The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3.25

v2.c40.s3.25

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.