Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s17.2

v2.c26.s17.2

“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.