A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c7.14

c7.14

10. So far we have considered the passages from the Bhagavadgītā and the Upanishads which are substantially identical from the point of view of either phraseology or ideology. We shall now consider those passages and ideas from the Upanishads which the Bhagavadgītā has borrowed, transformed, and developed, so as to suit its own particular philosophy. The verse from the Īśāvāsyopanishad which tells us in a spirit of apparent contradiction that "a man should spend his life-time only in doing actions, for it is only thus that he may hope to be untainted by action" (S. 14. a), has supplied the Bhagavadgītā with an idea so prolific of consequences that the Bhagavadgītā has deemed it fit to erect a whole philosophy of Karmayoga upon it. As we may also point out in the chapter on the Ethics of the Upanishads, this passage supplies us with the means as well as the goal of moral life, without giving us the connecting link between them. As we shall see later, the principal theme of the Bhagavadgītā is to teach a life of activity coupled with the effects of actionlessness through the intermediate linkage of un-attachment to and indifference to the fruits of action. Secondly, when in the Muṇḍakopanishad we find the description of the Cosmic Person with fire as his head, the sun and the moon as his eyes, the quarters as his ears, the Vedas as his speech, air as his Prāṇa, the universe as his heart, and the earth as his feet (S. 14. b), we have in embryo a description of the Viśvarūpa which later became the theme of the famous Eleventh Chapter of the Bhagavadgītā on the transfigured personality of Kṛṣṇa. It is true at the same time that the Muṇḍakopanishad probably borrows the idea from the Purushasūkta, but it is equally true to say that it supplies the Bhagavadgītā with a text upon which the latter enlarges, and evolves the conception of the Cosmic Person, who fills all, who is all-powerful, to whom the past and the future are like an eternal now, submission to whom and assimilation to whom constitute the ends of mortal endeavour. Then, thirdly, while the Kaṭhopanishad gives us a scheme of psychological and metaphysical existences mixed together in a famous passage where it declares that beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is mind, beyond the mind is intellect, beyond the intellect is Mahat, beyond the Mahat is the Avyakta, and finally beyond the Avyakta is the Purusha, beyond whom and outside whom there is nothing else (S. 14. c), the Bhagavadgītā simplifies the scheme very much by retaining only the psychological categories and doing away with the metaphysical, for the simple reason that it understands the passage to have a psychological rather than a metaphysical significance. Thus, when the Bhagavadgītā in III. 42 tells us that beyond the senses is mind, that beyond the mind is intellect, and that beyond intellect is the Purusha, it drops out altogether the categories of the objective world,—the Mahat and the Avyakta,—retains only the psychological categories and simplifies the scheme immensely. Finally, the devotional impulse which beats in the heart of Nārada when he implores Sanatkumāra to initiate him into spiritual wisdom (S. 15. a), as well as the equally fervent emotional attitude of Bṛhadratha when he requests Śākāyanya to lift him out of the mire of existence like a frog from a waterless well (S. 15. b),—which emotional attitudes may be seen to be strangely in contrast with the otherwise generally dry intellectual argumentation of the Upanishads,—become later almost the foundation-stone for the theistic-mystic philosophy of the Bhagavadgītā, in which the dry intellectualism and the speculative construction of the Upanishads disappear, and we have the rare combination of poetry and philosophy which makes the "Upāsanā" of the Śvetāśvatara (S. 15. c), or "Bhakti" to God as to Guru (S. 15. d) the *sine quâ non* of a truly mystic life, whose end is the realisation of God.