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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s12: § 12. The Ethics of the Upaniṣads and Yoga

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s12

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§ 12. The Ethics of the Upaniṣads and Yoga

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In comparison with the intellectual activity of the Brahmans the ethical content of the Upaniṣads must be said to be negligible and valueless.⁶ The total impression conveyed by the Upaniṣads is that of an intellectual exercise, whose aim was the attainment partly of immediate goods, partly of the highest good, normally the happiness of heaven which was often materially enough conceived, and there is made no attempt to make the theoretical philosophy a ground of morality of any sort. There are, here and there, moral maxims enunciated, but these are of no consequence and rise in no way above popular morality. On the contrary, the essential fact is expressed by Indra in his dialogue with Pratardana:⁷ the possession of knowledge makes a man independent of all morality, the slaying of an embryo, the murder of a father or of a mother. It is, of course, true that these statements are not meant seriously, and that we may console ourselves by supposing that the priest did not hold that these crimes could really be disposed of in this way, though of that we cannot be certain as the same results can be attained by ritual practices. But they must have felt an exaggerated value to attach to their speculations, and have completely failed to see that morality is the most objective and essential part of philosophy, and is something other than sacrificial activity or intellectual gymnastics.

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⁶ Radhakrishnan’s dictum (*Ind. Phil.* i. 243), ‘Morality, according to the Upaniṣads, expresses the true nature of things’, is not consistent with other views expressed by him (p. 230), and is wholly contrary to the spirit of the Upaniṣads.

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⁷ Kauṣ. iii. 1.

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Here and there we have views which are sound so far as they go; the allegory of life¹ as a Soma sacrifice postulates that the fee shall be asceticism, liberality, right dealing, non-injury to life, and truthfulness, and a list of a student's duties is given in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad.² The student is bidden by his teacher not to be negligent of truth, virtue, welfare, prosperity, study and teaching, and in due course propagation of children. Further, duties to the gods, the Fathers, and parents are inculcated, and teachers and guests are to be ranked as gods. Those acts which are irreproachable alone should be practised, and good deeds alone should be revered. Refreshments with a seat should be provided for deserving Brahmans. Giving is regulated;³ one should give with faith, one should not give without faith, one should give with plenty, with modesty, with fear,⁴ with sympathy. Further, a very useful practical rule is enjoined; if the student has doubt concerning an act or conduct, then recourse should be had to the attitude of Brahmans, competent to judge, apt, devoted, not harsh, lovers of virtue; as they behave themselves in such a case, so should the student demean himself, and similarly should he act in regard to persons who are spoken against. There is thus given as the norm of conduct the average righteous man, who embodies in himself the standard of action. In the same Upaniṣad⁵ in addition to the essential study and teaching a further list is given which runs: right dealing, truthfulness, asceticism, self-restraint, tranquility, maintenance of the sacred fire, the offering of the Agnihotra, hospitality, courtesy, and duties to children, wives, and grandchildren. Another text sees in the voice of the thunder the rules 'Be restrained, liberal, merciful'.⁶ So we have condemned as sinners the stealer of gold, the drinker of Surā, the murderer of a Brahman, and the defiler of his teacher's bed, and their associates,⁷ while Açvapati, the prince, boasts that his kingdom has no thief, churl, or drunkard, none who neglect the sacrifice or the sacred lore, no adulterer or courtesan.⁸ This is, it is clear, purely elementary: the failure to rise to the conception even of a system of ethics is a sign not so much, as Deussen⁹ suggests, of the virtue of the age, which is not proved by any other evidence, but rather of the lack of ethical sense on the part of the Brahmans. Philosophically also the doctrine of the absolute as all-pervading resulted in the negation of human responsibility: it is the deity who really acts in and through man, and the latter cannot be blamed for what he thus seemingly does.¹

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¹ CU. iii. 17.

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² i. 11.

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³ Cf. AA. ii. 3. 6. For Buddhism cf. Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, pp. 117 f., 279 ff.

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⁴ Possibly of hard-heartedness; cf. RV. x. 117. 5. Cf. PB. xvi. 5. 6; 6. 1; 9. 2; AA. ii. 3. 6, which urges moderation in generosity.

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⁵ i. 9.

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⁶ BAU. v. 2.

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⁷ CU. v. 10. 9.

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⁸ CU. v. 11. 5.

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⁹ *Phil. of Up.*, p. 366.

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¹ JUB. i. 5; above, § 6.

