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The Life Divine
A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad
[Draft A]
Foreword
Veda & Vedanta are the inexhaustible fountains of Indian spirituality With knowledge or without knowledge, every creed in India, sect, school of philosophy, outburst of religious life, great or petty, brilliant or obscure, draws its springs of life from these ancient and ever flowing waters Conscious or unwitting each Indian religionist stirs to a vibration that reaches him from those far off ages Darshana and Tantra and Purana, Shaivism & Vaishnavism, orthodoxy & heresy are merely so many imperfect understandings of Vedic truth & misunderstandings of each other; they are eager half-illuminated attempts to bring some ray of that great calm & perfect light into our lives & make of the stray beam an illumination on our path or a finger laid on the secret & distant goal of our seeking Our greatest modern minds are mere tributaries of the old Rishis Shankara, who seems to us a giant, had but a fragment of their knowledge Buddha wandered away on a bypath in their universal kingdom These compositions of an unknown antiquity are as the many breasts of the eternal Mother of Knowledge from which our succeeding ages have been fed & the imperishable life in us fostered The Vedas hold more of that knowledge than the Vedanta, hold it more amply, practically and in detail; but they come to us in a language we have ceased to understand, a vocabulary which often, by the change of meaning to ancient terms, misleads most where it seems most easy & familiar, a scheme of symbols of which the key has been taken from us Indians do not understand the Vedas at all; Europeans have systematised
Page – 361 a gross misunderstanding of them The old knowledge in the Vedas is to us, therefore, as a river wandering in dark caverns inaccessible to the common tread It is in the Upanishads that the stream first emerges into open country It is there that it is most accessible to us But even this stream flows through obscure forest & difficult mountain reaches and we only have it for our use at favourable points where the forest thins or the mountain opens It is there that men have built their little artificial cities of metaphysical thought and spiritual practice, in each of which the inhabitants pretend to control the whole river They call their dwelling places Vedanta or Sankhya, Adwaita or Dwaita, Shaivism or Vaishnavism, with a hundred names beside and boast that theirs is the way & theirs is the knowledge But, in reality, each of us can only command a little of the truth of the Sanatana Dharma, because none of us understands more than a little of the Upanishads. They become, indeed, easier to us as they come nearer to us in date & the modernity of their language—the stream more accessible as it draws farther away from the original sources and descends more into the plain and the lowlands But even the secret of these more modern revelations is not wholly ours and we delude ourselves if we think we have understood them entirely & need not plunge deeper for their meaning There is much gold in the sands of the bed which no man has thought of disinterring. The Isha Upanishad is simpler in form & expression than such writings as the Chhandogya & Brihad Aranyaka which contain in their symbolic expressions,—to us obscure & meaningless, disparaged by many as violently bizarre in idea & language & absurd in substance,—more of the detail of old Vedic knowledge The diction of the Upanishad is, for the most part, plain & easy; the ideas expressed by it, when they are not wrested from their proper sense, seem to be profound, yet lucid and straightforward Yet even in the Isha the real import of the closing passage is a sealed book to the commentators, and I am convinced that the failure to understand this culminating strain in the noble progressive harmony of the thoughts has
Page – 362 resulted for us in a failure to grasp the real & complete sense of the whole Upanishad We understand, more or less clearly, the separate sense of the different slokas, but their true connection & relation of the thoughts to each other has been almost entirely missed We have hold of some of its isolated truths; we have lost the totality of its purport. For the Isha Upanishad is one of the most perfectly worked out, one of the most finely and compactly stated inspired arguments the world possesses—an argument not in the sense of a train of disputatious reasoning, logical not in the fashion of an intellectual passage from syllogism to syllogism, but a statement of inspired thought each part of which has been perfectly seen by the revelatory faculty & perfectly stated by inspired expression in itself, in relation to the others & to its place in the whole Not only every sloka, but every word in each sloka has been perfectly chosen & perfectly placed There is a consummate harmony in the rhythm of the thought as well as in the rhythm of the language & the verse The result is a whole system of knowledge & spiritual experience stated with the utmost pregnant brevity, with an epic massiveness & dignity, but yet in itself full and free from omission We have in this Upanishad no string of incoherent thoughts thrown out at random, no loose transitions from one class of ideas to another, but a single subject greatly treated, with completeness, with precision, with the inspiration of a poet possessed by divine truth & the skill of a consummate architect of thought & language The Isha Upanishad is the gospel of a divine life in the world and a statement of the conditions under which it is possible and the spirit of its living. It is this harmonious totality of meaning which it is the sole object of my commentary to bring to light It has not been my object to support a particular philosophy or to read Adwaita or Dwaita or Visishtadwaita into its separate verses, and make it useful for metaphysical polemics I hold firmly the belief that the truths of the Upanishads were not arrived at by intellectual speculation, cannot be interpreted by disputation according to the rules of logic and are misused when they are employed merely as mines & quarries for the building of metaphysical systems I
Page – 363 hold them to have been arrived at by revelation & spiritual experience, to be records of things seen, heard & felt, drishta, sruta, upalabdha, in the soul and to stand for their truth not on logic which they transcend but on vision to which they aspire Those supra-intellectual faculties by which they received the Veda & developed its implications, drishti, sruti & smriti, are also the only means by which their thoughts can be perfectly understood What is it that the Upanishad reveals—this is the question I have set myself to answer; I am indifferent for what set of warring philosophical dogmas its texts can be made an armoury. Nevertheless in the course of exegesis I have been compelled to come into conflict with the opinions of the Mayavada The collision was inevitable rather than desired, for the Mayavada was the opinion with which I commenced my study of Vedanta It is a system which still attracts the abstract intellectuality in me and represents to me what I may call an intervening & mediary truth of realisation which can never lose its validity But when it seeks to govern human thought & life, to perpetuate itself as the sole truth of Vedanta, I feel that it is in conflict with the old Vedanta, stultifies the Upanishad & endangers or sterilises all our highest human activities without giving us the highest spiritual truth in its place Even so I would have preferred to leave aside all negative criticism of it in these commentaries But that is not possible For it has so possessed India's ideas about the Upanishads that it has to be cleared away in order that the true sense of this Upanishad at least may shine out from the obscuration For the Isha at least does not support the Mayavada as is indeed evident from the struggle & sense of difficulty in Shankara's own commentary which reduces its fine thought & admirable expression to incoherence & slipshod clumsiness The error, however lofty, must be removed in order that the plain & simple Truth may reveal itself. In following the end I have had in view there are a few plain and binding rules by which I have endeavoured always to be guided My method does not allow me to deal with the language of the Upanishads in the spirit of the scholar,—not the pride of the Pandit dealing with words as he chooses, but the humility of
Page – 364 the seeker after truth in the presence of one of its masters is, I have thought, the proper attitude of the exegete In the presence of these sacred writings, so unfathomably profound, so infinitely vast in their sense, so subtly perfect in their language, we must be obedient to the text and not presume to subject it ignorantly to our notions To follow the plain & simple meaning of the words has been therefore the first rule of my exegesis Vidya & Avidya are plain words, with a well-ascertained sense; I cannot turn aside from it to interpret them as knowledge of the gods & ignorance Sambhuti, asambhuti, vinasha are words with fixed meanings; my interpretation must arise directly & simply from those meanings The rhythm and metre of the Upanishads, the balance of the sentences demand their place in the interpretation; for chhandas is of primary importance in all Veda,—I must not disturb that rhythm, metre & balance in order to get over a philosophical difficulty The anustup of the Isha, for instance, is Vedic in its form & principle & not classical; it demands, that is to say, a stanza of two couplets and admits of sandhi in the middle of the pada but not between two padas: I must not take advantage of a possibility of sandhi between two padas possible only in the classical anustup in order to extract from the Upanishad the opposite of its apparent sense And when the meaning of a verse is determined, when it stands without qualification as an integral part of the teaching, I am not at liberty to read in a gloss of my own "for the ignorant" in order to depreciate or annul the validity of the doctrine I am bound by the thoughts of the Sage; I cannot force upon him any ideas of my own to govern & override his apparent meaning—all that I am allowed to do, is to explain his evident textual meaning in the light of my inward spiritual experience but I must not use that experience which may be imperfect to contradict the text. Shankara has permitted himself all these departures from the attitude of subjection to the text He has dealt with the Upanishad, and with this Upanishad more than any other, as a master of the Sruti & not its servant He has sought to include it among his grandiose intellectual conquests But the Sruti cannot be mastered by the intellect, and although the great Dravidian
Page – 365 has enslaved men's thoughts about the Sruti to his victorious intellectual polemic, the Sruti itself still preserves its inalienable freedom, rising into its secret heights of knowledge & being superior to the clouds & lightnings of the intellect, awaiting & admitting only the tread of the spirit, opening itself only to experience in the soul & vision in the supra-intellectual faculty of ideal knowledge I trust I shall not be considered as wanting in reverence for the greatest of Indian philosophers,—in my opinion, the greatest of all philosophers Nevertheless the greatest have their limitations In profundity, subtlety & loftiness Shankara has no equal; he is not so supreme in breadth & flexibility of understanding His was a spirit visited with some marvellous intuitions & realisations, but it would be to limit the capacities of the human soul to suppose that his intuitions exclude others equally great or that his realisations are the only or final word of spiritual knowledge Shankara of the Commentaries on the Upanishad,—although the greatest commentaries on them that we have,—is not so great as Shankara of the Bhashya on the Vedanta Sutras In the latter he is developing in full freedom his own philosophy, which even those who disagree with it must recognise as one of humanity's most marvellous intellectual achievements; in the former he is attempting to conquer for his own system the entire & exclusive authority of the Sruti A commentary on the Upanishads should be a work of exegesis; Shankara's is a work of metaphysical philosophy He does not really approach the Sruti as an exegete; his intention is not to use the philosophical mind in order to arrive at the right explanation of the old Vedanta, but to use explanation of the Vedanta in order to support the right system of philosophy His main authority is therefore his own preconceived view of Vedantic truth,—a standard external to the text & in so far illegitimate Accordingly he leaves much of the text unexplained, because it does not either support or conflict with the conclusions which he is interested in establishing; he gives merely a verbal paraphrase or a conventional scholastic rendering Where he is interested, he compels the Sruti to agree with him Without going quite to the same extent of self-will
