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Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s17: XXVI Brahman

Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s17

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XXVI Brahman

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“Time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change.” Nothing is; everything flows. The struggle to go beyond, to seek the real, know the truth, means that this flowing stream is not all. The logical, the cosmological and the moral arguments all point to something larger than the finite. The effort to escape from the limits of the finite implies the consciousness that the finite in itself is not the real. A felt necessity of thought obliges us to admit an absolute reality. As Descartes contends, the conception of an infinitely perfect being is assumed in the admission of one’s own finitude.² No truly negative judgment is simply negative. “Wherever we deny something as unreal, we do so with reference to something real.”³ We exclude the negative because of a positive. Something is *not*, means something *is*. If we exclude the real as well as the unreal, we get nihilism. While Śaṁkara agrees with the Buddhist view that all things change, he demands a supersensible reality which is not within the world of change. We require the reality of something which does not need the support or help of anything else. Even if we regard the whole universe as merely imagined, there must be something which is the basis of all imagination.⁴ Even imagined entities cannot float unsupported in mid-air. If there is no such reality, *i.e.* if even what we regard as reality is a produced effect, then there can be nothing real at all in this world or out of it.¹ Religious experience as registered in the Vedas guarantees at least some reality which does not come to be or cease to be. Deussen’s statement “that the Indians were never ensnared into an ontological proof”² is hardly correct. So far as any logical proof of Brahman is available in Śaṃkara’s writings, it is undoubtedly the ontological proof. We are obliged to posit an absolute reality; otherwise our whole structure of knowledge and experience tumbles to pieces. In the method of procedure Śaṃkara shows great originality and freshness. He does not start, as theological philosophers do, with a discussion of God’s attributes. He is indifferent to, and even critical of, the arguments which are adduced in favour of a great First Cause and Creator of the world. For him integral experience, or anubhava, is the basal fact. It is the highest religious insight. It supplies the proof—if proof be the name for it—of man’s awareness of a spiritual reality. Brahman is present to every man and is the universal fact of life. If any logical proof were necessary, Śaṃkara points to the inability of the mind to rest in the relative, *i.e.* the impossibility of accounting for experience except on the hypothesis of Brahman.

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² Meditations, p. iv.

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³ S.B., iii. 2. 22.

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⁴ Sarvakalpanāmūlatvāt (iii. 2. 22).

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¹ S.B., ii. 3. 7.

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² D.S.V., p. 123.

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In his account of causality Śaṃkara makes the causal nature the svabhāva, or the sāmānya or the universal, while the effect is regarded as a condition, avasthā, or viśeṣa.³ “There are in the world many sāmānyas with their viśeṣas—both conscious and unconscious. All these sāmānyas in their graduated series are included and comprehended in one great sāmānya, *i.e.* in Brahman’s nature as a mass of intelligence.”⁴ To understand the nature of this universal reality is to know all the particulars involved in it.⁵

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³ S.B., ii. 3. 9.

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⁴ Anekā hi vilakṣaṇāś cetanācetanarūpāḥ sāmānyaviśeṣāḥ; teṣām pāramparyagatyā ekasmin mahāsāmānye antarbhāvaḥ prajñānaghane . . . (S.B., Bṛh. Up., ii. 4. 9). Cp. Plato’s Idea of the Good as the ground of all other Ideas.

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⁵ Sāmānyasya grahaṇenaiva tadgatā viśeṣā gṛhītā bhavanti (S.B., Bṛh. Up., ii. 4. 7).

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To say that Brahman is reality is to say that it is different from the phenomenal, the spatial, the temporal and the sensible.⁶ Brahman is what is assumed as foundational, though it is in no sense substance.¹ It is not in any point of space, though it may be said to be everywhere, since all things imply and depend on it. Since it is not a thing, it cannot have spatial relations to anything else, and is therefore nowhere. It is not a cause, for that would be to introduce time relations.² Its nature is inexpressible, for when we say anything of it we make it into a particular thing. We may speak about it, though we cannot describe it adequately or have any logical knowledge of it.³ If the finite man can comprehend Brahman, then either our understanding must be infinite or Brahman finite. “Every word employed to denote a thing denotes that thing as associated with a certain genus, or act, or quality, or mode of relation.”⁴ Brahman has no genus, possesses no qualities, does not act, and is related to nothing else. It is devoid of anything of a like kind or of a different kind, and has no internal variety.⁵ A tree, for example, has the internal variety of leaves, flowers and fruits, has the relation of likeness to other trees and of unlikeness to objects of a different kind like stones.⁶ Brahman has nothing similar to it, nothing different from it, and no internal differentiation, since all these are empirical distinctions.

