A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c5.2

c5.2

1. When Sir Henry Maine said that except the blind forces of nature nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin, he should have at least excluded from the scope of his assertion the Upanishadic philosophy, and more particularly, the Upanishadic cosmogony. The hey-day of Upanishadic philosophy was that great millenium before ever the earliest Greek philosophers, Thales and Anaximander, began to speculate, and as in Greek philosophy, so in Upanishadic philosophy, the primary impulse to thought came from cosmologic, and more particularly from cosmogonic, speculation. The starry heavens above, the regularities of the moving seasons, the roaring of wind in the firmament, the conflagrations of the all-powerful fire, the periodical inundations of waters, in general, the settled recurrence of all happenings in nature, must have filled the natural inquirer with an impulse to find out the real meaning of all these phenomena; and it is no wonder that as in Greek philosophy, so in Upanishadic philosophy, the primary search was after the φύσις of things. What is that which abides in the midst of changes? What is that, which as the Upanishad puts it, may be called the "Tajjalān"? What is that from which all things spring, into which they are resolved, and in which they live and have their being? (S. 1. a)? From the Taittirīyopanishad we learn that "that alone might be regarded as the Ultimate Reality of things, from which all these beings were born, by which they live when born, to which they repair and into which they are finally resolved" (S. 1. b). This is very much like the way in which Aristotle tells us the early Greek cosmologists conceived of their primary substance: ἐξ οὗ γάρ ἐστιν ἅπαντα τὰ ὄντα, καὶ ἐξ οὗ γιγνεται πρῶτον καὶ εἰς ὃ φθείρεται τελευταῖον.... τοῦτο στοιχεῖον καὶ ταύτην ἀρχήν φασιν εἶναι τῶν ὄντων. Then again, when the Sage of the Śvetāśvataropanishad asks in wonder at the very beginning of his treatise, "From whom are we born, in whom do we live and have our being?" (S. 1. c), we are put in mind of a similar remark of Hesiod at the opening of his "Theogony" when he asks "Who made all this, and how did he make them?". The search after the ultimate cause of things, the substratum, the φύσις of things, is as characteristic of the early Upanishadic cosmogony, as it is of the later Greek cosmogony; and even though, as we may see in the sequel of this chapter, there is no justification for saying that Greek cosmogony was derived from the Upanishadic, still on account of the universally acknowledged, and definitely proved, priority of the Upanishadic speculation, he must be a bold man indeed who dares to say that all things except the blind forces of nature have come from Greece!