The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3.29

v2.c40.s3.29

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.