The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.60.2

v2.c40.s8.60.2

As against these clear theories, which recognize the problem of ideal and real or even material factors in knowledge and supply their varying solutions, we have in Buddhist texts³ of the earlier period a theory of contact which in the Milindapañha⁴ is frankly materialist and was doubtless so *ab initio*, but which at any rate seems not to have appreciated the real question involved. It is to this confused species of thought that we must in the main turn in considering the views of the Upaniṣads: the haziness of their ideas is shown conclusively by the fact that often, as later in Buddhism, organ and function seem hardly consciously to be separated in their conception of the activities of sense. Neither realism nor idealism can be said to be yet clearly held. If, as we have seen, in the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad⁵ we find all existential elements, &c., referred to and made dependent on consciousness, i. e. apparently a subjective idealism, yet in the Mādhyandina recension of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad⁶ we expressly hear of the Ātman that after death it is not possessed of empirical consciousness, because it is not in contact with Mātrā, which is most naturally interpreted as a realist or materialist conception, somewhat like that of the Sāṁkhya, such consciousness arising from the contact of the mind and matter, but the term Mātrā may have a wider sense of all empirical existence.