A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.5

c4.5

of religion. There are no hymns to gods or goddesses of nature in the Upanishads, but on the contrary, they contain a scientific search for the Substratum underlying the phenomenal forces of nature. There are neither any offerings of prayers to gods in the Upanishads, nor is there visible, throughout the Upanishadic period, any inordinate fear of the wrath of these natural forces personified as gods. In other words, we may say that as we go from the Vedic period to the Upanishadic period, there is visible at every stage the process of a transference of interest from God to Self. When the individual Self has become the universal Self, when, in short, the Ātman has been realised, whom and what may anybody fear? For whom and what may any offerings be made? For whom and what may anybody pray to divinity? In a word, we may say, that as we pass from the Vedas to the Upanishads, we pass from prayer to philosophy, from hymnology to reflection, from henotheistic polytheism to monotheistic mysticism. Then, secondly, we must not fail to notice the progress that was already being made towards the conceptions of cosmogony even in certain hymns of the Rigveda itself. If we just take into account such a hymn as Rigveda x. 88, where the seer inquires what was the "hylē" out of which the heavens and the earth were built eternally firm and what it was upon which the Creator stood when he upheld the worlds, or yet again hymns like x. 5 and x. 27, where the conceptions of Being and Not-being in a cosmological sense are being already broached, or even that famous agnostic hymn of creation x. 129, where the primal existent is declared as being superior to both Being and Not-being and where the cognisant activity of the Creator himself is called in question, we may say that a beginning was made even at this Rigvedic period of the real philosophical impulse which passing through the Brāhmaṇic period was to gather force at the beginning of the Upanishadic period. Thirdly, from the psychological point of view, we may say that while the Rigveda may be regarded as a great work of emotion and imagination, the Upanishads may be regarded as a work of thought and reason. There are many passages in the Rigveda, especially in the hymns to Varuṇa, which have a close analogy to the devotional psalms of the Bible both in point of language and ideas—passages which are rarely to be met with in the literature of the Upanishads; on the other hand, in the Upanishads, we have more or less the coolness of intellectual argument exhibiting itself in a systematic search after the Ultimate Reality. Thus it happens that while there are to be met with in the Rigveda many hymns which express the meek submission of the suppliant devotee asking for gracious forgiveness from a divinity which is the creation of his own imagination, the Upanishads say in bold terms: "Seek not favour from any such divinity; reality is not the divinity which you are worshipping—nedam yad idam upāsate; the guardian of order is not outside; natural and moral order does not come from without; it springs from the Ātman, who is the synthesis of both outside and inside, who is veritably the ballast of nature, who is the unshakable bund that prevents the stream of existence from flowing recklessly as it lists."