VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS
The authors—Their theme—Intellect vs. intuition—Atman—Brahman—Their identity—A description of God—Salvation—Influence of the “Upanishads”—Emerson on Brahma
“In the whole world,” said Schopenhauer, “there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.”95 Here, excepting the moral fragments of Ptah-hotep, are the oldest extant philosophy and psychology of our race; the surprisingly subtle and patient effort of man to understand the mind and the world, and their relation. The Upanishads are as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant.
The word is composed of upa, near, and shad, to sit. From “sitting near” the teacher the term came to mean the secret or esoteric doctrine confided by the master to his best and favorite pupils.96 There are one hundred and eight of these discourses, composed by various saints and sages between 800 and 500 B.C.97 They represent not a consistent system of philosophy, but the opinions, aperçus and lessons of many men, in whom philosophy and religion were still fused in the attempt to understand—and reverently unite with—the simple and essential reality underlying the superficial multiplicity of things. They are full of absurdities and contradictions, and occasionally they anticipate all the wind of Hegelian verbiage;98 sometimes they present formulas as weird as that of Tom Sawyer for curing warts;99 sometimes they impress us as the profoundest thinking in the history of philosophy.
We know the names of many of the authors,100 but we know nothing of their lives except what they occasionally reveal in their teachings. The most vivid figures among them are Yajnavalkya, the man, and Gargi, the woman who has the honor of being among the earliest of philosophers. Of the two, Yajnavalkya has the sharper tongue. His fellow teachers looked upon him as a dangerous innovator; his posterity made his doctrine the cornerstone of unchallengeable orthodoxy.101 He tells us how he tried to leave his two wives in order to become a hermit sage; and in the plea of his wife Maitreyi that he should take her with him, we catch some feeling of the intensity with which India has for thousands of years pursued religion and philosophy.
And then Yajnavalkya was about to commence another mode of life.
“Maitreyi!” said Yajnavalkya, “lo, I am about to wander forth from this state. Let me make a final settlement for you and that Katyayani.”
Then spake Maitreyi: “If, now, Sir, this whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I now thereby be immortal?”
“No, no!” said Yajnavalkya. “Of immortality there is no hope through wealth.”
Then spake Maitreyi: “What should I do with that through which I may not be immortal? What you know, Sir—that, indeed, explain to me.”102
The theme of the Upanishads is all the mystery of this unintelligible world. “Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go? O ye who know Brahman, tell us at whose command we abide here. . . . Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements be considered the cause, or he who is called Purusha”—the Supreme Spirit?103 India has had more than her share of men who wanted “not millions, but answers to their questions.” In the Maitri Upanishad we read of a king abandoning his kingdom and going into the forest to practice austerities, clear his mind for understanding, and solve the riddle of the universe. After a thousand days of the king’s penances a sage, “knower of the soul,” came to him. “You are one who knows its true nature,” says the king; “do you tell us.” “Choose other desires,” warns the sage. But the king insists; and in a passage that must have seemed Schopenhauerian to Schopenhauer, he voices that revulsion against life, that fear of being reborn, which runs darkly through all Hindu thought:
“Sir, in this ill-smelling, unsubstantial body, which is a conglomerate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears, rheum, feces, urine, wind, bile and phlegm, what is the good of enjoyment of desire? In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death, disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of desires? And we see that this whole world is decaying like these gnats, these mosquitoes, this grass, and these trees that arise and perish. . . . Among other things there is the drying up of great oceans, the falling-away of mountain-peaks, the deviation of the fixed polestar, . . . the submergence of the earth. . . . In this sort of cycle of existence what is the good of enjoyment of desires, when, after a man has fed upon them, there is seen repeatedly his return here to the earth?”104
The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless; it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and this reason. “Not by learning is the Atman (or Soul of the World) attained, not by genius and much knowledge of books. . . . Let a Brahman renounce learning and become as a child. . . . Let him not seek after many words, for that is mere weariness of tongue.”105 The highest understanding, as Spinoza was to say, is direct perception, immediate insight; it is, as Bergson would say, intuition, the inward seeing of the mind that has deliberately closed, as far as it can, the portals of external sense. “The self-evident Brahman pierced the openings of the senses so that they turned outwards; therefore man looks outward, not inward into himself; some wise man, however, with his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the self behind.”106
If, on looking inward, a man finds nothing at all, that may only prove the accuracy of his introspection; for no man need expect to find the eternal in himself if he is lost in the ephemeral and particular. Before that inner reality can be felt one has to wash away from himself all evil doing and thinking, all turbulence of body and soul.107 For a fortnight one must fast, drinking only water;108 then the mind, so to speak, is starved into tranquillity and silence, the senses are cleansed and stilled, the spirit is left at peace to feel itself and that great ocean of soul of which it is a part; at last the individual ceases to be, and Unity and Reality appear. For it is not the individual self which the seer sees in this pure inward seeing; that individual self is but a series of brain or mental states, it is merely the body seen from within. What the seeker seeks is Atman,* the Self of all selves, the Soul of all souls, the immaterial, formless Absolute in which we bathe ourselves when we forget ourselves.
