The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.1

v2.c40.s8.1

In the philosophy of Yājñavalkya the identity of the supreme and the individual souls is carried to the extreme extent, but at the same time the term soul is deprived of any distinct meaning. The identity of the soul of man and the absolute is due to the mere fact that, by reducing the soul to nothing save what may be termed the mere abstraction of subjectivity, or of the transcendental unity of apperception, the soul becomes nothing but an aspect of a process.⁶ It is perfectly legitimate then to identify the supreme and the individual souls, but we are really carried no further by this than the occasional remarks of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, which regards the universe as made up of nothing except subject and object. It is in fact perfectly true that all the world can be regarded as distinguished as subject and object, but, unless we are able to show that this is the sum total of all that we can know, it is clearly impossible for philosophy to stop there. The actual existing world of thought, emotion, and action requires explanation and investigation. In the Vedānta the matter is solved comfortably by the doctrine of the two forms of knowledge: on the upper stage the identity of the self and the absolute is recognized, on the lower there is found to be a personal deity, Hiraṇyagarbha, and personal selves, who are indeed the absolute self, but fall under the influence of conditioning facts, the Upādhis, mind, the senses, the vital airs, and the body, which, while in reality no more affecting the reality of the nature of the absolute than the red colour the rock crystal, nevertheless convert it into the self or soul, Jīva,¹ of everyday humanity. In the Upaniṣads we naturally expect to find both sides of this doctrine, and we do find them in point of fact quite clearly expressed. On the one hand, we have the constant efforts to show that there is but one self, that there is no multiplicity and no change, which is pure idealism of a very intransigeant type, and on the other the reality of the individual self is constantly insisted upon. It is, however, constantly repeated that the individual and the absolute self are the same, and this is true no less in those cases where we may accept the view that idealism of the Yājñavalkya type is present, than in those, in which there is mere pantheism or cosmogonism. In the latter cases equally there is no ground to distinguish ultimately between the selves, since at the most the individual is merely the absolute in another form. But even when the Upaniṣads are theistic in spirit, like the Kaṭha and still more decidedly by far the Çvetāçvatara, they never reach the view that the supreme and the individual souls are anything really different. The Kaṭha,² however, is marked by its clear enunciation for the first time of the conception of the enjoyer as the union of the self with mind and the senses. It also describes the two aspects of the souls as light and shadow, while in the Çvetāçvatara ³ we find the metaphor of the two birds on a tree, one eating the sweet berries, the other merely gazing downwards, without eating. It also develops the idea of the individual soul, as endowed with the faculty of framing concepts and resolves, individualism and intellect, as enjoying the fruit of action, as small as a thumb in height, or a needle's point, or the ten-thousandth part of the tip of a hair, which is yet identical with the infinitely great supreme soul, a statement which is clearly identical in essence with the Vedānta position as seen in Çaṅkara.