a safe one. Even if it could be shown that the teaching of all the chief Upanishads agrees in all essential points (a subject to which some attention will be paid later on), we should not on that account be entitled unhesitatingly to assume that the Sutras set forth the same doctrine. What¬ ever the true philosophy of the Upanishads may be, there remains the undeniable fact that there exist and have existed since very ancient times not one but several essen¬ tially differing systems, all of which lay claim to the dis¬ tinction of being the true representatives of the teaching of the Upanishads as well as of the Sutras. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that, for instance, the doctrine of Maya is distinctly enunciated in the Upanishads; nevertheless Ramanuja and, for all we know to the contrary, the whole series of more ancient commentators on whom he looked as authorities in the interpretation of the Sutras, denied that the Upanishads teach Maya, and it is hence by no means impossible that Bidaraya/za should have done the same. The a priori style of reasoning as to the teaching of the Sutras is therefore without much force.
But apart from any intention of arriving thereby at the meaning of the Sutras there, of course, remains for us the all-important question as to the true teaching of the Upa¬ nishads, a question which a translator of the Sutras and .Sankara cannot afford to pass over in silence, especially after reason has been shown for the conclusion that the Sutras and the vSankara-bhashya do not agree concerning most important points of Vedantic doctrine. The Sutras as well as the later commentaries claim, in the first place, to be nothing more than systematisations of the Upani¬ shads, and for us a considerable part at least of their value and interest lies in this their nature. Hence the further question presents itself by whom the teaching of the Upa¬ nishads has been most adequately systematised, whether by Badarayazza, or.Sankara, or Ramanuja, or some other commentator. This question requires to be kept altogether separate from the enquiry as to which commentator most faithfully renders the contents of the Sutras, and it is by no means impossible that.Sankara, for instance, should in INTRODUCTION.
cm the end have to be declared a more trustworthy guide with regard to the teaching of the Upanishads than concerning the meaning of the Sutras* We must remark here at once that, whatever commenta¬ tor may be found to deserve preference on the whole, it appears fairly certain already at the outset that none of the systems which Indian ingenuity has succeeded in erecting on the basis of the Upanishads can be accepted in its entirety. The reason for this lies in the nature of the Upanishads themselves. To the Hindu commentator and philosopher the Upanishads came down as a body of revealed truth whose teaching had, somehow or other, to be shown to be thoroughly consistent and free from contra¬ dictions; a system had to be devised in which a suitable place could be allotted to every one of the multitudinous statements which they make on the various points of Vedantic doctrine. But to the European scholar, or in fact to any one whose mind is not bound by the doctrine of >Sruti, it will certainly appear that all such attempts stand self-condemned. If anything is evident even on a cursory review of the Upanishads—and the impression so created is only strengthened by a more careful investigation—it is that they do not constitute a systematic whole. They themselves, especially the older ones, give the most unmis¬ takable indications on that point. Not only are the doctrines expounded in the different Upanishads ascribed to different teachers, but even the separate sections of one and the same Upanishad are assigned to different authorities. It would be superfluous to quote examples of what a mere look at the KMndogya Upanishad, for instance, suffices to prove. It is of course not impossible that even a multitude of teachers should agree in imparting precisely the same doctrine; but in the case of the Upanishads that is certainly not antecedently probable. For, in the first place, the teachers who are credited with the doctrines of the Upanishads manifestly belonged to different sec¬ tions of Brahminical society, to different Vedic j-akhas; nay, some of them the tradition makes out to have been kshattriyas. And, in the second place, the period, whose CIV vedanta-sOtras.
mental activity is represented in the Upanishads, was a creative one, and as such cannot be judged according to the analogy of later periods of Indian philosophic de¬ velopment. The later philosophic schools as, for instance, the one of which Sankara is the great representative, were no longer free in their speculations, but strictly bound by a traditional body of texts considered sacred, which could not be changed or added to, but merely sys¬ tematised and commented upon. Hence the rigorous uniformity of doctrine characteristic of those schools. But there had been a time when, what later writers received as a sacred legacy, determining and confining the whole course of their speculations, first sprang from the minds of creative thinkers not fettered by the tradition of any school, but freely following the promptings of their own heads and hearts. By the absence of school traditions, I do not in¬ deed mean that the great teachers who appear in the Upanishads were free to make an entirely new start, and to assign to their speculations any direction they chose; for nothing can be more certain than that, at the period as the outcome of whose philosophical activity the Upanishads have to be considered, there were in circulation certain broad speculative ideas overshadowing the mind of every member of Brahminical society. But those ideas were neither very definite nor worked out in detail, and hence allowed themselves to be handled and fashioned in different ways by different individuals. With whom the few leading conceptions traceable in the teaching of all Upanishads first originated, is a point on which those writings themselves do not enlighten us, and which we have no other means for settling; most probably they are to be viewed not as the creation of any individual mind, but as the gradual outcome of speculations carried on by generations of Vedic theologians. In the Upanishads themselves, at any rate, they appear as floating mental possessions which may be seized and moulded into new forms by any one who feels within himself the required inspiration. A certain vague knowledge of Brahman, the great hidden being in which all this manifold world is one, seems to be INTRODUCTION.
