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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3: § 3. The Interpretation of the Upaniṣads

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3

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§ 3. The Interpretation of the Upaniṣads

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It was attempted by the great philosopher Çaṅkara to find in the Upaniṣads the expression of a single simple doctrine, carried out consistently through all, and in his commentary on the Vedānta as set out in the Brahma Sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa it is his object to interpret that Sūtra and to bring out at the same time the doctrines of the Upaniṣads, the whole forming a great system of philosophy in which no contradictions should exist.² The plan adopted by the philosopher for this purpose was simple: he found in the Upaniṣads the principle that knowledge was of two kinds, wholly different. On the one hand the higher knowledge recognized the existence of absolutely nothing save the Brahman or the Ātman, the one unity, which was at once real, thought, and bliss. The force of these terms must be understood in a special sense: reality is not something outside the Brahman: no predication is possible of the Brahman, for predication involves diversity and in the Brahman there is no diversity. Thought or consciousness, which is not an attribute of, but the essence of the Brahman, does not mean actual activity, the νοῦς νοήσεως of Aristotle on the most probable view of that famous doctrine:³ it is consciousness without any object or subject, and therefore differs so entirely from the very nature of consciousness as not in our view to deserve the name at all. The bliss also is that of being which has no consciousness of any kind and no feeling, and therefore is merely a metaphorical expression. This single thing is all that the world really is, the one Brahman which is the Ātman. All the multiplicity of phenomena is unreal: the saving truth which redeems the individual from the constant stream of births is the recognition of this fact, that he himself is really the one Ātman, not related as part to it, but solely and absolutely it. In the expression 'That thou art',⁴ which is enunciated in the Upaniṣads, is set out the fundamental fact of all existence, the indivisible unity.

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² See e.g. his comment on the Sūtra, iii. 3. 1. The best defence of this theory is in A. E. Gough, *Philosophy of the Upanishads*.

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³ For an attack on Aristotle's view see Gomperz, *Greek Thinkers*, iv. 211 ff.

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⁴ CU. vi. 8. 7; cf. 'I am Brahman', BAU. i. 4. 10.

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The apparent multiplicity of the universe and the empirical knowledge of man is not in the view of Çañkara to be denied for a moment. Çañkara wages war both against the idealistic school of Buddhism, which denies that there is any real distinction between dreams and waking reality, and the nihilistic school, which asserts that all is mere void. Existence is not momentary at all: it has a substantiality and is real, but only from the point of view of the lower knowledge.¹ The Ātman in itself has allied with it a power, Māyā, illusion, which limits it: the limitation is not indeed real, for that would hopelessly violate the essential doctrine of Çañkara which denies any dualism whatever; but from the point of view of the lower knowledge that illusion exists, and through that illusion exists all that there is in the universe as known to us. Thus, there is room for a great god, the Hiraṇyagarbha of the Veda, who occupies the position of a demiourgos, inasmuch as he is the Ātman, when it is obscured by illusion, and there is afforded an explanation for the seeming multiplicity of souls, for the unending stream of life, for the world of living creatures and inanimate nature. All indeed is an illusion, but it has within that fundamental fact all the appearance of reality.²

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¹ For a modern defence of Çañkara, see Max Müller, *The Silesian Horseherd* (1903); a good criticism is given by Dahlmann, *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, pp. 236-55; cf. also Walleser, *Der ältere Vedānta* (1910).

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² Cf. de la Vallée Poussin, JRAS. 1910, pp. 128 ff.

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It will be seen at once that in this doctrine Çañkara has a powerful weapon, with which to explain the whole of the system of the Upaniṣads as the product of a single philosophical impulse. Nevertheless, the attempt is undoubtedly merely a clever *tour de force* without final validity, and its ingenuity is as great but no greater than its improbability. That this is the case could be easily proved by the examination of the Upaniṣads in detail, but it is sufficient to state that the Brahma Sūtra itself did not take the view adopted by Çañkara: it is now certain, thanks to the efforts of Thibaut,³ Sukhtankar,⁴ and Jacobi,⁵ among others, that the real view taken by Bādarāyaṇa was more akin to, though not identical with, that taken by the commentary of Rāmānuja,⁶ whose work dates some two centuries after Çañkara. The view of that scholar was that the explanation of the world and of the individual souls as mere products of illusion, enveloping the nature of the Brahman, was wholly wrong: on the contrary the two elements, the world and the individual souls, had a definite entity of their own, which was perfectly real, even if they were only parts of, and, therefore, much inferior in order of rank to, the Brahman, who is conceived no longer as mere impersonality but as personal being. The views of Rāmānuja are in many points difficult to formulate with precision: there is vagueness regarding the position of the individual soul, the world and the divinity, which is probably unavoidable, but certainly undeniable. But at any rate the system of pure idealism of the most abstract kind, which Çaṅkara put forward, is confronted with a system which is pantheistic, for the individual souls and the world are in some sense part of the deity, but which has also a strong theistic element in the fact that the individual souls, even when they become free from transmigration through the influence of their devotion to the lord and his compassion for them, are deemed still to retain a separate existence and not to be merged in the deity. As in the case of all Indian thinkers, the tendency of Rāmānuja is to be hazy regarding the nature of the deity, and the part played in that nature by consciousness, which, as we have seen, for Çaṅkara disappears into a meaningless abstraction, but the individual soul seems, contrary to the clear tendency of the Upaniṣads, and of the epic Sāṁkhya-Yoga,¹ to retain in its final form of existence some kind of consciousness which is consistent with its enjoyment of the most perfect bliss.

