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Part II
The Field and Instruments of Vedanta
Chapter I
Intellect and Revelation
If in the progression of the ages there are always golden periods in which man recovers self-knowledge and attunes the truth of himself to the truth of his surroundings—or may it not even be, may not this be the true secret of his evolution—attunes his surroundings to his fulfilled and triumphant self, not being merely determined by his environment, but using it freely for infinite purposes & determining it, and if the Veda keeps, even fragmentarily, the practical application and the Vedanta, the theoretical statement of that self-knowledge, the importance of the inner meaning of these books to the progress of humanity will be self-evident It is perfectly true, or so at least the Indian Yogin has always held, that we have in ourselves the eternal Veda Available by God’s grace or our own effort there is always in each human being that hidden salvation But it is hard to arrive at, harder to apply Many of the greatest, not seeing how it can be applied to the conditions of phenomenal life, carry it away with them into the eternal Silence They put away from them the Veda, they seek in the Vedanta or in their souls only so much knowledge as will help them to loosen the coils of thought & sense wound round them by the Almighty Magician But the Vedanta is not useful only for the denial of life; it is even more useful for the affirmation of life If it affirms the evil of bondage to the idea of this world, it also affirms the bliss of harmony between the world & God Neither Shankara nor Schopenhauer have for us the entirety of its knowledge. It is this supreme utility of Vedanta for life, for man’s individual and racial evolution that I hope to rescue from the obscuration of quietistic philosophies born of the pessimism of the iron age I have said that I do not deny the truth of these
Page – 341 philosophies The Asad Brahman, Nirvana, annihilation of the manifest soul in the unmanifest are all of them great truths and, if we regard them without the fear & shrinking of the ignorant existence-loving mind, they are not only great but also blissful truths; they are an eternal part of Vedanta and it is well that they should have been brought out though with exaggeration & the exclusion of other verities But they are only a part, a side of Vedantic truth There are other sides, in a way even greater and more blissful, and at any rate much more helpful to mankind as a whole God & the World is my subject,—not the incompatibility of God with the world He has created in Himself, but the fulfilment of Himself in it for which it was created—the conditions in which the kingdom of heaven on earth can be converted from a dream into a possibility,—by the willed evolution in man of his higher nature, by a steady self-purification and a development in the light of this divine knowledge towards the fulfilment of his own supra-material, supra-intellectual nature For that purpose he must know God and not only the physical laws of Nature He must know his soul and not only the open or secret machinery of his body This knowledge he can only get from his own soul or from Vedanta explained to him by the Master, the one who knows, and awakening by its contact the knowledge in his own soul He cannot get it from Science or from speculative Philosophy, but only from God’s revelation Nayam atma pravachanena labhyah If Vedanta had not this high utility, if it only brought a philosophical satisfaction or were good for logical disputation, I should not think it worth while to write a word about it, much less to delve deep for its meaning. We wish to know, we enlightened moderns, what man is, what God, the nature & relation of matter, mind, life in order to satisfy an intellectual craving If we can systematise our guesses about these things, if we can present the world with a theory intellectually interesting or logically flawless, we are satisfied But the ancients wished to know these things because they thought they were of the greatest importance for man’s life and being Whether they had their knowledge by thought
Page – 342 or by religion, from the judgment or from the heart, their first preoccupation was to live according to their knowledge,—the Stoic & the Epicurean quite as much as the Christian or the Jew held his knowledge as a means towards life, towards the highest fulfilment of his being It has been left for enlightened Europe to profess a religion, yet avowedly separate its precepts from practical life, and it has been first the privilege of Teutonic thinkers to speculate in the void, using great words & high ideas as if these were ornaments of a bright lustre & great costliness but of no living utility The Vedanta is above all a rule of life, a law of being and a determination of relation and conduct; for its ideas are sovereign, potent, insistent to remould a man’s whole outlook upon existence; it is at once a philosophy & a religion and it owes this sovereign force & double mastery not only to the substance of its message, but to the instrumentality of that message, the sources from which it is drawn and the principles of knowledge & activity in our complex being to which it appeals. For although the determination to live by the best light we have is important, it is equally important to know what that light is and how we came by it, whether by the inspiration of the heart & the satisfaction of the emotional being, as in ordinary religion, or by the working of the observation and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition as in the methods of the great founders of religion or by a higher principle in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of the Jnanam Brahma It is such a higher undivided principle from which Vedanta professes to derive its knowledge For the ancient Hindus, alone of earth’s nations, seem to have not only trusted the internal revelation in preference to the external, which, however, they also recognized & highly valued, but to have known & commanded the psychological sources of internal revelation and mastered to a certain extent its secret, its science and its workings They claim to have found a principle of knowledge as superior to reason as reason itself is to sensational perception and animal instinct—to have laid their grasp on workings and results which can satisfy the demands
