A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.s3.1.2

c4.s3.1.2

the poetry of the Śvetāśvatara rises in the sixth chapter to a theistic description of God, and a representation of Him as *causa sui*; it is only in the Muṇḍakopanishad that we find the highest emotion of which the Upanishads are capable. This of course is not yet of the highest order, but we may say that never elsewhere in the Upanishads do we find the stage of emotionalism that is reached in the Muṇḍaka. There are, however, a number of passages in the Upanishads which are couched in prose, and yet are highly poetic in sentiment. They are what a modern writer has called "conflagrations of prose-poetry". Thus for example, as a piece of sustained imaginative composition in prose, we may take the passage from the Chhāndogya which tells us that "the heaven must be regarded as the supporting beam from which the intermundane region hangs like a bee-hive. The Sun is the honey of the gods as preserved in this bee-hive. The rays which the Sun spreads in different quarters, namely, the eastern, the southern, the western, the northern and the upward directions are the different honey-cells looking in the various directions. The hymns of the four Vedas are the bees which work on the bee-hive from the various sides. The different colours of the Sun are the different kinds of nectar on which the various gods live", and, we are told, these gods live on them not by the ordinary processes of drinking or eating, but by merely "looking" at them (S. 12.