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On Translating the Upanishads
THIS translation of a few of the simpler and more exoteric Upanishads to be followed by other sacred and philosophical writings of the Hindus not included in the Revealed Scriptures, all under the one title of the Book of God, has been effected on one definite and unvarying principle, to present to England and through England to Europe the religious message of India only in those parts of her written thought which the West is fit to hear and to present these in such a form as should be attractive and suggestive to the Occidental intellect. The first branch of this principle necessitated a rigid selection on definite lines, the second dictated the choice of a style and method of rendering which should be literary rather than literal. The series of translations called the Sacred Books of the East, edited by the late Professor Max Muller, was executed in a scholastic and peculiar spirit. Professor Max Muller, a scholar of wide attainments, great versatility and a refreshingly active, ingenious and irresponsible fancy, has won considerable respect in India by his attachment to Vedic studies, but it must fairly be recognised that he was more of a grammarian and philologist, than a sound Sanskrit scholar. He could construe Sanskrit well enough, but he could not feel the language or realise the spirit behind the letter. Accordingly he committed two serious errors of judgment; he imagined that by sitting in Oxford and evolving new meanings out of his own brilliant fancy he could understand the Upanishads better than Shankaracharya or any other Hindu of parts and learning; and he also imagined that what was important for Europe to know about the Upanishads was what he and other European scholars considered they ought to mean. This, however, is a matter of no importance to anybody but the scholars themselves. What it is really important for Europe to know is in the first place what the Upanishads really do mean, so far as their exoteric teaching extends, and in a less degree what philosophic Hinduism took them to mean. The latter knowledge Page – 53 may be gathered from the commentaries of Shankaracharya and other philosophers which may be studied in the original or in their translations which the Dravidian Presidency, ignorantly called benighted by the materialists, has been issuing with a truly noble learning and high-minded enterprise. The former this book makes some attempt to convey. But it may be asked, why these particular Upanishads alone, when there are so many others far larger in plan and of a not inferior importance? In answer I may quote a sentence from Professor Max Müller’s Preface to the Sacred Books of the East. "I confess," he says, "it has been for many years a problem to me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred Books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial and silly, but even hideous and repellent." Now, I myself being only a poor coarse-minded Oriental and therefore not disposed to deny the gross physical facts of life and nature or able to see why we should scuttle them out of sight and put on a smug, respectable expression which suggests while it affects to hide their existence, this perhaps is the reason why I am somewhat at a loss to imagine what the Professor found in the Upanishads that is hideous and repellent. Still I was brought up almost from my infancy in England and received an English education, so that I have glimmerings. But as to what he intends by the unmeaning, artificial and silly elements, there can be no doubt. Everything is unmeaning in the Upanishads which the Europeans cannot understand, everything is artificial which does not come within the circle of their mental experience and everything is silly which is not explicable by European science and wisdom. Now this attitude is almost inevitable on the part of an European, for we all judge according to our lights and those who keep their minds really open, who can realise that there may be lights which are not theirs and yet as illuminating or more illuminating than theirs, are in any nation a very small handful. For the most part men are the slaves of their associations. Let us suppose that the ceremonies and services of the Roman Catholic Church were not mere ceremonies and formularies, Page – 54 borrowed for the most part from Eastern occultisms without understanding them, — that they had been arranged so as to be perfect symbols of certain deep metaphysical truths and to produce certain effects spiritual and material according to a scientific knowledge of the power of sound over both mind and matter; let us suppose that deep philosophical works had been written in the terminology of these symbols and often in a veiled allusive language; and let us suppose finally that these were translated into Bengali or Hindustani and presented to an educated Pundit who had studied both at Calcutta and at Nuddia or Benares, what would he make of them ? It will be as well to take a concrete instance. Jesus Christ was a great thinker, a man who had caught, apparently by his unaided power, though this is not certain, something of the divine knowledge, but the writers who recorded his sayings were for the most part ordinary men of a very narrow culture and scope of thought and they seem grossly to have misunderstood his deepest sayings. For instance, when he said "I and my Father are one", expressing the deep truth that the human self and the divine self are identical, they imagined that he was setting up an individual claim to be God; hence the extraordinary legend of the Virgin Mary and all that