CV spread everywhere, and often issues from the most unex¬ pected sources. SVetaketu receives instruction from his father Uddalaka; the proud G&rgya has to become the pupil of A^ata^atru, the king of Ka st; Bhu^yu Sahya- yani receives answers to his questions from a Gandharva possessing a maiden; Satyakama learns what Brahman is from the bull of the herd he is tending, from Agni and from a flamingo; and Upako^ala is taught by the sacred fires in his teacher’s house. All this is of course legend, not history; but the fact that the philosophic and theological doctrines of the Upanishads are clothed in this legendary garb certainly does not strengthen the ex¬ pectation of finding in them a rigidly systematic doctrine.
And a closer investigation of the contents of the Upani¬ shads amply confirms this preliminary impression. If we avail ourselves, for instance, of M. Paul Regnaud’s Materiaux pour servir a l’Histoire de la Philosophic de Unde, in which the philosophical lucubrations of the different Upanishads are arranged systematically according to topics, we can see with ease how, together with a certain uniformity of general leading conceptions, there runs throughout divergence in details, and very often not unimportant details. A look, for instance, at the collection of passages relative to the origination of the world from the primitive being, suffices to show that the task of demonstrating that whatever the Upanishads teach on that point can be made to fit into a homogeneous system is an altogether hopeless one. The accounts there given of the creation belong, beyond all doubt, to different stages of philosophic and theological development or else to different sections of priestly society. None but an Indian commentator would, I suppose, be inclined and sufficiently courageous to attempt the proof that, for in¬ stance, the legend of the atman purushavidha, the Self in the shape of a person which is as large as man and woman together, and then splits itself into two halves from which cows, horses, asses, goats, &c. are produced in succession (B ri. Up. I, i, 4), can be reconciled with the account given of the creation in the iTMndogya Upanishad, where it is said that in the beginning there existed nothing but the sat, CV1 vedAnta-sOtras.
f that which is, 5 and that feeling a desire of being many it emitted out of itself ether, and then all the other elements in due succession. The former is a primitive cosmogonic myth, which in its details shows striking analogies with the cosmogonic myths of other nations; the latter account is fairly developed Vedanta (although not Vedanta implying the Maya doctrine). We may admit that both accounts show a certain fundamental similarity in so far as they derive the manifold world from one original being; but to go beyond this and to maintain, as.Sankara does, that the atman purushavidha of the Brfhadara^yaka is the so-called Vira^ of the latter Vedanta—implying thereby that that section consciously aims at describing only the activity of one special form of livara, and not simply the whole pro¬ cess of creation—-is the ingenious shift of an orthodox commentator in difficulties, but nothing more.
How all those more or less conflicting texts came to be preserved and handed down to posterity, is not difficult to understand. As mentioned above, each of the great sections of Brahminical priesthood had its own sacred texts, and again in each of those sections there existed more ancient texts which it was impossible to dis¬ card when deeper and more advanced speculations began in their turn to be embodied in literary compositions, which in the course of time likewise came to be looked upon as sacred. When the creative period had reached its termina¬ tion, and the task of collecting and arranging was taken in hand, older and newer pieces were combined into wholes, and thus there arose collections of such heterogeneous character as the.Oandogya and Brfhadara^yaka Upani- shads. On later generations, to which the whole body of texts came down as revealed truth, there consequently devolved the inevitable task of establishing systems on which no exception could be taken to any of the texts; but that the task was, strictly speaking, an impossible one, i. e. one which it was impossible to accomplish fairly and honestly, there really is no reason to deny.
For a comprehensive criticism of the methods which the different commentators employ in systematising the contents INTRODUCTION.
CV11 of the Upanishads there is no room in this place. In order, however, to illustrate what is meant by the ‘ impossibility/ above alluded to, of combining the various doctrines of the Upanishads into a whole without doing violence to a certain number of texts, it will be as well to analyse in detail some few at least of ^Sankara’s interpretations, and to render clear the considerations by which he is guided.
We begin with a case which has already engaged our attention when discussing the meaning of the Sfitras, viz. the question concerning the ultimate fate of those who have attained the knowledge of Brahman. As we have seen, Sankara teaches that the soul of him who has risen to an insight into the nature of the higher Brahman does not, at the moment of death, pass out of the body, but is directly merged in Brahman by a process from which all. departing and moving, in fact all considerations of space, are altogether excluded. The soul of him, on the other hand, who has not risen above the knowledge of the lower qualified Brahman departs from the body by means of the artery called sushum^a, and following the so-called devayana, the path of the gods, mounts up to the world of Brahman. A review of the chief Upanishad texts on which.Sankara founds this distinction will show how far it is justified.
