The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.17

v2.c40.s7.t3.17

In the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad⁵ we find an expression of the order of development commencing from the absolute, as all-knowing, the second element being food, an expression perhaps for the undiscriminated, the coming breath, which may correspond with Hiraṇyagarbha, mind, truth, the worlds, and actions. The more precise similarity of the doctrine of the Muṇḍaka⁶ to that of the Kaṭha is maintained by Hertel,⁷ who has endeavoured to reconstruct an original text of this Upaniṣad by conjecture from that which, as he holds, based on a single manuscript which was far from correct, has been preserved to us by Çaṅkara. Reconstructions of this kind seldom permit of any satisfactory result to others than their author, and there is always the fundamental difficulty, apart from minor points, whether the incoherence of thought which gives rise to the reconstruction is not, as most probably in the case of the Bhagavadgītā, due to the author, and not the result of interpolation. If, however, we omit the whole of ii. 2, and iii. 1. 4–10 and 2. 3 and 9, we obtain the doctrine that, as in the Skambha hymn of the Atharvaveda,¹ which affords part of the material of the Upaniṣad, the highest thing in the world is regarded as personal, from which there emanates the Brahman and whatever else exists. On this view the ultimate fate of the soul on its return is not absorption in the Brahman but union with Puruṣa, the world of Brahman serving merely as the place of those who fully perform the sacrificial ritual in the mode approved by the Muṇḍaka. The other portions, however, of the text, which cannot with any assurance be ascribed to working over, definitely identify the highest principle with the Brahman, adopting the regular identification of the Brahman and the Ātman, and treating the final result to be aimed at as the recognition of the identity of the Brahman and the Ātman. Moreover, even in the verses which are spared by Hertel, we find hints contradicting his theory of a simple doctrine; thus in i. 1. 7 all is stated to arise from the imperishable (*akṣara*), while in ii. 1. 2 we find the personal highest being declared to be above the imperishable, and in ii. 1. 10 the Brahman and Puruṣa are directly identified, unless we hold with Hertel that there is a lacuna in the text for which we have no other ground. It is significant also that the interpolator has to be credited with iii. 2. 3, which adopts the Kaṭha² doctrine of salvation by the favour of the lord, so that we have to assume that, on the one hand, he altered the personal aspect of the Upaniṣad by insisting on the primacy of the impersonal Brahman, while, on the other, he deliberately added one of the most personal touches in the shape of the doctrine of grace. This is plainly incredible, and we may safely assume that, while the author worked on an older idea of a personal *prius* as in the Atharvaveda, and accepted the doctrine of grace from the Kaṭha, he himself adopted the Brahman standpoint.³