followed from it. Well, we all know the story of the Last Supper and Jesus’ marvellously pregnant utterance as he broke the bread and gave of the wine to his disciples "This is my body and this is my blood", and the remarkable rite of the Eucharist and the doctrine of Transubstantiation which the Roman Catholic Church have founded upon it. "Corruption! superstition! blasphemous nonsense!" cries the Protestant, "Only a vivid Oriental metaphor and nothing more." If so, it was certainly an "unmeaning, artificial and silly" metaphor, nay, "even a hideous and repellent" one. But I prefer to believe that Jesus’ words had always a meaning, generally a true and beautiful one. On the other hand, the Transubstantiation doctrine is one which the Catholics themselves do not understand, it is to them a "mystery". And yet how plain the meaning is to the Oriental intelligence ! The plasm of matter, the food-sheath of the universe to which bread and wine belong, is rendered the blood and body of God and typifies the great primal sacrifice by which God crucified Page – 55 himself so that the world might exist. The Infinite had to become finite, the Unconditioned to condition himself. Spirit to evolve Matter. In the bread and the wine which the communicant eats, God actually is, but he is not present to our consciousness, and he only becomes so present (here to our consciousness) by an act of faith; this is the whole doctrine of Transubstantiation. For, as the Upanishad says, we must believe in God before we can know him; we must realise him as the "He is" before we realise him in his essential. And indeed if the child had not believed in what his teacher or his book told him, how could the grown man know anything? But if a deep philosophical work were written on the Eucharist hinting at great truths but always using the symbol of the bread and wine and making its terminology from the symbol and from the doctrine of Transubstantiation based upon the symbol, what would our Hindu Pundit make of it? Being a scholar and philosopher, he would find there undoubtedly much that was "fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and true" but also a great deal that was "unmeaning, artificial and silly" and to his vegetarian imagination "even hideous and repellent". As for the symbol itself, its probable effect on the poor vegetarian would be to make him vomit. "What hideous nonsense," says the Protestant, "we are to believe that we are eating God!" How shall such a one know of Him where He abideth? Many of the Upanishads similarly are written round symbols and in a phraseology and figures which have or had once a deep meaning and a sacred association to the Hindus but must be unintelligible and repellent to the European. What possible use can be served by presenting to Europe such works as the Chhandogya or Aitareya Upanishad in which even the majority of Hindus find it difficult or impossible to penetrate every symbol to its underlying truth? Only the few Upanishads have been selected which contain the kernel of the matter in the least technical and most poetical form; the one exception is the Upanishad of the Questions which will be necessarily strange and not quite penetrable to the European mind. It was, however, necessary to include it for the sake of a due presentation of Upanishad philosophy in some of its details as well as in its main ideas, and its technical element has a more universal appeal than Page – 56 that of the Chhandogya and Aitareya. An objection may be urged to the method of translation that has been adopted. Professor Max Muller in his translation did not make any attempt to render into English the precise shades of Aryan philosophical terms like Atman and Prana which do not correspond to any philosophical conception familiar to the West; he believed that the very unfamiliarity of the terms he used, to translate them, would be like a bracing splash of cold water to the mind forcing it to rouse itself and think. In this I think the Professor was in error; his proposition may be true of undaunted philosophical intellects such as Schopenhauer’s or of those who are already somewhat familiar with the Sanskrit language, but to the ordinary reader the unfamiliar and unexplained terminology forms a high and thick hedge of brambles shutting him off from the noble palace and beautiful gardens of the Upanishads. Moreover, the result of a scholastic faithfulness to the letter has been to make the style of the translation intolerably uncouth and unworthy of these great religious poems. I do not say that this translation is worthy of them, for in no other human tongue than Sanskrit is such grandeur and beauty possible. But there are ways and their degrees. For instance, etad vai tat, the refrain of the Katha Upanishad has a deep and solemn ring in Sanskrit because etad and tat so used have in Sanskrit a profound and grandiose philosophical signification which everybody at once feels; but in English "This truly is that" can be nothing but a juggling with demonstrative pronouns; it renders more nearly both rhythm and meaning to translate "This is the God of your seeking", however inadequate such a translation may be. It may, however, fairly be said that a version managed on these lines cannot give a precise and accurate idea of the meaning. It is misleading to translate Prana sometimes by life, sometimes by breath, sometimes by life-breath or breath of life, because breath and life are merely subordinate aspects of the Prana. Atman again rendered indifferently by soul, spirit and self, must mislead, because what the West calls the soul is really the Atman yoked with mind and intelligence, and