Page – 366 as the Dwaita Commentator who does not hesitate to turn the famous Tat twam asi into Atat twam asi, "Thou art not that, O Swetaketu," he goes far enough & uses a fatal masterfulness The Isha especially, it seems to me, is vitiated by the defects of his method, because in the Isha the clear & apparent meaning of the text conflicts most decisively with some of his favourite tenets The great passage on Vidya & Avidya, Sambhuti & Asambhuti bristles for him with stumbling blocks We find him walking amid these difficulties with the powerful but uneasy steps of Milton's angels striding over the burning marl of their prison house I for my part am unwilling to keep to the trace of his footsteps For, after all, no human intellect can be permitted to hold the keys of the Sruti & fix for us our gate of entrance & the paths of our passage The Sruti itself is the only eternal authority on the Sruti. I have also held it as a rule of sound interpretation that any apparent incoherence, any want of logical relation & succession of thought in the text must exist in my deficiency of understanding & not in the Seer's deficiency of thinking This view I base upon my constant experience of the Upanishads; for I have always found in the end that the writers thought clearly & connectedly & with a perfect grasp of their subject & my own haste, ignorance & immaturity of spiritual experience has always been convicted in the end of the sole responsibility for any defect imputed by the presumption of the logical understanding to the revealed Scripture The text has to be studied with a great patience, a great passivity, waiting for experience, waiting for light & then waiting for still more light Insufficient data, haste of conclusions, wilful ramming of one's own favourite opinions into the text, wilful grasping at an imperfect or unfinished experience, wilful reading of a single narrow truth as the sole meaning of this complex harmony of thought, experience & knowledge which we call the Veda,—these are fruitful sources of error But if a man can make his mind like a blank slate, if he can enter into the condition of bottomless passivity proper to the state of the calm all-embracing Chaitanya Atma, not attempting to fix what the Truth shall be, but allowing Truth to manifest herself
Page – 367 in his soul, then he will find that it is the nature of the Sruti to reveal perfectly its own message. For ultimately, as I have already insisted, we can know the subject of the Veda only by the soul & its pure faculty of knowledge, not by verbal scholarship, metaphysical reasoning or intellectual discrimination By entering into communion with the soul of the thinker which still broods behind the inspired language, we come to realise what he saw, and what he put into his words, what waits there to make itself known to us By communion with the soul of the Universe which is behind the soul of the thinker & one with it, we get those experiences which illumine & confirm or correct by amplifying our vision of truth in the Sruti And since no man should lightly hope that he has been able always to think, act & know in this supreme method, it is fitting always to bow down in utter self-surrender to the Master of All, the Lord who as the Knower dwells in himself as name & form & offer to him the truth we have found in the Sruti & the error we have imported in it to do both with the truth & the error whatso He wills in His infinite power, love & wisdom for the purpose of His eternal & infinite Lila. _____
Chapter I The Subject & Plan of the Upanishad
The Upanishads have but one subject without a second and yet by the very nature of that subject they take all life & being & knowledge for their portion Their theme is the One who is Many It is an error which the Adwaitins have popularised to suppose that all the aim of the Upanishads is to arrive at the unconditioned Brahman A very cursory examination of their contents reveals a much wider and more complex purpose They strive rather to develop from various standpoints the identity of the One & the Many & the relations of the conditioned to the unconditioned Granting the unconditioned One, they
Page – 368 show us how this conditioned & manifold existence consists with, stands in and is not really different from the original unity Starting from the multitudinous world they resolve it back into a single transcendental existence, starting back from the transcendental they show us its extension within itself in phenomena Both the multitudinousness & the Unity, the manifestation & the Manifested they establish in the unknowable Absolute of which nothing can be proposed except that in some way different from any existence conceivable to mind or transferable to the symbols of speech, beyond all conception of Time & Space & Circumstance, beyond Personality & Impersonality, beyond Finite & Infinity It Is They seek not only to tell us of the way of withdrawal from life into unconditioned existence, but also of the way to dwell here in the knowledge & bliss of the Supreme They show us the path to heaven & the true joy of the earth Dwelling on the origin of things & the secret of life & movement, they have their parts of science,—their physics, their theory of evolution, their explanation of heredity Proceeding from the human soul to the Universal, they have their minutely scrupulous, subtle & profound system of psychology Asserting the existence of worlds & beings other than those that live within the compass of our waking senses, they have their cosmogony, theogony, philosophy of Nature & of mental & material nature powers The relations of mind to matter & soul to mind, of men to the gods & the illimitable Master Soul to the souls apparently limited in bodies, have all their authority in the Upanishads The philosophical analysis of Sankhya, the practices of Tantra, the worship & devotion of Purana, the love of the formed Divinity & the aspiration to the Formless, the atomic structure of Vaisheshika & the cardinal principles of Yoga,—whatever has been afterwards strong in development & influential on the Indian Mind, finds here its authority & sanction Not the unmanifested & unconditioned alone but the identity of the Transcendental & the phenomenal, their eternal relations, the play of their separation & the might of their union, is the common theme of the Upanishads They are not only for the anchorite but for the householder They do not reject life
Page – 369 but embrace it to fulfil it They build for mankind a bridge by which we can cross over from the limited to the illimitable, the recurrent & transitory to the persistent & eternal, but by which also we can recross & cross again with delight & without danger that once unfathomable & irremeable abyss They are God's lamps that illumine the stairs by which we ascend & descend no longer bound but freely & at will the whole scale of existence, finding Him there in His ineffability, concealed in utter luminousness, but also here in the garden of light & shade, manifest in every being. The Upanishads have therefore a common field of thought, experience & knowledge; but in that field each has its own peculiar corner or province There is nothing vague or ill-connected in their contents, nothing random in their structure Each sets out with a certain definite thought & aim which it progressively develops & brings to a perfect culmination The Aitareya for instance has for its subject the workings of the Self in the world as creator and master of evolution; creation, evolution, birth, heredity, death, our present human development are the matter of its brief & pregnant sentences The Taittiriya takes for its subject the Anandam Brahman, the constitution of the soul in relation to the Infinite Delight in Conscious Being which is God & the reality of existence & reveals the way & the result of its attainment; it develops for us our gospel of eternal Bliss The Kena starting from the present constitution of consciousness in man affirms the universal Brahman & teaches knowledge & self-surrender to Him as the inscrutable Self & the ever-present Master Similarly, the Isha has for its subject the nature of human life & action lived & done in the light of Vedantic knowledge & supreme realisation It is the gospel of a divine life on earth, a consecration of works, the seed & foundation of Karmayoga. The Upanishads are works of inspiration, not of reasoning; therefore we shall not find in them the development of thought or the logical connection of the sentences managed on the system of modern writers The principle of our modern writing borrowed from the Greeks, who were the first nation to replace inspiration by intellect, resembles the progress of the serpent over a field,
Page – 370 slow, winding, insinuating, covering perfectly every inch of the ground The literary method of the ancients resembles the steps of a Titan striding from reef to reef over wide & unfathomable waters The modern method instructs the intellect, the ancient illumines the soul In the latter also there is a perfect logical sequence but this logic demands for our understanding & capacity to follow it something of the same illumination which presided at its construction So profoundly characteristic is this difference that the Greek governs even his poetry by the law & style of the logical intellect, the Indian tends to subject even his prose to the law & style of the illuminated vision The Sage of the Isha is an inspired poet writing of God & life in a style of clear, but massive & epic sublimity, lofty & grandiose, but without the European epical tendency to amplitude & period, exceedingly terse, pregnant, compactly decisive,—every word stored with meaning & leaving behind it a thousand solemn echoes These conditions of his method of composition must be taken into full account when we try to interpret his thinking. The theme which he has to develop arises from the fundamental doctrine of the Vedanta, Sarvam khalu idam Brahma, Verily all this is the Brahman To realise that everything of which we have separate knowledge by the limited & dividing movement of the mind & senses, is limited & separate only in appearance, but in its reality transcends its appearance and is a manifestation, a form in consciousness, an eidolon, a mask of something absolute, transcendental & without limit,—this is the first necessity of true knowledge according to the early thinkers But when we have realised it, when we know that earth is not earth except in form & idea but the Brahman, man is not man except in form & idea but the Brahman, what then? Can we live in the light of that knowledge or must we abandon life to possess it? For it is obvious that all actions are done through mind with its two great instruments of name & form and if we are to look beyond name & form we must transcend mind & ignore its limitations How can we do that & still act & live in this world as men act & live? Can one keep one's eyes fixed on the transcendent & yet move with any ease or safety in the
Page – 371 phenomenal? Must we not remove our thoughts from That (Tat) in order to deal with this (sarvam idam),—just as a man cannot walk safely on earth if he keeps his eyes fixed on the heavens, but must constantly be removing his gaze from the lofty object of his contemplation? And another & deeper question arises Is life worth living when we know the Brahman? is there any joy & use in the phenomenal when we know the transcendent, in the recurrent & transient when we know the persistent & eternal, in the apparent when we know the real? Immense is the attraction of the infinite & unlimited, why should we take pleasure in the finite & fleeting? Does not the charm of phenomena disappear with the advent of this supreme knowledge & is it possible to busy ourselves with the phenomenal when its attraction & apparent necessity are removed? Is not persistence in life caused by ignorance and possible only if there is persistence in ignorance? Must we not abandon the world, if we would possess God? forsake Maya if we would become one in the Atman? For who can serve at the same time two masters & such different masters? We know the answer of Shankara, the answer of the later Adwaitin, the Mayavadin; and the answer of most religious minds in India since Buddhism conquered our intellects has not been substantially different To flee the world & seek God, sums up their attitude There have been notable exceptions, but the general trend hardly varies The majority of the pre-Buddhistic Hindus answered the question, if I am not mistaken, in a different sense & attained to a deeper consummation They answered it in the sense of the Isha Upanishad & the Gita; they held divine life in the Brahman here to be a possibility. The supreme importance of the question is apparent If the theory of the Illusionist is true, life is an inexplicable breach of Truth, an unjustifiable disturbance in the silence & stillness of the Eternal It is a freak to be corrected, a snare to be escaped from, a delusion to be renounced, a mighty cosmic whim & blunder The results upon the nation which produced this tremendous negation, have been prodigious India has become the land of saints & ascetics, but progressively also of a decaying society and an inert, effete & helpless people The indignant
Page – 372 denunciation of the Vishnu Purana against the certain results to society of the Buddhist heresy has been fulfilled in the fate of our strongly Buddhicised Hindu nation We see increasing upon it through the centuries the doom announced in the grave warnings of the Gita against the consequences of inaction, "utsideyur ime lokah sarirayatrapi akarmanah sankarasya cha karta syam upahanyam imah prajah buddhibhedam janayed ajnanam karmasanginam" etc The religious life of this country has divided itself into two distinct & powerful tendencies, the Hinduism of the withdrawal from life which has organised itself in the monastery & the hermitage and the Hinduism of social life which has resolved itself into a mass of minute ceremony & unintelligent social practice Neither is pure; both are afflicted with sankara, mixture & confusion of dharmas; for the life of the monastery is stricken with the tendency towards a return to the cares & corruptions of life, the life of society sicklied over & rendered impotent by the sense of its own illusion & worthlessness faced with the superiority of the monastic ideal If a man or a nation becomes profoundly convinced that this phenomenal life is an illusion, its aims & tendencies of a moment & its values all false values, you cannot expect either the man or the nation to flourish here, whatever may be gained in Nirvana For the nation any sustained & serious greatness of aim & endeavour becomes impossible To get through the years of life, to maintain the body and propagate the race, since for some unreasonable reason that is demanded of us, but to get done with the business as soon as possible & escape by sannyasa into the unconditioned, this must obviously be the sole preoccupation of man in a society governed by this negative ideal What is chiefly needed by it is an elaborate set of rules, the more minute & rigid the better, which will determine every action of life both social & religious, so as to save men the labour of thought & action & give them the assurance that they are doing only the nityakarma necessary to life in the body or the shastric karma which creates the least bondage for future lives & are not heaping up on themselves the burden of long continued existence in this terrible & inexplicable nightmare of
