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"THE LIFE DIVINE" A COMMENTARY ON THE ISHA UPANISHAD
Foreword Page-299 thins or the mountain opens. It is there that men have built their little artificial cities of metaphysical thought and spiritual practice, in each of which the inhabitants pretend to control the whole river. They call their dwelling places Vedanta or Sankhya, Adwaita or Dwaita, Shaivism or Vaishnavism, with a hundred names besides and boast that theirs is the way and theirs is the knowledge. But in reality each of us can only command a little of the truth of the Sanatana Dharma because none of us understands more than a little of the Upanishads.
They become indeed easier to us as they come nearer to us in date
and the modernity of their language, -
the stream more accessible
as it draws farther away from the original sources and descends more into the
plain and the lowlands. But even the secret of these more modern revelations is
not wholly ours and we delude ourselves if we think we have understood them
entirely and need not plunge deeper for their meaning. There is much gold in the
sands of the bed which no man has thought of disinterring. For the Isha Upanishad is one of the most perfectly worked out, one of the most finely and compactly stated inspired argu- Page-300 ments the world possesses, – an argument not in the sense of a train of disputatious reasoning, logical not in the fashion of an. intellectual passage from syllogism to syllogism, but a statement of inspired thought each part of which has been perfectly seen by the revelatory faculty and perfectly stated by inspired expression in itself, in relation to the others and in its place in the whole. Not only every Sloka but every word in each Sloka has been perfectly chosen and perfectly placed. There is a consummate harmony in the rhythm of the thought as well as in the rhythm of the language and the verse. The result is a whole system of knowledge and spiritual experience stated with the utmost brevity, with an epic massiveness and dignity, but yet in itself full and free from omission. We have in this Upanishad no string of incoherent thoughts thrown out at random, no loose transitions from one class of ideas to another, but a single subject greatly treated with completeness, with precision, with the inspiration of a poet possessed by divine truth and the skill of a consummate architect of thought and language. The Isha Upanishad is the gospel of a divine life in the world and a statement of the conditions under which it is possible and the spirit of Its living. For the Isha at least does not support the Mayavada as is indeed evident from the struggle and stress of difficulty in Shankara’s own commentary which reduces its fine thought and admirable expression to incoherence and slipshod clumsiness. The error, however lofty, must be removed in order that the plain and simple Truth may reveal itself. It is a system which still attracts the abstract intellectuality in me and represents to me what I may call an intervening and mediary truth which can never lose its validity. But when it seeks to govern human thought and life, to perpetuate itself on the sole truth of Vedanta, I feel that it is in conflict with the old Vedanta, stultifies the Upanishad and endangers all our highest human activities without giving us the highest spiritual truth in its place. Even so I would have preferred to leave aside all subjective criticism of it in these commentaries. But that is not possible. For it has so possessed men’s ideas about the Upanishads that it has to be cleared away in order that the true sense of this Upanishad at least may shine out from the obscuration. Page-301 It is this harmonious totality of meaning which it is the sole object of my commentary to bring to light. It has not been my object to support a particular philosophy or to read Adwaita or Dwaita or Visishtadwaita into its separate verses and make it useful for metaphysical polemics. I hold firmly the belief that the truths of the Upanishads were not arrived at by intellectual speculation, cannot be interpreted by disputation according to the rules of logic and are misused when they are employed merely as mines and quarries for the building of metaphysical systems. I hold them to have been arrived at by revelation and spiritual experience, to be records of things seen, heard and felt, dŗşţa, śruta, upalabdha, in the soul and to stand for their truth not on logic which they transcend but on vision to which they aspire. These supra-intellectual faculties by which they received the Veda and developed its implications, dŗşţi, śruti and smŗti, are also the only means by which their thoughts can be perfectly understood. What is it that the Upanishad reveals? - this is the question I have set myself to answer; I am indifferent for what set of warring philosophical dogmas its texts can be made an armoury. Nevertheless, in the course of exegesis I have been compelled to come into conflict with the opinions of the Mayavada. The collision was inevitable rather than desired, for the Mayavada was the opinion with which I commenced my study of Vedanta. In following this end I have had in view there are a few plain and binding rules by which I have endeavoured always to be guided. My method does not allow me to deal with the language of the Upanishad in the spirit of the scholar, – not the pride of the Pandit dealing with words as he chooses, but the humility of the seeker after truth in the presence of one of its masters is, I have thought, the proper attitude of the exegete. In the presence of these sacred writings, so unfathomably profound, so infinitely vast in their sense, so subtly perfect in their language, we must be obedient to the text and not presume to subject it ignorantly to our notions. To follow the plain and simple meaning of the words has been therefore the first rule of my exegesis. Vidya and Avidya are plain words with a well-ascertained sense; I cannot turn aside from it to interpret them as knowledge of the gods and ignorance. Sambhūti, asambhūti, vināśa are words with fixed Page-302 meanings; my interpretation must arise directly and simply from these meanings. The rhythm and metre of the Upanishads, the balance of the sentences demand their place in the interpretation; for chandas is of primary importance in all Veda; I must not disturb that rhythm, metre and balance in order to get over a philosophical difficulty. The anuụţup, of the Isha, for instance, is Vedic in its form and principle and not classical; it demands, that is to say, a stanza of two couplets and admits of sandhi in the middle of the pāda but not between two pādas: I must not take advantage of a possibility of sandhi between two pādas admissible only, in the classical anuşţup in order to extract from the Upanishad the opposite of its apparent sense. And when the meaning of a verse is determined, when it stands with- out qualification as an integral part of the teaching, I am not at liberty to read in a gloss of my own "for the ignorant" in order to depreciate or annul the validity of the doctrine. I am bound by the thoughts of the Sage; I cannot force upon him any ideas of my own to govern and override his apparent meaning, - all that I am allowed to do is to explain his evident textual meaning in the light of my inward spiritual experience but I must not use that experience which may be imperfect to contradict the text. Shankara has permitted himself all these departures from the attitude of subjection to the text. He has dealt with the Upanishads and with this Upanishad more than any other as a master of the Sruti and not its servant. He has sought to include it among his grandiose intellectual conquests. But the Sruti cannot be mastered by the intellect, and although the great Dravidian has enslaved men’s thoughts about the Sruti to his victorious intellectual polemic, the Sruti itself preserves its inalienable freedom, rising into its secret heights of knowledge and being superior to the clouds and lightnings of the intellect awaiting and admitting only the tread of the spirit, opening itself only to experience in the soul and vision in the supra-intellectual faculty of ideal knowledge. I trust I shall not be considered as wanting in reverence for the greatest of Indian philosophers, – in my opinion the greatest of all philosophers. Nevertheless the greatest have their limitations. In profundity, subtlety and loftiness Shankara has no equal; he is not so supreme in breadth and Page-303 flexibility of understanding. His was a spirit visited with some marvellous intuitions and realisation, but it would be to limit the capacities of the human soul to suppose that his intuitions exclude others equally great or that his realisations are the only or final word of spiritual knowledge. Shankara of the commentaries on the Upanishad, - although the greatest commentaries on them that we have, - is not so great as Shankara of the Bhashya on the Vedanta Sutras. In the latter he is developing in full freedom his own philosophy, which even those who disagree with it must recognise as one of the highest and a most marvellous intellectual achievement; in the former he is attempting to conquer for… enlist an exclusive authority of the Sruti. A commentary on the Upanishad should be a work of exegesis; Shankara’s is a work of metaphysical philosophy. He does not really approach the Sruti as an exegete; his intention is not to use the philosophical mind in order to arrive at the right explanation of the old Vedanta but to use explanation of the Vedanta in order to support the right system of philosophy. His main authority is therefore his own preconceived view of Vedantic truth, – a standard external to the text and in so far illegitimate. Accordingly, he leaves much of the text unexplained because it does not either support or conflict with the conclusions which he is interested in establishing; he gives merely a verbal paraphrase or a conventional scholastic rendering. Where he is interested, he compels the Sruti to agree with him. Without going quite to the same extent of self-will as Madhva, the Dwaita commentator, who does not hesitate to turn the famous tat tvam asi into atat tvam asi, "Thou art not that, O Swetaketu", he goes far enough and uses a fa~al masterfulness. The Isha especially, it seems to me, is vitiated by the defects of his method because in the Isha the clear and apparent meaning of the text conflicts most decisively with some of his favourite tenets. The great passage on Vidya and Avidya, Sambhuti and Asambhuti bristles for him with stumbling-blocks. We find him walking amid these difficulties with the powerful but uneasy steps of Milton’s angels striding "over the burning made" of their prison house. I for my part am unwilling to keep to the trace of his footsteps. For, after all, no human intellect can be permitted to hold the keys of the Sruti Page-304 and fix for us our gate of entrance and the paths of our passage. The Sruti itself is the only eternal authority on the Sruti. I have also held it as a rule of sound interpretation that any apparent incoherence, any want of logical relation and succession of thought in the text must exist by deficiency of understanding and not in the Seer’s deficiency of thinking. This view I base upon my constant experience of the Upanishads; for I have always found in the end that the writers thought clearly and connectedly and with a perfect grasp of their subject; for my own haste, ignorance and immaturity of spiritual experience has al- ways been convicted in the end of the sole responsibility for any defect imputed by the presumption of the logical understanding to the revealed scripture. The text has to be studied with a great patience, a great passivity, waiting for experience, waiting for light and then waiting for still more light. Insufficient data, haste of conclusions, wilful reading of one’s own favourite opinions into the text, wilful grasping at an imperfect or unfinished experience, wilful reading of a single narrow truth as the sole meaning of this complex harmony of thought, experience and knowledge which we call the Veda, - these are fruitful sources of error. But if a man can make his mind like a blank slate, if he can enter into the condition of bottomless passivity proper to the state of the calm all-embracing Chaitanya Atma, not attempting to fix what the Truth shall be but allowing Truth to manifest herself in his soul, he will find that then it is the nature of the Sruti to reveal perfectly its own message. For ultimately, as I have already insisted, we can know the subject of the Veda only by the soul and its pure faculty of know- ledge, not by verbal scholarship, metaphysical reasoning or intellectual discrimination. By entering into communion with the soul of the thinker which still broods behind the inspired language, we come to realise what he saw and what he put into his words, what waits there to make itself known to us. By communion with the soul of the Universe which is behind the soul of the thinker and one with it, we get those experiences which illumine and confirm or correct by amplifying our vision of truth in the Sruti. And since no man should lightly hope that he has been able always to think, act and know by the supreme method, it Page-305 is fitting always to bow down in utter self-surrender to the master of All, the Lord, who as the Knower dwells in Himself as name and form and offer to him the truth we have found in the Sruti and the error we have imported in it to do both with the truth and the error whatever He wills in His infinite power, love and wisdom for the purpose of His eternal and infinite Lila.
