But we return to the point which just now chiefly interests us. Whether Sa@nkara's interpretation of the chapter, and especially of section 6, be right or wrong, so much is certain that we are not entitled to view all those texts which speak of the soul going to the world of Brahman as belonging to the so-called lower knowledge, because a few other passages declare that the sage does not go to Brahman. The text which declares the sage free from desires to become one with Brahman could not, without due discrimination, be used to define and limit the meaning of other passages met with in the same Upanishad even—for as we have remarked above the Brihadâranyaka contains pieces manifestly belonging to different stages of development;—much less does it entitle us to put arbitrary constructions on passages forming part of other Upanishads. Historically the disagreement of the various accounts is easy to understand. The older notion was that the soul of the wise man proceeds along the path of the gods to Brahman's abode. A later—and, if we like, more philosophic—conception is that, as Brahman already is a man's Self, there is no need of any motion on man's part to reach Brahman. We may even apply to those two views the terms aparâ and parâ—lower and higher—knowledge. But we must not allow any commentator to induce us to believe that what he from his advanced standpoint looks upon as an inferior kind of cognition, was viewed in the same light by the authors of the Upanishads.
We turn to another Upanishad text likewise touching upon the point considered in what precedes, viz. the second Brâhmana of the third adhyâya of the Brihadâranyaka. The discussion there first turns upon the grahas and atigrahas, i.e. the senses and organs and their objects, and Yâjñavalkya thereupon explains that death, by which everything is overcome, is itself overcome by water; for death is fire. The colloquy then turns to what we must consider an altogether new topic, Ârtabhâga asking, 'When this man (ayam purusha) dies, do the vital spirits depart from him or not?' and Yâjñavalkya answering, 'No, they are gathered up in him; he swells, he is inflated; inflated the dead (body) is lying.'—Now this is for Sa@nkara an important passage, as we have already seen above (p. lxxxi); for he employs it, in his comment on Ved.-sûtra IV, 2, 13, for the purpose of proving that the passage Bri. Up. IV, 4, 6 really means that the vital spirits do not, at the moment of death, depart from the true sage. Hence the present passage also must refer to him who possesses the highest knowledge; hence the 'ayam purusha' must be 'that man,' i.e. the man who possesses the highest knowledge, and the highest knowledge then must be found in the preceding clause which says that death itself may be conquered by water. But, as Râmânuja also remarks, neither does the context favour the assumption that the highest knowledge is referred to, nor do the words of section 11 contain any indication that what is meant is the merging of the Self of the true Sage in Brahman. With the interpretation given by Râmânuja himself, viz. that the prânas do not depart from the jîva of the dying man, but accompany it into a new body, I can agree as little (although he no doubt rightly explains the 'ayam purusha' by 'man' in general), and am unable to see in the passage anything more than a crude attempt to account for the fact that a dead body appears swollen and inflated.—A little further on (section 13) Ârtabhâga asks what becomes of this man (ayam purusha) when his speech has entered into the fire, his breath into the air, his eye into the sun, &c. So much here is clear that we have no right to understand by the 'ayam purusha' of section 13 anybody different from the 'ayam purusha' of the two preceding sections; in spite of this Sa@nkara—according to whose system the organs of the true sage do not enter into the elements, but are directly merged in Brahman—explains the 'ayam purusha' of section 13 to be the 'asamyagdarsin,' i.e. the person who has not risen to the cognition of the highest Brahman. And still a further limiting interpretation is required by the system. The asamyagdarsin also—who as such has to remain in the samsâra—cannot do without the organs, since his jîva when passing out of the old body into a new one is invested with the subtle body; hence section 13 cannot be taken as saying what it clearly does say, viz. that at death the different organs pass into the different elements, but as merely indicating that the organs are abandoned by the divinities which, during lifetime, presided over them!
The whole third adhyâya indeed of the Brihadâranyaka affords ample proof of the artificial character of Sa@nkara's attempts to show that the teaching of the Upanishads follows a definite system. The eighth brâhmana, for instance, is said to convey the doctrine of the highest non-related Brahman, while the preceding brâhmanas had treated only of Îsvara in his various aspects. But, as a matter of fact, brâhmana 8, after having, in section 8, represented Brahman as destitute of all qualities, proceeds, in the next section, to describe that very same Brahman as the ruler of the world, 'By the command of that Imperishable sun and moon stand apart,' &c.; a clear indication that the author of the Upanishad does not distinguish a higher and lower Brahman in—Sa@nkara's sense.—The preceding brâhmana (7) treats of the antaryâmin, i.e. Brahman viewed as the internal ruler of everything. This, according to Sa@nkara, is the lower form of Brahman called Îsvara; but we observe that the antaryâmin as well as the so-called highest Brahman described in section 8 is, at the termination of the two sections, characterised by means of the very same terms (7, 23: Unseen but seeing, unheard but hearing, &c. There is no other seer but he, there is no other hearer but he, &c.; and 8, 11: That Brahman is unseen but seeing, unheard but hearing, &c. There is nothing that sees but it, nothing that hears but it, &c.).—Nothing can be clearer than that all these sections aim at describing one and the same being, and know nothing of the distinctions made by the developed Vedânta, however valid the latter may be from a purely philosophic point of view.