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³ SBE. xxxiv and xlviii.

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⁴ VOJ. xxii. 120 ff.

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⁵ JAOS. xxxi. 1 ff.; xxxiii. 52-4; in *Festschrift E. Windisch*, pp. 153-7, he traces in Çabarasvāmin on Mīmāṁsā Darçana, i. 5, the view that BAU. iii. 9. 26; iv. 5. 12, recognize a multiplicity of souls *contra* Çañkara's view (Brahma Sūtra, iii. 3. 53); cf. also de la Vallée Poussin, *Le Brahmanisme*, pp. 73 ff.

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⁶ See Keith, *ERE. s. v.*; Bhandarkar, *Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, and Minor Religious Systems*, pp. 50 ff. See also Kokileswar Sastri, *Adwaita Philosophy*.

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¹ This doctrine is definitely pantheistic; the Brahman realizes itself in the individual selves through the operation of Buddhi, 'intellect', and Ahaṁkāra, the principle of individuation, and recognition of the unity of the individual and the Brahman is the release aimed at; see Dahlmann, *Nirvāṇa* and *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, who contends that this is the primitive Sāṁkhya as a logical (*ānvīkṣikī*) science of the Brahman; see below, § 7.

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Rāmānuja quotes the Upaniṣads as agreeing with his doctrine, but he has not made any such determined and deliberate effort to bring the Upaniṣads into one definite scheme as has Çaṅkara: he relies rather on the Sūtra than on the Upaniṣads, but still he offers an alternative view which suits admirably many of the Upaniṣad passages, which he cites. He has, of course, the obvious advantage that the distinction of two kinds of knowledge is one which is artificial, and which has no direct sanction from the Upaniṣads themselves, so that Çaṅkara is forced in effect to postulate a distinction of knowledge, which is not asserted in his sources.

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Of modern interpreters of the Upaniṣads, the most important, Deussen,² as before him Gough³ also, has endeavoured to show that the view of Çaṅkara is the best key to the secrets of the Upaniṣads: Deussen insists that in his view, which is that of the Yājñavalkya of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Çaṅkara formulates the essential doctrine of the distinction between the empirical reality and the thing in itself, which was first made perfectly distinct by Kant, and which reaches its complement in the Christian and Schopenhauerian doctrine of the primacy of the will over the intellect. Deussen holds that this form of idealism is the main doctrine of the Upaniṣads in the sense that it was definitely formulated and laid down, and that other doctrines are really deviations from it, caused by the inability of man to remain on the high level of thought postulated in the distinction, and by the constant effort to apply empirical categories to the thing in itself. From the tendency to regard the universe, however, as actually real and an absolute thing, there grows up the view that the Ātman is the universe which we know, that is a system of pantheism. Even Yājñavalkya, like Parmenides in Greece,¹ could not resist this tendency, and falls into the error when he describes the Ātman as the internal ruler, or as supporting the sun and moon, heaven and earth, and the whole universe, or as expanding into the whole external universe. But this standpoint was also liable to difficulties: the identity was difficult to hold fast, and gave way to the simpler empirical conception of causality: the Ātman produces the universe, and he enters into it with his self, an idea which of course had abundant parallels in the Brāhmaṇas, when applied to personal deities such as Prajāpati. This doctrine is found, he thinks, nowhere in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, but in the Chāndogya, the Taittirīya, the Aitareya, and later. The Ātman, however, still remains the same in the world as in itself: it does not create other spirits, but enters in as itself. The pantheism thus passes into cosmogonism, and from this point of view or from the former can be explained the insistence on the identity of the spirit in the heart with the infinitely great outside. The next stage of thought produces theism: the relation of the Ātman to the soul in man is conceived as no longer one of identity, but as one of some degree of contrast and independence: the Ātman of the individual is set over against the Ātman in its highest aspect, tentatively even in some old passages, then definitely and openly in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, and still more markedly with the presentation of the Ātman as the god Rudra in the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad. The road was now open for the disappearance of the deity, since the individual souls were now independent entities, and could explain the universe if taken in conjunction with the principle of the world other than souls, Prakṛti, the primeval nature. The idea of god, therefore, disappears in the Sāṁkhya faith, and later the Yoga, which in deference to the demands of the popular movement of the day asked for a god, introduces the divinity *ab extra* with an obvious inconsequence, which makes him of no real importance in the philosophy of the theory.