Page-306
CHAPTER
I Page-307
worlds and beings other than those that live within the compass of our waking
senses, they have their cosmogony, theogony, philosophy of Nature and of mental
and material nature’s powers. The relations of mind to matter and soul to mind,
of men to the gods and the illimitable Master-Soul to the souls apparently
limited in bodies, have all their authority in the Upanishads. The philosophical
analysis of Sankhya, the practices of Tantra, the worship and devotion of Purana, the love of the formed Divinity and the aspiration to the Formless, the
atomic structure of Vaisheshika and the cardinal principles of Yoga,
-
whatever
has been afterwards strong in development and influential on the Indian Mind,
finds here its authority and sanction. Not the unmanifested and unconditioned
alone but the identity of the Transcendental and the phenomenal, their eternal
relations, the play of their separation and the might of their union, is the
common theme of the Upanishads. They are not only for the anchorite but for the
householder. They do not reject life but embrace it to fulfil it. They build for
mankind a bridge by which they can cross over from the limited to the
illimitable, the recurrent and transitory to the persistent and eternal, but by
which also we can recross and own again with delight and without danger that
once unfathomable and irremeable abyss. They are God’s lamps that illumine the
stairs by which we ascend and descend no longer bound but freely and at will the
whole scale of existence, finding Him there in His ineffability, concealed in
utter luminousness, but also here in the garden of light and shade, manifest in
every being. Page-308 relation to the Infinite Delight in Conscious Being which is God and the reality of existence and reveals the way and the result, of its attainment; it develops for us our gospel of eternal Bliss. The Kena starting from the present constitution of consciousness in man, affirms the universal Brahman and teaches knowledge and self-surrender to Him as the inscrutable Self and the ever- present Master. Similarly, the Isha has for its subject the nature of human life and action lived and done in the light of Vedantic knowledge and supreme realisation. It is the gospel of a Divine life on earth, a consecration of works, the seed and foundation of Karmayoga. The Upanishads are works of inspiration, not of reasoning; therefore we shall not find in them the development of thought or the logical construction of the sentences in the Isha managed on the system of modem writers. The principle of our modern writing, borrowed from the Greeks who were the first nation to replace inspiration by intellect, resembles the progress of the serpent over a field, slow, winding, insinuating, covering perfectly every inch of the ground. The literary method of the ancients resembles the steps of a Titan striding from reef to reef over wide and unfathomable waters. The modern method instructs the intellect, the ancient illumines the soul. In the latter also there is a perfect logical sequence but this logic demands for our understanding and expects it to follow something of the same illumination which presided at its construction. So profoundly characteristic is this difference that the Greek governs even his poetry by the law and style of the logical intellect, the Indian tends to subject even his prose to the law and style of the illuminated vision. The Scribe (Alternative reading: Sage ) of the Isha is an inspired poet writing of God and life in a style of clear but massive and epic sublimity, lofty and grandiose, but without the European tendency to amplitude and period, exceedingly terse, pregnant, compactly decisive, - every word stored with meaning and leaving behind it a thousand solemn echoes. These conditions of his method of composition must be taken into full account when we try to interpret his thinking. The theme which he has to develop arises from the funda- Page-309 mental doctrine of the Vedanta, sarvam khalu idam brahma, verily, all this is the Brahman. To realise that everything of which we have separate knowledge by the limited and dividing movement of the mind and senses, is limited and separate only in appearance, but in is reality transcends its appearance and is a manifestation, a form in consciousness, an eidolon, a mask of something absolute, transcendental and without limit, - this is the first necessity of true knowledge according to the early thinkers. But when we have realised it, when we know that earth is not earth except in form and idea but the Brahman, man is not man except in form and idea but the Brahman, what then? Can we live in the light of that knowledge or must we abandon life to possess it? For it is obvious that all actions are done through mind with its two great instruments of name and form and if we are to look beyond name and form we must transcend mind and ignore its limitations. How can we do that and still act and live in this world as men act and live? Can we keep our eyes fixed on the transcendent and yet move with any ease or safety in the phenomenal? Must we not remove our thoughts from That (Tat) in order to deal with this (sarvam idam), - just as a man cannot walk safely on earth if he keeps his eyes fixed on the heavens but must constantly be removing his gaze from the lofty object of his contemplation? And another and deeper question arises. Is life worth living when we know the Brahman? is there any joy and use in the phenomenal when we know the transcendent, in the recurrent and transient when we know the persistent and eternal, in the apparent when we know the real? Immense is the attraction of the infinite and unlimited, why should we take pleasure in the finite and fleeting? Does not the attraction of phenomena disappear with the advent of this supreme knowledge and is it possible to busy ourselves with the phenomenal when its attraction and apparent necessity are removed? Is not persistence in life caused by ignorance and possible only if there is persistence in ignorance? Must we not abandon the world, if we would possess God? forsake Maya if we would become one in the Atman? For who can serve at the same time two masters and such different masters? We know the answer of Shankara, the answer of the later Adwaitin, the Mayavadin; and the answer of Page-310 most religious minds in India since Buddhism conquered our intellects has not been substantially different. To flee the world and seek God sum up their attitude. There have been notable exceptions but the general trend hardly varies. The majority of the pre-Buddhistic Hindus answered the question, if I am not mistaken, in a different sense and attained to a deeper consummation. They answered it in the gloss of the Isha Upanishad and the Gita; they held divine life in the Brahman here to be a possibility. The supreme importance of this question is apparent. If the theory of the Illusionist is true, life is an inexplicable breach of Truth, an unjustifiable disturbance in the silence and stillness of the Eternal. It is a freak to be corrected, a snare to be escaped from, a delusion to be removed, a mighty cosmic whim and blunder. The results upon the nation which produced this tremendous negation have been prodigious. India has become the land of saints and ascetics, but progressively also of a decaying society and an inert people, effete and helpless. The indignant denunciation of the Vishnu Purana against the certain result to society of the Buddhist heresy has been fulfilled in the fate of our strongly Buddhicised Hindu nation. We see increasing upon it through the centuries the doom announced in the grave warnings of the Gita against the consequence of inaction उत्सीदेयुरिमे लोका: … शरी्रयात्रापि … अकर्मण: … सङकरस्य च कर्ता स्याम् उपहन्यामिमा: प्रजा: … (न) बुध्धिभेदं जनयेद् अज्ञानां कर्मसङगिनाम् Utsideyurime lokãb … sarirayãtrãpi … akarmanah … sankarasya ca kartã syãm upahanyãmimãh prajãh … (na) buddhibhedam janayed ajnãnãm karmasariginãm, etc. The religious life of this country has divided itself into two distinct and powerful tendencies, the Hinduism of the withdrawal from life which has organised itself in the monastery and the hermitage and the Hinduism of social life which has resolved itself into a mass of minute ceremony and unintelligent social practice. Neither is pure; both are afflicted with varņa-sankara, mixture and confusion of Dharmas; for the life of the monastery is stricken with the tendency towards