The relativity o£ divinity is the discovery of the Upanishads. And the relativity of happiness hereafter is the key-note of their religious philosophy. Pious men are of three classes, according to the completed system. Some are good men, but they do not know enough to appreciate, intellectually or spiritually, the highest. Let this class meditate on the Vedas. They desire wealth, not freedom. The second class wish, indeed, to emancipate themselves; but to do so step by step; not to reach absolute brahma, but to live in bliss hereafter. Let these worship the Spirit as physical life. They will attain to the bliss of the realm of light, the realm of the personal creator. But the highest class, they that wish to emancipate themselves at once, know that physical life is but a form of spiritual life; that the personal creator is but a form of the Spirit; that the Spirit is absolute brahma; and that in reaching this they attain to immortality. These, then, are to meditate on spirit as the highest Spirit, that is, the absolute. To fear heaven as much as hell, to know that knowledge is, after all, the key to brahma; that brahma is knowledge; this is the way to emancipation. The gods are; but they are forms of the ego, and their heaven is mortal. It is false to deny the gods. Indra and the Father-god exist, just as men exist, as transient forms of brahma. Therefore, according to the weakness or strength of a man's mind and heart (desire) is he fitted to ignore gods and sacrifice. To obtain brahma his desires must be weak, his knowledge strong; but sacrifice is not to be put away as useless. The disciplinary teaching of the sacrifice is a necessary preparation for highest wisdom. It is here that the Upanishads, which otherwise are to a great extent on the highway to Buddhism, practically contrast with it. Buddhism ignores the sacrifice and the stadia in a priest's life. The Upanishads retain them, but only to throw them over at the end when one has learned not to need them. Philosophically there is no place for the ritual in the Upanishad doctrine; but their teachers stood too much under the dominion of the Br[=a]hmanas to ignore the ritual. They kept it as a means of perfecting the knowledge of what was essential.
So 'by wisdom' it is said 'one gets immortality.' The Spirit develops gradually in man; by means of the mortal he desires the immortal; whereas other animals have only hunger and thirst as a kind of understanding, and they are reborn according to their knowledge as beasts again. Such is the teaching of another of the Upanishads, the [=A]itareya [=A]ranyaka.
This Upanishad contains some rather striking passages: "Whatever man attains, he desires to go beyond it; if he should reach heaven itself he would desire to go beyond it" (2. 3. 3. 1). "Brahma is the A, thither goes the ego" (2. 3. 8. 7). "A is the whole of Speech, and Speech is Truth, and Truth is Spirit" (2. 3. 6. 5-14).[16] "The Spirit brooded over the water, and form (matter) was born" (2. 4. 3. 1 ff.); so physically water is the origin of all things" (2. 1. 8. 1).[17] "Whatever belongs to the father belongs to the son, whatever belongs to the son belongs to the father" (ib.). "Man has three births: he is born of his mother, reborn in the person of his son, and finds his highest birth in death" (2. 5).
In the exposition of these two Upanishads one gets at once the sum of them all. The methods, the illustrations, even the doctrines, differ in detail; but in the chief end and object of the Upanishads, and in the principle of knowledge as a means of attaining brahma, they are united. This it is that causes the refutation of the Vedic 'being from not-being.' It is even said in the [=A]itareya that the gods worshipped breath (the spirit) as being and so became gods (great); while devils worshipped spirit as not-being, and hence became (inferior) devils (2. 1. 8. 6).