Page – 373 the phenomenal world But the attachment to works remains & it tends to satisfy itself by an excessive insistence on the petty field still left to it We see an exclusive preoccupation with a petty money-getting, with the mere maintenance of a family, with the sordid cares of a narrow personal existence The great ideals, the universalising & liberating movements which have continually swept rajasic Europe & revivified it, have been more & more unknown to us in the later history of our country We have had but one world-forgetting impulse & one world-conquering passion,—the impulse of final renunciation & the passion of self-devotion to the Master of all or to a spiritual teacher It is this habit of bhakti that alone has saved us alive; preserving an imperishable core of strength in the midst of our weakness & darkness it has returned upon us from age to age and poured its revivifying stream always through our inert mass and our petrifying society But for all that our great fundamental mistake about life has told heavily; it has cursed our rajasic activity with continual inefficiency and our sattwic tendencies with a perpetual weight of return to tamas Andham tamah pravishanti ye avidyam upasate Tato bhuya iva te tamo ya u vidyayam ratah Both these sentences of gloom have weighed upon us; we have divided ourselves into the exclusive seekers after the unconditioned knowledge & the exclusive lingerers in the phenomenal ignorance We have made the life divine well nigh impossible in the world, possible only in remote hermitage, desolate forest or lonely mountain We have not known the harmony which the early Vedantins practised; we have given ourselves instead to a great negation which, however inspiring and strength giving by its positive side—for it has its strong positive side—to a few exceptional spirits, cannot be grasped by the ordinary soul even when it is accepted by the ordinary intellect, is not man's swadharma, and must therefore tend only to destroy his strength & delight in life by imposing upon him an effort beyond our average human capacity, from which it sinks back dispirited, weakened and nerveless No nation, not even a chosen race, can with impunity build its life on a fundamental error about the meaning of life We are here to manifest God in
Page – 374 our mundane existence; our business is to express & formulate in phenomenal activity such truth as we can command about the Eternal; and in order to do that effectively we must answer the riddle set for us of the coexistence of the eternal & the phenomenal—we must harmonise God & Nature on peril of our destruction The European nations have invariably decayed after a few centuries of efflorescence because they have persisted in ignorance, & been obstinate in Avidya We who possess the secret but misunderstand it, have taken two millenniums to decay, but in the end we have decayed & brought ourselves to the verge of actual death & decomposition We can preserve ourselves only by returning to the full & harmonious truth of our religion, truth of Purana & Tantra which we have mistranslated into a collection of fables and of magic formulae, truth of Veda which we have mistranslated into the idea of vacant & pompous ceremonial & the truth of Vedanta which we have mistranslated into the inexplicable explanation, the baffling mystery of an incomprehensible Maya Veda & Vedanta are not only the Bible of hermits or the textbook of metaphysicians, but a gospel of life and a guide to life for the individual, for the nation & for all humanity. The Isha Upanishad stands first in the order of the Upanishads we should read as of a supreme importance for us & more almost than any of the others, because it sets itself with express purpose to solve that fundamental difficulty of life to which since Buddha & Shankara we have persisted in returning so lofty but so misleading an answer The problem resolves itself into a few primary & fundamental questions Since we have here a great unconditioned unity and a great phenomenal multitudinous manifestation, what is the essential relation between this unity & this manifestation? Given the coexistence & identity of the reality & the phenomenon where is the key to their identity? what is the principle which harmonises them? and wherein lies the purpose & justification of their coexistence & apparent differentiation? The essential relation being known, what is that practical aspect of the relation upon which we can build securely our life here in this world? Is it possible to do the
Page – 375 ordinary works of our human life upon earth consistently with the higher knowledge or in such a way as to embody in our every action the soul of the divine knowledge & the divine guna? What is that attitude towards God & the world which secures us in such a possibility? Or what the rule of life which we must keep before us to govern our practice and what the practical results that flow from its observance? The present curses of phenomenal life seem always to have been the sorrowful trinity of pain, death & limitation; will these practical results of a Vedantic life include the acceptance of this great burden and this besetting darkness or has mankind even here, even in this body & in this society, an escape from death & sorrow? As human beings what is our aim here or what our hope hereafter? These are the great questions that arise from the obscured soul of man to the Infinite & the conflicting & partial answers to them have eternally perplexed humanity But if they can once be answered, simply, embracingly, satisfyingly—so as to leave no true demand of the God in man upon the world unsatisfied, then the riddle of existence is solved The Isha Upanishad undertakes to answer them all Setting out with a declaration of God's purpose in manifestation for which the world was made & the golden rule of life by which each man individually can utterly consummate that divine purpose, the mighty Sage to whom as an instrument & channel we owe this wise & noble solution asserts the possibility of human works without sin, grief & stain in the light of the one spiritual attitude that is consistent with the conscious & true knowledge of things & in the strength of the golden rule by which alone a divine life here can be maintained In explaining & justifying these original positions he answers incidentally all the other great human questions. The structure of the Upanishad is built up, the harmony of its thought worked out in four successive movements, with the initial verse of each swelling passage linking it in the motion of thought to the strain that precedes Before we proceed to any work of analysis or isolate each note in order to obtain its full value, it will be convenient to have a synthetical understanding of the main ideas that run through the symphony and perceive
Page – 376 something of the manner with which they pass into or help each other and build up by their agreement a great and harmonious philosophy of life.
II. The First Movement
"For the Lord all this is a habitation, yea, whatsoever single thing is moving in this universe of motion: by that abandoned thou shouldst enjoy; neither do thou covet any man's possession Doing verily works in this world thou should wish to live a hundred years, for thus it is with thee & not otherwise; action clingeth not to a man Sunless, truly are those worlds and enveloped in blind gloom whither they passing hence arrive who are hurters of their own souls " So runs the first movement of the Upanishad. In the very beginning the Rishi strikes the master note to which all the rest of the harmony vibrates, lays down the principle of which every Upanishad is an exposition God & the World,—these are the two terms of all our knowledge From their relation we start, to their relation in union or withdrawal from union all our life & activity return When we have known what the world is, when we have exhausted Science & sounded all the fathomless void, we have still to know what God is, & unless we know what God is, we know nothing fundamental about the world Tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam He being known, all the rest is known Material Philosophy & Science have to admit in the end that because they do not know the Transcendental, therefore they cannot be sure about the phenomenal They can only say that there are these phenomena which represent themselves as acting in these processes to the thought & senses, but whether their appearance is their reality, no man can say The end of all Science is Agnosticism. The Rishi takes these two great terms, God, one, stable & eternal, the world shifting, multitudinous, transient For this great flux of Nature, by which we mean a great cosmic motion & activity, shows us nowhere a centre of knowledge & intelligent control, yet its every movement, denoting law, pointing
Page – 377 to harmony, speaks of a centre somewhere of knowledge & intelligent control It shows nowhere any definite unity except that of sum and process, yet every little portion of it the more we analyse, cries out more loudly, "There is One & not many " Every single thing in it is perishable & mutable, yet for ever its ancient & inevitable movements thunder in our ears the chant of the immutable & eternal She is one term, Prakriti, jagati, the ever moving, with every object, small or great, a mere knot of motion, jagat; that which she obeys & worships & of which she speaks to us always & yet seems always by the whirl of her motions in mind & matter to conceal, is the Lord, the Purusha He is that One, Eternal & Immutable; it is He that is the centre of knowledge & eternal control He is Ish, the Lord The relation between the world & its Lord on which the Rishi bids us fix as the one on whose constant & established realisation we can best found the thoughts & activities of the Life Divine, is the relation of the Inhabitant & His inhabitation For habitation by Him it was made, not only as a whole, but every object which it has built up, is building or will build in the whirl & race of its eternal movement, from the god to the worm, from the Sun to the atom & the grain of dust to the constellations & their group, each, small or great, mean or mighty, sweet or sombre, beautiful or repulsive, is his dwelling place & that which dwells in it, is the Lord.1 We start then with this truth We have seen that the problem of life involves two essential questions; first, the essential relation between the Transcendent & the phenomenal, secondly, that practical aspect of the relation on which we can build securely our life & action in the world The Rishi starts with the practical relation This is the knowledge which we must win, the attitude which having attained we must guard & keep Looking around upon the multitude of objects in the world, we have to see so many houses & in each an inhabitant, one inhabitant only, He
1 In the manuscript, the above paragraph is followed by one that is bracketed and struck through This is reproduced as piece [1] of the Appendix Piece [2] of the Appendix, a passage written separately, is related to the above paragraph in theme—Ed
Page – 378 who has built also the whole & inhabits the whole, its Lord When we see the infinite ether containing this multitude of suns & solar systems, we are not to forget or ignore what we see but we must look on infinity as a house of manifest being & in it one great infinite indwelling Consciousness, Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Narayana, God When we see around us man & animal & leaf & clod, king & beggar, philosopher & peasant, saint & criminal, we must look on these names & forms as so many houses of being and within each the same great inhabitant, Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Narayana, the Lord Manhood & animality, animation & inanimation, wealth & poverty, wisdom & ignorance, sainthood & criminality are the robes he wears, but the wearer is One In every man I meet, I must recognise the Lord I adore In friend & stranger, in my lover & my slayer, I must see equally, since I also must be He, myself This is the great secret of existence & the condition which we must first satisfy if we wish to live divinely & be divine. This is, internally, our necessary attitude towards God & the world But to translate an internal attitude into the terms of action, it is our experience that a rule of life is needed The purpose for which a householder builds himself a mansion & dwells in it, can only be one; it is to live & enjoy So it is with the Purusha & Prakriti; their relation is the enjoyment of the one by the other God has made this world in His own being that He may in mind & other principles live phenomenally in phenomena & enjoy this phenomenal existence even while secretly or openly He enjoys also His transcendent existence The Soul or God is, says the Gita, Ishwara, bharta, jnata, anumanta; the Master for whose pleasure Prakriti acts, the Indweller who fills her with his being & supports her actions, the Knower who watches & takes into His cognisance her activities, the anumanta who gives or withholds or after giving withdraws His consent and as He gives, continues or withdraws it, things begin, endure or cease But He is also & preeminently bhokta, her enjoyer For all this is bhogartham—for the sake of enjoyment But in practice we find that we are not Ish, but anish, not master, but slave; not jnata & anumanta, but ajna, not knowing & controlling, but