a return to the cares and corruptions of life, the life of society sicklied over and rendered impotent by the sense of its own illusion and worthlessness, faced with the superiority of the monastic ideal. If a man or a nation becomes profoundly convinced that this phenomenal life is an illusion, its Page-311 aims and tendencies of a moment and its values all false values, you cannot expect either the society or the nation to flourish here, whatever may be gained in Nirvana. For the nation any sustained and serious greatness of aim and endeavour become impossible. To get through the years of life, to maintain the body and propagate the race, since for some unreasonable reason that is demanded of us, but to get done with the business as soon as possible and escape by Sannyasa into the unconditioned, - this must obviously be the sole preoccupation of man in a society governed by this negative ideal. What is chiefly needed by it is an elaborate set of rules, the more minute and rigid the better, which will determine every action of life both social and religious, so as to save men the labour of thought and action and give them the assurance that they are doing only the nityakarma necessary to life in the body or the shastric karma which creates the least bondage for future lives and are not heaping upon themselves the burden of long continued existence in this terrible and inexplicable nightmare of the phenomenal world. But the attachment to works remains and it tends to satisfy itself by an excessive insistence on the petty field still left to it. We see an exclusive preoccupation with a petty money-getting, with the mere maintenance of a family, with the sordid cares of a narrow personal existence. The great ideals, the universalising and liberating movements which have continually swept rajasic Europe and revivified it, have been more and more unknown to us in the later history of our country. We have had but one world-forget- ting impulse and one world-conquering passion, – the impulse of final renunciation and the passion of self-devotion to the Master of all or to a spiritual teacher. It is this habit of Bhakti that alone has saved us alive, preserving an imperishable core of strength in the midst of our weakness and darkness; it has returned upon us from age to age and poured its revivifying stream always through our inert mass and our petrifying society. But for all that our great fundamental mistake about life has told heavily; it has cursed our rajasic activity with continual insufficiency and our sattwic tendencies with a perpetual weight of return to Tamas. Andham tamab pravisanti ye .avidyãm upãsate. Tato bhuya iva te tamo ya u vidyãyãm ratãh. And both these Page-312 sentences of gloom have weighed upon us; we have divided ourselves into the exclusive seekers after the unconditioned knowledge and the exclusive lingerers in the phenomenal ignorance. We have made the life divine well – nigh impossible in the world, possible only in remote hermitage, desolate forest or lonely mountain. We have not known the harmony which the early Vedantins practised; we have given ourselves instead to a great negation which, however inspiring and strength-giving by its positive side, – for it has its sure positive side, - to a few exceptional spirits, cannot be grasped by the ordinary soul even when it is accepted by the ordinary intellect, is not man’s Swadharma, and must therefore tend only to destroy his strength and delight in life by imposing upon him an effort far beyond an average human capacity from which it sinks back dispirited, weakened and nerve- less. No nation, not even a chosen race, can with impunity build its life on a fundamental error about the meaning of life. We are here to manifest God in our mundane existence, our business is to express and formulate in phenomenal activity such truth as we can command about the Eternal; and in order to do that we must answer the riddle set for us of the co-existence of the eternal and the phenomenal, – we must harmonise God and Nature, - on peril of our destruction. The European nations have invariably decayed after a few centuries of efflorescence because they have persisted in ignorance and been obstinate in Avidya. We who possess the secret but misunderstand it, have taken two millenniums to decay but in the end we have decayed and brought ourselves to the verge of actual death and decomposition. We can preserve ourselves only by returning to the full and harmonious truth of our religion, truth of Purana and Tantra which we have mistranslated into a collection of fable and of magic formulae, truth of Veda which we have mistranslated into the idea of vacant and pompous ceremonial and the truth of Vedanta which we have mistranslated into the inexplicable explanation, the baffling mystery of an incomprehensible Maya. Veda and Vedanta are not only the Bible of hermits or the textbook of metaphysicians but a gospel of life and a guide to life for the individual, for the nation and for all humanity. The Isha Upanishad stands first in the order of the Upa- Page-313 nishads we should read as of a supreme importance for us and more almost than any of the others because it sets itself with express purpose to solve that fundamental difficulty of life to which since Buddha and Shankara we have persisted in returning so lofty but so misleading an answer. The problem resolves itself into a few primary and fundamental questions. Since we have here a great unconditioned unity and a great phenomenal multitudinous manifestation, what is the essential relation between this unity arid this manifestation? Given the coexistence and identity of the reality and the phenomenon, where is the key to their identity? what is the principle which effectively harmonises them? and wherein lies the purpose and justification of their coexistence and apparent differentiation? The essential relation being known, what is that practical aspect of the relation upon which we can build securely our life here in this world? Is it possible to do the ordinary works of our human life upon earth consistently with the higher knowledge or in such a way as to embody the soul of the divine knowledge and the divine Guna in our every action? What is that attitude towards God and the world which secures us in such a possibility? Or what the rule of life which we must keep before us to govern our practice and what the practical results that flow from its observance? The present aims of phenomenal life seem always to have been the sorrowful trinity of pain, death and limitation; will these practical results of a Vedantic life include the acceptance of this great burden and this besetting darkness, or has mankind even here, even in this body and in this society an escape from death and sorrow? As human beings what is our aim here or what our hope hereafter? These are the great questions that arise from the obscure soul of man to the Infinite and the conflicting and partial answers to them have eternally perplexed humanity. But if they can once be simply, embracingly, satisfyingly answered, - so as to leave no true demand of the God in man upon the world unsatisfied, - then the riddle of existence is solved. The Isha Upanishad undertakes to answer them all. Setting out with a declaration of God’s purpose in manifestation for which the world was made and the golden rule of life by which each man individually can utterly consummate that divine purpose, this Page-314 mighty Sage to whom as an instructor we owe this asserts the possibility of human works without sin, grief and stain in the light of the one spiritual attitude that is consistent with their consummation, and true knowledge of things in the strength of the golden rule by which alone a Divine life here can be maintained. In explaining and justifying these original positions he answers incidentally all the other great human questions. The structure of the Upanishad is built up, the harmony of its thought worked out in four successive movements, with the initial verses of each swelling passage linking it in the motion of thought to the strain that precedes. Before we proceed to any work of analysis or isolate each note in order to obtain its full value, it will be convenient to have a synthetical understanding of the main ideas that run through the symphony and perceive something of the manner with which they pass into or help each other and build up by their agreement a great and harmonious philosophy of life.
II.
