Vedanta-Sutras Part I · 15 of 103

Introduction (Part 15)

I do not, however, consider this line of argumentation a safe one. Even if it could be shown that the teaching of all the chief Upanishads agrees in all essential points (a subject to which some attention will be paid later on), we should not on that account be entitled unhesitatingly to assume that the Sûtras set forth the same doctrine. Whatever the true philosophy of the Upanishads may be, there remains the undeniable fact that there exist and have existed since very ancient times not one but several essentially differing systems, all of which lay claim to the distinction of being the true representatives of the teaching of the Upanishads as well as of the Sûtras. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that, for instance, the doctrine of Mâyâ is distinctly enunciated in the Upanishads; nevertheless Râmânuga and, for all we know to the contrary, the whole series of more ancient commentators on whom he looked as authorities in the interpretation of the Sûtras, denied that the Upanishads teach Mâyâ, and it is hence by no means impossible that Bâdarâyana should have done the same. The à priori style of reasoning as to the teaching of the Sûtras is therefore without much force.

But apart from any intention of arriving thereby at the meaning of the Sûtras there, of course, remains for us the all-important question as to the true teaching of the Upanishads, a question which a translator of the Sûtras and Sankara cannot afford to pass over in silence, especially after reason has been shown for the conclusion that the Sûtras and the Sankara-bhâshya do not agree concerning most important points of Vedântic doctrine. The Sûtras as well as the later commentaries claim, in the first place, to be nothing more than systematisations of the Upanishads, and for us a considerable part at least of their value and interest lies in this their nature. Hence the further question presents itself by whom the teaching of the Upanishads has been most adequately systematised, whether by Bâdarâyana, or Sankara, or Râmânuga, or some other commentator. This question requires to be kept altogether separate from the enquiry as to which commentator most faithfully renders the contents of the Sûtras, and it is by no means impossible that Sankara, for instance, should in the end have to be declared a more trustworthy guide with regard to the teaching of the Upanishads than concerning the meaning of the Sûtras.

We must remark here at once that, whatever commentator may be found to deserve preference on the whole, it appears fairly certain already at the outset that none of the systems which Indian ingenuity has succeeded in erecting on the basis of the Upanishads can be accepted in its entirety. The reason for this lies in the nature of the Upanishads themselves. To the Hindu commentator and philosopher the Upanishads came down as a body of revealed truth whose teaching had, somehow or other, to be shown to be thoroughly consistent and free from contradictions; a system had to be devised in which a suitable place could be allotted to every one of the multitudinous statements which they make on the various points of Vedântic doctrine.

But to the European scholar, or in fact to any one whose mind is not bound by the doctrine of Sruti, it will certainly appear that all such attempts stand self-condemned. If anything is evident even on a cursory review of the Upanishads—and the impression so created is only strengthened by a more careful investigation—it is that they do not constitute a systematic whole. They themselves, especially the older ones, give the most unmistakable indications on that point. Not only are the doctrines expounded in the different Upanishads ascribed to different teachers, but even the separate sections of one and the same Upanishad are assigned to different authorities. It would be superfluous to quote examples of what a mere look at the Khândogya Upanishad, for instance, suffices to prove.

It is of course not impossible that even a multitude of teachers should agree in imparting precisely the same doctrine; but in the case of the Upanishads that is certainly not antecedently probable. For, in the first place, the teachers who are credited with the doctrines of the Upanishads manifestly belonged to different sections of Brahminical society, to different Vedic sâkhâs; nay, some of them the tradition makes out to have been kshattriyas. And, in the second place, the period, whose mental activity is represented in the Upanishads, was a creative one, and as such cannot be judged according to the analogy of later periods of Indian philosophic development. The later philosophic schools as, for instance, the one of which Sankara is the great representative, were no longer free in their speculations, but strictly bound by a traditional body of texts considered sacred, which could not be changed or added to, but merely systematised and commented upon. Hence the rigorous uniformity of doctrine characteristic of those schools.