spirit is a word of variable connotation often synonymous with soul; even self Page – 57 cannot be used precisely in that way in English. Again the Hindu idea of "immortality" is different from the European; it implies not life after death, but freedom from both life and death; for what we call life is after all impossible without death. Similarly Being does not render puruṣa, nor "matter" rayi, nor askesis the whole idea of tapas. To a certain extent all this may be admitted, but at the same time I do not think that any reader who can think and feel will be seriously misled, and at any rate he will catch more of the meaning from imperfect English substitutes than from Sanskrit terms which will be a blank to his intelligence. The mind of man demands, and the demand is legitimate, that new ideas shall be presented to him in words which convey to him some associations with which he will not feel like a foreigner in a strange country where no one knows his language, nor he theirs. The new must be presented to him in the terms of the old; new wine must be put to some extent in old bottles. What is the use of avoiding the word "God" and speaking always of the Supreme as "It" simply because the Sanskrit usually, — but not, be it observed, invariably,—employs the neuter gender? The neuter in Sanskrit applies not only to what is inanimate, not only to what is below gender but to what is above gender. In English this is not the case. The use of "It" may therefore lead to far more serious misconceptions than to use the term "God" and the pronoun "He". When Matthew Arnold said that God was a stream of tendency making towards righteousness, men naturally scoffed because it seemed to turn God into an inanimate force; yet surely such was not Arnold’s meaning. On the other side, if the new ideas are presented with force and power, a reader of intelligence will soon come to understand that something different is meant by "God" from what ideas he attaches to that word. And in the meanwhile we gain this distinct advantage that he has not been repelled at the outset by what would naturally seem to him bizarre, repulsive or irreverent. It is true, however, that this translation will not convey a precise, full and categorical knowledge of the truths which underlie the Upanishads. To convey such knowledge is not the object of this translation, neither was it the object of the Upanishads themselves. It must always be remembered that these Page – 58 great treatises are simply the gate of the Higher Knowledge; there is much that lies behind the gate. Sri Krishna has indeed said that the knowledge in the Vedas is sufficient for a holy mind that is capable of knowing God, just as the water in a well is sufficient for a man’s purpose though there may be whole floods of water all around. But this does not apply to ordinary men. The ordinary man who wishes to reach God through knowledge, must undergo an elaborate training. He must begin by becoming absolutely pure, he must cleanse thoroughly his body, his heart and his intellect, he must get himself a new heart and be born again; for only the twice-born can understand or teach the Vedas. When he has done this he needs yet four things before he can succeed, the Sruti or recorded revelation, the Sacred Teacher, the practice of Yoga and the Grace of God. The business of the Sruti and especially of the Upanishads is to seize the mind and draw it into a magic circle, to accustom it to the thoughts and aspirations of God (after the Supreme), to bathe it in certain ideas, surround it with a certain spiritual atmosphere; for this purpose it plunges and rolls the mind over and over in an ocean of marvellous sound through which a certain train of associations goes ever rolling. In other words it appeals through the intellect, the ear and the imagination to the soul. The purpose of the Upanishad cannot therefore be served by a translation; a translation at best prepares him for and attracts him to the original. But even when he has steeped himself in the original, he may have understood what the Upanishad suggested, but he has not understood all that it implies, the great mass of religious truth that lies behind, of which the Upanishad is but a hint or an echo. For this he must go to the Teacher. "Awake ye, arise and learn of God, seeking out the Best who have the knowledge." Hard is it in these days to find the Best, for the Best do not come to us, we have to show our sincerity, patience and perseverance by seeking them. And when we have heard the whole of the Brahmavidya from the Teacher, we still know of God by theory only; we must further learn from a preceptor the practical knowledge of God, the vision of Him and attainment of Him which is Yoga and the goal of Yoga. And even in that we cannot succeed unless we have the Grace of God; for Yoga is beset with Page – 59 temptations not the least of which are the powers it gives us, powers which the ignorant call supernatural. "Then must a man be very vigilant for Yoga, as it hath a beginning, so hath it an ending." Only the Grace of God can keep us firm and help us over the temptations. "The spirit is not to be won" etc… — the blessing of triumphant self-mastery that comes from long and patient accumulation of soul experience. Truly does the Upanishad say, "Sharp as a razor’s edge is the path, difficult and hard to traverse, say the seers." Fortunately it is not necessary and indeed it is not possible for all to measure the whole journey in a single life, nor can we or should we abandon our daily duties like the Buddha and flee into the mountain or the forest. It is enough for us to make a beginning. Page – 60 |