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As it is opposed to all empirical existence, it is given to us as the negative of everything that is positively known. Śaṁkara declines to characterise it even as one, but calls it non-dual, advaitam. It is the “wholly other,” but not non-being.⁷ Though the words used are negative, what is meant is intensely positive. A negation is only an affirmation of absence. It is non-being, since it is not the being which we attribute to the world of experience. It does not follow that it is pure nothing, since the negative has its meaning only in relation to the positive. The Upaniṣads as well as Śaṃkara,¹ deny of Brahman both being and non-being of the type with which we are familiar in the world of experience. We can at best say what Brahman is not, and not what it is. It transcends the opposition of permanence and change, whole and part, relative and absolute, finite and infinite, which are all based on the oppositions of experience. The finite is always passing beyond itself, but there is nothing which the infinite can pass into. If it did so, it would no longer be the infinite. If we call it infinite, it is not to be equated with a mere negation of the finite. We cannot understand the nature of Brahman until we let go the formal and the finite. Since personality cannot be realised except under the limiting condition of a non-ego, the absolute is not a person.

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If we use the term personality in a different sense, in which it does not demand any dependence on another, then it is an illegitimate use. When the Absolute is said to be nirguṇa, this only means that it is trans-empirical, since guṇas are products of prakṛti and the Absolute is superior to it. The guṇas qualify the objective as such, and God is not an object. The objects come and go, but the real persists as the permanent in the midst of all changes. So it transcends the guṇas or phenomenal being. The Absolute is not on that account to be regarded as a mere blank. So the Upaniṣad says “nirguṇo guṇī.” Brahman is of the nature of ultimate consciousness and yet knows nothing, since empirical cognition is a modification of the internal organ.² Knowledge, again, is its essence and not its property.³ It is not eternal in the sense of persisting changelessly through time like the motionless being of Parmenides, the "mindless, unmoving fixture," which Plato derides in the *Sophist*,¹ but in the sense of absolute timelessness and incorruptibility. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time.² The sequence which binds things and events in the time order has no meaning for it. It is eternal perdurance, to which all time relations are irrelevant. It can only be negatively described as the other of its own otherness. It is sat (real), meaning that it is not asat (unreal).

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It is cit (consciousness), meaning that it is not acit (unconsciousness).³ It is ānanda (bliss), meaning that it is not of the nature of pain (duḥkhasvarūpa). It is real, having authentic being. It never fails to be, since it depends on nothing to preserve it in being. It does not take in anything from outside itself, for then being would include non-being. There is no first or last in it. It does not unfold, express, develop, manifest, grow and change, for it is self-identical throughout. It cannot be regarded as a whole including parts, for it is uniform in nature (ekarasa).⁴ It is real and yet devoid of the nature of the world.⁵ Such a being cannot of course be physical and quantitative and fragmentary. The everlasting being devoid of any deficiency is of the nature of consciousness, cit. Such a fulness of authentic being and ideality perforce is free delight, ananda.⁶ All human bliss is a phase of the bliss of Brahman.⁷ It is highest truth, perfect being and fullest freedom.

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⁶ S.B., iv. 3. 14.

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¹ Vedāntaparibhāṣā, i.

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² Cp. Kāryakāraṇavyatirektasyātmanaḥ sadbhāvaḥ . . . aśanāyādi-saṁsāradharmātītatvaṁ viśeṣaḥ (S.B., iii. 3. 36).

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³ S.B., iii. 2. 23.

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⁴ S.B.G., xiii. 12.

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⁵ Sajātīyavijātīyasvagatabhedarahitam.