Page – 379 ignorant, clouded, struggling for knowledge & mastery; not an immortal enjoyer in delight, but victim of sorrow, death & limitation Limited, we struggle to enlarge ourselves & our scope; unpossessed of our desire, we demand & we strive; unattaining, reacted upon by hostile forces, we are full of sorrow & racked by pain We see others possess & ourselves lack & we struggle to dispossess them and possess in their stead The facts of life as we live it contradict at every turn the sublime dogma of the Vedantist What are we to do? To struggle with God in others & God in the world or live only for God in others & not at all for God in ourselves? In his second line the Rishi utters his golden rule of life which supplies us with the only practical solution of the difficulty To enjoy as we enjoy now is to lift to our lips a cup of mixed honey & poison; to abandon the world is to contradict God's purpose by avoiding the problem instead of solving it; to sacrifice self to others is a half solution which, by itself, limits the divine lila & stultifies our occupation of the body The fulfilment of self both in our own joy & in the joy of others & in the joy of the whole world is the object of our life How then is the problem to be solved? By that abandoned thou shouldst enjoy; do not thou covet any man's possession Tena, that, refers back to yat kincha jagat By that you have to enjoy—for the world and all in it is meant for the purpose of enjoyment, it is the means, movement & medium created by the Lord for the purpose, but by that abandoned, by that renounced You have not to cast the world & its objects themselves away from you, for then you defeat your own object It is a deeper, a truer renunciation that is asked of us Everything in the world has to be renounced and yet, through the thing so renounced, tena tyaktena, you have to enjoy, bhunjithah 2 Shankara translates "possess", not "enjoy" Essentially this makes no difference, for possession implies enjoyment But the
2 Sri Aurobindo wrote the paragraph that follows on a separate page of the manuscript but marked it for insertion here Two other separately written passages whose points of insertion were not marked are reproduced as pieces [3] and [4] of the Appendix—Ed
Page – 380 ordinary sense of the root is to enjoy, & it is clearly the sense which the Rishi intended; for the collocation of the strongly opposite ideas of tyaga & bhoga can no more be an accident than the significant collocation of jagati & jagat in the preceding lines Nowhere in this Upanishad is there random writing; rather every word is made to carry its entire weight & even run over with fullness of meaning. In order to make his meaning perfectly clear the Rishi adds "Do not covet" This then is the renunciation demanded, not the renunciation of the thing itself, but the renunciation of the attachment, the craving, the demand—when that is renounced, then only is enjoyment possible, then only can the bitterness be cast out of the cup & only the pure honey remain For the reason that we are anisha is because we demand He who is Lord & Master, does not struggle & demand; he does not need even to command; for Prakriti knows His will & hastens to obey it If we would live divinely, we must realise the Lord in ourselves, we must have sadharmya with Him & be as He What the Lord wills for His lila in this habitation, Prakriti will bring; what Prakriti brings for our lila, is what the Lord wills That which struggles in us, craves, fights, covets, struggles, weeps, is not the pure Self but the mind,—which, as we shall find, weeps & struggles because ensnared in limitations it does not understand,—not Ish, but jagat, the movement, the whirl, one eddy in the shifting & struggling movement & clash of forces—perfectly guided by Isha, but to our human understandings unguided or ill-guided—which we call Prakriti In this great knowledge & its practice we can become desireless & calm, august, joyous, free from anxiety, pain, grief, sama, udasina, yet full of delight in all that we here in Prakriti,—Purushah Prakritistha,—say, see & do. Immediately the great recurring problem presents itself of works and the cessation from works,—the ancient crux which it is so easy to get rid of by a trenchant act of logic, so hard to solve in harmony with the actual facts of existence To the ordinary mind action seems impossible or purposeless without desire; to the logical mind it seems inevitable that the more one penetrates into the supreme calm, the farther one must move
Page – 381 from all impulse to action,—that pravritti & nivritti, shama & karma are eternally opposed Shankara, therefore, deciding all things by his triumphant & inexorable logic, insists that action is inconsistent with the state divine In practice the seeker after perfection finds that calm, renunciation, joy, peace seem only to be secure when one rests motionlessly established in the impersonal Brahman; freedom of desire is only easy by freedom from activity Does not then enjoyment without demand or craving, does not enjoyment by the thing renounced mean enjoyment of the renunciation & not of the thing itself? Is it not the enjoyment of the eremite, eremite in soul if not in body, the spectator watching the action of the world but himself no part of it, that is alone possible to the desireless mind? And even if it is not the sole possible enjoyment, is it not the superior & preferable? Who that has self-enjoyment in the soul, would condescend to the enjoyment of external objects? Or if he condescended, it is the greater bliss of other worlds that would attract him and not the broken shreds which are all this world's joys, the hampered fulfilments which are all this world's actualisation of infinite possibility. To all these ancient questionings the reply of the Upanishad is categorical, explicit, unflinching "Doing verily works here one should wish to live a hundred years; thus it is with thee & it is not otherwise than this; action cleaveth not to a man " It is not surprising that the great Shankara with his legacy of Buddhist pessimism, his rejection of action, his sense of the nullity of the world, faced by this massive & tremendous asseveration should have put it aside by his favourite device of devoting it to the service of unenlightened minds, although it occurs apparently as an integral portion of the argument & there is not a hint or a trace of its being intended as a contradiction or qualification of the main teaching, although too this interpretation is stultified both by the run of the two lines & by the immediate occurrence of the next verse,—but every incongruity & impossibility is to be accepted rather than suffer such an assertion to stand as the teaching of the Sruti Nor is it surprising that Shankara's greatest follower, Vidyaranya, feeling perhaps that his master's dealings
Page – 382 with the text in this commentary were of the most arbitrary & violent, should have preferred to exclude the Isha from his list of authoritative Upanishads But to us, uncommitted to any previous theory, this sloka offers no difficulty but is rather an integral & most illumining step in the development of a great & liberating doctrine. Kurvanneva, says the Rishi, having his eye on the great dispute Thou shalt do works & not abstain from doing them and the works are the works of this material world, those that are to be done iha, here, in this life & body Doing his works in this world a man shall be joyously willing to live the full span of years allowed to the mortal body If he grows weary, if he seeks to abridge it, if he has haste in his soul for the side beyond death, he is not yet an enlightened soul, not yet divine With this great admission the Vedanta can no longer be a mere ascetic gospel Life—full & unabridged in its duration,—full and uncontracted in its activity is accepted, welcomed, consecrated to divine use And the Rishi affirms his reason for acceptance—because so it is with thee & it is not otherwise than this Because in other words this is the law of our being and this is the will of the Eternal No man, as the Gita clearly teaches, can abstain from works, for even the state of withdrawal of the ascetic, even the self-collected existence of the silent Yogin is an act and an act of tremendous effect & profoundest import So long as we are in manifest existence, so long we are in the jagati using, influencing & impressing ourselves on the jagat and we cannot escape from the necessity self-imposed on Himself by God within us And it is so imposed for the reason already stated, because He has made this world for His habitation & as a means for His enjoyment & a thing for His delight—& this his great will & purpose no man can be allowed to frustrate The wise mind, the illumined soul knowing this truth makes no vain attempt to square this circle; he accepts that which God intends fully & frankly and only seeks the best way to fulfil God in this existence which he occupies on the way to another For he knows that bondage and freedom are states of the outer mind, not of the inner spirit; for there is none free & none bound, none panting after liberation
Page – 383 & none fleeing from bondage, but only the Eternal rejoicing secretly or manifestly in His innumerable habitations. But in that case we are eternally bound by the chain of our works, nailed helplessly to the wheel of karma? Not so; for the wheel of karma is an error and the chain of our works is a grand illusion "Action clingeth not to a man " Bondage is not the result of works, & liberation is not the result of cessation of works Bondage is a state of the mind; liberation is another state of the mind When through the principle of desire in the mind the soul, the Ish, the lord, mixes himself up in the whirl of Prakriti, he sees himself in mental consciousness as if carried forward in the stream of causality; he seems to the mind in him to be bound by the effects of his works; when he relinquishes desire, then he recovers his lordship—which in his higher being he has never lost—and appears to himself what he has always been in reality, free in his being, swarat, samrat It follows then that the way to liberate oneself is not to renounce works but to rise from mind to Supra-mind, from the consciousness of mental being, sambhava, to the consciousness of self-being, swayambhava or asambhuti It is necessary to remember oneself, but it is not necessary to forget phenomena For action is the movement of Prakriti and the chain of action is nothing more terrible or mystic than the relation of cause & effect That chain does not bind the Master; action leaves no stain on the soul The works of the liberated man produce an effect indeed, but on the stream of Prakriti, not on the soul which is above its action and not under it, uses action & is not victimised by it, determines action & is not determined by it But if action in its nature bound the soul, then freedom here would be impossible It does not & cannot; the soul allows mind to mix itself up with its works, buddhir lipyate, but the action does not adhere to the soul, na karma lipyate nare The fear of action is Maya; the impossibility of combining action with calm & renunciation is a false sanskara Nivritti or calm is the eternal state & very nature of the soul, pravritti is in manifestation the eternal state and very nature of Prakriti Their coexistence & harmony is not only possible, but it is the secret of the world obscured only by ignorance in the mind The enemy therefore is
Page – 384 not action, but ignorance; not works bind us, but works done in the state of ignorance give us the illusion of bondage The idea of separateness, of limitation with its fruit of desire, internal struggle, disappointment, grief, pain,—this alone is our stumbling block Abolish it, see God alone everywhere & all difficulty disappears Nivritti & Pravritti, tyaga & bhoga move harmoniously to the perfect fulfilment of the divine purpose. Those important enunciations completed, the Sage proceeds to a minor, but not inessential effect of the knowledge he is developing—the life after this one which we have to use here, our progress into worlds beyond The gati, trans-mortal journey or destination of the soul, occupied profoundly the Vedantic mind as it has occupied humanity in all except in its brief periods of entire materialistic this-worldliness As yet the Sage does not proceed to any positive statement; but by a negative movement he indicates the importance of the question Our life here is only one circumstance in our progress—the fundamental circumstance, indeed, since earth is the pratistha or pedestal of our consciousness in manifest being,—but still the fundamental is not the final, the pratistha is not the consummation but only the means to the consummation It is the first step in our journey, the initial movement in the triple stride of Vishnu There is beyond it a second step, from which we constantly return till we are ready here for the third, for the consummation Our future state depends on our fullness at the time of our passage, on our harmonious progress towards divine being That is the hidden thing in us which we have to develop We are to become atmavan, to possess our divine being, to disengage & fulfil our real self Those who fall from this development, who turn aside from it are self-hurters or, to take the full vigorous sense of the word used, self-slayers Not that God in us can be slain, for death of the soul is impossible,—but there may be temporary perdition of the apparent divinity by the murder of its self-expression And to this we may arrive either by wilfulness of passion or by intellectual wilfulness Instead of becoming gods, Suras, images of the Most High, the Paratpara Purusha in His effulgent glory, we may become misrepresentations of Him, false
