A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.s1.6

c4.s1.6

is that all these great works, whether we take the Vedas and the Upanishads on the one hand, or History and Mythology on the other, may be regarded as having been due to the inspirational activity of God in the minds of those who composed them. It was not the writers of these works that were the authors of them, but it was the Divinity within them that was responsible for their production. We thus have the Upanishadic view of the Upanishads as the result of the inspirational activity of God, the philosophers to whom they are attributed having served merely as instruments for the display of this activity. This is a sort of a new Upanishadic Occasionalism, where the Seer or the Sage serves merely as an occasion for the creative activity of God. Thus, when the sage Śvetāśvatara said, that the Upanishad, which is named after him, was revealed to him through the power of his penance and the grace of God (S. 4. a), and yet again when the sage Triśaṅku uttered his vedānuvachana, which expression might be understood to mean either a " post-illuminational " discourse, or one which was " in consonance with his mystical illumination " (S. 4. b), they are supporting the view of the meaning of Revelation which we have taken above. There is yet again a second view which implies more or less a human participation in the transmission, if not in the composition, of these revealed texts, when, as in the Īśa and the Kena Upanishads, we are made aware of a continuity of philosophical tradition which had come down to the days of the Upanishads (S. 5. a). In the Chhāndogya Upanishad, likewise, we are told that Sages of old were careful to learn spiritual wisdom from their Teachers, for fear that when these Teachers had departed, there would be nobody living who would tell them " what could not be otherwise heard, what could not be otherwise thought, what could not be otherwise known" (S. 5. b). Finally, we have in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka a strange view of the genesis of Revelation, when we are told that the Ṛigveda, the Yajurveda and the Sāmaveda were all of them produced by the God of Death, who having coupled himself with a wife of his own creation, namely Speech, produced the above-mentioned Vedas along with all men and cattle from his union (S. 6)—a view which is quixotic enough for philosophical purposes, unless we understand it as having an anthropologic value, and as being the remnant of an old mythological way of thought which is to be found in plenty in most Brāhmaṇical as well as in some Upanishadic literature. On the whole, it may not be untrue to say that the Upanishads are regarded by the Upanishads themselves as being the work of the inspirational activity of God in the human mind.