A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c7.2

c7.2

**1. Introductory.** It has been customary among commentators of Upanishadic Philosophy to regard the variegated philosophical texts of the Upanishads as constituting one systematic whole. Thus the many great commentators on the Upanishads, such as those belonging to the schools of Pluralism, Qualified Monism, Monism, Pure Monism and others, have tried to utilise even those passages, whose import is manifestly against the particular doctrines which they are holding, as authoritative texts to prop up their own particular dogmas. The primary cause of such a handling of the Upanishads is a mistaken notion of the meaning of revelation. The Upanishads, like the Ṛigveda, having been regarded as a revelation from God, it seems impossible to these commentators that such a revelation should contain texts which are contradictory of each other. A second reason for the manifest attempt to press all the Upanishadic texts into the service of the particular dogma to which these philosophers are committed is the lack of a historico-critical spirit which refuses to see in the Upanishads the bubbling up of the thoughts of numerous sages of antiquity, each of whom tried to express as naively, as simply, and as directly as possible the thoughts which were uppermost in his mind, and which he regarded as fully descriptive of the view of reality which consciously or unconsciously had sprung up within him. As we shall see in the course of the chapter, the Upanishads supply us with various principles of thought, and may thus be called the Berecynthia of all the later systems of Indian Philosophy. Just like a mountain which from its various sides gives birth to rivers which run in different directions, similarly the Upanishads constitute that lofty eminence of philosophy, which from its various sides gives birth to rivulets of thought, which, as they progress onwards towards the sea of life, gather strength by the inflow of innumerable tributaries of speculation which intermittently join these rivulets, so as to make a huge expanse of waters at the place where they meet the ocean of life. It is thus that we see in the Upanishads roots of Buddhistic as well as Jain Philosophy, of Sāmkhya as well as Yoga, of Mīmānsā as well as Śaivism, of the theistic-mystic philosophy of the Bhagavadgītā, of the Dvaita, the Vīśiṣṭādvaita as well as the Advaita systems. Let no man stand up and say that the Upanishads advocate only one single doctrine. A careful study of the Upanishads, supplemented by a critico-historical spirit engendered by the study of Western thought, will soon reduce to nought all such frivolous notions that there is only one system of thought to be found in the Upanishads. For long the personal equation of philosophers has weighed with them in determining the interpretation of texts so as to suit their own particular dogmas. As against these, it shall be our business in the course of this chapter to point out how from the Upanishads spring various streams of thought, which gradually become more and more systematised into the architectonic systems of later Indian Philosophy.