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A Commentary on the Kena Upanishad
Foreword
The Upanishads are an orchestral movement of knowledge, each of them one strain in a great choral harmony. The knowledge of the Brahman, which is the Universality of our existence, and the knowledge of the world, which is the multiplicity of our existence, but the world interpreted not in the terms of its appearances as in Science, but in the terms of its reality, is the one grand and general subject of the Upanishads. Within this cadre, this general framework each Upanishad has its smaller province; each takes its own standpoint of the knower and its resulting aspect of the known; to each there belongs a particular motive and a distinguishing ground-idea. The Isha Upanishad, for example, is occupied with the problem of spirituality and life, God and the world; its motive is the harmonising of these apparent opposites and the setting forth of their perfect relations in the light of Vedantic knowledge. The Kena is similarly occupied with the problem of the relations between God and the soul and its motive is to harmonise our personal activities of mental energy and human will with the movement of the infinite divine Energy and the supremacy of the universal Will. The Isha, therefore, has its eye more upon the outward Brahman and our action in and with regard to the world we see outside us; the Kena fixes rather on our psychological action and the movements within us. For on this internal relation with the Brahman must evidently depend, from it must evidently arise that attitude towards the external world, the attitude of oneness with all these multitudinous beings which the Isha gives to us as the secret of a perfect & liberated existence. For we are not here in the phenomenal world as independent existences; we appear as limited beings clashing with other limited beings, clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with
Page – 311 forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the physical senses but with the mind. We must become this multitudinous world, become it in our souls, obviously, not in our body & senses. The body & senses are intended to keep the multitudinousness,—they are there to prevent God’s worldwide time-filling play from sinking back into the vague & inchoate. But in the soul there must be nothing but the sense & rapture of oneness in the various joy of multitude. How is that possible? It is possible because our relations with others are not in reality those of separate life-inspired bodies, but of the great universal movement of a single soul—ekah sanatanah,—broken up into separate waves by concentration in these many life-inspired bodies which we see appearing like temporary crests, ridges and bubbles in the divine ocean, apah. This soul in us is in relation to the outside world through the senses, through vitality, through mind. But it is entangled in the meshes of its instruments; it thinks they alone exist or is absorbed in their action with which it tends to identify itself preponderatingly or wholly;—it forgets itself in its activities. To recall the soul in man to self-knowledge, to lift it above the life of the senses [....................................................................................] always refer its activities to that highest Self and Deity which [we] ultimately are, so that we may be free and great, may be pure and joyous, be fulfilled and immortal,—this is the governing aim of the Kena Upanishad. I propose in my commentary to follow with some minuteness & care the steps by which the Upanishad develops its aim, to bring out carefully the psychological ideas on which the ancient system was founded and to suggest rather than work out the philosophical positions which are presupposed in the ancient sage’s treatment of his subject. To work them out in a volume of the present size and purpose would not be possible, nor, if possible, would it be convenient, since it would need a freer and ampler method delivered from the necessity of faithful subordination to the text. The first principle of a commentary must be to maintain the order of ideas and adhere to the purpose and connotation of the text which it takes as its authority.
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