It was noticed above that a king instructed priests. This interchange of the rôles of the two castes is not unique. In the K[=a]ush[=i]taki Upanishad (4. 19), occurs another instance of a warrior teaching a Brahman. This, with the familiar illustration of a Gandh[=a]ra (Kandahar) man, the song of the Kurus, and the absence of Brahmanic literature as such in the list of works, cited vii. 1, would indicate that the Ch[=a]ndogya was at least as old as the Br[=a]hmana literature.[18]
In their present form several differences remain to be pointed out between the Vedic period and that of the Upanishads. The goal of the soul, the two paths of gods and of brahma, have been indicated. As already explained, the road to the absolute brahma lies beyond the path to the conditioned brahma. Opposed to this is the path that leads to the world of heaven, whence, when good works have been exhausted, the spirit descends to a new birth on earth. The course of this second path is conceived to be the dark half of the moon, and so back to man. Both roads lead first to the moon, then one goes on to brahma, the other returns to earth. It will be seen that good works are regarded as buoying a man up for a time, till, like gas in a balloon, they lose their force, and he sinks down again. What then becomes of the virtue of a man who enters the absolute brahma, and descends no more? He himself goes to the world where there is "no sorrow and no snow," where he lives forever (Brihad [=A]ran. 5. 10); but "his beloved relations get his virtue, and the relations he does not love get his evil" (K[=a]ush[=i]t. Up. 1. 4). In this Upanishad fire, sun, moon, and lightning die out, and reappear as brahma. This is the doctrine of the Götterdämmerung, and succession of aeons with their divinities (2. 12). Here again is it distinctly stated that pr[=a]na, breath, is brahma; that is, spirit is the absolute (2. 13).
What becomes of them that die ignorant of the ego? They go either to the worlds of evil spirits, which are covered with darkness—the same antithesis of light and darkness, as good and evil, that was seen in the Br[=a]hmanas—or are reborn on earth again like the wicked ([=I]ç[=a], 3).
It is to be noted that at times all the parts of a man are said to become immortal. For just as different rivers enter the ocean and their names and forms are lost in it, so the sixteen parts of a man sink into the godhead and he becomes without parts and immortal (Praçna Up. 6. 5); a purely pantheistic view of absorption, in distinction from the Vedic view of heaven, which latter, in the form of immortal joy hereafter, still lingers in the earlier Upanishads.
It is further to be observed as the crowning point of these speculations that, just as the bliss of emancipation must not be desired, although it is desirable, so too, though knowledge is the fundamental condition of emancipation, yet is delight in the true a fatal error: "They that revere what is not knowledge enter into blind darkness; they that delight in knowledge come as it were into still greater darkness" (Iç[=a], 9). Here, what is not real knowledge means good works, sacrifice, etc. But the sacrifice is not discarded. To those people capable only of attaining to rectitude, sacrifices, and belief in gods there is given some bliss hereafter; but to him that is risen above this, who knows the ego (Spirit) and real being, such bliss is no bliss. His bliss is union with the Spirit.
This is the completion of Upanishad philosophy. Before it is a stage where bliss alone, not absorption, is taught.[19] But what is the ego, spirit or self ([=a]tm[=a])? First of all it is conscious; next it is not the Person, for the Person is produced by the [=a]tm[=a]. Since this Person is the type of the personal god, it is evident that the ego is regarded as lying back of personality. Nevertheless, the teachers sometimes stop with the latter. The developed view is that the immortality of the personal creator is commensurate only with that of the world which he creates. It is for this reason that in the Mundaka (1. 2. 10) it is said that fools regard fulfillment of desire in heavenly happiness as the best thing; for although they have their 'reward in the top of heaven, yet, when the elevation caused by their good works ends, as it will end, when the buoyant power of good works is exhausted, then they drop down to earth again. Hence, to worship the creator as the [=a]tm[=a] is indeed productive of temporary pleasure, but no more. "If a man worship another divinity, devat[=a], with the idea that he and the god are different, he does not know" (Brihad [=A]ran. Up. 1. 4. 10). "Without passion and without parts" is the brahma (Mund. 2. 2. 9). The further doctrine, therefore, that all except brahma is delusion is implied here, and the "extinction of gods in brahma" is once or twice formulated.[20] The fatal error of judgment is to imagine that there is in absolute being anything separate from man's being. When personified, this being appears as the supreme Person, identical with the ego, who is lord of what has been and what will be. By perceiving this controlling spirit in one's own spirit (or self) one obtains eternal bliss; "when desires cease, the mortal becomes immortal; he attains brahma here" in life (Katha Up. 2. 5. 12; 6. 14; Br. [=A]ran. Up. 4. 4. 7).