is attaining by knowledge union with the Brahman, but the influence of the traditional view is seen in the fact that it is still regarded as the arrival at a world of heaven as if the Ātman were without the self.² The same conflict appears in the view that the Ātman is the infinitely great and the infinitely small, and that on the departure of the soul, it is to go to the Ātman, and enter in. In all these passages it is necessary to recognize that the knowledge of the Ātman leads only to unity with the Ātman after death, and that the unity is conceived on the old model of community with a deity.

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⁵ ÇB. ii. 6. 4. 8; xi. 4. 4. 1, 21; 6. 2. 2, 3; TB. iii. 10. 9. 11; 11. 6. Immortality even in life is secured by TS. vi. 6. 9. 2.

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⁶ AV. x. 8. 44.

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⁷ TB. iii. 12. 9. 8.

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¹ ÇB. x. 5. 4. 15.

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² Deussen, *op. cit.*, p. 343.

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A further and important step is undoubtedly taken with the recognition of the fact that the emancipation desired is already achieved in this life by means of the recognition of the fact of the unity of the self and the absolute.³ He who knows ‘I am the Brahman’ becomes the universe: even the gods have no power to prevent him so becoming, for he is its soul.⁴ Or, in the words of the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad,⁵ ‘He who knows the supreme Brahman becomes the Brahman.’ The mere knowledge constitutes the deliverance: the man ceases to be affected by any desires of any kind: his deeds good or bad cease to have any effect on him:⁶ like the reed stalk in the fire, his works consume themselves away:⁷ as water does not stay on the lotus leaf, further works do not cling to him.⁸ The discussions of Yājñavalkya with the king, Janaka,⁹ reveal the truth that the absence of desire, the disappearance of every passion,¹⁰ is the mark of the man becoming immortal and attaining to the Brahman. Similarly, in veiled language he informs the king that death will not produce any essential change in the self, and he denies in his discussion with Maitreyī that there is any consciousness after death.¹¹ Though later interpreted materialistically by the Cārvākas, the sense is clearly otherwise. After death the indestructible self ceases to have that division of consciousness as subject and object, which gives the empirical consciousness of the world. The wise know that there is in the universe as we have it no reality, nor is there any further reality in immortality, if understood as a prolonged individual existence after death.

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³ Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, iv. 98.

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⁴ BAU. i. 4. 10.

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⁵ iii. 2. 9, which Hertel (ed., pp. 49 f.) treats as a working over of an original identification with the personal Puruṣa.

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⁶ BAU. iv. 4. 22; TU. ii. 9; Kauṣ. i. 4; iii. 1. So analogously in the doctrine of St. Paul and Lao Tsé enlightenment frees from the law; in the Brāhmaṇas (e.g. ÇB. i. 6. 1. 21) sacrifice has a similar potency; Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 114.

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⁷ CU. v. 24. 3.

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⁸ CU. iv. 14. 3.

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⁹ BAU. iv. 2; cf. 3 and 4.

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¹⁰ This ideal is, of course, dominant in later thought; by a singular delusion, Rhys Davids (*Early Buddhism*, p. 59) persists in his denial of the obvious truth. Cf. de la Vallée Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 60, 414.

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¹¹ *pretya saṁjñā nāsti*; BAU. ii. 4. 12; iv. 5. 13; CU. vi. 9 (deep-sleep and death are both meant).

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The attainment of emancipation by this knowledge which gives it, and is it, results in the immediate cessation of every emotion: how can man desire anything who knows himself to be all? How can he fear when there is no other? There can be no sorrow for him nor pain: he is like a blind man who has gained his sight, a wounded man healed, a sick man made whole. All his works are annihilated, as they have meaning only for an individuality. Future works have no effect upon him, but evil he cannot wish to do, since he has no desires:¹ he may, if he cares, live on for the full length of life or do any action so long as he does it disinterestedly, a view which the Īçā Upaniṣad offers, despite its paradoxical appearance, doubtless as a sop to those who did not wish to be denied the position of emancipation, but preferred also to enjoy the things of life. He cannot again ever feel any doubt;² he has the full and abiding knowledge for all time.

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¹ BAU. iv. 4. 23.

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² CU. iii. 14. 4.

