The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13.32

v2.c40.s13.32

On the other hand, the attainment of the ideal of union with the absolute led to the addiction to the practise of meditation, and above all in ever increasing measure in later times to the seeking of mystic states of absorption in the absolute. It is right to recognize that of this tendency on its worst side the Upaniṣads have very little to show. It is an exception when the Chāndogya Upaniṣad⁵ solemnly assures us that the possession of saving knowledge enables a man to have at pleasure the presence of the Fathers, the Mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, garlands, perfumes, music, and women: doubtless in some degree concession had to be made to the desires of those who, unlike Naciketas, preferred material joys and the houris of paradise⁶ to the knowledge of the truth of the fate of man after death. But it was inevitable that a doctrine, which regarded morality as not really existent, and preached the attainment of union with the absolute by means of mystic abstraction, should be productive of means of attaining the desired end which were grossly immoral: the Tantras of the later Hinduism, which in Bengal⁷ have ousted the Veda, which in a very real sense are the most important books of a large section of Hindus, and which are certainly by no means without occidental and American admirers, are in ultimate analysis descendants of one side of the mysticism of which a higher form appears in the Upaniṣads. The same tendencies were from the first marked in Buddhism, as in the earliest texts we find the possession of certain supernatural powers admitted as real.