Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19.8

Language: English

v2.c26.s19.8.1

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.

v2.c26.s19.8.2

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.

v2.c26.s19.8.3

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.

v2.c26.s19.8.4

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.

v2.c26.s19.8.5

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.