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The view that the emancipation is attained in the moment of the knowledge is, however, very far from being universally expressed or believed. The idea on the contrary occurs, ever and again, that the result of the enlightenment is only complete at the end of the life of the self, and that the enlightenment takes the form of an alteration in space to a new abode.³ These ideas are, of course, merely the ideas regarding the fate of the soul, transferred to the new conception of the gaining of knowledge. The view that the attainment of knowledge brought release was one, which, we may safely assume, was not easy to grasp or to hold, for the very good reason that it is as a matter of fact unintelligible. Hence the Upaniṣads as a rule merely consider that the advantages of the acquisition of knowledge are the winning of the desired immortality: the view of the merger of the Ātman in the Ātman as a mere recognition of identity is not the conception usually found, which is rather that the reward is eternity. Thus in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, in which has been seen the doctrine of final release by Deussen, there is no trace, as Whitney⁴ has clearly pointed out, of anything more than the mere recognition of the winning of immortality as the result of knowledge, in this case philosophical knowledge, not as in the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa,⁵ from which the conception of the Upaniṣad is borrowed, ritual knowledge. So we have many other accounts, all of the same kind: the soul is supposed to go out by the veins to the rays of the sun and to the sun;⁶ in the accounts in the transmigration doctrine⁷ the souls even of the men who have acquired knowledge are conceived as going by a long journey to the world of Brahman and the same idea is repeated in the variant versions of the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad⁸ where from the moon such souls go by the worlds of fire, wind, Varuṇa, Indra, Prajāpati and then reach Brahman. In the Aitareya Āraṇyaka⁹ we learn that Vāmadeva, as a result of knowing the Ātman, ascended from this world, and attained immortality in yonder world of heaven. The Kauṣītaki also has an account in detail of the world of Brahman, with the Aparājita palace, which is derived from Varuṇa’s Rigvedic abode, the tree Ilya, the Sālajya city, and the sea Āra, the later conception being perhaps derived from the seas, Ara and Ṇya, in the world of Brahman invented by the Chāndogya Upaniṣad.¹ Yet another version makes the emancipated man be separated from the non-emancipated by the fact that at death his soul goes out by the 101st vein,² whence he proceeds by the crown of the head, fire, wind, and sun up to Brahman. All these are proofs of the perfectly simple meaning given to saving knowledge by the Upaniṣads generally. The knowledge might really confer the enlightenment in the view of a few minds, but the overwhelming opinion of the age was that the reward was the heaven in one form or another.⁴ The later Vedānta endeavoured to bring order into these ideas, and reconcile them with the real nature of emancipation by the theory of the contrast between the Jīvanmukta, who obtains release in perfection only on death, but who is really released in life by his attainment of knowledge, and the subject of the progressive emancipation, Kramamukti, by which the passage to the world of Brahman took place before the final release by the attainment of complete insight, but these devices remain as unnatural as possible.⁵

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³ The Īçā (11; Maitr. vii. 9) actually provides for a regime of works (termed Avidyā) to conquer repeated death, and of knowledge, to conquer the migration, as simultaneously to be pursued.

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⁴ TAPA. 1890, pp. 88 ff.; JAOS. xiii. pp. ciii ff.; KU. iii. 7–9.

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⁵ iii. 11. 8.

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⁶ CU. viii. 6. 1–5.

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⁷ BAU. vi. 2; CU. v. 10; Nirukta, Par. ii. 8, 9. See also CU. iv. 15. 5, 6; Muṇḍ. i. 2. 11.

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⁸ i. 2; cf. JB. i. 18. 4 ff.; 49. 7 ff.

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⁹ ii. 5; Keith, *Aitareya Āraṇyaka*, p. 234, n. 9.

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¹ CU. viii. 5. 3.

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² CU. viii. 6. 6; KU. vi. 16; *suṣumṇā*, Maitr. vi. 21. Cf. PU. iii. 7.

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³ Cf. the power of motion and enjoyment of women ascribed in the CU. viii. 12. 3; BAU. iv. 3. 15, however illogically. So TU. iii. 10, 5 f., where motion, eating, changing form, and singing occur.

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⁴ This agrees precisely with the views of Açoka, whose preoccupation is with men’s future heavenly bliss; Oltramare, *L’histoire des idées théosophiques*, ii. 55.

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⁵ ÇU. i. 4, 11; v. 7; Muṇḍ. iii. 2. 6; cf. Oltramare, *L’histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 208–210.

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