Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c21.3

c21.3

**Doctrines common to both: those of Ātman, Sorrow, Deliverance, Desire, Karma, Rebirth.** Oldenberg [*Buddha*, Introduction] has well shown how "for hundreds of years before Buddha’s time movements were in progress in Indian thought which prepared the way for Buddhism” (p. 6). Hindu thought, turning aside from the very outset from life and its realities, addressed itself to the world of spirit which it peopled with divinities symbolizing the different forces or phenomena of nature to be worshipped through sacrifice. There thus grows up a religion of sacrifice with an elaborate symbolism and literature, but the irresistible quest of the substance soon leads to a search for Unity in all diversity, outgrowing the oldest Vedic thought. Thus arose gradually the conceptions of the Prajāpati, of the Ātman and Brahmā, wherein “the yearning spirit, wearied of wandering in a world of gloomy, formless phantasms, finds its rest” (p. 30). But “the glorification of the Ātman becomes involuntarily an ever increasingly bitter criticism of this world” (p. 42). “When thought, liberal to itself, had laden the idea of the Ātman with all attributes of every perfection, of absolute unity, of unlimited fulness, the world of plurality, measured by the standard of the everlasting One, must have necessarily appeared a state of disruption, restriction, and pain” (ib.). Yājñavalkya declares in the Upanishads: “Whatever is beside Him is full of sorrow”; “as the sun, the eye of the Universe, remains far off and unaffected by all sickness that meets the (human) eye, so also the One, the Ātman, who dwells in all creatures, dwells afar and untouched by the sorrows of the world” (p. 43). Here, for the first time, is delivered that message of sorrow or pessimism which forms the common and abiding note in the manifold expressions and systems of Indian thought through the ages. A natural transition from this philosophy of Pessimism leads to the conceptions of Metempsychosis and to their concomitants and antidotes, the doctrines of Deliverance, a message of Hope against the other message of Despair, the formulation of the ways of escape from the appalling fatality of “the endless migration from world to world, from existence to existence, the endlessness of the struggle against the pallid power of that ever-recurring destruction” (p. 45). The older Vedic conceptions of Deliverance comprised “the use of the right words and the right offerings” (p. 44), and, later, with the rise of the Upanishadic speculations regarding the Ātman, the attainment of “the unity of the soul with its true mode of being, the Brahma”, while, as a natural counterpart of this doctrine, “the wandering of the soul through the domains of death” was regarded as “the fruit of its non-union with the Brahma”