This, then, is the first step in the Secret Doctrine: that the essence of our own self is not the body, or the mind, or the individual ego, but the silent and formless depth of being within us, Atman. The second step is Brahman,* the one pervading, neuter,†impersonal, all-embracing, underlying, intangible essence of the world, the “Real of the Real,” “the unborn Soul, undecaying, undying,”110 the Soul of all Things as Atman is the Soul of all Souls; the one force that stands behind, beneath and above all forces and all gods.
Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him. “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
He answered, . . . “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Six.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Two.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“One and a half.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“One.”111
The third step is the most important of all: Atman and Brahman are one. The (non-individual) soul or force within us is identical with the impersonal Soul of the World. The Upanishads burn this doctrine into the pupil’s mind with untiring, tiring repetition. Behind all forms and veils the subjective and the objective are one; we, in our de-individualized reality, and God as the essence of all things, are one. A teacher expresses it in a famous parable:
“Bring hither a fig from there.”
“Here it is, Sir.”
“Divide it.”
“It is divided, Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“These rather fine seeds, Sir.”
“Of these please divide one.”
“It is divided, Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Nothing at all, Sir.”
“Verily, my dear one, that finest essence which you do not perceive—verily from that finest essence this great tree thus arises. Believe me, my dear one, that which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. Tat tvam asi—that art thou, Shwetaketu.”
“Do you, Sir, cause me to understand even more.”
“So be it, my dear one.”112
This almost Hegelian dialectic of Atman, Brahman and their synthesis is the essence of the Upanishads. Many other lessons are taught here, but they are subordinate. We find already, in these discourses, the belief in transmigration,* and the longing for release (Moksha) from this heavy chain of reincarnations. Janaka, King of the Videhas, begs Yajnavalkya to tell him how rebirth can be avoided. Yajnavalkya answers by expounding Yoga: through the ascetic elimination of all personal desires one may cease to be an individual fragment, unite himself in supreme bliss with the Soul of the World, and so escape rebirth. Whereupon the king, metaphysically overcome, says: “I will give you, noble Sir, the Videhas, and myself also to be your slave.”118 It is an abstruse heaven, however, that Yajnavalkya promises the devotee, for in it there will be no individual consciousness,119 there will only be absorption into Being, the reunion of the temporarily separated part with the Whole. “As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all.”120
Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity. We shall find this philosophy of the Upanishads—this monistic theology, this mystic and impersonal immortality—dominating Hindu thought from Buddha to Gandhi, from Yajnavalkya to Tagore. To our own day the Upanishads have remained to India what the New Testamenthas been to Christendom—a noble creed occasionally practised and generally revered. Even in Europe and America this wistful theosophy has won millions upon millions of followers, from lonely women and tired men to Schopenhauer and Emerson. Who would have thought that the great American philosopher of individualism would give perfect expression to the Hindu conviction that individuality is a delusion?
Brahma
If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings.