Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s17.31

v2.c26.s17.31

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,