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In truth the aims of the Brahmans were bent on things which are not ethical at all, immediate profit on the one hand, or, on the other, the closer realization of the absolute in which they believed, and which they desired to appreciate in full enjoyment. The ideal is embodied in the most curious forms. Knowledge in the Upaniṣads is essentially profitable,² and by no means for spiritual ends alone. He who knows the world as fivefold obtains it; he who knows Indra as without a rival has no rival; the possessor of knowledge cannot be injured by an enemy; neither the northern nor the southern mountains can prevail against him, and his foes die around him, an idea found in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa.³ It is an easy step to the result already seen; knowledge obliterates evil; one who knows may consort with even the murderer without being contaminated.⁴ With a strange contrast to Sokrates who held that the wise man would necessarily be good, we are repeatedly assured that knowledge relieves man from worrying as to whether he has done wrong or right in any matter.⁵ Entry into the absolute is accompanied by the casting aside of good and evil deeds, which are transferred on one view to one's relatives or foes respectively.⁶ With an anticipation of modern idealism, and in the true spirit of mysticism, good and bad may be regarded as imperfect concepts for which there is no proper place in the absolute; if speech were not, neither right nor wrong, true nor false, good nor bad, pleasant nor unpleasant, could be known.⁷ The absolute self is unsullied by evil to which he is external; an etymology proves it; for he is called the person, Puruṣa, since he burned (*uṣ*) up evil before (*pūrva*) all these worlds.⁸ In uniting with him the individual parts utterly from good or bad.⁹ We see this even in sleep, for in it neither evil nor good attaches itself effectively to the self.¹⁰ When we are told¹¹ that the world is truth, there is no ethical implication, for it is plain that there is here merely an assertion of the reality of the universe, the word Satya conveying both senses, and in the theistic Çvetāçvatara¹² the description of the lord as the bringer of right and the remover of evil is due to the confusion, there constant, between the personal deity and the absolute. The emancipated self possesses autonomy, but it is not an ethical state;¹ it is merely a condition of unhindered power, the ideal of a despot, the state of the man who goes up and down these worlds, eating what he desires, assuming what form he desires.²

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² BAU. i. 4. 17; 5. 12; CU. i. 2. 8; BAU. i. 3. 28; 5. 21; v. 4; TU. ii. 1; iii. 7; Kauṣ. i. 7; ii. 13; Muṇḍ. iii. 2. 9.

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³ viii. 28; *cf.* TU. iii. 10. 4.

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⁴ BAU. v. 7; 14. 8; CU. v. 10. 9 f.; 24. 3. *Cf.* BAU. iv. 4. 23; CU. iv. 14. 3; PU. v. 5; Maitr. iii. 2; vi. 18. Contrast KU. ii. 24; iii. 7, 8.

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⁵ TU. ii. 9; BAU. iv. 4. 22; Muṇḍ. iii. 1. 3.

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⁶ Kauṣ. i. 4.

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⁷ CU. vii. 2. 1.

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⁸ KU. v. 11; Īçā 8; BAU. i. 4. 1.

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⁹ BAU. iv. 3. 21 f.

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¹⁰ BAU. iv. 3. 7, 16; CU. viii. 6. 3.

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¹¹ CU. vi. 16.

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¹² vi. 6.

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¹ CU. vii. 25. 2; TU. i. 6. 2.

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² TU. iii. 10. 5.

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Prajāpati utterly condemns³ the doctrine, derived allegedly from his teaching by the demon Virocana, which asserts that the man who consults his own desires in this life obtains both this world and the world to come; this view is described as devilish, naturally enough since it would have turned all against gifts to the priests or sacrifice. But we have instead the clear doctrine⁴ that the self is dearer even than a son, and that whatever is dear, be it wife, sons, wealth, the Brahman class, the Kṣatriya class, the gods, worlds, anything, is dear not for itself, but for the sake of the self or soul. We have here, not the psychological theory that things are desired for their pleasure, not for themselves, nor the suggestion that all love is ultimately self-love, but the recognition of the fact of the unity of the whole, which finds its truth in the self. Plainly, however, there is no attempt to develop a positive morality⁵ which would render empiric selfishness wrong on the score that it was based on a false distinction between self and not-self. On the contrary we find only emphasized throughout the necessity of caring for one's own salvation; Yājñavalkya abandons his faithful wives to seek the welfare of his soul, just as the Buddha abandons his young bride and his child, because they are hindrances to the attainment of release.

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³ CU. viii. 7 f.

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⁴ BAU. ii. 4; iv. 5.

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⁵ Radhakrishnan (*Ind. Phil.* i. 228 ff., 242 ff.) ignores the fundamental moral indifference of the Upaniṣads by reinterpreting them in the light of absolute idealism.