Page – 385 because distorted images, distorted by imperfection, distorted by onesidedness, Titans, Asuras or else souls unillumined by the sun of Knowledge & if illumined at all then only by false lights which eventually become eclipsed in darkness Our after state will be Asurya, sunless, unillumined To what worlds do we then journey? The ordinary reading of the first word in the third verse ˘ of the Upanishad, is Asurya, Titanic, but there is a possible variation Asurya, sunless The substantial sense resulting from both readings is the same, but the colour given will be different The Titans or Asuras of the Veda are souls of mere undisciplined might They are those who found themselves not on light & calm but on asu, the vital force & might which is the basis of all energetic & impetuous feeling & action The self-willed ones, who from temperamental passion wreck themselves by the furious pursuit in desire of a false object or from intellectual passion wreck themselves by the blind pursuit in belief of a false idea, they follow a path because it is their own from Titanical attachment, from an immense though possibly lofty egoism Mole ruit sua They fall by their own mass, they collapse by excess of greatness They need not be ignoble souls, but may even seem sometimes more noble than the gods & their victorious legions When they hack & hew at the god within them, it may be in tremendous devotion to a principle; when they subdue, cloud & torture themselves till they stumble forward into misery & night, till they become demoniac in nature, it may be in furious & hungry insistence on a great aspiration They may be grandiosely mighty like Hiranyakashipu, ostentatiously largehearted like Bali, fiercely self-righteous like the younger Prahlada But they fall whether great or petty, noble or ignoble & in their fall they are thrust down by Vishnu to Patala, to the worlds of delusion & shadow, or of impenetrable gloom, because they have used the heart or intellect to serve passion & ignorance, enslaved the spiritual to the material & vital elements & subordinated the man in them to the Naga, the serpent The Naga is the symbol of the mysterious earthbound force in man Wisest he of the beasts of the field, but still a beast of the field,
Page – 386 not the winged Garuda revered to be the upbearer of divinity who opens his vans to the sunlight and soars to the highest seat ˘ of Vishnu If we read Asurya we shall then have to translate "Verily it is to the worlds of the Titans, worlds enveloped in blind gloom, that they after passing hence resort who are self-slayers " Otherwise it is the worlds farthest removed from the Sun, our symbol & principle of divine Knowledge There are materialised states of darkness in the conscious being in which they must work out the bewilderment & confusion they have fastened on themselves by an obstinate persistence in self-will & ignorance In either case the intention of the Sage is evident from the later passages of this Upanishad Whether we follow exclusively after Avidya or exclusively after Vidya, we go equally astray, exclusiveness means ignorance, exclusiveness means confusion & division of the indivisible Brahman, & persistence in such error is an obstinacy fatal to the soul in its immediate prospects Temporarily—because eternal perdition is impossible,—it fails to cross successfully over death & enters into trans-mortal darkness Those who accept the unity of the Brahman, who see in Vidya & Avidya only vyavahara, light & shadow reflected in Him for the use of self-expression in phenomena, who live in the knowledge of the One in the Many, embracing like Brahman all being in themselves, rejecting nothing, preferring nothing, bearing everything, effecting everything, infinite in calm by renunciation, infinite in might & bliss by enjoyment, they are men perfected, they are the siddhas Even those who not yet attaining, follow faithfully this law & this ideal journey onwards in the way of their self-fulfilment and are lifted by all-purifying Agni to the regions of the Sun where they possess their perfect oneness & receive their consummate felicity With this warning (for the promise comes afterward) closes the first movement of the Upanishad.
III
God then & the world are before us, the Inhabitant to be recognised as the Lord of things even when He appears otherwise & 388
Page – 387 His habitation to be regarded merely as a movement set going by Him for phenomenal purposes, a stream of form & action by which He can enjoy His own conditioned being,—God & the world are to be possessed by a pure & infinite enjoyment, Ananda, or bliss which depends on a perfect renunciation not of the world, but of the limited struggle & the ignorant attachment, of the demand & the groping These poor & imperfect movements [are] to be replaced by a mighty calm and a divine satisfaction We are not to renounce works, which do not & cannot stain the soul or bind it, but to be liberated through acceptance of works in a luminous knowledge of their divine use & nature; not mutilation of life is to be our ideal, but fulfilment through life of the intention of the Most High in His phenomenal manifestation If we mutilate life through self-will & ignorance we imprison ourselves after death in worlds of confusion & darkness and here like a ship befogged & astray in dense sea mists are hindered & long delayed in our divine voyage. But now farther questions arise Stated by itself & without development or qualification the first line of this great teaching, although fundamental to the practical living of the divine life and the sufficient & right attitude for its fulfilment might yet, like all trenchant assertions, too positively & exclusively taken, lead us into a profound error & misunderstanding God & the World, the Movement & the Dweller in the movement, that is the practical relation between the unconditioned & the phenomenal which we have to accept as the unalterable basis of our rule of right living But this general movement, with the particular knots in it of apparent movement & apparent status which we call formations or objects,—what is it? Movement of Mahat or movement of what nature,—real or unreal? And the inhabitant, is he different from His habitation? If He is different & the habitation is real, what becomes of the universal unity Vedanta teaches and how are we not handed over to duality and a fundamental disparity, if not a fundamental opposition? It is to remove this possible misunderstanding that the Rishi now proceeds to a completer though not yet entirely complete statement of universal existence He has stated the practical relation,
Page – 388 he now states the essential relation It amounts in effect to the fundamental tenet of Vedanta in the Upanishads "Sarvam khalu idam Brahma " All this, in truth, is the Brahman He says "There is One who unmoving is swifter than mind, neither have the gods reached It for it goes always in front Standing, it outstrips others as they run In It Matariswan sets activity That moves & that does not move; that is far & the same that is verily near; That is within all this, the same that is outside all this " Not only the stable but the unstable; not only the constant, but the recurrent; not only the Inhabitant but His habitation; not only Purusha but Prakriti It is ekam, not a number [of] different beings, as in the dogma of the Sankhyas, but One being; not two separate categories, the real & the unreal, Brahman & Maya, but only One, the Brahman That which moves not is the Brahman but also that which moves is the Brahman, not merely Maya, not merely a base & ugly dream We know already by the first verse that the innumerable inhabitants of this moving universe are not essentially many, but are one Soul disporting in many bodies or not really disporting but supporting the multiform play of Prakriti; eko achalah sanatanah, in the solemn language of the Gita, one, motionless, without beginning or end He is this man & that woman, yonder ancient leaning on his staff, this blue winged bird, that scarlet winged But now we learn that also the name & form & property, the manhood & the womanhood, the age & the youth, the blueness & the scarlet hue, the staff, the attitude of leaning, the bird, the wing, all is the Brahman The Inhabitant is not different from His habitation. This is a difficult point for the ordinary mind to admit intellectually; it is difficult, even for minds not ordinary, really to grasp the intellectual conception, take it into the soul & realise it there in feeling & consciousness Even the greatest materialist in theory regards himself in his feelings as a mind or a soul and is aware of a gulf between himself & the inanimate His opinions contradict his heart's consciousness In Yoga also one of our first realisations is the separateness of the body by the practical removal of the dehatmabuddhi,—a sensation the psychology of which is not well understood & being misunderstood gives
Page – 389 rise to many errors Hence we have a proneness to regard the inanimate as undivine, the material as gross & even foul and the objective as unreal—as if all this were not merely arrangement & vyavahara, as if the material was not also Atman & spirit, Brahman equally present in clod & man, body & soul, thought & action, as if all were not essentially equal in their divinity, and apparently so diverse merely because of the infinite variation of form & guna! By this cardinal error the intellectual man comes to despise & neglect the body, the religious man to treat the body & often the intellect also as an impediment, praising the heart only, the contemplative spiritual man to aim at casting out both mind & body & banishing from him the very thought & perception of the objective All are ruled or driven by this dim sensation or clear belief that the subjective soul seated within them alone is God, alone the Self, that the objective movement of Spirit seeming to the movement of mind & senses to be outside & apart from us, is not God & is therefore worthless & evil They all insist on a mental attitude to things, an attitude of analysis, separation & logical distinction instead of rising beyond mind-limitations & mind-methods to God's transcendent embracing vision which sees all things & states & is affected & bound by none They all therefore make the essential error of duality, from which eventually every kind of ignorance & confusion arises It is for this reason, to discourage this error that the Sage insists on his ekam in the neuter—not only is He divine, Sa, God regarding Himself subjectively as universal cognisant Personality, but That is divine, Tat, Brahman realising Himself by identity both beyond & in and as all phenomenal existences, at will & coexistently transcendental & phenomenal, conditioned & unconditioned, One in the One & One in the Many. Brahman is spoken of here, not as the absolute Parabrahman outside all relation to life & phenomena, for to the unknowable utterness of Parabrahman such phrases as "swifter than the mind" or such ideas as outrunning the gods or going in their front cannot be applied,—It is the Brahman as we see It in Its relation to phenomena, God in the world, conditioned to our awareness in vyavahara, unconditioned to our awareness
Page – 390 in paramartha, which is the subject of this & the following shloka 3 That is the One & sole Existence which, though indeed It does not move, is swifter than the mind & therefore the Gods cannot attain to It because It goes always in front For the mind served by the senses is the instrument which men use to grasp & measure the world & the gods are the presiding powers of all mental & physical functions, but neither the mind nor the senses, neither sensation nor reason can attain to the Brahman It always goes far in front of any swiftest agency by which we can pursue It. What is the precise significance of this imagery? The intention can only be understood if we remember the nature of mental action upon which such enormous stress is here laid and the limitations of that action Mind always starts from a point, the thinker or the object of thought; it works in space or time on particular objects or groups of objects or at most on the sum of all objects known It can only seek to know the movement & process of the world, but of that which is beyond & behind movement & process, what can it know? At most it can feel or be told that He the eternal & ineffable exists Ordinarily, it can only go as far back as itself and say "I, mind, am He; because I think, I am; because I am & think, things are"—propositions which as the expression of a relative & intermediate fact have their validity but are as an universal & ultimate statement untrue But even the movement of God in nature is too vast & swift for the mind to grasp It catches at & seizes petty surrounding eddies or even great masses of movement at a little distance; it seizes, arranges to itself in its own terms of vision & classes them triumphantly as ultimate laws of Nature But who has sailed all these waters or can tell where, if at all, they end? Who shall say that those laws are not byelaws only, or the charter & constitution of a single dependency only or province? Follow
3 The following sentence was written in the top margin of the manuscript page Its place of insertion was not marked: Of the Absolute all we can say is "It is not that, it is not that"; it is unknowable in Itself, knowable only in our existence here or in relation to our existence here, not to be characterised by any epithet, description or suggestion
Page – 391 God to the utmost confines of observable space,—He is sure to be whirling universes into being far in front Pursue Him into the deepest recesses of experimentable being, there are unguessed universes of consciousness behind to which you have no present access Infinity is only one of His aspects, but the very nature of Infinity is that the mind cannot grasp it, though the reason deduces it Who measured Space? Can any vastest Mind find out when Things began or know when & how they shall end? Nay, there may be near to us universes of another Time, Space & arrangement to which our material dimensions & mind & sense limitations forbid us entrance Even here who has traced out the purpose of creation or systematised the ways of Providence? Of a hundred things that happen immediately around us, can we even in a dozen instances tell more than fragmentarily & at a hazard why the thing has happened, to what end it conduced, or of what ordering of things it was a piece & movement? Yet, as the eye opens to the innermost secret of things, one realises that an infinite Wisdom presides over the smallest happening & eternally links today's trifling action to the grandiose movement of the centuries—nay, that every thought which passes through our minds however weak, trivial or absurd, has its mark, in the depths of itself its purpose, even its necessity But of all this how much can the gods of mind, reason & sense ascertain? They run, they gallop, they outstrip the arrow, the bullet, the lightning, the meteor, all material swiftnesses, but That though it moves not, travels still in front Yes, even when we think we are in front of Him, have fathomed His ways, classified His laws, understood existence, ascertained & determined the future by the past, suddenly we stumble & come across a new landmark or footprint which shows where That has passed; a touch of His finger surprises us as He speeds past & our theories crumble, our knowledge is turned into foolishness, our enlightenment becomes the laughingstock of better enlightened generations It standing outstrips others as they run, yet all the time, had no need to move Already God was in front of us, as He is behind, above, below, on every side Our latest knowledge will always be a candle burning in the mists of the night; our discoveries
