A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.s2.5

c4.s2.5

(i) In the first place, we must note the enigmatic method which occurs from time to time in these Upanishads. When Śāṇḍilya said that reality was “tajjalān,” he was adopting a cryptic way for saying how God could be regarded as the origin, the end, and the life of all things. When the philosopher of the Īśāvāsyopanishad introduced the Vidyā and Avidyā, and the Saṃbhūti and Asaṃbhūti triplets, he was also taking recourse to the same method, pointing to a synthesis of opposites underlying the apparent contradictions involved in the formulation of the two riddles. The best illustration, however, of the enigmatic method is to be found in the Śvetāśvataropanishad, where we are told that reality is like a great circumscribing felly, whose tyres are the three Guṇas, whose ends are the sixteen Kalās, whose spokes are the fifty Bhāvas or conditions of Sāṃkhya philosophy, whose counter-spokes are the ten Senses and their ten Objects, whose six sets of eights are the eights such as the Dhātus, the Gods, the eight-fold Prakṛiti and so on, whose single rope is the Cosmic Person, whose three paths are the Good, the Bad and the Indifferent, or yet again, the Moral, the Immoral, and the A-moral, and finally which causes the single infatuation of the Ignorance of Self on account of the two causes, namely, Good and Bad works (S. 9. a). The philosopher of the Śvetāśvatara again tells us that he contemplates Nature which is like a vast expanse of water contributed to by the five different streams of the Senses, whose springs are the five Elements which make it fierce and crooked, whose waves are the five Prāṇas, whose fount is the Antaḥkaraṇapañchaka, whose whirl-pools are the five Objects of sense which entangle a man into them, whose five rapids are the kinds of grief caused by Generation, Existence, Transformation, Declination and Decay, which diverts itself into the fifty channels of the Bhāvas of Sāṃkhya philosophy, and finally, which has the five tides of periodic overflow namely, at Birth, in Childhood, in Manhood, in Old age and at Death (S. 9. b). Philosophy would be arid and dry, if it did not occasionally contain such enigmatic riddles. Even Plato describes how a man and no-man, seeing and not-seeing a bird and no-bird on a tree and not-tree, killed it and did not kill it, with a stone and no-stone.