Page – 343 of the intellect but transcend intellectual ideation, meet the test of observation & logic but act in a sense wider, more direct & more penetrating than observation & logic, and fulfil all the demands of the heart while preserving our freedom from the heart’s vagaries All existence is a staircase by which we are climbing in God & through God Godwards We start here at the bottom rung, from the involution, the obscuration in matter and ascend from the obscurer manifestation to the less obscure, from an air in which light comes to us from above to emergence in the very light itself The spirit in the stone, clod and metal is at the bottom of that ladder; tree & plant and all vegetable life a little higher; animal life dwelling in vitality but using from below the lower functions of mind and a reason which entirely depends on memory & observation & almost consists in memory & observation climbs yet higher; man dwelling in the lower mind but using matter & vitality from above and from below taking possession of reason and imagination, seems, of all beings on earth, to be at the top But above man’s present position, above the heart in which he dwells & the imagination & reason to which he rises there opens out a wider atmosphere of life, there shoots down on him a more full & burning splendour of strength & knowledge, a more nectarous lustre of joy & beauty There there is another sun, another moon, other lightnings than ours To this the poet and the artist aspire in the intoxication of the vision and the hearing, chakshush cha shrotran cha; from this the prophet & the Pythoness draw the exaltation of their inspiration or its frenzy; genius is a beggar at the doors of that bounty But all these are like men that dream and utter ill-understood fragments of their dream For man in his heart is awake; in his reason & imagination, half awake, not yet buddha, but in that higher principle he is asleep It is to him a state of sushupti Yet secretly, subliminally, unknown to the egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought & knowledge, though he is compelled by the limitations of mind to mistake & misuse it For that slumber is the real waking and our waking is a state of dream and delusion in which we use a distorted truth & establish a world of false relations Therefore the Gita says, “Yasyam
Page – 344 jagrati bhutani sa nisha pashyato muneh ” In that which is night to all creatures, he who has mastered his own being is awake; that in which these creatures are awake, is night to the eye of the awakened seer The Vedantists call this principle by the name, vijnanam, an entire & pervading principle of knowledge which puts everything in its true light & its right relations It is from vijnanam that Veda descends to us; the movement of this higher principle is the source of all internal revelation It is the drishti of which the Veda is the result, it is the sruti which in its expression the Veda is, it is the smriti of the Rishi which gives to the intelligent part, the manishi in him a perfect account of the vision & inspired hearing of the seer in him, the Kavi. For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in the mind He has to be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into the vijnanamaya self,—the mahan atma,—just as, in his animal state, he had to be fulfilled in body & vitality before he could develop freely in mind Thus it comes about that even when Veda manifests in the mental world, it has although the higher & truer, to give an account of itself to the lower & more fallible, to Science, to Philosophy & to Religion It must answer their doubts & questions, it must satisfy all their right and permissible demands For although from the ideal point of view it is an anomaly that the higher should be cross-questioned by the lower, the source of truth by the propagators of half-truth and error, yet from the evolutionary point of view an anomaly is often the one right and indispensable process For if we act otherwise, if we deny for instance the claims of the reason in order to serve revelation only & exclusively—though we ought to serve her first and chiefly—we are in danger of defeating man’s evolution, which consists in self-fulfilment and not, except as a temporary means to an end, in self-mortification Otherwise, we are in danger of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration self-injurers, self-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless & gloomy states beyond of which the Isha Upanishad speaks Religion makes this mistake when she attempts to destroy the body & the vitality in order to satisfy the aspirations of the heart; philosophy, when she stifles the heart
Page – 345 in order to enthrone the pure intellect; Science when she denies the power of vision of the heart and the pure intellect in order to strengthen & serve solely the analytical reason—denying herself thus the benefit of the great benediction “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,” denying herself the fullness of the great secular effort of humanity summed up in the gnothi seauton of the sages, binding herself to a barren Agnosticism, urging mankind towards the gran rifiuto, the great refusal & renunciation of its past and its future Mayavada commits this error when not content with trampling the tyranny of cosmic Illusion underfoot, it seeks to deny and destroy the world in order to attain That which has chosen to express itself through the world For God has expressed us in many principles & not one He has ranged them one over the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicide, but to rise from one principle to the other, taking it up with us as we go, fulfilling the lower first in itself and then in the higher We have to dissociate our sense of being from body & vitality and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness & being, Sachchidanandam manifest in phenomenal existence, to dissociate it from Sachchidanandam and become That which is in the world Sachchidanandam, not in order to destroy body, vitality, mind, knowledge, manifested bliss & being but to transcend and satisfy them more mightily, without being limited by their conditions, to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine & universal Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering into the Sunyam Brahma; but we can maim ourselves in the world by the attempt to destroy them For thus are we made and we can be no other,—evam twayi nanyatheto’sti “Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise ” Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression. Therefore all attempts to deny and slaughter the reason are reprehensible and should be strongly opposed & discouraged The revolt of Rationalism against the tyranny of the creeds & the Churches is justified by God’s law and truth And not only the