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The true ideal, therefore, of the seeker for truth is embodied in the practice of asceticism and the adoption of renunciation: by turning away from the things of this world, and by concentrating unnaturally the mind on the object, the vision beatific was to be obtained: the utter incompatibility of this with the purely intellectual view, that the recognition of the Brahman as the self was emancipation, is obvious, but contradictions *in adjecto* are the normal characteristic of the Upaniṣads. Hence was developed the scheme by which the old rule of life was complicated and a series of four Āçramas, ‘places of asceticism’, was devised, through which the man should pass on his way to his home in the heaven.

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In the earliest Upaniṣads we find only the conception that, beside the life of the student and the householder, men might give themselves up to ascetic practices in their seeking for the truth. There was no idea that the stages of life should be successive, ending with the ascetic stage: the ascetic stage might follow the stage of household life if desired, but equally it might not.⁶ But in the later Upaniṣads, such as the Jābāla⁷, we find the four stages ordered as student, householder, anchorite, Vānaprastha, and finally wandering beggar, Parivrājaka, Bhikṣu. The first two stages remain much as in the Brāhmaṇa period: it is of interest that we hear of cases, where a pupil seems to have been used by his alleged teacher mainly for the purpose of tending his cattle, in return for which the teaching might be long delayed, as in the case of Satyakāma.¹ Other pupils again were deemed unworthy of the teaching they desired: Upakosala² tended the fires for twelve years without his teacher making up his mind to trust him with the sacred knowledge. The householder may still attain the world of Brahman by attention to his duties, if he continues to study and brings up pious sons and pupils, subduing his organs in the self and slaying no life, save at the sacrificial ground. But another view condemns such persons to life in the moon, and then to return to earth again. Sacrifice, Veda study, liberality, and the production of sons are still the chief duties, though, as we have seen, the tendency was growing to reduce the sacrifice to symbolic acts.

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⁶ CU. viii. 15; ii. 23. 1; v. 10; BAU. iv. 2. 22; iii. 8. 10.

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⁷ 4. Cf. also N. Law, IA. lii. 272 ff. S. Dutt (*Early Buddhist Monachism*, chap. ii) holds that the fourth Āçrama is an addition to the Brahmanical system of the Çramaṇas, wandering teachers of semi-Aryanized eastern communities. This seems quite unproved.

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¹ CU. iv. 4. 5.

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² CU. iv. 10. 1, 2.

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The late Vaikhānasa Dharmasūtra lays down that there are four categories of householder. The first (*vārttāvṛtti*) devotes himself to the duty of agriculture, cattle rearing or trade. The second (*çālīna*) performs regularly the domestic offerings, Pākayajñas, and, after establishing his fire, carries out each fortnight the new and full moon offerings, and every four months the four-month offerings, as well as twice a year the animal offering, and once the Soma offering. The third (*yāyāvara*) performs the Çrauta sacrifices, including the Soma sacrifice, for himself and also acts as priests for others, whence his name of ‘Wanderer’; he studies and teaches pupils; he gives and accepts gifts; he maintains his fire and entertains guests. The fourth (*ghorācārika*) is a man of severe observances, for he offers Iṣṭis, studies and gives gifts, practising specially rigorous abstinence in the months Mārgaçīrṣa and Jyaiṣṭha, performing morning and evening the Agnihotra, and maintaining the fire with fruits of the wood. We need not suppose that this ideal scheme corresponded to any very definite practice; it is noteworthy that it recognizes that in many cases the householder was more busied in his business than in the performance of his domestic ritual.

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The business of teaching³ was doubtless carried on by many of the householders, as well as by those who had passed this stage. For the early Vedic period we have no indication of anything corresponding to the later Maṭh, where large bodies of teachers and pupils were united in a loose form of monastic life. We seem to find nothing more than individual teachers attracting a larger or smaller number of pupils; the ideal seems to have been that a true student must dwell in his teacher’s house (*antevāsin*), and this fact alone would negative large bodies. The epic tradition⁴ seems to suggest that five was a maximum. From this simple relationship may be explained a dominant feature of the Buddhist and later monastic system, the free right of any person who had entered on a course of study to abandon it. The development of monastic systems which soon became common to all sects was furthered by the rise of Buddhism, though it need not be held to have been a specific Buddhist innovation, for it may easily have risen spontaneously among Buddhists Jains and Brahmans alike as the outcome of their competition for public favour.

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³ Cf. Weber, *Religionssoziologie*, ii. 157 ff.

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⁴ Mahābhārata, xii. 328. 41.