Page – 392 pebbles picked up on the shore of a boundless ocean Not only can we not know That in all Its absolute, transcendent reality, but we cannot know It in all the vastness of Its phenomenal workings Much we may yet know by the mind, but not all, not more than a corner or a system All that we can do is to seek the boundless Lord of a boundless universe & here & elsewhere to know each habitation and recognise its Inhabitant The dweller is divine, but the house too divine, a temple of God, sukritam, well built, delightful & holy—my God Himself manifested as name & form. That stands really & does not run What then is the movement by which He outstrips others or is far in front? The clue is given in the expression swifter than mind It is the mind that runs in us but what is it that runs swifter than mind just as mind runs swifter than any material force? Something of which mind & matter are lower movements,—that which is the essence of the jagati, the essential conscious being of which mind, life & matter are particular currents This conscious-being is That—the sole Reality which assumes so many appearances It does not run, for where should it run when it does not exist in time & space, but time & space exist in the Brahman All things are created in God's consciousness which has no more to move than a man has to move when he follows a particular train of thought He who was before Time, is still just what He was after Time is finished—drawn back, that is to say, into supratemporal consciousness He has not moved in His being an inch, He has not changed in His being by the shadow of a shadow He is still eko achalah sanatanah, one, motionless, without change or end This side of the Sun or that side of Lyra are to Him one point, or rather no point at all Space is a symbol into which Thought has translated an arrangement in supraspatial Consciousness Time & Causality are not different Therefore it appears that both jagati & jagat are no movement of matter or material force, (that is expressly excluded in the [eighth] verse), nor of mind, (that is expressly excluded here) but of Conscious being in itself, a mysterious activity the essence of which is limitless & absolute Awareness not expressible in language, but translated
Page – 393 in the symbols of our Thought here into a movement in Time, Space & Causality This universal tenet of Vedanta, although not expressly stated, is yet implied in the Rishi's thought & follows inevitably from his expression He could very well in his age & surroundings take it for granted, but we have to state it explicitly; for, unless it is assumed, the second movement of the Sage's thought cannot be entirely understood by us It is, indeed, the foundation of all Vedantic thinking.
In this Brahman Matariswan sets activity Tasminn apo
Matariswan dadhati Tasmin, in the containing, stable & fulfilling active Brahman already described; Apas, work or activity (Latin opus), this Vedic word being used in preference to karmani, because karmani expresses individual actions & it is here the general universe-activity of Brahman that is intended, not indeed all Prakriti, but that which is manifest as work productive & creative, the movement of the sun & star, the growth of the tree, the flowing of the waters, the progress of life in all its multitude;
Matariswan, he that rests in the matrix of things, that is to say Vayu, the motional or first energetic principle of Nature founded in Akasha, the static principle of extension which is the eternal matrix of things, working in it as Prana, the universal life-activity; dadhati,
( The reason for introducing this final and more limiting idea about the Brahman as the culminating phrase of this shloka, is the Sage's intention to emphasise the divineness of that particular movement of Prakriti which is the basis of karmani, human action in this mortal life Matariswan is the energy of God in Prakriti which enters into as into a womb or matrix (Matar), is first concealed in,—as a child in the womb—& then emerges out of the static condition of extension, represented to our senses in matter as ether It emerges in the motional principle of expansion & contraction represented to the senses as the gaseous state, especially as breath & as air, called by us therefore Vayu, which by disturbing the even, self-contained vibration (shabda) of the ether, produces vibratory waves (kshobha), generates action &
Page – 394 reaction (rajas) on which ether behind is continually impressing a tendency to equipoise (sattwa), the failure of which is the only cause of disintegration of movement (death, mrityu, tamoguna) & creates contact (sparsha) which is the basis of mental & material sensation & indeed of all relation in phenomenal existence Matariswan, identifying himself with Vayu, supporting himself on these principles of wave-vibration, action-reaction & contact, valid not only in matter but in life & mind, using the other three elementary or fundamental states known to Vedic enquiry,—agni (fire), the formatory principle of intension, represented to our senses in matter as heat, light & fire, apas or jala (water), the materialising or outward flowing principle of continuation, represented to our senses in matter as sap, seed, rasa, & prithwi (earth), the stabilising principle of condensation, represented to us in matter as earth, the basis of all solids,—Matariswan, deploying existence in settled forms by the fivefold (panchabhautic) complex movement of the material Brahman, of conscious being as the essential substance of things, reveals himself as universal life activity, upholder of our vitality, prompter & cause of our actions He as Life, is latently active in the utter inanimate, present, but unorganised in the metal, organised for life and growth only in the plant, for sense & feeling & thought in the animal creation, for reason & illumination & progress to godhead in man, for sempiternal immortality in the gods But who, ultimately, is this Matariswan? Brahman himself, as the Rigvedic Rishis already knew, manifesting himself in relation to His other movements as the cause, condition & master of vitality. Life-action, then, is not indeed the whole action of the universe; nor is our human life-action, our apas, work, task here, its culminatory activity There are more developed beings, superior states, other worlds But it is, whether here or in other planets, the central activity of this universe It is of this apparently insignificant pebble, the stone that builders not Almighty, not All-wise would have rejected, that God has made the keystone of this work of His construction In this the movement of our universe finds the means for its central purpose, through it fulfils itself, in it culminates or from it falls away When God has
Page – 395 fulfilled himself here, under these conditions, with prithivi as his pratistha, then we may pass away finally into other conditions or into the unconditioned, but till then, till God here is satisfied, Brahman here manifested, we come here to fulfil him Till then, so it must be with us & not otherwise And this principle is not undivine but divine, not something utterly delusive or diabolical, not the kingdom of a lower spirit or an aberration in knowledge, but God's movement, mahimanam asya, the manifest might, the apparent extension in Itself of the Brahman Life here is God, the materials of Life here are God The work is not separate from the worker nor the thought from the thinker All is the play of a divine Unity. We can now grasp what the Sage intends when he says, Tad ejati tannaijati Tat or That, the suggestive vague name for the Brahman whether impersonal or above personality or impersonality, moves & That does not move It moves or appears to move,—as action of Prakriti & the corresponding knowledge in Purusha,—in the conception of Time, Space & Causality; it does not move in reality, because these are mere symbols, conceptual translations of the actual truth, & movement itself is only such a symbol The Habitation is the creation of a formative movement of Prakriti, who is indeed always recurrent in her doings because she & her ways are eternal, but also always mutable & inconstant because she works in Time, Space & Causality, terms of perception which have no meaning except as measures of movement or progression from one moment to another, one point to another, one state or event to another Succession & therefore change is the fundamental law of God's ideative & formative activity in the terms of these three great symbols But the inhabitant is one & constant, because He is beyond Time & Space Surrounded apparently by the whirl of Prakriti, to the ignorant tossed about in it, He in reality exists both as its continent & creator as well as its informing soul, master & guide That therefore in Itself is unmoving, immutable and eternal; in Its movement in Itself, Time-movement, Space-movement, Condition-movement (although as we shall see governed by durable patterns or general processes of conscious being which
Page – 396 ensure order & recurrence from one state or form to another) That is mobile, active, inconstant & fleeting Sooner or later, all here passes out of our view, except the Inhabitant, the eternal Existence-Consciousness, Him we see seated for ever On Him in this flux of things we have our sure foundation. Thus we have the essential reality of things, we have the practical relation of God in Impersonality or Personality as the Inhabitant of His own objective being We have the principle of unity by which the practical relation refers back always to the essential & derives from it We have the fundamental justification of works briefly indicated in the identity of the working principle with the eternal Reality behind our works But the justification of the harmony of tyaga & bhoga on this basis has now to be prepared After stating, therefore, the identity of the eternal who moveth not, with the eternal who moves, of the Timeless, Spaceless, Conditionless, with the Timed, Spaced & Conditioned, the Sage proceeds with a consideration of the latter only with which our vyavahara or practical life has to deal & emphasises the unity of all things near & far, subjective & objective That is the near, the same That is the far He is near to us in our subjective experience, he removes to a distance in the objective where our mind & senses pursue him until they have to cease or return In the subjective also, he is not only the unknown, but the known, ourselves, that which is seated in our hearts, not only the ungrasped, but the grasped, that which we have & that which we seem not to have, that which we have reached or passed or are approaching & that towards which we vaguely or blindly move Nothing should we think, feel or observe without saying of it "It is He; it is the Brahman " That is within every creature as all the continent of body & mind & what is more than mind; That is outside every creature as that in which it moves, lives & has its being; not only are our surroundings near or far but that which contains our surroundings, is outside & inside them, alike their continent & their content, sarvam Brahma For That is the content of all this Universe; That also exceeds & Is apart from every Universe The Pantheism or Monism which, unable to rise beyond the unity of attainable
Page – 397 data or manifest appearance, makes God conterminous with the world, is not Vedanta The Pluralism which makes God merely a sum of realised experiences, a growing & diminishing, a fluctuating unknown quantity, X sometimes equal to a + b and sometimes equal to a b, is not our conception of the Universe These things are He, but He is not these things To us the world is only a minor term in God's absolute & limitless existence God is not even infinite, though finity & infinity both are He; He is beyond finity & infinity He is sarvam Brahma, the All, but he is inexpressibly more than the sarvam To our highest conception He is One, but in Himself He is beyond conception Neither Unity nor multiplicity can describe Him, for He is not limited by numbers Unity is His parabhava, it is His supreme manifestation of being, but it is after all a manifestation, not the utter & unknowable reality
IV
The object of these two verses which have amplified the idea of monistic Unity in the universe, so as to remove any essential opposition between the world movement & the Inhabitant of the movement, is to lead up to the two verses that follow,—verses of a still higher importance for the purpose of the Upanishad The Sage has laid down his fundamental positions in the first three verses,—(1) the oneness of all beings in the universe, (2) the harmony of renunciation & enjoyment by freedom from desire & demand, (3) the necessity of action for the fulfilment of the one purpose for which the One inhabits this multitude of names & forms,—the enjoyment of this phenomenal & in its consummation the liberated being The remainder of the Upanishad is explanatory & justificatory of these original & fundamental positions In this second movement the object is to establish the possibility of absolutely sorrowless & fearless enjoyment here in this world & in this body on the eternal & unassailable foundations of the Vedantic truth, sarvam khalu idam Brahma For from that truth the Seer's golden rule of life derives all its validity & practical effectiveness
Page – 398 These are the words, words of a rich & moving beauty, in which he discharges this part of his argument "But he who sees all existences in the self and the self in all existences, thereafter shrinketh not at all He who knows, in whom all existences have become the self, how shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded, who seeth all things as one ".
