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Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19: XXVIII The Phenomenal Character of Īśvara

Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19

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XXVIII The Phenomenal Character of Īśvara

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It is indifferent whether we say that Brahman, cast in the moulds of logic, is the world of experience or that it is Īśvara.

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Īśvara is all-comprehensive and contains within himself all that exists, potentially in pralaya and actually in creation. There does not seem to be much point in Deussen’s observation, that Śaṃkara did not carefully distinguish Brahman, the undifferentiated, from the phenomenal world on the one hand, and Īśvara on the other. He says: “This undifferentiated Brahman has two contraries: first the forms of the phenomenal world, as Brahman, conditioned by upādhis, appears; then the imperfect figurative ideas, which we form of the Godhead, in order to bring it nearer to our understanding and our worship. It is strange that between these two contraries of the undifferentiated Brahman, however wide apart they naturally are, Śaṃkara draws no sharp distinction, and even if, according to one passage, it seems as if he saw in the phenomenal forms the basis (ālambanam) of the presentation forms, yet from the continual intermingling of the two . . . it follows that our author never became clearly conscious of the difference between them.”¹ Deussen agrees that Śaṃkara referred to this distinction in one passage² and dismissed it as meaningless (vyartha). The whole phenomenal world is the appearance of Brahman. Brahman, on which all rests, becomes Īśvara, which includes all, when shaped by the phenomenal forms. The distinction between the infinite Īśvara on the one side and the individual souls on the other is a distinction of different members of a whole, analogous to that between the kingdoms of Magadha and Vaideha, which belong to the same world.³ When Brahman the real is conceived as Brahman the saṃsāra, God, man and the world (Īśvara, jīva, prapañca) become the chief elements.

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¹ D.S.V., pp. 205-206.

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² S.B., iii. 2. 21.

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³ S.B., iii. 2. 31.

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Theoretical philosophy, interested in deducing the world of being from the first principle of an absolute self which has nothing contingent about it, is obliged, whether in East or West, to accept some principle of self-expression (māyā), of objectivity (prakṛti). In European thought Kant contended that there was no experience apart from the transcendental unity of apperception, and yet he made this purely formal, and so failed to derive the whole of experience from it. By regarding experience as an interaction between the transcendental unity of apperception and the things in themselves, he introduced into his system an element of irrational contingency. Fichte accepts from Kant the central truth that all experience is only for a subject, and attempts to develop the whole of experience from it. He holds that in the development of the subject there is no intrusion of a foreign factor, but every step is determined from within. The absolute subject gives itself an " other " in the very act of self-positing. The self cannot affirm or posit itself except by opposing or distinguishing from itself a not-self. The element of otherness is brought about within the very being of the self. Gradually we have the differentiation of the absolute self into a multiplicity of finite egos at once other than itself and modes of itself. The self of Fichte has thus to throw up from itself a check or an impediment, a not-self, as the very condition of its becoming aware of its activity. The self limitation of the primal consciousness, or the rise of the obstacle against which the self breaks itself, has to be assumed, however incomprehensible it may be. Similarly in the conception of Īśvara we have, besides the absolute Brahman, the element of objectivity or prakṛti, self-expression or māyā.

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When we start from the human end, we must offer some explanation of the world of becoming. It cannot be due to Brahman, which is immutable. If Brahman itself changes, it ceases to be Brahman. If it never ceases to be itself, i.e. never changes, the change we come across remains unexplained. The changing universe cannot be traced to prakṛti, which is unintelligent. While Brahman stands for being, prakṛti stands for becoming. But to posit prakṛti by the side of Brahman as an ultimate category would be to limit the nature of Brahman, which has no second, nothing outside; but if no second is posited, the explanation of the world becomes difficult. The only way is through the recognition of a saguṇa Brahman or changing Brahman, an Īśvara who combines within himself the natures of both being and becoming, the unattached Brahman and the unconscious prakṛti. The indeterminate for thought becomes the self-determined. The primal unity goes out of itself and produces a manifestation relatively independent of it. The pure, simple, self-subsistent Absolute becomes the personal Lord, the principle of being in the universe binding all things to each other in binding them to himself. Brahman is what is beyond both subject and object. When it becomes subject dealing with an object, we have Īśvara, the Logos, the one-many. The blank objectivity or prakṛti, develops the whole world through the power of the subject, God. By itself prakṛti or the object, has no existence or meaning.