Page – 346 Churches & creeds, but Veda must bend down from its altitudes & justify itself before reason even as God descends from his heavens of infinity to humour our weakness & limitations and take us into His embrace On the other hand, to deny Veda in order to give reason a supremacy which its natural limitations, its stumbling imperfections make impossible to it, is to go against Nature and restrict our evolution It has been well said that to deny Veda by hetuvada, divine revelation by intellectual rationality, is, in the end, to become a pashanda,—a word which has now acquired only the significance of an abusive epithet but meant originally and etymologically a materialist, one who denies his higher self in order to enthrone & worship the brute matter in which he is cased A harmony is needed in which the higher shall illumine the lower, the lower recognise & rise to the higher The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science & Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers Religion, putting Veda away into a sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of the undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of the vital impulses, chittam pranair otam, and becomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-sufficiency, ends by living in words, a thing of vain disputations & exultant logic-splitting, abstract, unpractical and visionary Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant & bigoted in her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda For all her analytical knowledge she knows not that that in man which believes only in matter is the beast in him,—the beast so long & with such difficulty subdued & disciplined by Philosophy, Religion & Veda; she keeps telling him, “Thou, O brute body & nerve system, art Brahman,” Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma, until his whole nature begins to believe it One day, while she yet reigns, he is sure to rise,—the egoistic heartless lust of power & pleasure in man,—and demand that she shall be his servant with her knowledge, her sophistries, her organisation, her appliances,
Page – 347 shall justify to him his selfishness, lusts & cruel impulses and arm them with engines of irresistible potency Already the shadow of this terrible revival is cast upon the world; already Science is bowing her head to this tremendous demand What the Hindus foresaw and dreaded and strove to organise their society against it, erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as their own knowledge & grasp upon Veda diminished, is now growing actual and imminent The way to avoid it is not to deny the truth of Science, but to complete, correct and illuminate it For the Veda also says with Science, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man & God as the Master of the Animal, the Pashupati; but by completing the knowledge and putting it in its right relations, it completes him also & liberates him, lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the supramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by an universal mastery & helpfulness and egoistic & unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine & universal. In any explanation, therefore, that we may offer of Veda and Vedanta we must give an account to Science, Philosophy & Religion in their own terms of that which we mean by Veda & Vedanta and our reasons for attaching a supreme importance to the conclusions we reach by them In order that this satisfaction may be given the Vedantist must make it clear what he means by knowledge, what he holds to be the value of the criteria relied on respectively by Science, Philosophy & Religion and how he determines their relation to the standards used by Vedanta Science takes her stand upon two means of knowledge only; she admits observation by the physical senses aided by physical instruments and she admits inference from this observation, or to use our Indian terms physical pratyaksha & anumana from physical pratyaksha All else she puts by as misleading and unreliable She admits neither aptavakya nor analogy, neither the statements of well-equipped & credible witnesses nor argument from the perception of like circumstances as between the various objects or movements observed Aptavakya is in this system only
Page – 348 an uncertain makeshift, a secondhand pratyaksha; analogy is only a doubtful and often a false inference But the Vedantist in common with all Indian thinkers admits in intellectual reasoning aptavakya and analogy as well as pratyaksha and anumana. At bottom all human thinking is some sort of perception; either perception by the mind of something that seems to be outside itself or of something that seems to be within itself, either, as we say, physical perception or mental perception Logic itself is only the science of placing our perceptions in their proper order,—nothing more If we take things physical with which alone the modern scientific method is really at home, it must be clear to us that the whole basis of knowledge is the right perception of objects We have first to bring it under observation by the mind through some sense-organ usually or predominantly the eye,—we have to bring not only the eye, but the mind into concentrated contact with the object; for if only the eye dwells on it, the mind is likely to retain nothing in memory or only a vague impression of what has been seen This process I may be allowed to call simply bodha or taking into the observation Once I have the object in my mind’s grasp, I proceed to separate it clearly in my observation from all surrounding object or circumstance foreign to it even if contiguous or attached—by separation in observation, by prithagbodha Finally, I take it completely into my mind by a perfect observation of it in its parts, its circumstance & its entirety, by totality in observation, by samyagbodha Only if I have accomplished these three movements of perception perfectly, can I be said to have properly or scientifically observed the object; only then can I be sure of its dwelling in my memory or of my power to reproduce it accurately before my imagination. Page – 349 |