A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c8.s4.8

c8.s4.8

17. We have seen, hitherto, the epistemological significance of the conception of pure Self-consciousness in the Upanishads. We have seen that the Self is regarded as unknowable in his essential nature, as well as because he cannot be an object of knowledge. We have seen also that he can dichotomise himself and make himself at once the knower and the known. It remains for us now to discourse on what may be called the metaphysical significance of the conception of Self-consciousness. In the preceding Chapter we have seen how the whole field of philosophic thought was torn by the conflicts of the metaphysicians, some regarding the Self as entirely distinct from the Absolute, others regarding it as a part of the Absolute, and yet others regarding the Self and the Absolute as entirely identical. These constitute respectively the fundamental positions of the three great metaphysical schools—the dualistic, the quasi-monistic, and the monistic. Never has any land possibly experienced such bitter and prolonged argumentative battles as were witnessed in India throughout the history of its thought. The question arises : Is there any way out of the difficulty? How is it that each of these different metaphysical schools comes to interpret the same Upanishadic passages as confirming its own special metaphysical doctrines? Shall we not say that the Upanishads are higher than the Commentators? Is there not a common body of metaphysical doctrine in the Upanishads which each of the metaphysical schools has only partially envisaged? Is the utterance of that greatest of Indian philosophers to be regarded as vain, when he said that the Schools may battle among themselves, but yet that Philosophy is above the Schools? May we not find a supreme clue to the reconciliation of these different battling doctrines? We must go back to the Upanishads themselves, with our mind entirely purged of all scholastic interpretation. Let us make our mind a *tabula rasa*, an unwritten slate upon which there is no hurtful imprint of scholastic superstition, and we shall see that there is a clue through the labyrinth and mazes of the philosophic conflicts. It is true that the reconciliation of the different schools must come, if at all, only through mystical experince. It is only in mystic experience that each school and each doctrine can have its own appointed place and level. But it may also be granted to us to look even philosophically at the problem, to go back to the texts of the Upanishads themselves, to arrange them in a serial order of developing philosophical propositions, and finally to see a vista of supreme reconciliation spreading out before us among the battling forces.