We may refer to one more similar instance from the Chândogya Upanishad. We there meet in III, 14 with one of the most famous vidyâs describing the nature of Brahman, called after its reputed author the Sândilya-vidyâ. This small vidyâ is decidedly one of the finest and most characteristic texts; it would be difficult to point out another passage setting forth with greater force and eloquence and in an equally short compass the central doctrine of the Upanishads. Yet this text, which, beyond doubt, gives utterance to the highest conception of Brahman's nature that Sândilya's thought was able to reach, is by Sa@nkara and his school again declared to form part of the lower vidyâ only, because it represents Brahman as possessing qualities. It is, according to their terminology, not jñâna, i.e. knowledge, but the injunction of a mere upâsanâ, a devout meditation on Brahman in so far as possessing certain definite attributes such as having light for its form, having true thoughts, and so on. The Râmânujas, on the other hand, quote this text with preference as clearly describing the nature of their highest, i.e. their one Brahman. We again allow that Sa@nkara is free to deny that any text which ascribes qualities to Brahman embodies absolute truth; but we also again remark that there is no reason whatever for supposing that Sândilya, or whoever may have been the author of that vidyâ, looked upon it as anything else but a statement of the highest truth accessible to man.
We return to the question as to the true philosophy of the Upanishads, apart from the systems of the commentators.—From what precedes it will appear with sufficient distinctness that, if we understand by philosophy a philosophical system coherent in all its parts, free from all contradictions and allowing room for all the different statements made in all the chief Upanishads, a philosophy of the Upanishads cannot even be spoken of. The various lucubrations on Brahman, the world, and the human soul of which the Upanishads consist do not allow themselves to be systematised simply because they were never meant to form a system. Sândilya's views as to the nature of Brahman did not in all details agree with those of Yâjñavalkya, and Uddâlaka differed from both. In this there is nothing to wonder at, and the burden of proof rests altogether with those who maintain that a large number of detached philosophic and theological dissertations, ascribed to different authors, doubtless belonging to different periods, and not seldom manifestly contradicting each other, admit of being combined into a perfectly consistent whole.
The question, however, assumes a different aspect, if we take the terms 'philosophy' and 'philosophical system,' not in the strict sense in which Sa@nkara and other commentators are not afraid of taking them, but as implying merely an agreement in certain fundamental features. In this latter sense we may indeed undertake to indicate the outlines of a philosophy of the Upanishads, only keeping in view that precision in details is not to be aimed at. And here we finally see ourselves driven back altogether on the texts themselves, and have to acknowledge that the help we receive from commentators, to whatever school they may belong, is very inconsiderable. Fortunately it cannot be asserted that the texts on the whole oppose very serious difficulties to a right understanding, however obscure the details often are. Concerning the latter we occasionally depend entirely on the explanations vouchsafed by the scholiasts, but as far as the general drift and spirit of the texts are concerned, we are quite able to judge by ourselves, and are even specially qualified to do so by having no particular system to advocate.
The point we will first touch upon is the same from which we started when examining the doctrine of the Sûtras, viz. the question whether the Upanishads acknowledge a higher and lower knowledge in Sa@nkara's sense, i.e. a knowledge of a higher and a lower Brahman. Now this we find not to be the case. Knowledge is in the Upanishads frequently opposed to avîdyâ, by which latter term we have to understand ignorance as to Brahman, absence of philosophic knowledge; and, again, in several places we find the knowledge of the sacrificial part of the Veda with its supplementary disciplines contrasted as inferior with the knowledge of the Self; to which latter distinction the Mundaka Up. (I, 4) applies the terms aparâ and parâ vîdyâ. But a formal recognition of the essential difference of Brahman being viewed, on the one hand, as possessing distinctive attributes, and, on the other hand, as devoid of all such attributes is not to be met with anywhere. Brahman is indeed sometimes described as saguna and sometimes as nirguna (to use later terms); but it is nowhere said that thereon rests a distinction of two different kinds of knowledge leading to altogether different results. The knowledge of Brahman is one, under whatever aspects it is viewed; hence the circumstance (already exemplified above) that in the same vidyâs it is spoken of as saguna as well as nirguna. When the mind of the writer dwells on the fact that Brahman is that from which all this world originates, and in which it rests, he naturally applies to it distinctive attributes pointing at its relation to the world; Brahman, then, is called the Self and life of all, the inward ruler, the omniscient Lord, and so on. When, on the other hand, the author follows out the idea that Brahman may be viewed in itself as the mysterious reality of which the whole expanse of the world is only an outward manifestation, then it strikes him that no idea or term derived from sensible experience can rightly be applied to it, that nothing more may be predicated of it but that it is neither this nor that. But these are only two aspects of the cognition of one and the same entity.