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It is unintelligent, and so cannot cause anything without the aid of an intelligent spirit. It is merely the other of the subject and the world is the heterisation or the othering of Īśvara, the self-conscious Brahman. Īśvara combines the two principles of Brahman and prakṛti. He is not pure consciousness (caitanya) but a self-conscious personality. "He designed (aikṣata), I will become many, I will procreate."¹ Knowledge, self-consciousness and personality are possible only if there are objects. Omniscience (sarvajñatva) characterises God, though its possibility is explained in different ways.² The nature of Brahman is jñāna, or knowledge. This takes the shape of an effect when it is limited by an object to be known. Then in relation to that object is Brahman known as Vijñātṛ, or the subject of knowledge. In other words, Brahman, whose nature is knowledge, becomes a knower, when he is confronted with an object to be known.³ Śaṃkara agrees with Rāmānuja and Hegel in thinking that a not-self remains an integral element of personality. Only, while they regard the conception of personality as the highest, Śaṃkara declares that we are in the world of phenomena, so long as we have the consciousness of not-self. To reach the real, we must transcend this distinction. When pure being becomes related being, its first relation must be to something different from being.

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That which is different from being is not-being.¹ Īśvara, who is different from Brahman, or the unbroken energy of light, is the light affirming itself in and through darkness. He is the principle of truth creating order of chaos, the spirit of God brooding on the face of the waters.² The darkness tries to overwhelm and eclipse the light and seeks to cover all, and the light is always busy overtaking the darkness. While there is an essential antagonism between Brahman and darkness, between Īśvara and darkness, there is struggle and ultimate victory of light over darkness. Īśvara is thus the mediating principle between Brahman and the world, sharing the natures of both. He is one with Brahman, and yet related to the object world. Śaṁkara holds that even before creation, the personal Īśvara has an object in "the names and forms which are neither to be defined as beings nor as their opposites, which are not evolved though striving towards evolution."³ We have here the ultimate spirit viewed as ego contemplating the non-ego as its object. For Īśvara, changelessness and inactivity are impossible. As real in the empirical sense, he must be ever acting, losing himself to find himself, going out to the universe and returning to himself through the universe. He who does nothing and stands aloof from the world is not God, not at any rate a God of love.

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Love lives in the life of its objects, exhibiting the sorrow though not the guilt of wrong-doing and sin and the joy of righteous living. For Śaṁkara, as for many other philosophers, a self-conscious being which has no object, which does not possess its opposite and does not affirm its unity in terms of it, is impossible. It is through its manifestations or objects that a self-conscious personality lives, moves and has its being. Yet it is necessary to hold that it is in no way affected by the changes of its object, a thesis which it is difficult to maintain. The events of nature and the change of souls bring about alterations in the nature of Īśvara. The Vedāntaparibhāṣā openly admits that the activities of living beings produce various modifications of māyā or prakṛti, which is the upādhi or the body of Īśvara.¹ The appearance and disappearance of the world shows that the Divine nature undergoes change, contraction and expansion. So long as creation and destruction are real movements in the life of God, the latter is not above time but is subject to time; so that, even as creation and destruction belong to the empirical world, Īśvara belongs to it.

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We employ the category of change which demands a permanence and argue that Īśvara is the permanent background, to whose body these changes pertain.² Īśvara assumes an undeveloped subtle body, forming the seed plot for names and forms, and serving as the groundwork for the Lord, and yet only as a limitation ascribed to himself.³ The admission of a formless matter co-eternal with God clearly involves limitations on the infinity of God. To say that the limitations are not those of an external, more or less intractable material, does not help us much.

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¹ Chān., vi. 2. 3. See also Ait., i. 1. 1; Praśna, vi. 3. 4; Muṇḍ., i. 1. 9.

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² Bhāratītīrtha makes out that Īśvara is conditioned by māyā, in which abide the subtle impressions of the minds of all creatures. The author of Prakaṭārtha agrees with this, and remarks that as māyā is coextensive with the phenomenal world, present and future, it enables its possessor to have all-comprehensive knowledge. The author of Tattvaśuddhi observes that God's knowledge need not always be direct. While the whole of the present world is directly cognised by God, he may remember the past and anticipate the future. The author of Kaumudī holds that God as having the characteristics of Brahman is the illuminator of all objects. See S.B., i. 4. 9, and Siddhāntaleśa, i.

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³ This is the view of Vācaspati also.

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¹ Cp. "And the light shineth in darkness" (St. John i. 5). Bishop Westcott, commenting on it, writes: "Side by side with the light, the darkness appears suddenly and without preparation" (The Gospel according to St. John, p. 5).

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² See Introduction, S.B.G.

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³ S.B., i. 1. 5. "Anirvacanīye, nāmarūpe avyākṛte vyācikīrṣite."

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¹ Sṛjyamānaprāṇikarmavaśena parameśvaropādhibhūtamāyāyāṃ vṛtti-viśeṣā idam idānīm sraṣṭavyam, idam idānīm pālayitavyam, idam idānīm saṃhartavyam ityādyākārā jāyante, tāsāṃ ca vṛttīnāṃ sāditvāt tatpratibimbitacaitanyam api sādīty ucyate (i).

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² S.B., ii. 1. 4. In the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra it is said: “All that is moving or unmoving in the universe—earth, water, air, fire, ether, the sun, the moon and the spirit—is but the eightfold form of Him, and there is nothing whatever which on reflection is other than the Supreme Lord.”

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³ Avyākṛtaṃ nāmarūpabījaśaktirūpam, bhūtasūkṣmam īśvarāśrayam, tasyaivopādhibhūtam (S.B., i. 2. 22).

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While the saguṇa Brahman changes, it is maintained that it still remains within its constitutive idea, so that the alterations are all in the accidents and not in the essentials. Īśvara's oneness is not impaired by self-expression in the many.⁴ “As the magician is not affected by the māyā which has himself created, since it is unreal, so also the Supreme is not affected by the māyā of saṃsāra.”⁵ Thus Śaṃkara attempts to combine the ideas of the negation of the finite and the presupposition of the finite in his conception of Īśvara. The charge against Spinoza that he reduces the Absolute to a mere blank of indeterminate being, which he inconsistently transforms into the self-determining God, has no force against Śaṃkara, who commits no such sublime inconsequence. He is clearly conscious that the negation of all the determinations of the finite can give us only an abstract being of which nothing can be said except that it is. So long as we are employing the methods of logic, the highest reality is not the indeterminate Brahman but determinate Īśvara, who is the source of all the manifold changes of the universe. But there is throughout Śaṁkara’s philosophy the pervading prejudice against the adequacy of logic and the finality of its ideal, and so we find that this conception of saguṇa Brahman, or concrete spirit, is, according to him, so riddled with self-contradictions and inconsistencies that it cannot be regarded as the highest reality.

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⁴ Chān., viii. 14. 1; vi. 3. 2; Tait. Ar., iii. 12. 7; Śvet. Up., vi. 12.

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⁵ S.B., ii. 1. 9. Yathā svayamprasāritayā māyayā māyāvī triṣv api kāleṣu na saṃspṛśyate 'vastutvāt, evam paramātmāpi saṃsāramāyayā na saṃspṛśyata iti.

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That Īśvara is the home of all finite existence, the material and the efficient cause of the world, is an assumption. It is quite easy to say that the concrete universal combines the reality of the universal and the particular, but the how of it is a mystery. If the relation of identity and difference, permanence and change, is unintelligible in the world of experience, it cannot become intelligible when applied to Īśvara. Śaṁkara knows that his view is open to the charge of abstract identity, but he believes that identity and difference cannot be logically related. How the two can coexist he feels that he does not know.¹ The conception of Īśvara as a concrete whole is not so much an explanation of experience as a restatement of the problem. Our experience has in it the two features of identity and difference, or permanence and change. We ask how is the experience, which is a complex of souls and things and characterised by permanence and change, to be accounted for, and we answer that Īśvara is the explanation of experience, since he combines both these features and has the world of souls and things organically related to him. To say that they constitute his body is not to explain experience. We frame a generalised concept of experience and call it Īśvara. The explanation of the experienced world is that world itself, which in its general terms is called Īśvara. Rāmānuja and Hegel hold that the ultimate reality is a one containing many. For them the rational is the real: God and the world are both real. The indeterminateness of intuition and the mystery of reality do not appeal to them. They are interested not in the real in itself but the real for thought, which has an element of negativity in it. The process of thought consists in the continual absorbing and transcending by mind of its own discrepant and rebellious parts. So all spiritual life is an unceasing struggle with refractory elements. Divine life is regarded as an eternal activity. To think of the world as a logical unity or a single system is to think of it as the manifestation of one perfectly determinate principle in an infinity of details. But we should not overlook the difficulties attending this conception of the highest as the concrete universal or the union of the finite and the infinite.

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¹ Śaṁkara would not have found much help in the realist theory of the reality of the universals along with that of the particulars, for the universals of the realists do not claim infinity. They are finite reals, though of a different order from the particulars, and if God is a universal of this character, he can realise himself in various ways simply because he is finite. Were he infinite, he could only act in one way, or rather, Śaṁkara would say, he could not act at all. He could only be and not become, and there is then no question of his activity or manifestation.

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Śaṃkara believes that the aim of the scriptural accounts of creation is to establish the identity of Brahman and the world.¹ If the world were not identical with God, and if he created it as a substance separate from himself, then he would be guilty of the charge of making efforts under the influence of motives. In other words, he is no God at all.² If he acts in obedience to the law of karma, then he is limited by it. We have referred to Fichte’s conception of the self which comes to self-consciousness by breaking itself, so to speak, against some obstacle and by being reflected back, as it were, upon itself from this obstacle. Such a self is really dependent on its other, of which it is said to be the source and support. The self cannot precede the world nor can it survive it. If we succeed in abolishing the not-self, we at the same time succeed in abolishing the self. When Fichte becomes vaguely aware of these consequences, he rises to the conception of a reality which is “neither subject nor object but the ground of both.” Śaṃkara recognises most clearly what Fichte was groping after, that subject and object are distinctions of logic which have no meaning when we speak of the source of all logic. The Absolute is neither the bearer of knowledge nor the object of knowledge, but knowledge itself (jñānam). If the whole world is regarded as an objectification of the thought of God, existing in order that he might perpetually maintain himself as self-conscious of the world as an object, then such a God is only relative and not absolute;³ for “The Absolute does not want to make eyes at itself in a mirror or like a squirrel in a cage, to revolve the circle of its own perfections.”⁴ In short, personality is not the ultimate category of the universe. Plotinus observes: “All that has self-consciousness and self-intellection is derivative.”⁵ So beyond the personal Īśvara is Brahman the Absolute, lifted above all self-divisions and holding together both absolute objectivity and subjectivity in the unbreakable bond of absolute consciousness.

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¹ Evam utpattyādiśrutīnām aikātmyāvagamaparatvāt (S.B., iv. 3. 14). See also S.B., ii. 1. 33.

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² S.B., ii. 2. 37.

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³ Māyopādhir jagadyoniḥ sarvajñatvādilakṣaṇaḥ (Vākyavṛtti, p. 45).

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⁴ Appearance and Reality, p. 172.

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⁵ Enneads, iii. 9. 3, McKenna’s E.T., vol. ii, p. 141.

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There is a gap between the intuited Brahman which is devoid of logical determinations and the conceived Brahman which is the productive principle, which explains difference and at the same time overcomes it. The indeterminate Brahman in itself will seem to the logical intellect, as the dark in which all colours become grey. If it should serve as an explanation of the finite at all, it can only be through the introduction of the very form of the finite into the heart of the absolute. If we attempt to *think* pure being, we at the same time think non-being, and from the interaction of the two the becoming of the universe follows. Strictly speaking, even God becomes. The contradiction of being-non-being appears in his own inward nature. Perhaps Īśvara may not himself come to be, but still he makes his meaning explicit in an unending process of becoming. Being and non-being are aspects of one and the same reality, the positive substance and the negative shadow of the same reality. The criticism that Śaṁkara leaves us with an unbridgeable chasm at the summit of things, between the nirguṇa Brahman of which nothing can be said and the saguṇa Brahman which embraces and unifies all experience, is due to a confusion of standpoints. Thought can never overleap the distinction of subject and object, and so the highest for thought is the absolute subject with the object in it, but behind the subject and the object we have Brahman.

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