The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3.15

v2.c40.s3.15

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.