A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c5.s1.2

c5.s1.2

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.