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The third stage, that of the anchorite, is not distinguished by Yājñavalkya from that of the wanderer: when he decides to give up the life of the householder he contemplates wandering about as a beggar.¹ The value of penance for the knowledge of the Brahman is not overestimated in the oldest Upaniṣads: the king Bṛhadratha,² after most painful mortification, is still far from attaining the desired knowledge. Asceticism, it is even said, leads only to the way of the Fathers, and has not the result of future emancipation. The man who really realizes the Brahman is above the Āçramas;³ he has realized all that is aimed at by asceticism; he has no longer individuality or family connexion, he wanders about homeless, begging, without possessions, and bears the name Sannyāsin, the renouncer of everything. How this ideal can be logically derived from knowledge of the Ātman is nowhere explained in the Upaniṣads.

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¹ BAU. ii. 4. 1.

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² Maitr. i. 2.

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³ ÇU. vi. 21.

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With the usual curious turns of Indian thought the Sannyāsin, who is really a person beyond the Āçramas as the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad calls him, becomes in the later Upaniṣads a man striving for the knowledge of the Ātman by means of asceticism. He should undertake this stage only as a rule after being a forest hermit, though he may enter into it direct from the householder's state.⁴ He parts solemnly after sacrifice from all his kin, abandons all sacrifice for ever, gives up the sacred cord and the tonsure, lays aside his former garments and his staff, is clad in rags and a loincloth, and wanders about save at the period of the rains, living on what he begs and inhabiting lonely spots: some texts even demand nudity: he bears now a triple staff or a single staff, to signify perhaps the reconciliation of caste differences. Only one night may he live in a village, five in a town, but in the four months of the rains he may stay there. He is to recite Upaniṣads and the Āraṇyaka, to meditate, perform bathings, be indifferent to every human emotion, and show charity to all creatures. He must practise Yoga, that is, exercises intended to bring the mind into mystic union with the absolute. Though the system of the later Yoga,⁵ which is linked to the Sāṁkhya, and which, therefore, in theory aims really primarily at the isolation of the spirit and nature, not at union with the divinity, is not found set out in the same precise detail, most of its elements can be traced in the Upaniṣads,¹ and in the Kaṭha we are distinctly told that it is necessary to suppress speech and mind, merging the latter in the knowledge self, that in the great self, and that in the calm self, the absolute. The highest stage is attained when the five senses cease to give knowledge, when the mind and the intellect are at rest; the firm restraint of the senses is Yoga. The Çvetāçvatara devotes its second chapter to the praise of Yoga, prefacing it with prayers, adapted from the Taittirīya Saṁhitā, in which the aid of Savitṛ is invoked to secure the application of the mind to the task set before the Yogin. He should hold erect his body, and cause his senses and mind to enter into the heart, check his movements, and breathe with diminished intensity through the nose, restraining from distraction his mind. A clean level spot, free from pebbles, fire or gravel, favourable to thought by the presence of water, not offensive to the eye, protected from the wind and secluded, is recommended. Fog, smoke, sun, fire, wind, fireflies, lightning, crystal, the moon, are given as the preliminary appearances which present themselves to the Yogin; lightness, healthiness, steadiness or freedom from desire, clearness of countenance, pleasantness of voice, sweetness of odour, and scantiness of excretions are the first stage in his progress. The revelation of the absolute procures freedom from fetters and sorrow; sickness, old age, and death are overcome. The Upaniṣad, however, does not rely on Yoga alone; the one is attainable not by Yoga merely but by reflection (*sāṁkhya*) also, terms in which we need not see references to established schools, as does Oldenberg.² The insistence on breathing as a matter of importance is noteworthy;³ restraint of breath not merely banishes evil influences, it tends to generate heat, thus producing Tapas, and by restraint serves to deaden the activity of the brain, thus favouring the feeling of severance from the world and union with the absolute.

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⁴ See Jābāla, Āçrama, Sannyāsa, Kaṇṭhaçruti (or Kaṭhaçruti), Brahma, Āruṇeya, and Paramahaṁsa.

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⁵ The sense of ‘harnessing’ seems to be found in *ātmānaṁ yuñjīta* in Mahānār. lxiii. 21; Maitr. vi. 3; as a union of breath and Om, Yoga is found in Maitr. vi. 25; in KU. ii. 12 it is practically equivalent to the restraint of the senses. Cf. above, § 8.

