The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.4

v2.c40.s7.t3.4

No Upaniṣad attains the point of view of the Sāṁkhya system, and it is therefore only possible to indicate the mode in which the conception of the absolute tended to fade away and to leave the individual spirits confronted with nature. The essential feature of the Sāṁkhya is the evolutionary series, and the name Sāṁkhya, ‘examination’, ‘calculation’, or ‘description by enumeration of constituents’,⁵ rather than a mere counting, suggests that the philosophy owed its importance to its insistence on the principle of careful examination of the elements of the process of development from the absolute. Now in the Upaniṣads the first case in which the order of evolution from the absolute is stated with precision—even then incomplete—is in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,⁶ where we find that in the carrying out of meditation, Yoga, in order to reach the absolute, the objects are merged in the senses, the senses in the mind, the mind in the intellect, Buddhi, the intellect in the great self, which is also then merged in the undiscriminated, Avyakta, described as the calm self, and that again in the spirit, Puruṣa, which is the absolute. The similitude of these views to the series of development of the Sāṁkhya is obvious: the separation of the Mahān Ātmā, the great self, and Buddhi is a distinction which it is difficult to appreciate in the Kaṭha and would naturally disappear on further reflection, with the abandonment of a cosmic Ātman, while the interposition of the undiscriminated, which corresponds to the position of the old primitive material or waters of the Brāhmaṇas, between the spirit and the intellect, corresponds also precisely to the position of Prakṛti in the Sāṁkhya system, except for the fact that the Kaṭha is still monistic, and still regards the spirit as an absolute, whence nature is derived, the individual spirit being identified more or less clearly with the highest spirit. But it must have been an obvious, if no less a very important, step when it was decided by some thinker that there was no necessity to imagine the unity of all the spirits in one. *Ex hypothesi* the spirits were all identical with the one spirit, and, therefore, each must have the same creative power to produce the undiscriminated as the supreme spirit. To what end then to feign a supreme spirit? Moreover, from another point of view the postulating of a supreme spirit would appear unsound: the enormous variety of individual experience of life, the plain facts of every-day existence, show that there is not one spirit merely but many.¹ The theory of unity of all spirits is difficult and confusing, and the obvious refuge from these difficulties is to admit that each spirit is a separate entity. The relation of the spirits and Prakṛti would follow at once, when this was accepted: the doctrine of Yājñavalkya was clear that the self was merely the knowing subject: clearly, therefore, as the self was the subject only, Prakṛti cannot be produced from the spirit in any material sense: it is the independent object merely of spirit.²