The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.45

v2.c40.s7.t3.45

Apart from the fact that there is really no good ground for calling the first stage Sāṁkhya,¹ and that the denial of illusionism cannot be accepted as absolutely true of the Upaniṣads, Dahlmann’s theory has the merit of directing attention to a real aspect of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads and the epic: there is a real affinity between the process by which Buddhi and Ahaṁkāra are deemed to produce the world of experience and the older myths of Prajāpati and his desire, Kāma, as playing their parts in the creation of the world, while still further back we have the picture of Puruṣa as at once the material and the spiritual source of the world. But it would be a mistake to accept the view that the aspect insisted upon by Dahlmann was really either the sole aspect or the chief aspect of philosophy in the period of the later Upaniṣads. In particular Dahlman goes clearly too far in stressing the independent character of the evolution of Prakṛti, and in his insistence on the nature of Īçvara as the world soul arising from Prakṛti alone, thus placing Prakṛti beside the Ātman as in itself accounting for the whole of the empirical world. It must never be forgotten, as Dahlmann himself elsewhere² recognizes, that the spiritual side of existence is essentially conditioned by the fact that in Prakṛti the Ātman is present as the observer, a fact which in the Sāṁkhya is preserved and emphasized in the insistence on the doctrine that but for the connexion of Puruṣa and Prakṛti there would be no cognition or feeling of any kind. When due weight is accorded to this fact, we reach fairly closely to a conception which is not far different from that of Bādarāyaṇa as the normal, not unique, doctrine of the Upaniṣads: there is an absolute on which matter is dependent indeed, but not illusory, and individual souls which in the Upaniṣads, but not in the Brahma Sūtra, at the end are resolved into the absolute, but which are not in themselves illusory, being, we may assume, the necessary result of the coexistence of the absolute and matter, and therefore endowed, until united with the absolute through knowledge, with a certain relative but real independence.³