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⁶ Pañcadaśī, ii. 20. Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy, E.T., p. 25. Plato mounts beyond the worlds of being and becoming to the good. Plotinus seeks to apprehend the Absolute as yet undivided between subject and object and so above all diversity. “This absolute is none of the things of which it is the source; its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it—not existence, not essence, not life—since it is That which transcends all these . . .” “Once you have uttered the ‘Good,’ add no further thought to it; by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency. Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it” (Enneads, iii. 8. 10, E.T., McKenna, vol. ii, pp. 134, 135). Clement of Alexandria reaches a point where the Supreme could be recognised not by what it is, but by what it is not.

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⁷ Vāṅmanasātītatvaṁ nābhāvābhiprāyam (S.B., iii. 2. 22).

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¹ S.B., Praśna Up., iv. 1.

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² As Spinoza says: “The intellect which would constitute the essence of God must differ toto cœlo from our will and intellect, nor can they agree in anything save in name, nor any more than the Dog as a celestial constellation and the dog as a barking animal agree” (Ethics, i. 17, Scholium).

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³ Rāmānuja and the Naiyāyikas interpret jñānam in “satyaṃ jñānam anantam Brahma” as the basis of knowledge. Cp. Nityaṃ vijñānam ānandam Brahma ityādau vijñānapadena jñānāśraya evoktaḥ (Viśvanātha’s Siddhāntamuktāvali, p. 49).

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¹ P. 249.

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² Cp. Spinoza: "Eternity cannot be defined in terms of time nor can it have any relation to time" (*Ethics*, v. 1, Scholium). Nicholas of Cusa distinguishes between the *infinitum* of God and the *interminatum* of the world. As infinity is to boundlessness, so is eternity to perpetuity.

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³ Jaḍatvarāhityam. Deussen defines caitanyam as "a potency which lies at the root of all motion and change in nature, which is therefore also ascribed, for example, to plants, and means thus rather the capacity of reaction to outer influences, a potency which in its highest development reveals itself as human intellect, as spirit" (D.S.V., p. 59).

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⁴ S.B., i. 3. 1.

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⁵ Niṣprapañcasadātmakatvam (S.B., ii. 1. 6).

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⁶ S.B., i. 1. 12; iii. 3. 11-13; Tait. Up., ii. 7.

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⁷ Bṛh., iv. 3. 32.

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Ātman and Brahman have the same characteristics of being, consciousness, all-pervadingness and bliss. Ātman is Brahman. The purely subjective is also the purely objective. Brahman seems to be mere abstract being, even as Ātman seems to be mere abstract subjectivity to the eyes of intellect. When we strip the Absolute of all its veils, we find that it is being refined away, evaporated into almost nothing. How can we assume this residuum, this nonentity, to be the supreme reality of the world? "Is Brahman then non-being? No, since even imagined things must have something to stand upon."¹ If anything exists, Brahman must be real. It is our human conception of Brahman that seems to be empty and not Brahman in itself, which is the fullest reality. The differenceless Brahman which we reach by an everlasting No, "not coarse, not fine, not short, not long,"² "not to be heard, not to be felt,"³ is likely to be confused with an indeterminate blank, an uncomfortable night of nothing. Hegel has declared that pure being devoid of all predicates is not different from non-being. Rāmānuja and the Naiyāyikas agree with Hegel in thinking that such an undifferenced Brahman is not a reality capable of being known.⁴ Śaṃkara knows it as much as his critics, for he says: "Brahman, free from space, attributes, motion, fruition and difference, being in the highest sense and without a second, seems to the slow of mind no more than non-being."⁵ We seem to get a Brahman in which all is lost, though the mystic might explain that everything is found. The upward flight of thought which is afraid of making God determinate seems to us, the worldly minded, to end in making God nothing. Yet all the great religious seers deny conceptual designations to the Absolute.⁶ For the sake of the mass of mankind, the scripture defines Brahman in positive terms,¹ for " the scripture thinks, Let them first find themselves on the path of the existent, then I shall gradually bring them also to an understanding of the existent in the highest sense."² As an interpreter of the Upaniṣads, Śaṁkara was obliged to offer a reconciliation between the negative and the positive descriptions of Brahman.³ Commenting on the spatial conception of Brahman, Śaṁkara says that it is meant to convey our ideas to others⁴ or serve the purposes of worship.⁵ We rise to the highest in itself, Brahman, through the highest in relation to us or Īśvara, the creator and governor of the universe. While Brahman is devoid of attributes, still those of being, consciousness and bliss may be said to be its essential features (svarūpalakṣaṇas), while those of creatorship, etc., are accidental ones (taṭasthalakṣaṇas).⁶ Śaṁkara knows that even the definition of Brahman as saccidānanda⁷ is imperfect though it expresses the reality in the best way possible. The power of the human mind is great enough to recognise its own limitations. Brahmānubhava gives the highest insight into Brahman, and he who has it answers every question of the nature of Brahman by silence or negative marks. Vidyā gives the highest positive conceptual account of Brahman by equating it with the attributes of being, consciousness and bliss, which are self-sufficient. Avidyā, or lower knowledge, applies attributes which imply relation,

