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A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c5.s1: 12. Prāṇa, a bio-psycho-metaphysical conception

A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c5.s1

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12. Prāṇa, a bio-psycho-metaphysical conception

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In the account of Prāṇa which we find in the Kaushitaki Upanishad there are certain noticeable features which do not occur either in the Chhāndogyopanishad or the Praśnopanishad. In the first place, Prāṇa is directly identified with life (Āyuḥ). This is as much as to say that life exists so long as Prāṇa exists and life departs as soon as Prāṇa departs. Then again, Prāṇa is identified with consciousness (Prajñā). It is interesting to note that consciousness is here distinguished from life as the higher category of existence. There may be forms of life without consciousness; but wherever there is consciousness there must be life; and the aki Upanishad seems to recognise this difference and describes Prāṇa not merely as the principle of life but as the principle of consciousness also. Then, thirdly, the Upanishad identifies Prāṇa with the Atma, the Ultimate Reality, which is ageless and immortal, which does not increase by good actions nor diminish by bad actions (§. 14). It thus comes about that Prāṇa is life from the biological point of view, consciousness from the psychological point of view, and Ātman from the metaphysical point of view. This is verily a philosophical apotheosis of Prāṇa.

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13. We now come to the personalistic theories of creation. Hitherto we have discussed theories which regard either or all of the elements, namely fire, air, water, earth and space, or even such privative conceptions as Not-Being or Night or Hunger or Death, or even such an abstract metaphysical conception as Being, or finally the highly developed bio-psycho-metaphysical conception of Prāṇa, as the φύσις of things. We must note that in all these theories of creation, no creator with a personal existence is brought in for the purposes of creation. We have a more or less naturalistic account of cosmogenesis. On the other hand, in the theories which we are now about to discuss, we shall have to take account of the personal element in creation. In the Praśnopanishad we are told by Pippalāda that at the beginning of creation, the creator became desirous of creating, and, with that end in view, practised penance, and after having practised penance, first created a pair namely Rayi and Prāṇa, corresponding respectively to matter and spirit, with the intention of creating all existence whatsoever from them. While we must give credit to Pippalāda for having conceived the notion of a duality of primary existences, Rayi and Prāṇa, almost in the spirit of Aristotle's Matter and Form, the application which Pippalāda makes of his twofold principle is rather amusing. The moon is matter, he says, while the sun is spirit; the path of the fathers is matter, while the path of the gods is spirit; the dark half of the month is matter, while the bright half is spirit; night is matter, while day is spirit. It was in this way that the Creator was able to create all the dual existence whatsoever in the world (S. 15. a). In a similar spirit does the Taittirīyopanishad tell us that "the Creator at the beginning of things practised penance, and having practised penance, created all things that exist, and having created them entered into them, and having enered into them, became himself both the manifest and the unmanifest, the defined and the undefined, the supported and the unsupported, the conscious and the unconscious, the true and the false" (S. 15. b). Though the Taittirīyopanishad agrees with the Praśnopanishad in positing a Creator who at the beginning of things was required to practise penance, still it differs from it in substituting the philosophical duality of the defined and the undefined, the conscious and the unconscious, the true and the false, instead of the mythological duality of the Praśnopanishad, namely, the dark half of the month and the bright half of the month, the path of the fathers and the path of the gods, night and day, the moon and the sun, and the rest. But it is evident that in the two passages we have been considering, we have the idea of a Creator introduced, which enables us to say that these passages logically mark an advance over the earlier ones which give merely an impersonalistic account of creation.

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14. Another explanation of the duality of existence, this time of the duality of sex, occurs in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopanishad, where we are told that "the Atman alone existed in the beginning of things.

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and he had the form of man.....He first said to himself, I am He, and it was for this reason that he came to be called I. It is for this reason also that when a man is asked who he is, he first replies it is I, and then he gives out his name.....This Ātman was afraid; it is for that reason that when a man is alone, he fears. Then the Ātman began to reflect, why should I fear if there is nothing existing beside me, of which I might be afraid; it was thus that all fear departed from him.....It is said verily that fear proceeds only from a second. But the Ātman could not still find satisfaction; for that reason it is that when a man is alone, he does not find satisfaction. The Ātman therefore wished for a second,......and having divided himself into two halves, became both the husband and the wife, man as well as woman. The woman began to reflect, 'how having generated me from himself, he seeks intercourse with me?' 'Let me hide myself' she said, and so she became a cow; the Ātman, however, became a bull and had intercourse with her. .....She became a mare, while he became a horse. She became a she-ass, and the other became a he-ass and had intercourse with her. It was thus that both the male and the female creatures were created by the Ātman up to the very ants. All these were created by him" (S. 16). It must be noted, as we have pointed out above, that this passage gives us an explanation of the generation of the duality of sex from the Ātman in the organic world, but it yet leaves the inorganic generation entirely unexplained.

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