THE FIRST MOVEMENT "For
the Lord all this is a habitation, yea, whatever single thing is moving in this
universe of motion; by that abandoned thou shouldst enjoy; neither do thou covet
any man’s possession. Doing verily works in this world thou shouldst wish to
live a hundred years, for thus it is with thee and not otherwise; action
clingeth not to a man. Sunless truly are those worlds and enveloped in blind
gloom whither they passing hence arrive who are hurters of their own
souls." So runs the first movement of the Upanishad. Page-315 unless we know what God is, we know nothing fundamental about the world. Tasmin vijnāte sarvam vijnātam. He being known, all the rest is known. Material Philosophy and Science have to admit in the end that because they do not know the Transcendental, therefore they cannot be sure about the phenomenal. They can only say that there are these phenomena which represent themselves as acting in these processes to the thought and senses, but whether their appearance is their reality, no man can say. The end of all Science is Agnosticism. The Rishi takes these two great terms, God, one, stable and eternal, the world shifting, multitudinous, transient. For this great flux of Nature, by which we mean a great cosmic motion and activity, shows us nowhere a centre of knowledge and intelligent control, yet its every movement denoting law, pointing to harmony, speaks of a centre somewhere of knowledge and intelligent control. It shows nowhere any definite unity except that of sum and process, yet every little portion of it the more we analyse, cries out more loudly, "There is One and not many." Every single thing in it is perishable and mutable, yet for ever its ancient and inevitable movements thunder in our ears the chant of the immutable and eternal. Prakriti, jagati, the ever-moving with every object, small or great a mere knot of motion, jagat, - she is one term, that which she obeys … and of which she speaks to us always and yet seems always by the whirl of her motions in mind and matter to conceal, is the Lord, the Purusha. He is that One, Eternal and Immutable; it is He that is the centre of knowledge and eternal control. He is Ish, the Lord. The relation between the world and its Lord on which the Rishi bids us fix as I the one on whose constant and established realisation we can best found the thoughts and activities of the Life Divine is the relation of the Inhabitant and His inhabitation. For habitation by Him it was made, not only as a whole, but every object which it has built up, is building or will build in the whirl and race of its eternal movement, from the god to the worm, from the sun to the atom and the grain of dust to the constellations and their group, each, small or great, mean or mighty, sweet or cruel, beautiful or repulsive, is his dwelling-place and that which dwells in it is the Lord. Page-316
We start then with this truth. We have seen that the problem of life involves
two essential questions; first, the essential relation between the Transcendent
and the phenomenal, secondly, that practical aspect of the relation on which we
can build securely our life and action in the world. The Rishi starts with the
practical relation. This is the knowledge which we must win, the attitude which
having attained we must guard and keep. Looking around upon the multitude of
objects in the world, we have to see so many houses and in each an inhabitant,
one inhabitant only, He who has built it, also the whole and inhabits the whole,
its Lord. When we see the infinite ether embracing this multitude of suns and
solar systems, we are not to forget or ignore what we see but we must look on
infinity as a house of manifest being, and in it one great infinite indwelling
Consciousness, Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Narayana, God. When we see around us man
and animal and leaf and clod, king and beggar, philosopher and peasant, saint
and criminal, we rimst look on these names and forms as so many houses of being
and within each the same great inhabitant, Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Narayana, the
Lord. Manhood and animality, animation and inanimation, wealth and poverty,
wisdom and ignorance, sainthood and criminality are the robes he wears, but the
wearer is One. In every man I meet I must recognise the Lord I adore. In friend
and stranger, in my lover and my slayer, I must see equally, since I also must
be He, myself. This is the great secret of existence and the condition which we
must first satisfy if we wish to live divinely and be divine Page-317 being and supports her actions, the Knower who watches and takes into His cognisance her activities, the anumantā who gives or withholds or after giving withdraws His consent and as He gives, continues or withdraws it, things begin, endure or cease. But He is also pre-eminently bhoktā, her enjoyer. For all this is bhogārtham - for the sake of enjoyment. But in practice we find that we are not Ish but anīś, not master but slave; not jnātā and anumantā but ajna, not knowing and controlling but ignorant, clouded, struggling for knowledge and mastery, not an immortal enjoyer in delight but victim of sorrow, death and limitation. Limited, we struggle to enlarge ourselves and our scope; unpossessed of our desire, we demand and we strive; unattaining, reacted upon by hostile forces, we are full of sorrow and racked by pain. We see others possess and ourselves lack and we struggle to dispossess them and possess in their stead. The facts of life contradict at every turn the sublime dogma of the Vedantist. What are we to do? To struggle with God in others and God in the world or live only for God in others and not at all for God in ourselves. In his second line the Rishi utters his golden rule of life which supplies us with the only practical solution of the difficulty. To enjoy as we enjoy now is to lift to our lips a cup of mixed honey and poison; to abandon the world is to contradict God’s purpose by avoiding the problem instead of solving it; to sacrifice self to others is a half solution which, by itself, limits the divine lilā and stultifies our occupation of the body. The fulfilment of self both in our own joy and in the joy of others and in the joy of the whole world is the object of our life. How then is the problem to be solved? "By that abandoned thou shouldst enjoy, do not thou covet any man’s possession." Tena, that, refers back to yat kinca jagat. Everything in the world has to be renounced and yet through the thing so renounced you have to enjoy, bhunjithah. *
*
Additional note, place of insertion in MS. not indicated:
* Additional note, place of insertion in MS. not indicated: ¹ Here three lines are unreadable. Page-318 By that you have to enjoy, for the world and all in it is meant for the purpose of enjoyment. It is the means, movement and medium created by the Lord for the purpose, but by that abandoned, by that renounced. You have not to cast the world and its objects themselves away from you, for then you defeat your own object. It is a deeper, a truer renunciation that is asked of us. In order to make his meaning perfectly clear the Rishi adds "Do not covet". * This then is the renunciation demanded, not the renunciation of the thing itself but the renunciation of the attachment, the craving, the demand, – when that is renounced, then only is enjoyment possible, then only can the bitterness be cast out of the cup and only the pure honey remain. For the reason that we are anīś is because we demand. He who is Lord and Master does not struggle and demand; he does not need even to command: for Prakriti knows His will and hastens to obey it, If we would live divinely, we must realise the Lord in ourselves, we must have sadharmya with Him and be as He. What the Lord wills for His līlā in this habitation, Prakriti will bring; what Prakriti brings, Page-319 for our līlā, is what the Lord wills. That which struggles in us, craves, fights, covets, struggles; weeps, is not the pure Self but the mind, - which as we shall find weeps and struggles because ensnared in limitations it does not understand, - not Ish, but jagat, the movement, the whirl, one eddy in the shifting and struggling movement and clash of forces which we call Prakriti. In this great knowledge and its practice we can become desireless and calm, august, joyous, free from anxiety, pain, grief, sama, udāsīna, yet full of delight in all that we have in Prakriti,- puruşah prakrtisthah, say, see and do. *
* Additional note, place of insertion in MS. not indicated: Practically, therefore, the renunciation demanded of us is the renunciation by the lower, unreal and incomplete self, mind, senses, vitality, intellect, will, egoism of all that they are and seek to our real, complete and transcendental self, the Lord. And that renunciation we make sure by substituting another demand, the demand to be rid of all these things and released from the fulfilment of His cosmic purpose, but in order the better to fulfil His purpose and enjoy Him utterly in His movement, in all experience and all action that He in us and through us is manifesting and perfecting. For that which we have to enjoy is not only Isha but jagat, - for as we shall see both are one Brahman and by enjoying Him entirely we come to enjoy all His movement, since He is here as the Lord of His own movement. For this reason the word Isha has been selected as the fundamental relation of God to ourselves and the world, - the master of all creation and His own universe, the Lord who for His purposes has made and governs the world, – for in this relation of Lord He is inseparable from His movement. It is a relation that depends on the existence and play of the world of which He is the ruler and master. Envisaging the ruler, we envisage that which He rules, the habitation for the sake of the inhabitant, indeed, but still the habitation. We get therefore in this, first verse of the Upanishad the foundations of the great principle of activity with renunciation with which the teaching of the Gita begins and the still greater principle of ātmasamarpaņa or entire surrender to God, the uttamam rahasyam, with which it culminates. We get the reason and spirit of the command to Arjuna from which all the moral teaching of the Gita starts and to which it returns, jitvā śatrūn bhuñkşva rājyam samŗddham, the command of activity, the command of enjoyment, - but activity for God only, yajñārtham, without ahankāra, enjoyment in God only, mayi sannyasya, without desire or attachment, neither demanding what He does not like for Himself in us nor rejecting what He is here to enjoy, whether the enjoyment be of victory or defeat, of the patched loin cloth of the beggar or the emperor’s imperial crown. Page-320 Even those who not yet attaining follow faithfully this law and this ideal, who live in the knowledge of the One ill the Many, embracing like Brahman all being in themselves, rejecting nothing, preferring nothing, bearing everything, effecting everything, infinite in calm by renunciation, infinite in might and bliss by enjoyment, they are men perfected, they are the siddhas. Immediately the great recurring problem presents itself of works and the cessation from works, – the ancient crux which it is so easy to get rid of by a trenchant act of logic, so hard to solve in harmony with the actual facts of existence. To the ordinary mind action seems impossible and purposeless without desire, to the logical mind it seems inevitable that the more one penetrates into the supreme calm the farther one must move from all impulse to action, – that pravŗtti and nivŗtti, śama and karma are eternally opposed. Shankara, therefore, deciding all things by the triumphant and inexorable logic insists that action is inconsistent with the state divine. In practice the seeker after perfection finds that calm, renunciation, joy, peace, seem only to be secure when one rests motionlessly established in the impersonal Brahman; freedom of desire is only easy by freedom from activity. Does not then enjoyment without demand or craving, involve enjoyment seated, inactive, accepting whatever, true [?] enjoyment by the thing renounced mean enjoyment of the renunciation not of the thing itself? Is it not the enjoyment of the eremite, eremite in soul if not in body, the spectator watching the action of the world but himself no part of it, that is alone possible to the desireless mind? And even if it is not the sole possible enjoyment, is it not Page-321 the