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¹ "Śūnyam eva tarhi tat, na, mithyāvikalpasya nirnimittatvānupatteḥ" (S.B. on Gauḍapāda's Kārikā).

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² Bṛh., iii. 8. 8. Cp. Augustine: "We can know what God is not, but not what He is" (Trinity, viii. 2).

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³ Kaṭha, iii. 15.

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⁴ Nirviṣayasya jñānatve mānābhāvāt (Viśvanātha's Siddhāntamuktāvali, p. 49).

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⁵ Digdeśaguṇagatiphalabhedaśūnyaṃ hi paramārthasad advayam brahma mandabuddhīnām asad iva pratibhāti (S.B., Chān. Up., viii. 1. 1).

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⁶ Cp. Rudolf Otto: "This negative theology does not mean that faith and feeling are dissipated and reduced to nothing; on the contrary, it contains within it the loftiest spirit of devotion, and it is out of such negative attributes that Chrysostom fashions the most solemn confessions and prayers. . . . A conception negative in form may often become the symbol for a content of meaning which, if absolutely unutterable, is none the less

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¹ Chān. Up., i. 6. 6; iii. 14. 2.

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² Sanmārgasthās tāvad bhavantu, taṭaḥ śanaiḥ paramārthasad api grāhayiṣyāmīti manyate śrutiḥ (S.B., Chan. Up., viii. i. 1). Saḍānanda, in his Vedāntasāra (ii), describes the method of adhyāropāpavāda by which we first attribute certain qualities to Brahman and then withdraw them. See S.B.G., xiii. 13.

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³ See S.B., i. 1. 1-31; i. 2 passim; i. 3. 1-18, 22-25, 39-43; i. 4. 14-22; iii. 3. 35-36. See D.S.V., p. 102, pp. 206-210.

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⁴ Upalabdhyartham.

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⁵ Upāsanārtham. S.B., Chān. Up., viii. i. 1; S.B., i. 1. 20, 24, 31; i. 2. 11, 14; iii. 2. 12, 33.

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⁶ When we define Devadatta's house as that on which a crow is perched, we do not define its essence but state a feature which applies to it accidentally. It is an indirect definition of Devadatta's house. Even so is the definition of Brahman as the Creator and the cause of the universe.

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⁷ Nrsimhatāpanī Uṭ.

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in the highest degree positive. . . . A negative theology can and indeed must arise . . . from purely and genuinely religious roots, the experience of the luminous " (The Idea of the Holy, p. 189).

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such as creatorship and rulership of the universe.¹ There are thus two views of the ultimate, higher and lower. "Where, by discarding the differences of name, form, and the like, ascribed by avidyā, Brahman is indicated by negative expressions, as not gross, etc.,² it is the higher (param). But where, on the contrary, exactly the same reality is described, for purposes of worship, as distinguished by some difference or other, it is the lower (aparam)."³ Brahman cast through the moulds of logic is Īśvara. It is not the highest reality, since it has no meaning for the highest experience where existence and content are no longer separated. Yet it is the best image of the truth possible under our present conditions of knowledge. The saguṇa Brahman is not the mere self-projection of the yearning spirit or a floating air-bubble. The gleaming ideal is the way in which the everlasting real appears to our human mind.⁴ sistency requires us to describe the absolute by a set of negations, “neither personal nor moral, nor beautiful nor true,” as Bradley does. The inevitable effect of the negative account is to make us believe that the absolute has nothing to do with or is indifferent to the higher aspects of experience. When these negative formulas of an exact metaphysics defeat their object, we are inclined, in the interests of our religious needs, to lay a different emphasis.¹