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² *Phil. of Up.*, pp. 39 ff.

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³ *Philosophy of the Upanishads.*

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¹ What was Parmenides’ real view in the second part of his poem is doubtful in the extreme, and Deussen’s assertion is far from being certainly correct.

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This is a brilliant and attractive theory, and it, of course, affords a far more rational ground for the historical comprehension of the Upaniṣads than does that of Çaṅkara with its contrast of the two kinds of knowledge, and its wholly incredible suggestion² that the authors of the views found in the Upaniṣads really were making this distinction between the higher and the lower forms of knowledge, when it is plain to the reader that they are simply doing their best to express their philosophic beliefs for what they were worth. Nevertheless, the idea that the different stages of view are related in the form given by Deussen is one impossible to accept: the obvious history of the Upaniṣads,³ if we are not led astray by the belief in the opening up of new ideas by the warrior class, would suggest that the cosmogonic is the oldest form of the doctrine of the Brahman or Ātman. The Vedic cosmogonism is the natural standpoint: we have there the first principle, the first creation or emanation of that principle, and the entry of that principle into the creation. The tendency of the Veda is throughout to treat creation, not as something which is developed by the mere will of the creator, but as something lying in his nature *ab initio*: creation is rather development than the bringing into being of something hitherto not existing in any way. Hence the way is paved for the doctrine of identity in the Ātman:¹ the principle is manifested in the whole world, as in the myth Puruṣa by his sacrifice becomes the whole world, and the further step of identifying the spiritual principle in each man with the spiritual principle which is the *prius* of the world, is an obvious and easy one. The pantheism of the Brāhmaṇas is thus inseparably connected with their cosmogonism: it would be unwise to seek to establish for the Upaniṣads any real distinction between these ideas.

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² Cf. Speyer, *Indische Theosophie*, p. 307.

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³ Edgerton (*JAOS.* xxxvi. 197-204; *Studies in honor of Maurice Bloomfield*, pp. 117-35) very justly emphasizes the continuity of the Vedic tradition; the philosophic hymns of the AV. have relations with the Upaniṣads.

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¹ Hopkins (JAOS. xxii. 380, 381) insists that Ātmanism without illusion is the essential side of the Upaniṣads and that illusion is late, but this again is over-straining the position to some slight extent at least.

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The tendency of the Brāhmaṇas is certainly to diminish the personal aspect of the deity, but the influence of the popular religion must be borne in mind, as explaining the nature of the development of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads. The worship of Rudra was, it is perfectly clear from the Brāhmaṇas themselves, a very important thing indeed for the Brahmans and the people alike, and the inevitable tendency of this vivid belief in powerful and real gods, not an abstraction, was to make the character of the universal change. Prajāpati had been in some measure a god of the ritual: his name helped to make him more than mere priestly fiction, but he could not be expected to have that vivid nature, which is the characteristic of the form of Rudra. The effect of this personal adoration of great gods with the sense of dependence on them and trust in them, which is a real element in the religion of India,² shows itself in philosophy in the theism which begins to be clearly marked in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad and which is expressed in the doctrine of predestination there enunciated, in the form that the saving knowledge is not a matter of learning, but is revealed to the fortunate man by the highest power itself. It is only a step hence to the sectarianism of the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad, a work which has often wrongly been deemed of much more modern date than it really is, because of the belief that the spirit of devotion to god was a product of the introduction of Christian influences. The theism of the Upaniṣads is, then, we may believe, a later stage than their pantheism and cosmogonism, and is due to the influence of the personal element in the religion of the priest and Brahmans alike.

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² Bhandarkar, *Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, and Minor Religious Systems* (Strassburg, 1913); Keith, *JRAS.* 1907, pp. 490–3; 1915, pp. 833 ff.; Grierson, 1908, p. 361; Nicol Macnicol, *Indian Theism* (1915); Weber, *Religionssoziologie*, ii. 319 ff.