superior and preferable? Who that has self-enjoyment in the soul would
condescend to the enjoyment of external objects? Or if he condescended it is the
greater bliss of other worlds that would attract him and not the broken shreds
which are all this world’s joys, the hampered fulfilments which are all this
world’s actualisation of infinite possibility. Kurvanneva, says the Rishi, having his eye on the great dispute: Thou shalt do works and not abstain from doing them and the works are the works of this material world, those that are to be done iha, here, in this life and body. Doing his works in this world a man shall be joyously willing to live the full span of years allowed to the mortal body. If he grows weary, if he seeks to abridge it, if he has haste in his soul for the side beyond death, he is not yet an enlightened soul, not yet divine. With this great admission the Vedanta can no longer be a mere ascetic Page-322 gospel Life, - full and unabridged in its duration, - fun and uncontracted in its activity is accepted, welcomed, consecrated to divine use. And the Rishi affirms his reason for the acceptance, - because so it is with thee and it is not otherwise than this. Because in other words this is the law of our being and this is the will of the Eternal. No man, as the Gita clearly teaches, can abstain from works, for even the state of withdrawal of the ascetic, even the self-collected existence of the silent Yogin is an act and an act of tremendous effect and profoundest import. As long as we are in manifest existence, so long we are in the jagatī using, influencing and impressing ourselves on the jagat, and we cannot escape from the necessity self-imposed on Himself by God within us. And it is so imposed for the reason already stated because He has made this world for His habitation and as a means for His enjoyment and a thing for His delight, - and this His great Will and purpose no man can be allowed to frustrate. The wise mind, the illumined soul knowing this truth makes no vain attempt 10 square this circle; he accepts that which God intends fully and frankly and only seeks the best way to fulfil God in this existence which he occupies on the way to another. For he knows that bondage and freedom are states of the outer mind, not of the inner spirit; for there is none free and none bound, none panting after liberation and none fleeing from bondage but only the Eternal rejoicing secretly or manifestly in His innumerable habitations. But in that case we are eternally bound by the chain of our works, nailed helplessly to the wheel of Karma? Not so; for the wheel of Karma is an error and the chain of our works is a grand illusion. "Action clingeth not to a man." Bondage is not the result of works, and liberation is not the result of cessation of works. Bondage is a state of the mind; liberation is another state of the mind. When through the principle of desire in the mind, the soul, the Ish, the Lord, mixes Himself up in the whirl of Prakriti, he sees himself in mental consciousness as if carried forward in the stream of causality; he seems to the mind in him to be bound by the effects of his works; when he relinquishes desire, then he recovers his lordship, - which in the higher being he has never lost, – and appears, to himself what he has always Page-323
been in reality, free in his being, svarāt, samrat. It follows then
that the way to liberate oneself is not to renounce works but to rise from mind
to supra-mind, from the consciousness of mental being, sambhava, to the
consciousness of self-being, svayambhava or asambhūti. It is
necessary to remember oneself but it is not necessary to forget phenomena. For
action is the movement of Prakriti and the chain of action is nothing more
terrible or mystic than the relation of cause and effect. That chain does not
bind the Master; action becomes no stain on the soul. The works of the liberated
man produce an effect, indeed, but on the stream of Prakriti, not on the soul
which is above its action and not under it, uses action- and is not victimised
by it, determines action and is not determined by it. But if action in its
nature bound the soul, then freedom here would be impossible. It does not and
can- not; the soul allows mind to mix itself up with its works, buddhir
lipyate, but the action does not adhere to the soul, na karma lipyate
nare. The fear of action is Maya; the impossibility of combining action with
calm and renunciation is a false samskāra. Nivritti or calm is the
eternal state and very nature of the soul, Pravritti is -in manifestation, the
eternal state and very nature of
Prakriti. Their coexistence and harmony is not only possible but it is
the secret of the world obscured only by ignorance in the mind. The enemy
therefore is not action but ignorance; not works bind us but works done in the
state of ignorance give us the illusion of bondage. The idea of separateness of
limitation with its fruit of desire, internal struggle, disappointment, grief,
pain, – this alone is our stumbling-block. Abolish it, see God alone everywhere
and all difficulty disappears. Nivritti and Pravritti, tyāga and bhoga
move harmoniously to the perfect fulfilment of the divine purpose. Page-324 he indicates the importance of the question. Our life here is only one circumstance in our progress, - the fundamental circumstance, indeed, since earth is the Pratistha or pedestal of our consciousness in material being, - but still the fundamental is not the final, the Pratistha is not the consummation but only the means to the consummation. It is the first step in our journey, the initial movement in the triple stride of Vishnu. There is beyond it a second step from which we constantly return till we are ready here for the third, for the consummation. Our future state depends on our fullness at the time of our passage, on our harmonious progress towards divine being. That is the hidden thing in us which . we have to develop. We are to become ātmavān, to possess our divine being, to disengage and fulfil our real self. Those who fall from this development, who turn aside from it are self-hurters or to take the full vigorous sense of the word used, self-slayers. Not that God in us can be slain, for death of the soul is impossible, - but there may be temporary perdition of the apparent divine by the murder of its self-expression and to this we may arrive either by wilfulness of passion or by intellectual wilfulness. Instead of becoming gods, suras, images of the Most High, the Paratpara Purusha in His effulgent glory, we may become misrepresentations of Him, false because distorted images, distorted by imperfection, distorted by one-sidedness, Titans, Asuras or else souls unillumined by the- sun of Knowledge and if illumined at all then only by false lights which eventually become eclipsed in darkness. Our after-state will be Asurya, sunless, unillumined. To what worlds do we then journey? The ordinary reading of the first word in the third verse of the Upanishad, is asurya, Titanic, but there is a possible variation asūrya, sunless and the substantial sense resulting from both readings is the same, but the colour given will be different. The Titans or Asuras of the Veda are souls of mere indisciplined might. They are those who found themselves not on light and calm but on asu, the vital force and might which is the basis of all energetic and impetuous feeling and action. The self-willed ones, who from temperamental passion reck themselves by the furious pursuit in desire of a false object or from intellectual passion reck themselves by the blind pursuit in belief of a false Page-325 idea, they follow a path because it is its own from Titanical attachment, from an immense though possibly lofty egoism. Mole ruit sua. They fall by their own mass, they collapse by excess of greatness. They need not be ignoble souls, but may even seem sometimes more noble than the gods and their victorious legions. When they hack and hew at the god within them, it may be in tremendous devotion to a principle, when they cloud and torture themselves till they stumble forward into misery and night; when they become demoniac in nature, it may be in furious and hungry insistence on a great aspiration. They may be grandiosely mighty like Hiranyakashipu, ostentatiously large- hearted like Bali, fiercely self-righteous like the younger Prahlada, but they fall whether great or petty, noble or ignoble, and in their fall they are thrust down by Vishnu to Patala, to the worlds of delusion and shadow, or of impenetrable gloom, because they have used the heart or intellect to serve passion and ignorance, enslaved the spiritual to the material and vital elements and subordinated the man in them to the Naga, the serpent. The Naga is the symbol of the mysterious earth-bound force in man. Wisest he of the beasts of the field, but still a beast of the field, not the winged Garuda revered to be the upbearer of divinity, who opens his vans to the sunlight and soars to the highest seat of Vishnu. If we read asurya we shall then have to translate "Verily it is to the worlds of the Titans, worlds enveloped in blind gloom that they after passing hence resort who are self-slayers." Otherwise it is the worlds farthest removed from the Sun, our symbol and principle of divine Knowledge. There are materialised states of darkness in the conscious being in which they must work out the bewilderment and confusion they have fastened on themselves by an obstinate persistence in self-will and ignorance. In either case the intention of the Sage is evident from the later passages of this Upanishad. Whether We follow exclusively after Avidya or exclusively after Vidya we go equally astray, exclusiveness means ignorance, exclusiveness means confusion, division of the indivisible Brahman, and persistence in such error is an obstinacy fatal to the, soul in its immediate prospects. Temporarily, - because eternal perdition is impossible, – it fails to cross successfully over death and enters into trans-mortal dark- Page-326 ness.
But those who accept the unity of the Brahman, Who see in Vidya and Avidya only vyavahara,
light and shadow reflected in Him for the use of self-expression in
phenomena, journey onwards in the way of their self-fulfilment and are lifted by
all- purifying Agni to the regions of the Sun where they possess their perfect
oneness and receive their consummate felicity. With this warning (for the
promise comes afterward) closes the first movement of the Upanishad.
Page-327
III God
then and the world are before us, the Inhabitant to be recognised as the Lord of
things even when He appears other- wise and His habitation to be regarded merely
as a movement set going by Him for phenomenal purposes, for a stream of form and
action by which He can enjoy His own conditioned being, -
God and the world are to be possessed by a pure and infinite enjoyment,
Ananda, or bliss which depends on a perfect renunciation not of the world, but
of the limited struggle and the ignorant
attachment, of the demand and the groping. -
These [are?]
imperfect movements to be replaced by a mighty calm and a divine satisfaction.
We are not to renounce works, which do not and cannot stain the soul or bind it,
but to be liberated through acceptance of works in a luminous knowledge of their
divine use and nature; not mutilation of life is to be our ideal but fulfilment
through life of the intention of the Most High in His phenomenal manifestation.
