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The Secret of the Isha
IT IS now several thousands of years since men ceased to study Veda and Upanishad for the sake of Veda or Upanishad. Ever since the human mind in India, more and more intellectualised, always increasingly addicted to the secondary process of knowledge by logic and intellectual rationalism, increasingly drawn away from the true and primary processes of knowledge by experience and direct perception, began to dislocate and dismember the many-sided harmony of ancient Vedic truth and paved it out into schools of thought, a system of metaphysics, its preoccupation has been rather with the opinions of later Sutras and Bhashyas than with the early truth of Scripture. The Veda and Vedanta ceased to be guides to knowledge and became merely mines and quarries from which convenient texts might be extracted regardless of context, to serve as weapons in the polemic disputes of metaphysicians. The inconvenient texts were ignored or explained away by distortion of their sense or by depreciation of their value. Those that neither helped nor hindered the polemical purpose of the exegete were briefly paraphrased or often left in a twilit obscurity. For the language of the Vedantic writers ceased to be understood; their figures, symbols of thought, shades of expression became antique and unintelligible. Hence passages which when once fathomed reveal a depth of knowledge and delicacy of subtle thought almost miraculous in its wealth and quality seem to the casual reader today is a mass of childish, obscure and ignorant fancies characteristic of an unformed and immature thinking. Rubbish and babblings of humanity’s nonage, an eminent Western scholar has termed them, not perceiving that it was not the text but his understanding of it that was rubbish and the babblings of ignorance. Worst of all, the spiritual and psychological experiences of the Vedantic seekers were largely lost to India as the obscurations of the Iron Age grew upon her, as her knowledge contracted, her virtues diminished and her old Page – 520 spiritual valiancy lost its daring and its nerve. Not altogether lost indeed for its sides of knowledge and practice still lived in cave and hermitage, its sides of feeling and sensation, narrowed by a more exclusive and self-abandoned fervour, remained, quickened even in the throbbing intensity of the Bhakti Marga and the violent inner joys of countless devotees. But even here it remained dim and obscure, shorn of its fullness, dimmed in its ancient and radiant purity. Yet we think we have understood and possess however it may be half the Vedas. The Upanishads! we have understood a few principal texts and even those imperfectly; but of the mass of the Upanishads we understand less than we do of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and of the knowledge these great writings hold enshrined we possess less than we do of the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. Dabhram evāpi tvam vettha brahmaṇo rūpam! I have said that the increasing intellectualisation of the Indian mind has been responsible for this great national loss. Our forefathers who discovered or received Vedic truth, did not arrive at it either by intellectual speculation or by logical reasoning. They attained it by actual and tangible experience in the spirit, — by spiritual and psychological observation, as we may say, and what they thus experienced they understood by the instrumentality of the intuitive reason. But a time came when men felt an imperative need to give an account to themselves and to others of this supreme and immemorial Vedic truth in the terms of logic, in the language of intellectual ratiocination. For the maintenance of the intuitive reason as the ordinary instrument of knowledge demands as its basis an iron moral and intellectual discipline, a colossal disinterestedness of thinking, — otherwise the imagination and the wishes pollute the purity of its action, replace, dethrone it and wear flamboyantly its name and mask; Vedic knowledge begins to be lost and the practice of life and symbol based upon it are soon replaced by formalised action and unintelligent rite and ceremony. Without Tapasya there can be no Veda. This was the course that the stream of thought followed among us according to the sense of our Indian tradition. The capacity for Tapasya belongs to the Golden Age of man’s first virility; it fades as humanity ages and the cycle takes its way Page – 521 towards the years that are of Iron, and with Tapasya, the basis, divine knowledge, the superstructure, also collapses or dwindles. The place of truth is there taken by superstition, by irrational error that takes its stand upon the place where truth lies buried and builds its tawdry and fantastic palace of pleasure upon lost, concealed and consecrated foundations and even the ruins of old truth as stones for its irregular building. But such an usurpation can never endure. For since the need of man’s being is truth and light, the divine law, whose chief aspect it is that no just demand of the soul shall remain always unsatisfied, raises up Reason to clear away Superstition. Reason arrives as the Angel of the Lord, armed with her sword of double denial (for it is the nature of intellectual Reason that beyond truth of objective appearance she cannot confidently and powerfully affirm anything but must always remain with regard to fundamental truth agnostic and doubtful, her highest word of affirmation "probably", her lowest "perhaps"), — comes and cuts away whatever she can, often losing herself also in a fury of negation, denying superstition indeed, but doubting and denying even Truth because it has been a foundation for superstition or formed with some of its stones part of the building. But at any rate she clears the field for sounder work; she makes tabula rasa for a more correct writing. The ancient Indian mind felt instinctively — I do not say it realised or argued consciously — the necessity, as the one way to avoid such a reign of negation; the necessity of stating to the intellectual reason so much of Vedic truth as could still be grasped and justify it logically. The Six Darshanas were the result of this mighty labour. Buddhism, the inevitable rush of negation came indeed but it was prevented from destroying spirituality, as European negation destroyed it for a time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the immense and unshakeable hold the work of the philosophers had taken upon the Indian temperament, so firm was this grasp that even the great Masters of negation — for Brihaspati who affirmed matter was a child and weakling in denial compared with the Buddhists, —could not wholly divest themselves of this characteristic Indian realisation that subjective experience is the basis of existence, the objective only an outward term of that existence. Page – 522 But admirable and necessary as was this vast work of intellectual systemisation, subtle, self-grasped and successful beyond parallel, supreme glory as it is now held and highest attainment of Indian mentality, it had from the standpoint of Vedantic truth three capital disadvantages.
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