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There is, however, undoubtedly another side of the absolute, which must be set off against the theistic development which in the time of Rāmānuja was used to place on a philosophic basis the worship of Viṣṇu, as in the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad it had been made the base of the worship of Rudra. We know of its existence from two independent sources of the highest value, the Buddhist and the Sāṁkhya systems of philosophy, which reveal to us such despair of and disbelief in the one Ātman and the absolute as to present us with nothing but individual souls in the Sāṁkhya, and even to deny, though in a foolish and superficial way, the existence of souls in the Buddhist faith. It is certainly not easy to see how the pantheism and cosmogonism or the theism of the Upaniṣads could have produced this outlook on the world, and it suggests that there must have been in existence a view of the Ātman as absolute which emptied it of much significance, and made it therefore tempting for those, who desired to rise superior to the mere fictions of the popular religion, to find true reality in something nearer hand, the existence of the individual and of the external universe. The theory which postulated an Ātman of no real content was indeed to be found, and that was the theory of Yājñavalkya. It is true that the teaching in question is not consistently carried out, as Deussen admits, but it is plain that it lays stress on the three propositions that (1) the Ātman is the knowing self, is the subject of cognition ; (2) that as such it can never be an object of knowledge of any sort ; and (3) that beyond the Ātman there is no reality at all, as it is the sole reality. These propositions form the basis of the views of Çaṅkara, and it would be a complete error to suppose that the position of Çaṅkara was really due¹ to the effect of the teaching of the nihilist and idealist schools of Buddhism, the Mādhyamikas and the Vijñānavādins. That Çaṅkara was deeply influenced by their doctrines is doubtless true enough, but at the same time it seems beyond doubt that the doctrine which he maintained was originally the property of a school of Aupaniṣadas, and that, therefore, it was descended from an interpretation of the Upaniṣads, whose accuracy is confirmed by the actual texts of the Upaniṣads in so far as they bear out the meaning of Yājñavalkya’s own doctrine : the distinction of the two forms of knowledge, and the effort to show that other views in the Upaniṣads can be reconciled with Yājñavalkya’s on this basis, are of course the work of the predecessors of Çaṅkara.

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¹ As held by Gaṅgānātha Jhā, *Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya*, i. p. xii ; cf. Keith, *JRAS.* 1916, pp. 379–81. The same view appears in Walleser, *Der ältere Vedānta* (1910), but it is incredible that, as he held, it is really first in Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad that the real Vedānta appears.

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The view of Yājñavalkya cannot, save by paradox, be deemed the earliest view or the dominating view expressed in the Upaniṣads : it must be taken as one view of considerable importance, which has received expression in portions of two of the oldest Upaniṣads, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Chāndogya, but most of all in the first. Independent and older are the cosmogonic and pantheistic views which appear in the Aitareya Āraṇyaka ² and in the Brāhmaṇas, and the dominating influence of the view of Yājñavalkya ascribed to it by Deussen cannot be established. Its interest for us is not lessened by that fact: it is the most characteristically individual of the doctrines of the Upaniṣads, and in some ways of the greatest philosophic value. It is, moreover, the chief matter in which an advance on the views of the Brāhmaṇas can be recognized.

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² Keith, *Aitareya Āraṇyaka*, pp. 41 ff. ; *JRAS.* 1906, pp. 490 ff.

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If we are to seek a more plausible theory of stages of development, we may assume that the fundamental question of finding a unity in the world was attacked from two points of view, already foreshadowed in the Brāhmaṇas. On the one hand the conception of the Brahman was developed to include the whole of the universe; the holy power which controls things becomes expanded in idea into that which contains and accounts for all. On the other hand the psychic element is also developed, in part doubtless through the study of the stages of the spirit in waking and sleep; the unity here is imagined first as breath, Prāṇa, then it becomes conceived as intellect, Prajñā, and finally in the more abstract form of the self, Ātman, a term which has the advantage of including the conception of breath, and also of intelligence, while transcending both. A decisive advance occurs when, in lieu of inadequate efforts to express the nature of the Brahman, we have the pregnant assertion of the identity of the individual Ātman with the Brahman regarded as a cosmic Ātman. But this assertion leaves us with unsolved difficulties; on the one hand it leads to suggestions such as those implied or made by Yājñavalkya which indicate the illusory character of the world of appearances, asserting the unity of Ātman, broken in life by the duality induced by individuality, which is merged temporarily in deep sleep, finally in death; on the other we have efforts, as in the Kaṭha, to accept as real, and deduce from the Brahman, the whole of the spiritual and non-spiritual world, efforts which lead to antinomies regarding the relation of the absolute and individual souls and end in the abolition of the absolute in the Sāṅkhya, and of both absolute and individual in Buddhism.

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