But there had been a time when, what later writers received as a sacred legacy, determining and confining the whole course of their speculations, first sprang from the minds of creative thinkers not fettered by the tradition of any school, but freely following the promptings of their own heads and hearts. By the absence of school traditions, I do not indeed mean that the great teachers who appear in the Upanishads were free to make an entirely new start, and to assign to their speculations any direction they chose; for nothing can be more certain than that, at the period as the outcome of whose philosophical activity the Upanishads have to be considered, there were in circulation certain broad speculative ideas overshadowing the mind of every member of Brahminical society.

But those ideas were neither very definite nor worked out in detail, and hence allowed themselves to be handled and fashioned in different ways by different individuals. With whom the few leading conceptions traceable in the teaching of all Upanishads first originated, is a point on which those writings themselves do not enlighten us, and which we have no other means for settling; most probably they are to be viewed not as the creation of any individual mind, but as the gradual outcome of speculations carried on by generations of Vedic theologians. In the Upanishads themselves, at any rate, they appear as floating mental possessions which may be seized and moulded into new forms by any one who feels within himself the required inspiration.

A certain vague knowledge of Brahman, the great hidden being in which all this manifold world is one, seems to be spread everywhere, and often issues from the most unexpected sources. Svetaketu receives instruction from his father Uddâlaka; the proud Gârgya has to become the pupil of Agâtasatru, the king of Kâsî; Bhugyu Sâhyâyani receives answers to his questions from a Gandharva possessing a maiden; Satyakâma learns what Brahman is from the bull of the herd he is tending, from Agni and from a flamingo; and Upakosala is taught by the sacred fires in his teacher’s house. All this is of course legend, not history; but the fact that the philosophic and theological doctrines of the Upanishads are clothed in this legendary garb certainly does not strengthen the expectation of finding in them a rigidly systematic doctrine.

And a closer investigation of the contents of the Upanishads amply confirms this preliminary impression. If we avail ourselves, for instance, of M. Paul Régnaud’s Matériaux pour servir à l’Histoire de la Philosophie de l’Inde, in which the philosophical lucubrations of the different Upanishads are arranged systematically according to topics, we can see with ease how, together with a certain uniformity of general leading conceptions, there runs throughout divergence in details, and very often not unimportant details.

A look, for instance, at the collection of passages relative to the origination of the world from the primitive being, suffices to show that the task of demonstrating that whatever the Upanishads teach on that point can be made to fit into a homogeneous system is an altogether hopeless one. The accounts there given of the creation belong, beyond all doubt to different stages of philosophic and theological development or else to different sections of priestly society. None but an Indian commentator would, I suppose, be inclined and sufficiently courageous to attempt the proof that, for instance, the legend of the âtman purushavidha, the Self in the shape of a person which is as large as man and woman together, and then splits itself into two halves from which cows, horses, asses, goats, &c.

are produced in succession (Bri. Up. I, 1, 4), can be reconciled with the account given of the creation in the Khândogya Upanishad, where it is said that in the beginning there existed nothing but the sat,

‘that which is,’ and that feeling a desire of being many it emitted out of itself ether, and then all the other elements in due succession. The former is a primitive cosmogonic myth, which in its details shows striking analogies with the cosmogonic myths of other nations; the latter account is fairly developed Vedânta (although not Vedânta implying the Mâyâ doctrine). We may admit that both accounts show a certain fundamental similarity in so far as they derive the manifold world from one original being; but to go beyond this and to maintain, as Sankara does, that the âtman purushavidha of the Brihadâranyaka is the so-called Virâg of the latter Vedânta—implying thereby that that section consciously aims at describing only the activity of one special form of Îsvara, and not simply the whole process of creation—is the ingenious shift of an orthodox commentator in difficulties, but nothing more.