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¹ Cp. *Ratnaprabhā*: "Vidyāviṣayo jñeyaṃ nirguṇaṃ satyam avidyāviṣaya upāsyaṃ saguṇaṃ kalpitam" (i. i. 11). Cp. with this the analogical knowledge of Schoolmen, the knowledge that knows its deficiency and by the very acknowledgment of it corrects it. Cp. Plotinus: "If we call it the Good, we do not intend any formal affirmation of a quality within itself; we mean cnly that it is the Goal or Term to which all aspire. When we affirm existence of it, we mean no more than that it does not fall within the realm of non-existents; it transcends even the quality of being" (McKenna's E.T., vol. i, p. 118).

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² Bṛh., iii. 8. 8.

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³ S.B., i. 31; iv. 3. 14.

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⁴ D.S.V., p. 103. Cp. Eckhart, who draws a distinction between Godhead who is incomprehensible and God who works and creates. "In himself he is not God, in the creature only doth he become God. I ask to be rid of God, *i.e.* that God by his grace would bring me into the essence; that essence which is above God and above distinction. I would enter into that eternal unity which was mine before all time, and when I was what I would and would what I was; into that state which is above all addition or diminution, into the immobility whereby all is moved" (quoted in Hunt's *Essay on Pantheism*, p. 179). Plotinus says: "We form a conception of its Authentic Being from its image playing upon the Intellectual Principle. This image of itself it has communicated to the Intellect that contemplates it; thus all the striving is on the side of the Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer. The Being beyond neither strives, since it feels no lack, nor attain, since it has no striving" (*Enneads*: McKenna's E.T., vol. ii, p. 135). Cp. Bradley: "Fully to realise the existence of the Absolute is for finite beings impossible. . . . But to gain an idea of its main features—an idea true so far as it goes, though abstract and incomplete—is a different endeavour. . . . And surely no more than this is wanted for a knowledge of the Absolute. It is a knowledge which of course differs enormously from the fact. But it is true for all that, while it respects its own limits; and it seems fully attainable by the finite intellect" (*Appearance and Reality*, p. 159).

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¹ Cp. Bradley : *Truth and Reality*, p. 431.

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But Brahman cannot be both determinate (saguṇa) and indeterminate (nirguṇa).² A reality that has two sides or can be experienced in two ways is not the highest reality. The sides are dissolved the moment we touch the fountain of being. We catch aspects of the Absolute when we look at it from outside. In itself the Absolute is without sides, without forms, and without any element of duality or guṇas. These characters of form and personality have meaning in the world of vidyā, or experience. In the supreme Brahman there is a natural dissolution of all relativities. It is not a system or a whole which can be achieved by an endless process of reconciling opposites.³ The infinite is not an object constructed by philosophy; it is an ever-present fact. Śaṁkara is opposed to all attempts to think the Absolute. The moment we think it, it becomes a part of the world of experience.⁴

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² “One and the same thing cannot in itself be affected by differences such as form, etc., and not be affected by them, for this is a contradiction. . . And by being connected with limitations a thing of one kind cannot assume another nature; for when rock crystal is transparent it does not become opaque by being connected with limitations such as red colour and the like; on the contrary, it is a misconception (bhrama) that opaqueness permeates it. . . Whatever character is assumed, Brahman must be regarded as unchangeably free from all differences and not the reverse” (D.S.V., pp. 102-3).

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³ While strict logic requires Bradley to adopt a similar position, he yet wavers and has certain ultimate doubts. Strictly speaking, the Absolute excludes all positive and negative features, and we cannot reach it through logic, for we cannot go out of the relative by the relative. Our logical understanding, proceeding from limit to limit, cannot arrive at the unlimited. When we transcend our finiteness, we have nothing else than an absolute in which all that is formal and finite is dissolved.

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⁴ Rāmānuja holds that the divine is the human view enlarged. The difference between the human understanding and the divine is one of range and not character; while the human view takes in some relations, the divine takes in all of them. But Śaṁkara is of a different opinion. If we are lost in the world of relatives, it is not possible to exhaust the relative.

Cites (8)