If we mutilate life through self- will and ignorance, we imprison ourselves
after death in worlds of confusion and darkness and here like a ship befogged
and astray in a dense sea of mists are hindered and long-delayed in our divine
voyage. Page-327
God and the World, the Movement and the Dweller in the Movement, that is the
practical relation between the unconditioned and the phenomenal which we have to
accept as the inalterable basis of our rule of right living. But this general
movement, with the particular knots in it of apparent movement and apparent
status which we call formations or objects, -
what is it? Movement
of Mahat or movement of what nature,
-
real or unreal?
And the -inhabitant, is He different from His habitation? If He is different and
the habitation is real, what becomes of the universal unity Vedanta teaches and
how are we not handed over to duality and a fundamental disparity, if not a
fundamental opposition? It is to remove this possible misunderstanding that the
Rishi now proceeds to a completer though not yet entirely complete statement of
universal existence. He has stated the practical relation, he now states the
essential relation. It amounts in effect to the fundamental tenet of Vedanta in
the Upanishads: sarvam khalu idam brahma. All this, in truth, is the
Brahman. He says, "There is One who unmoving is swifter than mind, neither
have the gods reached It for it goes always in front. Standing, it outstrips
others as they run. In it Matariswan establishes activity. That moves and that
does not move, that is far and the same that is verily near; That is within all
this, the same that is outside all this." Page-328 learn
that also the name and form and property, the manhood and the womanhood, the age
and the youth, the blueness and the scarlet hue, the staff, the attitude of
leaning, the bird, the wing, all is the Brahman. The Inhabitant is not different
from His habitation. Page-329
this error that the Sage insists on his ekam, in the neuter,
-
not
only
is He divine Sa, God regarding Himself subjectively as universal cognisant
Personality, but That is divine Tat, Brahman realising Himself by identity both
beyond and in and as all phenomenal existences, at will and coexistently
transcendental and phenomenal, conditioned and unconditioned, One in the One and
One in the many. What is the precise significance of this imagery? The intention can only be understood if we remember the nature of mental action upon which such enormous stress is here laid and the limitations of that action. Mind always starts from a point, the thinker or the object of thought; it works in space or time on particular objects or groups of objects or at most on the … of all objects known. It can only seek to know the movement and process of the world, but of that which is beyond and behind * Additional passage, place of insertion in MS. not indicated: Of the Absolute all we can say is: "It is not that, it is not that," it is unknowable in Itself, knowable only in our existence here, or in relation to our existence here, not to be characterised by any epithet, description or suggestion. Page-330 movement and process, what can it know? At most it can feel or be told that He exists, He is eternal and ineffable. Ordinarily, it can only go as far back as itself and say, "I, mind, am He; because I think, I am; because I am and think, things are", - propositions which as the expression of a relative and inter- mediate fact have their validity but are as an universal and ultimate statement untrue. But even the movement of God in nature is too vast and swift for the mind to grasp. It catches at and grasps at petty surrounding eddies or even great masses of movements at a little distance; it seizes, arranges to itself in its own terms of vision and classes them triumphantly as ultimate laws of Nature. But who has sailed all these waters or can tell where, if at all, they end? Who shall say that those laws are not bye-laws only, or the charter and constitution of a single dependency only or province? Follow God to the utmost confines of observable space, - He is sure to be whirling universes into being far in front. Pursue Him into the deepest experimentable recesses of being, there are unguessed universes of consciousness behind to which you have no present access. Infinity is only one of His aspects but the very nature of Infinity is that the mind cannot grasp it, though the reason deduces it. Who measured Space? Can any vastest Mind find out when Things began or know when and how they shall end? Nay, there may be near to us universes of another Time, Space and arrangement to which our material dimensions and mind and sense limitations forbid us an entrance. Even here who has traced out the purpose of creation or systematised the ways of Providence? Of a hundred things that happen immediately around us, can we even in a dozen instances tell more than fragmentarily and at a hazard why the thing has happened, to what end it endured, of what ordering of things it was a piece and movement? Yet, as the eye opens to the inner- most secret of things, one realises that an infinite Wisdom presides over the smallest happening and eternally links today’s trifling action to the grandiose movement of the centuries, - nay, that every thought which passes through our minds however weak, trivial or absurd, has its mark, in the depths of itself its purpose, even its necessity. But of all this how much can the gods of mind, reason and sense ascertain? They run, they gallop, Page-331
they outstrip the arrow, the bullet, the lightning, the meteor, all material
swiftnesses, but That though it moves not, travels still in front. Yes, even
when we think we are in front of Him, have followed His ways, classified His
laws, understood existence, ascertained and determined the future by the past,
suddenly we stumble and come across a new landmark or footprint which shows
where That has passed; a touch of His finger surprises us as He speeds past and
our theories crumble, our knowledge is turned into foolishness, our
enlightenment becomes the laughing- stock of better enlightened generations. It,
standing, outstrips others as they run. Yet, all the time, He had no need to
move. Already God was in front of us, as He is behind, above, below, on every
side. Our latest knowledge will always be a candle burning in the mists of the
night, our discoveries pebbles picked up on the shore of a boundless ocean. Not
only can we not know That in all Its absolute, transcendent reality, but we
cannot know It in all the vastness of Its phenomenal workings. Much we may yet
know by the mind, but not all, not more than a corner or a system. All that we
can do is to seek the boundless Lord of a boundless Universe and here and
elsewhere to know each habitation and recognise its Inhabitant. The dweller is
divine, but the house too divine, a temple of God, sukrtam, well-built,
delightful and holy, -
the God Himself manifested as name and form. Page-332 sciousness. He has not moved in His being an inch, He has not changed in His being by the shadow of a shadow. He is still ekah, acalah, sanātanah), one, motionless, without change or end. This side of the Sun or that side of Lyra are to Him one point or rather no point at all. Space is a symbol into which Thought has translated an arrangement in supraspatial Consciousness. Time and Causality are not different. Therefore it appears that both jagatī and jagat are no movement of matter or material force, (that is expressly excluded in the First verse) nor of mind (that is expressly excluded here) but of … conscious being in itself, a mysterious activity the essence of which is limitless and absolute Awareness, not expressible in language, but translated in the symbols of our Thought here into a movement in Time, Space and Causality. This universal tenet of Vedanta, although not expressly stated, is yet implied in the Rishi’s thought and follows inevitably from his expression. He could very well in his age and surroundings take it for granted, but we have to state it explicitly, - for unless it is assumed, the second movement of the Sage’s thought cannot be entirely understood by us. It is, indeed, the foundation of all Vedantic thinking. We can now grasp what the Sage intends when he says, tad ejati tannaijati. Tad or That, the suggestive vague name for the Brahman, whether impersonal or above personality or impersonality, moves and That does not move. It moves or appears to move, - as action of Prakriti and the corresponding Knowledge in Purusha, - in the conception of Time, Space and Causality; it does not move in reality, because these are mere symbols, conceptual translations of the actual truth, and movement itself is only such a symbol. The Habitation is the creation of a formative movement of Prakriti, who is indeed always recurrent in her doings because she and her ways are eternal, but also always mutable and inconstant because she works in Time, Space and Causality, terms of perception which have no meaning except as measures of movement or progression from one moment to another, one point to another, one state or event to another. Succession and therefore change is the fundamental law of God’s ideative and formative activity in the terms of these three great symbols. But the Inhabitant is one and constant, because Page-333 He is beyond Time and Space, surrounded apparently by the whirl of Prakriti, to the ignorant tossed about in it, He in reality exists both as its continent and creator as well as its informing soul, master and guide. That therefore in Itself is unmoving, immutable and eternal, in Its movement in … Time-movement, Space-movement, Causation-movement (although as we shall see ordered and governed by durable patterns or general processes of being) continues, which ensures recurrence, That is yet mobile, active, inconstant and fleeting from one state or form to another. All here passes out of our view, sooner or later, except the Inhabitant, the eternal Existence-Consciousness, Him we see seated for ever. On Him in the flux of things we have our sure foundation. In this Brahman Matariswan sets activity. Tasmin apo mātarisvā dadhāti. Tasmin, in the containing stable and fulfilling active Brahman already described. Apas is work of activity (Latin: opus), the Vedic word being used in preference to karmāņi because karmāņi expresses individual actions and it is here the general universe-activity of