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¹ e.g. KU. iii. 13; vi. 10, 11; cf. Hopkins, JAOS. xxii. 333 ff. According to Tuxen (*Yoga*, pp. 20 ff.) the prime sense of Yoga is Samādhi; Charpentier (ZDMG. lxv. 846, 847) thinks practical effort is the root sense. Cf. Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 300–2.

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² *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 280. Contrast Deussen, *Sechzig Upanishad's*^2, p. 308, n. 3, who justly insists on the parallel of *dhyānayoga* in i. 3.

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³ Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 322 ff.

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The Maitrāyaṇīya repeatedly develops the theme; the state to be aimed at is reaching the fourth stage,⁴ by the suppression of the living self. By pressing the tip of the tongue against the palate,⁵ by suppressing voice, mind, and breath, one sees the Brahman, the self, and becomes selfless. Another device, forming the beginning of an advance by sound to the absolute without sound, consists in closing the ears with the thumbs,⁶ when the sound of the ether within the heart becomes audible. By the suppression of breath the light of the ether within the heart is made manifest.⁷ Or again by using the sound Om as an arrow, with mind as its point, the Yogin pierces the darkness and sees him who sparkles like a wheel of fire, the colour of the sun, the Brahman that shines beyond the darkness, in the sun, the moon, the fire, and the lightning.¹ The oneness of the breath and mind and also of the senses and the relinquishment of all conditions of existence is declared to be Yoga. A formal list of six elements of Yoga appears in the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad.² These are Prāṇāyāma, ‘regulation of the breathing out and in’, Pratyāhāra, ‘suppression’ of the organs of sense such as the mind, so as to prevent its activity spoiling concentration, Dhyāna, ‘meditation’, Dhāraṇā, ‘concentration of the attention’, Tarka, ‘reflection’, a term of doubtful sense in this context,³ and Samādhi, ‘absorption’ or complete union with the object of meditation. This list differs, in the insertion of Tarka, and in the placing of Dhyāna before Dhāraṇā, from the later list, which makes up the number of eight members by inserting as the first three items Yama, ‘discipline’, refraining from doing injury, truthfulness, &c., Niyama, ‘self-restraint’ such as purity, contentment, &c., and Āsana, ‘postures in sitting’. Of all these the most important is the use of Om as a symbol of Brahman to meditate upon. It is recognized by the Kaṭha,⁴ but its importance belongs to the later Upaniṣads, which delight in mystery regarding it; it has three syllables or morae, or three and a half, or three morae and three echoes, three morae and four half morae, and so on; the point of the Anusvāra is given a hidden sense and the echo is also famed. It is refreshing to find that silence is called the highest point of all.⁵ The view then is that man can only enter on the meditation with Om: he must at the end attain the nothingness in that which is not a word, like the sap of the flowers in the liquid honey.⁶ In the condition of Samādhi the consciousness of a separate subject and object entirely disappears, and the state of selflessness is reached. This union is attained by the ascent of the soul, from the heart through the Suṣumṇā vein and the Brahmarandhra, to union with the absolute.⁷ Naturally this conception is developed with the aid of the metaphor by which the heart is called a lotus, and by the use of the veins, 72,000 in number, into wild fantasies. Yet, though most of this absurdity is found in the later Upaniṣads, it should be recognized that the needs of Āsana are hinted at in the Çvetāçvatara,⁸ and the virtues of Pratyāhāra are recognized by the Chāndogya.⁹

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⁴ vi. 19.

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⁵ vi. 20 f.

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⁶ vi. 22.

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⁷ vi. 27.

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¹ vi. 24.

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² Maitr. vi. 18.

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³ Possibly it indicates the stage of meditation accompanied by reflexion; cf. MBh. xii. 195. 15; the first Pāli Jhāna; Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 324.

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⁴ ii. 17; cf. CU. i. 1; TU. i. 8; ÇU. i. 14; Muṇḍ. ii. 2. 4. See also Keith, *ERE*., *s.v.*

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⁵ Dhyānabindu 4.

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⁶ Maitr. vi. 22.

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⁷ Brahmavidyā 11, 12; Kṣurikā 8, 9; Maitr. vi. 21.

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⁸ ii. 10.

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⁹ viii. 15.

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Religious suicide, which we have not seen in the Brāhmaṇa period, is mentioned in this, but only at the latest stage, long after the period of the Upaniṣads proper, when authority is given to the beggar to abstain from food, to throw himself into the water or fire,¹⁰ to choose a hero’s death. Strange folly to emerge from the comparative rationalism of the Upaniṣads, and to reach its apotheosis in the religion of the Jina.

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¹⁰ Jābāla 5; Kaṇṭhaçruti 4; cf. Keith, *ERE*., *s.v.*

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