In a considerable number of passages the Upanishads contrast the fate of two classes of men, viz. of those who perform sacrifices and meritorious works only, and of those who in addition possess a certain kind of knowledge. Men of the former kind ascend after death to the moon, where they live for a certain time, and then return to the earth into new forms of embodiment; persons of the latter kind proceed on the path of the gods—on which the sun forms one stage—up to the world of Brahman, from which there is no return. The chief passages to that effect are Kh. Up. V, io; Kaush. Up. I, 2 ff.; Mu nd. Up. I, 2, 9 ff.; B ri. Up. VI, 2, 15 ff.; Prama Up. I, 9 ff—In other passages only the latter of the two paths is referred to, cp.Kh. Up. IV, 15; VIII, 6, 5; Taitt. Up. I, 6; Bri. Up. IV, 4, 8, 9; V, 10; Maitr.Up.VI, 30, to mention only the more important ones.
Now an impartial consideration of those passages shows CV111 VEDANTA-S^TRAS.
I think, beyond any doubt, that what is meant there by the knowledge which leads through the sun to the world of Brahman is the highest knowledge of which the devotee is capable, and that the world of Brahman to which his know¬ ledge enables him to proceed denotes the highest state which he can ever reach, the state of final release, if we choose to call it by that name.— Kh. Up. V, 10 says, c Those who know this (viz. the doctrine of the five fires), and those who in the forest follow faith and austerities go to light/ &c.— Kh. Up. IV, 15 is manifestly intended to convey the true knowledge of Brahman; Upako^ala’s teacher himself represents the instruction given by him as superior to the teaching of the sacred fires.— Kh. Up. VIII, 6, 5 quotes the old i'loka which says that the man moving upwards by the artery penetrating the crown of the head reaches the Im¬ mortal.—Kaush. Up. I, %—which gives the most detailed account of the ascent of the soul—contains no intimation whatever of the knowledge of Brahman, which leads up to the Brahman world, being of an inferior nature.—Mu nd. Up. I, 2, 9 agrees with the Khandogya in saying that c Those who practise penance and faith in the forest, tranquil, wise, and living on alms, depart free from passion, through the sun, to where that immortal Person dwells whose nature is imperishable,’ and nothing whatever in the context coun¬ tenances the assumption that not the highest knowledge and the highest Person are there referred to.—B ri. Up. IV, 4, 8 quotes old jlokas clearly referring to the road of the gods ( c the small old path ’), on which c sages who know Brahman move on to the svargaloka and thence higher on as entirely free.—That path was found by Brah¬ man, and on it goes whoever knows Brahman.’—B ri. Up. VI, 2, 15 is another version of the Pa^agnividya, with the variation, ‘Those who know this, and those who in the forest worship faith and the True, go to light,’ &c.—Prama Up. 1, 10 says, £ Those who have sought the Self by penance, abstinence, faith, and knowledge gain by the northern path Aditya, the sun. There is the home of the spirits, the im¬ mortal free from danger, the highest. From thence they do not return, for it is the end.’—Maitr. Up. VI, 30 quotes INTRODUCTION.
C1X riokas, ‘ One of them (the arteries) leads upwards, piercing the solar orb: by it, having stepped beyond the world of Brahman, they go to the highest path.’
All these passages are as clear as can be desired. The soul of the sage who knows Brahman passes out by the sushumTZct, and ascends by the path of the gods to the world of Brahman, there to remain for ever in some bliss¬ ful state. But, according to Sankara, all these texts are meant to set forth the result of a certain inferior knowledge only, of the knowledge of the conditioned Brahman. Even in a passage apparently so entirely incapable of more than one interpretation as B ru Up. VI, 2,15, the ‘True/ which the holy hermits in the forest are said to worship, is not to be the highest Brahman, but only Hira/zyagarbha!—And why?—Only because the system so demands it, the system which teaches that those who know the highest Brahman become on their death one with it, without having to resort to any other place. The passage on which this latter tenet is chiefly based is Bri. Up. IV, 4,6,7, where, with the fate of him who at his death has desires, and whose soul therefore enters a new body after having departed from the old one, accompanied by all the pranas, there is contrasted the fate of the sage free from all desires. ‘ But as to the man who does not desire, who not desiring, freed from desires is satisfied in his desires, or desires the Self only, the vital spirits of him (tasya) do not depart—being Brahman he goes to Brahman.’