Brahman that is intended, not indeed all Prakriti but that which is manifest as work, productive and creative, the movement of the sun and star, the growth of the tree, the flowing of the waters, the progress of life in all its multitude; Matariswan, he that rests in the matrix of things, that is to say, Vayu, the motional or first energetic principle of Nature founded in ākāśa, the static principle of extension which is the eternal matrix of things, working in it as Prana, the universal life-activity, dadhāti, (Gr. tithēsi) establishes, sets in its place and manages. For the root dhā has always the idea of arrangement, management, working out of things. The reason for introducing this final and more limiting idea about the Brahman as the culminating phrase of this Sloka, is the Sage’s intention to emphasise the divineness of that particular movement of Prakriti which is the basis of karmāņi, human action in the mortal life. Matariswan is the energy of God in Prakriti which enters into, as into a womb or matrix (mātar), is first concealed in, – as a child in the womb (Ma) and then emerges out of the static condition of extension, represented to our senses in matter as ether. It emerges in the motional prin- Page-334 ciple of expansion and contraction represented to the senses as the gaseous state, specially called by us therefore Vayu, which by disturbing the even self-contained vibration (śabda) of the ether, produces vibratory waves (kşobha), generates action and re- action (rajas) on which the ether behind is continually impressing a tendency to equipoise (sattva), the failure of which is the only cause of disintegration of movement (death, mŗtyu, tamoguņa) and creates contact (sparśa) which is the basis of mental and material sensation and indeed of all relation in phenomenal existence. Matariswan, identifying himself with Vayu, supporting himself on these principles of wave-vibration, action-reaction and contact, ruled not only in matter but in life and mind, using the other three elementary or fundamental states known to Vedic enquiry, – agni (fire), the formatory principle of intension, represented to our senses in matter as heat, light and fire, apas or jala (water), the materialising or outward flowing principle of continuation, represented to our senses in matter as sap, seed, Rasa, and pŗthvī (earth), the stabilising principle of condensation, represented to us in matter as earth, the basis of all solids, - Matariswan, deploying in existence in settled forms by the fivefold (pāñcabhautika) complex movement of the material Brahman, of conscious being as the essential substance of things, reveals himself as universal life-activity, upholder of our vitality, prompter and cause of our actions. He is life, is latently active in the inanimate, … but unorganised in the metal, organised for life and growth only in the plant, for sense and feeling and thought in the animal creation, for reason and illumination and progress to godhead in man, and for eternal immortality in the gods. But who ultimately is this Matariswan? Brahman himself as the Rig Vedic Rishis already knew, manifesting himself in relation to the other movements as the cause, condition and master of vitality, as breath and as air. Life-action, then, is not indeed the whole action of the universe; nor is our human life-action, our apas, work, task here its culminatory activity. There are more developed beings, superrior states, other worlds. But it is, whether here or in other planets, the central activity of this universe. It is of this apparently insignificant pebble, the stone that builders not Almighty, not Page-335 All-wise would have rejected, God has made the keystone of this work of His construction. In this the movement of our universe finds the means for its central purpose, through it fulfils itself, in it culminates or from it falls away. When God has fulfilled him- self here under these conditions with Pŗthvī as his pratişthā, then we may pass away finally into other conditions or into the unconditioned, but till then, till God here is satisfied, Brahman here manifested, we come here to fulfil him. Till then, so it must be with us and not otherwise. And this principle is not undivine but divine, not something utterly delusive or diabolical, not the kingdom of a lower spirit or an aberration in knowledge, but God’s movement, mahimānam asya, the manifest might, the apparent extension in Itself of the Brahman. Life here is God, the materials of Life here are God. The work is not separate from the worker, nor the thought from the thinker. All is the play of a divine Unity. Thus we have the essential reality of things, we have the practical relation of God in Impersonality or Personality as the Inhabitant of His own objective being. We have the principle of unity by which the practical relation refers back always to the essential and derives from it. We have the fundamental justification of works briefly indicated in the identity of the working principle with the eternal Reality behind our works. But the justification of the harmony of tyāga and bhoga on this basis has now to be prepared. After stating, therefore, the identity of the eternal who moveth not, with the eternal who moves, of the Timeless, Spaceless, Conditionless, with the Timed, Spaced, Conditioned, the Sage proceeds with a consideration of the latter only with which our vyavahaāra or practical life has to deal and emphasises the unity of all things near and far, subjective and objective. That is the near, the same That is the far. He is near to us in our subjective experience, He moves to a distance in the objective where our mind and senses pursue him until they have to cease or return. In the subjective also, he is not only the unknown, but the known, ourselves, that which is seated in our hearts; not only the ungrasped, but the grasped, that which we have and that which we seem not to have, that which we have reached or passed or are approaching and that towards which Page-336 we vaguely or blindly move. Nothing should we think, feel or observe without saying of it, "It is He, it is the Brahman." That is within every creature as all the continent of body and mind and which is more than mind; That is outside every creature and That in which it moves, lives and has its being; not only are our surroundings near or far but that which contains our surroundings is outside and inside them, alike their continent and their content: sarvam brahma. For That is the content of all this Universe; That also exceeds and is apart from every Universe. The Pantheism or Monism which unable to rise beyond the unity of attainable data or manifest appearance, makes God conterminous with the world, is not Vedanta. The Pluralism which makes God merely a sum of realised experiences, a growing and diminishing, a fluctuating unknown quantity, X, sometimes equal to a + b and sometimes equal to a - b, is not our conception of the Universe. These things are He, but He is not these things. To us the world is only a minor term in God’s absolute and limitless existence. God is not even infinite, though finite and infinite both are He; He is beyond finite and infinity. He is sarvam brahma, the All, but He is inexpressibly more than the sarvam. To our highest conception He is One, but in Himself He is beyond conception. Neither Unity nor multiplicity can describe Him, for He is not limited by numbers. Unity is His parabhava, it is His supreme manifestation of being, but it is after all a manifestation, not the utter and unknowable reality.
IV
The object of these two verses which have amplified the idea of monistic Unity in the universe, so as to remove any essential opposition between the world movement and the Inhabitant of the movement, is to lead up to the two verses that follow, verses of a still higher importance for the purpose of the Upanishad. The Sage has laid down his fundamental positions in the first three verses, – (1) the oneness of all beings in the universe, (2) the harmony of renunciation and enjoyment by freedom from desire and demand, (3) the necessity of action for the fulfillment Page-337
of the one purpose for which the One inhabits this multitude of his names and
forms, -
the
enjoyment of this phenomenal and in its consummation the liberated being. The
remainder of the Upanishad is explanatory and justificatory of these original
and fundamental positions. In this second movement the object is to establish
the possibility of absolutely sorrowless and fearless enjoyment here in this
world and in this body on the eternal and
unassailable foundations of the Vedantic truth,
sarvam khalu
idam brahma. For
from that truth the Seer’s golden rule of life derives all its validity and
practical effectiveness. The connecting word (the Greek de) does not in Vedic Sanskrit always imply entire opposition, it suggests a new circumstance suggesting an additional fact or a different point of view. The new circumstance introduced in this verse is the idea of the Atman. The knowledge that the impersonal Brahman is all, need not of itself bring peace and a joyous activity; for the all includes sorrow, includes death, fear, weariness, disgust. Matariswan in establishing action, has also established reaction. He has established that unequally between the force in activity and the force acted upon, that want of harmony which is the cause of pain, recoil, disintegration, mutual fear and oppression. We may recognise that all these are one coordinated movement in a single existence, are themselves all one existence, but how does that help us if in the movement itself there are these inequalities, these discords, these incapacities which impose on us so much that is painful and sorrowful. We may be calm, resigned, stoical, but how can we be free from pain and sorrow? It is here that Mayavada comes in with its great gospel of liberation. "All this discord," it says in effect, "is not Brahman, it is Maya, it is an illusion, a dream, it does not exist in the pure Atman. That is the unmoving; the movement is a cosmic nightmare affecting the mind only. Renounce life, take refuge in the pure, uncondi- Page-338 tioned, dreamless Atman, mind will dissolve, the world will vanish from you as a
dream vanishes and with the world its pain, its useless striving, its miserable
joys, its ineffugable sorrow." That is an escape but it is not the escape
which the Seer of the Upanishad meditates for us. He holds to his point.
