A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.s4: The Problems of Upanishadic philosophy

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certain heavenly deities before whom they had to bow down their heads in unconscious awe. From the Rigveda to the Upanishads we find the same transition as we find in the History of Greek Philosophy from Homer and Hesiod to Thales and Anaximander. Natural forces cease to be personified, and a definite attitude comes to be taken which is worthy only of speculative thinkers. "What is that," asked the Upanishadic philosophers, "which being known, everything else becomes known" (S. 20)? In short, they wanted to know the "archē" of knowledge. They first tried to find this in the cosmological sphere; but having failed to find it therein, they began to search after it in the psychological domain. What is it, they asked, which persists when the body is dead? What is it, again, which lives and persistently creates, even though the body may go into a state of sleep (S. 21)? Not without reason did Yājñavalkya stand victorious in the intellectual arena in Janaka's court when he appealed to the transmundane problem of the persistence of the Self after death. What is the real root, he asked, from which the tree of life springs again and again, even though knocked and cut down by that Dark Cutter, Death (S. 22)? We may well imagine how Janaka, who saw in the elephant, on which he was riding, a former sage, namely Buḍila, must have been regarded as a very wise man of the day (S. 23). Eschatological knowledge was regarded as the most precious of all. But even then, the desire of man to know the Ultimate could not be finally quenched. He must know the answer to the most central problem—What is the Real, What is the Ātman, What intellectual construction could he make about it? An attempt to solve this problem would lead the Upanishadic philosopher into the very heart of metaphysics, and when a certain intellectual solution was arrived at, the next problem would be how practically to attain to that knowledge, what should be the norm of conduct following which one may hope to "appropriate the God-head." As the culmination of this practical endeavour would come the mystical attitude, which would complete the moral endeavour, which, without it, would be like the *Hamlet* with Hamlet out. Mysticism was the culmination of Upanishadic philosophy, as it is the culmination of all philosophies, and one who does not understand that the cosmology and the psychology, the metaphysics and the ethics of the Upanishads are merely a propaedeutic to their mystical doctrine can scarcely be said to have understood the spirit of Upanishadic philosophy.