Closely connected with the question as to the double nature of the Brahman of the Upanishads is the question as to their teaching Mâyâ.—From Colebrooke downwards the majority of European writers have inclined towards the opinion that the doctrine of Mâyâ, i.e. of the unreal illusory character of the sensible world, does not constitute a feature of the primitive philosophy of the Upanishads, but was introduced into the system at some later period, whether by Bâdarâyana or Sa@nkara or somebody else. The opposite view, viz. that the doctrine of Mâyâ forms an integral element of the teaching of the Upanishads, is implied in them everywhere, and enunciated more or less distinctly in more than one place, has in recent times been advocated with much force by Mr. Gough in the ninth chapter of his Philosophy of the Upanishads.
In his Matériaux, &c. M. Paul Régnaud remarks that 'the doctrine of Mâyâ, although implied in the teaching of the Upanishads, could hardly become clear and explicit before the system had reached a stage of development necessitating a choice between admitting two co-existent eternal principles (which became the basis of the Sâ@nkhya philosophy), and accepting the predominance of the intellectual principle, which in the end necessarily led to the negation of the opposite principle.'—To the two alternatives here referred to as possible we, however, have to add a third one, viz. that form of the Vedânta of which the theory of the Bhâgavatas or Râmânujas is the most eminent type, and according to which Brahman carries within its own nature an element from which the material universe originates; an element which indeed is not an independent entity like the pradhâna of the Sâ@nkhyas, but which at the same time is not an unreal Mâyâ but quite as real as any other part of Brahman's nature. That a doctrine of this character actually developed itself on the basis of the Upanishads, is a circumstance which we clearly must not lose sight of, when attempting to determine what the Upanishads themselves are teaching concerning the character of the world.
In enquiring whether the Upanishads maintain the Mâyâ doctrine or not, we must proceed with the same caution as regards other parts of the system, i.e. we must refrain from using unhesitatingly, and without careful consideration of the merits of each individual case, the teaching—direct or inferred—of any one passage to the end of determining the drift of the teaching of other passages. We may admit that some passages, notably of the Brihadâranyaka, contain at any rate the germ of the later developed Mâyâ doctrine[25], and thus render it quite intelligible that a system like Sa@nkara's should evolve itself, among others, out of the Upanishads; but that affords no valid reason for interpreting Mâyâ into other texts which give a very satisfactory sense without that doctrine, or are even clearly repugnant to it. This remark applies in the very first place to all the accounts of the creation of the physical universe. There, if anywhere, the illusional character of the world should have been hinted at, at least, had that theory been held by the authors of those accounts; but not a word to that effect is met with anywhere. The most important of those accounts—the one given in the sixth chapter of the Chândogya Upanishad—forms no exception. There is absolutely no reason to assume that the 'sending forth' of the elements from the primitive Sat, which is there described at length, was by the writer of that passage meant to represent a vivarta rather than a parinâma that the process of the origination of the physical universe has to be conceived as anything else but a real manifestation of real powers hidden in the primeval Self. The introductory words, addressed to Svetaketu by Uddâlaka, which are generally appealed to as intimating the unreal character of the evolution about to be described, do not, if viewed impartially, intimate any such thing[26]. For what is capable of being proved, and manifestly meant to be proved, by the illustrative instances of the lump of clay and the nugget of gold, through which there are known all things made of clay and gold? Merely that this whole world has Brahman for its causal substance, just as clay is the causal matter of every earthen pot, and gold of every golden ornament, but not that the process through which any causal substance becomes an effect is an unreal one. We—including Uddâlaka—may surely say that all earthen pots are in reality nothing but earth—the earthen pot being merely a special modification (vikâra) of clay which has a name of its own—without thereby committing ourselves to the doctrine that the change of form, which a lump of clay undergoes when being fashioned into a pot, is not real but a mere baseless illusion.