The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3.8

v2.c40.s3.8

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.