We have seen above (p. lxxx) that this passage is referred to in the important Sutras on whose right interpretation it, in the first place, depends whether or not we must admit the Sutrakara to have acknowledged the distinction of a para and an apari vidyct. Here the passage interests us as throwing light on the way in which Sankara systematises. He looks on the preceding part of the chapter as describing what happens to the souls of all those who do not know the highest Brahman, inclusive of those who know the lower Brahman only. They pass out of the old bodies followed by all pranas and enter new bodies. He, on the other hand, section 6 continues, who knows the true Brahman, does not pass out of the body, but becomes one with Brahman then cx VEDANTA-sfjTRAS.
and there. This interpretation of the purport of the entire chapter is not impossibly right, although I am rather in¬ clined to think that the chapter aims at setting forth in its earlier part the future of him who does not know Brahman at all, while the latter part of section 6 passes on to him who does know Brahman (i. e. Brahman pure and simple, the text knowing of no distinction of the so-called lower and higher Brahman). In explaining section 6 Sankara lays stress upon the clause ‘na tasya prazza utkramanti/ ‘ his vital spirits do not pass out,’ taking this to signify that the soul with the vital spirits does not move at all, and thus does not ascend to the world of Brahman; while the purport of the clause may simply be that the soul and vital spirits do not go anywhere else, i. e. do not enter a new body, but are united, somehow or other, with Brahman. On.Sankara’s interpretation there immediately arises a new difficulty. In the ^lokas, quoted under sections 8 and 9, the description of the small old path which leads to the svargaloka and higher on clearly refers—as noticed already above—to the path through the veins, primarily the sushumzza, on which, according to so many other pas¬ sages, the soul of the wise mounts upwards. But that path is, according to.Sankara, followed by him only who has not risen above the lower knowledge, and yet the ^lokas have manifestly to be connected with what is said in the latter half of 6 about the owner of the para vidya. Hence .Sankara sees himself driven to explain the ^lokas in 8 and 9 (of which a faithful translation is given in Professor Max Muller’s version) as follows: 8. ‘ The subtle old path (i. e. the path of knowledge on which final release is reached; which path is subtle, i. e. difficult to know, and old, i. e. to be known from the eternal Veda) has been obtained and fully reached by me. On it the sages who know Brahman reach final release (svarga- lokai*abda^ samnihitaprakarazzat mokshabhidhayaka/^).
9. ‘ On that path they say that there is white or blue or yellow or green or red (i. e. others maintain that the path to final release is, in accordance with the colour of the arteries, either white or blue, &c.; but that is false, for the INTRODUCTION.
CXI paths through the arteries lead at the best to the world of Brahman, which itself forms part of the sa^sara); that path (i. e. the only path to release, viz. the path of true knowledge) is found by Brahman, i. e. by such Brahma^as as through true knowledge have become like Brahman, 5 &c.
A significant instance in truth of the straits to which thorough-going systematisers of the Upanishads see them¬ selves reduced occasionally!
But we return to the point which just now chiefly interests us. Whether Sankara’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 Brah¬ man as belonging to the so-called lower knowledge, be¬ cause 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 Brzhadara?zyaka 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 Brah¬ man’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 apara and para—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 Brahma^a of the third adhyaya of the Brzhadara/^yaka. The discussion there first turns upon the grahas and ati- CX11 vedanta-s6tras.
grahas, i.e. the senses and organs and their objects, and Y&^avalkya 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, Artabhaga asking, ‘ When this man (ayam purusha) dies, do the vital spirits depart from him or not?' and Yci^avalkya answering, ‘ No, they are gathered up in him; he swells, he is inflated; inflated the dead (body) is lying.'—Now this is for.Sankara an important passage, as we have already seen above (p. lxxxi); for he employs it, in his comment on Ved.-shtra 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 Rdmanu^a 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 Ramanuja himself, viz. that the pranas do not depart from the ^iva 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 5 by ‘ man 5 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) Artabh&ga 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 c ayam purusha 5 of section 13 anybody different from the c ayam purusha 5 of the two preceding sections; in spite of this.Sankara—according to whose system the organs of the true sage do not enter into the elements, but are directly INTRODUCTION.
CX111 merged in Brahman—explains the ‘ ayam purusha 5 of sec¬ tion 13 to be the c asazzzyagdamn,’ 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 asazzzyagdamn also—who as such has to remain in the sazzzsara—cannot do without the organs, since his ^iva 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 adhyaya indeed of the Brzhadarazzyaka affords ample proof of the artificial character of.Sankara’s attempts to show that the teaching of the Upanishads follows a definite system. The eighth brahmazza, for in¬ stance, is said to convey the doctrine of the highest non- related Brahman, while the preceding brahmazzas had treated only of l^vara in his various aspects. But, as a matter of fact, brahmazza 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, 4 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.Sankaras sense.—The preceding brahmazza (7) treats of the antaryamin, i. e. Brahman viewed as the internal ruler of everything. This, according to.Sankara, is the lower form of Brahman called l.rvara; but we observe that the antaryamin 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 [34] h