The connecting word तु
(the Greek
The worship of a Personal God different from ourselves &
Page – 399 the world brings with it a better chance of joyful activity in the world "God's will, be it joy or sorrow; God's will, be it the triumph of good or the siege of the evil " This is a great mantra & has mighty effects But it does not by itself give a secure abiding place God's will may bring doubt & then there is anguish; may bring loss of the Divine presence, separation from the Beloved & then there is a greater agony The intellectual man has the intellect God has given him to satisfy The active man has the impulse to work, but at every step is faced with the difficulties of religion & ethics He has to slay as a soldier, condemn as a judge, inflict pain, inflict anguish, choose between two courses which seem both to be evil in their nature or their results Sin enters his heart, or there are ensnaring spirits of doubt which suggest sin where sin is not, he feels that he is acting from passion, not from God His body suffers, pain distracts, his own pain, the pain of others In this maelstrom it is only those whose hearts are mightier than their intellects & their devotion a part of their nature who can overcome all the winds that blow upon them Therefore most devotees withdraw from life or from the greater part of life like the Mayavadin; those who remain have more resignation than happiness They bear the cross here in the conviction that the aureole awaits them hereafter But where then is that perfect bliss & that perfect activity which the Sage promises us, doing verily our works here in the ordinary life of mankind? The thing can be done on the devotional foundation, but only by a peculiar & rare temperament aided by God's special grace & favour We need a wider pedestal, a securer foundation. He finds that foundation who sees wheresoever he looks (that is the force of anu in anupashyati) only the Atman, only the Self He watches the bird flying through the air, but what he is aware of is the Self watching the movement of the Self through the Self—air & bird & flight & watcher are only name & form, presentations of the one Reality to itself in itself by itself atmani atmanam atmana He is stung by the scorpion but what he is aware of is only the touch of the Self on the Self; the scorpion that stings is Brahman, the stung is Brahman, the sting is Brahman, the pain is Brahman And this he not only
Page – 400 thinks as a metaphysical truth, for mere metaphysical opinion or intellectual attitude never yet brought salvation to living man,—but knows it, feels it & is aware of it utterly with his whole single & complex knowing existence Body, senses, heart & brain are at one in that experience Thus to the soul perfected in this knowledge everything that is, seems or is experienced, thinker & thought, action, doer, sufferer, object, field, result, becomes only one reality, Brahman, Self, God and all this variety is only play, only movement of conscious-self in conscious-self That moves, God has His lila, the Self rejoices in its own inner experiences of itself seen & objectivised There arises in the soul not merely calm, resignation, desirelessness, heart's joy in God's presence, but with the perfect knowledge comes a perfect bliss in the conditioned & the unconditioned, in the transcendent & in the phenomenal, in action & in resting from action, in Ishwara & in apparent anIshwara, in God's nearness & in God's remoteness, in what men call joy & what men call pain Grief falls away from the soul, pain becomes rapture, doubt & darkness disappear in an assured & brilliant luminosity Mukti is fulfilled, the soul is perfectly liberated here & in this body ihaiva,—for this & not renunciation of phenomenal existence is the true Vedantic moksha This is what is meant by all existing things becoming the Self in a man, this is the result which is predicated of such a divine realisation "Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded who seeth all things as one?" There are certain stages in the realisation, two of which are indicated in these slokas, and although the indication is only a minor & incidental movement of the Rishi's thought, the subject is of sufficient practical importance to be dwelt upon for a little even in this necessarily rapid examination Brahman, Atman, Ishwara—these are the three great names, the three grand realisations we have here about the Absolute Existence That existence, Paratparam Brahma, in its absolute truth (if such an expression is admissible where the ideas of truth & falsehood, absolute & relative no longer apply & knowledge itself disappears in an unconceivable & unimaginable Identity)—is unknowable by any, even the highest faculty of conscious
Page – 401 mind Arriving at the farthest limits of our existence here we may become & do become aware of it as a thing beyond our experience It presents itself to us here as some ultimate shadow of itself which we feel sometimes as Sat, sometimes as Asat, sometimes as both Sat & Asat, & then we perceive that it is none of these things, but something beyond both existence & non-existence which are merely uncertain symbols of it & we end by the formula of the Rishis renouncing all vain attempts at knowledge, Neti, neti, not this not that We must not go beyond this formula or seek to explain & amplify it To describe It by negative epithets is as illegitimate & presumptuous as to describe it by positive epithets We can say of Brahman that it is shuddha, pure; we cannot say of the Paratparam that it is shuddha How can we know what It is? We can only say that here It translates itself into an utter purity Neither can we say of It that it is alakshanam, without feature How do we know what It is not? We can only say that we cannot describe It by any lakshanas, for the features we perceive here are those of a movement in which all opposites present themselves as equally true. But here in this manifest universal existence we do perceive certain universal states & certain still more fundamental realisations which transcend all phenomena & all oppositions & antinomies We perceive, for example, a state of Universal Being, the Sad Atman of the Upanishads, the goal of the Adwaitins; we perceive a state of Universal Non-Being, the Asad Atman of the Upanishads, Sunyam, the goal of the Madhyamika Buddhists Then we perceive that both of these are the same thing differently experienced in the soul It is That which expresses itself in our experience of Being & forgetfulness of Being, of Consciousness & forgetfulness of Consciousness, of Bliss & forgetfulness of Bliss, of Sacchidananda conditioned & Sacchidananda unconditioned We call it the Brahman, that which extends itself here in space & time & fills its extension We feel our identity with it & we realise that it is our true Self & the true Self of everything in the universe & of the universe both in its sum & in its entirety We call it then the Atman, a word which originally meant true Being or true
Page – 402 Substance We become aware of It as extending itself & filling its extension here for a purpose, the purpose of Ananda, delight in Vidya, delight in Avidya & governing all things towards that purpose,—self-aware as the One & self-aware as the Many, self-aware as Sat & self-aware as Asat This great self-aware transcendent more than universal existence we call Sa, Ishwara, "He", God, the Paratpara Purusha, the Higher than the Highest We see therefore that these three names merely try to express in human language certain fundamental conceptions we have here of That which is not perfectly expressible The greatest names, tremendous as is their power,—how tremendous only those can know who have made the test without flinching—are only symbols,—I will not say shadows, for that is a word which may be misunderstood But very great & blissful symbols in which we are meant to find a perfect content & satisfaction. Through these symbols & the realisations which they try to represent, we have to work out our divine fulfilment here, & the Rishi gives all three of them to us in this Upanishad For all three are supremely helpful &, in a way, necessary Until we realise Ishwara, the mighty Inhabitant, as one with ourself, as the Atman, we find a difficulty in identifying Him with all that Is We fall into these ideas of an extra-Cosmic God which satisfy the early & immature stages of soul development; or we see a God who pervades & upholds all existences but has put them forth in His being as eternally apart from Himself That is a great practical realisation with immense results to the soul, the realisation of the Bhakta who rests in some kind of Dualism, but it is not the supreme goal which we are seeking If we realise the Ishwara as the Atman, our Self, without realising Him as the Brahman we run, unless our souls have first become purified, another peril, the peril of the Asura who misapplies the mighty formula So Aham & identifies God with his own unregenerated ignorant Ego,—extending the Inhabitant only to some transient circumstances of the movement in which He dwells He forgets the other equally important formula, Tat twam asi; he does not realise others as Narayan, does not become one self with all existences, forgets that the very idea of his egoistic self is inconsistent
Page – 403 with the true Adwaita and to extend that in imagination & call it the whole Universe is a caricature of Adwaita It is like the error of the unphilosophical Idealist who concludes that the objective Universe exists only in his individual Mind, forgetting that it exists equally in other individual minds & not knowing that in reality there is no individual Mind, but only one sea of mind with its self-formed solid bed of sanskaras, waves of which are constantly flowing through him, rising & breaking there & leaving their marks in the sands of his mental, infra-mental & supramental being Even if we realise all beings as Narayan and one Self, there is a difficulty in realising all things as God & self The Inhabitant is the Atman, good—but the name & form? We can realise that God dwells in the stone as well as under the stone & around it, but how can the stone be God,—this clod, that rusty piece of iron, this clot of filth? With difficulty the mind unreleased from dwandwa & sanskaras can believe that God logically must be in the piece of filth He has created, but how can He be that filth? The seeker can eventually realise God in the criminal who is to be hanged no less than in the executioner who hangs him & the saint who has pity for both, in the harlot no less than the Sati, in all of the filth no less than in the glorious star that shines in Heaven & the petals of the rose or jasmine that intoxicates our soul with its fragrance, but the crime of the criminal, the sin of the harlot, the corporeality of the filth, must not that be kept separate? The sattwic mere lover of virtue, the lover of beauty, the devotee reverently bowing before the throne, must they not revolt eternally from such conceptions? We shall see that for certain practical reasons we must in action preserve a kind of separateness,—not only between the criminal & his crime, but between the saint & his virtue,—for this reason the Rishi has fixed on the relation of world of Movement & world's Inhabitant as the basis of his system,—but the distinction must be one of vyavahara only, for practice only & must not interfere with our conception of All as Brahman We must not yield to the limitations of the sattwic mind, the moha or delusions of the sattwic ahankara For if we yield, we cannot proceed to that greater goal of bliss, which attaining the soul shrinks not at all,