How all those more or less conflicting texts came to be preserved and handed down to posterity, is not difficult to understand. As mentioned above, each of the great sections of Brahminical priesthood had its own sacred texts, and again in each of those sections there existed more ancient texts which it was impossible to discard when deeper and more advanced speculations began in their turn to be embodied in literary compositions, which in the course of time likewise came to be looked upon as sacred. When the creative period had reached its termination, and the task of collecting and arranging was taken in hand, older and newer pieces were combined into wholes, and thus there arose collections of such heterogeneous character as the Khândogya and Brihadâranyaka Upanishads. On later generations, to which the whole body of texts came down as revealed truth, there consequently devolved the inevitable task of establishing systems on which no exception could be taken to any of the texts; but that the task was, strictly speaking, an impossible one, i.e. one which it was impossible to accomplish fairly and honestly, there really is no reason to deny.

For a comprehensive criticism of the methods which the different commentators employ in systematizing the contents of the Upanishads there is no room in this place. In order, however, to illustrate what is meant by the ‘impossibility,’ above alluded to, of combining the various doctrines of the Upanishads into a whole without doing violence to a certain number of texts, it will be as well to analyse in detail some few at least of Sankara’s interpretations, and to render clear the considerations by which he is guided.

We begin with a case which has already engaged our attention when discussing the meaning of the Sûtras, viz. the question concerning the ultimate fate of those who have attained the knowledge of Brahman. As we have seen, Sankara teaches that the soul of him who has risen to an insight into the nature of the higher Brahman does not, at the moment of death, pass out of the body, but is directly merged in Brahman by a process from which all departing and moving, in fact all considerations of space, are altogether excluded. The soul of him, on the other hand, who has not risen above the knowledge of the lower qualified Brahman departs from the body by means of the artery called sushumnâ, and following the so-called devayâna, the path of the gods, mounts up to the world of Brahman. A review of the chief Upanishad texts on which Sankara founds this distinction will show how far it is justified.

In a considerable number of passages the Upanishads contrast the fate of two classes of men, viz. of those who perform sacrifices and meritorious works only, and of those who in addition possess a certain kind of knowledge. Men of the former kind ascend after death to the moon, where they live for a certain time, and then return to the earth into new forms of embodiment; persons of the latter kind proceed on the path of the gods—on which the sun forms one stage—up to the world of Brahman, from which there is no return. The chief passages to that effect are Kh. Up. V, 10; Kaush. Up. I, 2 ff.; Mund. Up. I, 2, 9 ff.; Bri. Up. VI, 2, 15 ff.; Prasna Up. I, 9 ff.—In other passages only the latter of the two paths is referred to, cp. Kh. Up. IV, 15; VIII 6, 5; Taitt. Up. I, 6; Bri. Up. IV, 4, 8, 9; V, 10; Maitr. Up. VI, 30, to mention only the more important ones.

Now an impartial consideration of those passages shows

I think, beyond any doubt, that what is meant there by the knowledge which leads through the sun to the world of Brahman is the highest knowledge of which the devotee is capable, and that the world of Brahman to which his knowledge enables him to proceed denotes the highest state which he can ever reach, the state of final release, if we choose to call it by that name.—Kh. Up. V, 10 says, ‘Those who know this (viz. the doctrine of the five fires), and those who in the forest follow faith and austerities go to light,’ &c.—Kh. Up. IV, 15 is manifestly intended to convey the true knowledge of Brahman; Upakosala’s teacher himself represents the instruction given by him as superior to the teaching of the sacred fires.—Kh. Up.

VIII, 6, 5 quotes the old sloka which says that the man moving upwards by the artery penetrating the crown of the head reaches the Immortal.—Kaush. Up. I, 2—which gives the most detailed account of the ascent of the soul—contains no intimation whatever of the knowledge of Brahman, which leads up to the Brahman world, being of an inferior nature.—Mund. Up. I, 2, 9 agrees with the Khândogya in saying that ‘Those who practise penance and faith in the forest, tranquil, wise, and living on alms, depart free from passion, through the sun, to where that immortal Person dwells whose nature is imperishable,’ and nothing whatever in the context countenances the assumption that not the highest knowledge and the highest Person are there referred to.—Bri. Up.