"All this is Brahman,- the movement no less than the moving." A few
may escape by the wicket gates of the Buddhist and the Mayavadin. Not by denial
of fundamental Vendantic truth is mankind intended to be saved. Page-339 He finds that foundation who sees wheresoever he looks (that is the force of anu in anupaśyati,) only the Atman, only the Self– He watches the bird flying through the air but what he is aware of is the, Self watching the movement of the Self through the Self, - air and bird and flight and watcher are only name and form, presentations of the one Reality to itself in itself by itself ātmani ātmanam ātmanā. He is stung by the scorpion, but what he is aware of is only the touch of the Self on the Self, the scorpion that stings is Brahman, that stinging is Brahman, the sting is Brahman, the pain is Brahman. And this he not only thinks as a metaphysical truth, for mere metaphysical opinion or intellectual attitude never yet brought salvation to living man, - but knows it, feels it and is aware of it utterly with his whole single and complex Knowing existence. Body, senses, heart and brain are at one in that experience. Thus to the soul perfected in this knowledge everything that is, seems or is experienced, thinker and thought, action, doer, sufferer, object, field, result, becomes only one reality, Brahman, Self, God and all this variety is only play, only movement of conscious-self in conscious-self. That moves, God has his līlā. The Self rejoices in its own inner experiences of itself seen and objectivised. There exists in the soul not merely calm, resignation, desirelessness, heart’s joy in God’s presence but with the perfect knowledge comes a perfect bliss in the conditioned and the unconditioned, in the transcendent and in the phenomenal, in action and in resting from action, in iśvara and in apparent anīśvara, in God’s nearness and in God’s remoteness, in what men call joy and what men call pain. Grief falls away from the soul, pain becomes rapture, doubt and darkness disappear in an assured and brilliant luminosity. Bhakti is fulfilled, the soul perfected is liberated here and in this body, ihaiva, - for this and not renunciation of phenomenal existence is the true Vedantic mokşa. This is what is meant by all existing things becoming the Self in a man, this is the result which is predicated of such a divine realisation. "Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded, who seeth all things as one?" There are certain stages in the realisation, two of which are indicated in these slokas and although the indication is only a minor and incidental movement of the Rishi’s thought, this Page-340 subject is of sufficient practical importance to be dwelt upon for a little even in this necessarily rapid examination. Brahman, Atman, Ishvara, - these are the three great names, the three grand realisations we have here about the Absolute Existence. That existence, parātparam brahma, in its absolute truth (if such an expression is admissible where the ideas of truth and falsehood, absolute and relative, no longer apply and knowledge itself disappears in an unconceivable and unimaginable Identity) is unknowable by any, even the highest faculty of conscious mind. Arriving at the farthest limits of our existence here we may become aware of it as a thing beyond our experience. It presents itself to us here as some ultimate shadow of itself which we feel sometimes as Sat, sometimes as Asat, sometimes as both Sat and Asat, and then we perceive that it is none of these things but something beyond both existence and non-existence which are necessarily uncertain symbols of it and we end by the formula of the Rishis renouncing all vain attempts at knowledge, Neti, Neti; not this, not that. We must not go beyond this two-word formula or seek to explain and amplify it. To describe It by negative epithets is as illegitimate and presumptuous as to describe by positive epithets. We can say of Brahman that it is śuddha, pure; we cannot say of the Paratparam that it is śuddha. How can we know what It is? We can only say that here It translates itself into an utter purity. Neither can we say of It that it is alakşaņam, without feature. How do we know what It is not? We can only say that we cannot describe It by any lakşaņas, for the features we perceive here are those of a movement in which all opposites present themselves as equally true. But here in this manifest universal existence we do perceive certain universal states and certain still more fundamental realisations which transcend all phenomena and all oppositions and antinomies. We perceive, for example, a state of Universal Being, the Sad Atman of the Upanishads, the goal of the Adwaitins; we perceive a state of the Universal Non-Being, the Asad Atman of the Upanishads, Sunyam, the goal of the Madhyamika Buddhists. Then we perceive that both of these are the same thing differently experienced in the soul. It is that which expresses itself in our experience of Being and forgetfulness of Page-341 Being, of Consciousness and forgetfulness of Consciousness, of Bliss and forgetfulness of Bliss, of Sachchidananda conditioned and Sachchidananda unconditioned. We call it the Brahman, that which extends itself here hi space and time and fins its extension. We feel our identity with it and we realise that it is our true Self and the true Self of everything in the universe and of the universe both in its division and in its entirety. We call it then the Atman, a word which originally meant true Being or true Substance. We become aware of It as extending itself and filling its extension here for a purpose, the purpose of Ananda, delight in Vidya, delight in Avidya, and governing all things towards that purpose, – self-aware as the One and self-aware as the Many, self-aware as Sat and self-aware as Asat. This great self-aware Transcendent, more than universal existence, we call Sa, Ishwara, He, God, the Paratpara Purusha, the Higher than the Highest. We see therefore that these three names merely try to express in human language certain fundamental conceptions we have here of That which is not perfectly expressible. The greatest names, tremendous as is their power, – how tremendous only those can know who have made the test without flinching, - are only symbols, I will not say shadows, for that is a word which may be misunderstood. But very great and blissful symbols in which we are meant to find a perfect content and satisfaction and the realisation which they try to represent. But through these symbols we have to work out the divine fulfilment here, and the Rishi gives all three of them to us in this Upanishad. For all three are supremely helpful and, in a way, necessary. Until we realise Ishwara, the mighty Inhabitant, as on~ with ourself, as the Atman, we find a difficulty in identifying Him with all that Is. We fall into these ideas of an extra-cosmic God which satisfy the early and immature stages of soul-development; or we see a God who pervades and upholds all existences but has put them forth in His being as eternally apart from Himself. That is a great practical realisation with immense results to the soul, the realisation of the Bhakta who rests in some kind of Dualism, but it is not the supreme goal or truth we are seeking. If we realise the Ishwara as the Atman, inner Self, without realising Him as the Brahman, we run another peril, unless Page-342 our souls have first become purified, the peril of the Asura who misapplies the mighty formula So Aham and identifies God with his own unregenerated ignorant ego, – extending the Inhabitant only to some transient circumstances of the movement in which He dwells. He forgets the other equally important formula, tat tvam asi; he does not realise others as Narayana, does not become one self with all existences, forgets that the very idea of his egoistic self is inconsistent with the true Adwaita and to extend that in imagination and call it the whole Universe is a caricature of Adwaita. It is like the error of the unphilosophical Idealist who concludes that the objective Universe exists only in his individual mind, forgetting that it exists equally in other individual minds, not knowing that in reality there is no individual mind but only one sea of mind with its self-formed solid bed of samskāras, waves of which are constantly flowing through him, rising and breaking there and leaving their marks on the sands of his mental, infra-mental and supra-mental being. Even if we realise all beings as Narayana and one self, there is a difficulty in realising all things as God and Self. The inhabitant is the Atman, good, - but the name and form? We can realise that God dwells in the stone as well as under the stone and around it, but how can the / stone be God, - this clod, that rusty piece of iron, this clot of filth? With difficulty the mind unreleased from dvandva and samskāras can believe that God logically must be, is in the piece of filth He has created, but how can He be that filth? The seeker can eventually realise God in the criminal who is to be hanged no less than in the executioner who hangs him, and \ the saint who has pity for both, in the harlot no less than the Sati, in all of the filth no less than in the glorious star that shines in the Heaven, and the petals of the rose or jasmine flower that intoxicates our soul with its fragrance, but the crime of the criminal, the sin of the harlot, the corporeality of the filth, must not that be kept separate? The sattwic man, the lover of virtue, the lover of beauty, the devotee reverently bowing before the throne, must they not revolt strongly, from such conceptions? We shall see that for certain practical reasons we must maintain and preserve a kind of separateness, – not only between the criminal and his crime but between the saint and his virtue, - Page-343 and for this reason the Rishi has fixed on the relation of world of Movement and world’s Inhabitant as the basis of his system, - but the distinction must be one of vyavahāra only, for practice only, and must not interfere with our conception of All as Brahman. We must not yield to the limitations of the sattwic mind, the moha or delusions of the sattwic ahainkāra. For if we yield, we cannot proceed to that greater goal of bliss, where attaining mind shrinks not at all, has no delusion, is not touched by any grief. Therefore we must realise the Ishwara not only as the true Self of things but as Brahman, that which extends itself here equally in all things, in the beautiful but also in the ugly, in the holy and great but also in that which we look on as base and impure. Looking on Brahman moving and Brahman unmoving we have to say with the Mundaka Upanishad tad etat sat yam (That yonder is this here and the Truth) -and in Ishwara and Brahman moving and unmoving we have to say with the same. Upanishad, pursha evedam sarvam karma tapo brahma parāmrtam: It is the divine Soul that is all this, even all action and all active force and Brahman and the supreme immortality. We have to realise the Self everywhere, but we have also to remember always in all our being, to feel always in every fibre of our existence that the Self is Brahman and the Lord. In the realisation of Atman by itself there is this danger that as we human beings stand in the subjective mind, that represents itself to us as our true Self and we are first in danger of identifying our subjective consciousness which is only one movement of Chit with the sarvam brahma. Even when we go beyond to the Sad Atman or pure Existence we, approaching it necessarily through our subjective being, tend to realise it as pure subjective existence, are in danger of not realising the real and ultimate Sat which is pure Existence itself beyond subjectivity and objectivity but expressing itself here subjectively because of the Purusha and objectively because of the Prakriti, - the mingled strain of our subjective-objective existence here being the result of the interaction and mutual enjoyment of His Male and His Female principle. (Incomplete) Page-344 |