Page – 404 has no delusion, is not touched by any grief Therefore we must realise the Ishwara not only as the true Self of things, but as Brahman, that which extends itself here equally in all things, in the beautiful but also in the ugly, in the holy & great but also in that which we look on as base & impure Looking on Brahman moving & Brahman unmoving we have to say with the Mundaka Upanishad, Tad etat satyam (That yonder is this here & the Truth), & looking on Ishwara & Brahman moving & unmoving we have to say with the same Upanishad, "Purusha evedam sarvam karma tapo brahma paramritam " "It is the divine Soul that is all this, even all action and all active force and Brahman & the supreme immortality." We have to realise the Self everywhere, but we have also to remember always in all our being, to feel always in every fibre of our existence that this Self is Brahman & the Lord In the realisation of Atman by itself there is this danger that as we human beings stand in the subjective mind, that represents itself to us as our true Self and we are first in danger of identifying our subjective consciousness which is only one movement of Chit, with the Sarva Brahman Even when we go beyond to the Sad Atman or Pure Existence, we, approaching it necessarily through our subjective being, tend to realise it as pure subjective existence & are in danger of not realising the real & ultimate Sat which is pure Existence itself beyond subjectivity & objectivity, but expressing itself here subjectively because of the Purusha & objectively because of the Prakriti,—the mingled strain of our subjective-objective existence here being the result of the interaction & mutual enjoyment of His Male & His Female principle Hence arise the misconceptions of the Idealists, Illusionists & Mayavadins If we halt in subjective mind, we see the objective world as a mere dream or vision of our conscious subjective activity That is the dogma of the Idealist, nor can anyone fathom the depths of our mental being without passing through this experience If we halt in our pure subjective existence, then not only the objective world, but the mind & its perceptions seem to be a dream, & the only truth is the subjective Nirguna Brahman aware only of his pure subjective existence When this subjective
Page – 405 Nirguna Brahman looks out from the truth of himself & watches the perceptions of the mind, the great dream of the objective, then It alone as the sakshi seems to be real—but we get rid of the sakshi too & retire into the perfect samadhi in which Brahman is aware only of Itself as self-existent, self-conscious pure Atman This is the dogma of the Mayavadin & no one can fathom all the depths of our subjective being who has not passed through this experience Then comes the Buddhist, who turns upon this sakshi, this subjective Atman & says "Thou too art only a dream, for the same thing that tells me thou art, tells me the world is I have no other evidence of the existence of Atman than I have of the existence of the world without, as both are equally dreams " And without going farther, he says with the Madhyamikas "The truth is the Asat, the Nihil, the universal Non-being", or he says with the Buddha—"There is Nirvana of all this subjective & objective; what there is beyond, we need not ask"—so as to say "we cannot know", "we need only to know that it releases from all pain & grief & death & all return of egoism " This experience too, if one can have it & not be bound by it, is of great use, of a rich fruitfulness to the soul He can hardly gaze out of the manifest towards Parabrahman who has never stood face to face with the Asat & launched his soul into the fathomless & shoreless Negation But we come back to the truth That which is beyond is Parabrahman & that which represents Him here as the basis of our existence is the absolute existence, neither subjective, nor objective, turned both towards the world & away from it, capable of manifesting everything, capable of manifesting nothing, capable of universality, capable of nullity, capable of putting forth all antinomies, capable of reconciling them, capable therefore both of cosmos & chaos, which is expressed in the formula OM Tat Sat But this is no other than the Brahman Is it enough then to realise the Atman as the Brahman? Yes, if we realise that the absolute Brahman, who is rather beyond both Guna & absence of Guna than Nirguna, is also that which expresses itself as Guna, extends itself in space & informs its own extension We must say with the Mandukya, Sarvam hyetad Brahma—Ayam Atma Brahma—So'yam atma
Page – 406 chatushpat All this world is Brahman, this Self is Brahman, & this Self which is Brahman is fourfold . Fourfold, not only the Transcendent Turiya, but also He who sees Himself the gross & sees Himself the subtle & sees His own single & blissful being in the states to which we have only access now in the deep trance of sushupti Nor is this enough For the realisation goes still too much towards abstraction, towards remoteness It is necessary to remember that this great Self-Aware Being is the Lord, that He has created & entered into His own movement, with a mighty purpose & for the enjoyment of His own phenomenal being in the worlds Otherwise we shall not be so much both spectators & masters of our worlds, but its spectators only—& a mere spectator tarries not long at a spectacle, he is soon sated of his inactive joy & withdraws The movement of withdrawal is necessary for a certain number of souls, it is, so effected, a great, blissful & supremely satisfied movement, but it is not the purpose for which God is in us here We must realise our true Self as Brahman-Ishwara We must be one with the Ekah sarvabhutantaratma rupam rupam pratirupo bahishcha, the one Self within all existences who shapes Himself to form & form & is outside all of them, & understand the intention of the Aitareya in its great opening, Atma va idam eka evagra asit—Sa ikshata—Sa iman lokan asrijata In the beginning this was all the Atman, He alone, He looked & put forth these worlds. Finally, it is not even enough for the Sage's purpose that we should realise the Brahman except as the Atman & Ishwara For if we do not realise Brahman as the Self & our Self we shall be in danger of losing the subjective aspect of existence & laying too much stress on That as the substratum of our objective existence in which I stand merely as a single unimportant movement The result is a tamasic, an inert calm, a tendency to merge in the jada Prakriti, the apparent unintelligently active aspect of things which the Europeans call Nature or at the highest a resolution of our selves into that substratum of the objective in the Impersonal Brahman The denial of the Transcendent Personality, the Paratpara Purusha is a strong tendency of the present-day Adwaita "God", say these modern Adwaitins, "is a myth, or at most a
Page – 407 dream like ourselves Just as there is no I, so there is no God " Under this figure of thought, there lies a philosophical blunder Personality is not necessarily individual Personality, neither is it a selection & arrangement of qualities, any more than existence is necessarily individual existence or a selection & arrangement of movements in our being Personality can be & is Universal; this Universal Personality is God in relation to our individual experiences Personality also can be & is Transcendent, self-existent, beyond individuality & Universality,—this transcendent Personality, a blissful unlimited self-conscious Awareness in self-existence is the Paratpara Purusha—adityavarnas tamasah parastat, drawing us like a sun beyond the darkness of ignorance & the darkness of the Asat This is He—God universal, but also God transcendent—the Lilamaya Krishna who transcends His lila Therefore the Upanishads everywhere insist not upon mere Existence, like the later Adwaitin, but on the sole Existent; and they speak continually on the Brahman as the creator, Master, enjoyer of the worlds, by meditating on whom we shall attain to perfect liberation Neither Buddha nor Jada Bharata are the true guides & fulfillers of our destiny; it is Yajnavalkya, it is Janaka &, most of all, it is Krishna son of Devaki who takes us most surely & entirely into the presence & into the being of the Eternal. Atman, Brahman, Ishwara, on this triune aspect here of the Transcendent depend all our spiritual realisations and as we take one or the other & in its realisation stop a little this side or proceed a little to that side, our realisations, our experiences & our creeds & systems will vary from each other; & we shall be Buddhists or Adwaitins or Mayavadins or Dualists, followers of Ramanuja or Madhwa, followers of Christ, of Mahomed, of whosoever will give us such light on the Eternal as we are ready to receive The Rishi of the Isha wishes us to realise all three, but for the sake of divine life in the world to dwell upon Ishwara, but on Ishwara neither extracosmic nor different from His creatures but rather in & about all beings as their indwelling Self, their containing Brahman and that material Brahman also or Prakriti which is the formal continent of the indwelling Self and the
Page – 408 formal content of the containing Brahman In this realisation there are many stages of progress, many necessary first steps & later approximations; but the Rishi, his work being to throw out brief fundamental & important suggestions only & not to fill in details, to indicate & illumine, not to educate or instruct, gives us for the present only two of the final realisations which are the most essential for his purpose We shall find, however, that there is more beyond. We are first to realise this one divine Self, (which is ourself also) in all existences and all existences in the Self We have, therefore, in this realisation three terms, Self within, Self without, which are the same & invariable samam Brahma, & all existences, of which each separate existence is fundamentally the same, but in generic or individual play & movement different from other genera & individuals All existences—not only animate but inanimate, for sarvabhuteshu does not mean sarvapranishu—not only the man, the animal, the insect, but in the tree, plant & flower & not only in the tree, plant & flower which have a sort of life, but in the mountain, the metal, the diamond, the pebble which seem not to have life, & not only in these bhutas which if they have not an organised life, have at least an organised or a manifest form, but in those which have no organised form, or no form at all to the eye or to any sense The wind & sea also are He & the gases which constitute the air which moves as wind & the water which flows as the sea He is ether that contains all & He is that which contains the ether. Swami Vivekananda in a passage of his works, makes a striking or, as the French say better, a seizing distinction between the locomotive & the worm that it crushes, between the animate which has conscious life in it, however weak, & the inanimate which has only in it, however powerful, a blind & undeveloping power But, however useful & true this distinction may be for certain practical purposes, certain vyavahara, it is not allowed us by the pure Adwaita of the Upanishads God is not only in the worm that is crushed, but in the engine that crushes it—the engine too & the power of the engine are Brahman and as much Brahman as the life & consciousness in the worm He is samam
Page – 409 Brahma We have a right to make certain practical distinctions for vyavahara but none to make any essential difference For the Vedanta is inexorable in its positiveness; as it will not spare us the most loathsome worm that crawls but insists that that too is Brahman, so also it will not spare us the most inert or sordid speck of matter, but insists that that too is Brahman If we stop short anywhere, we create bheda & lose our full spiritual heritage The seer anupashyati—he follows Prakriti in her movement from the greatest to the most infinitesimal, from the noblest to the meanest & everywhere finds only Brahman, God, the Self Bhuteshu bhuteshu vichitya dhirah, says the Kena We must have dhairyam, utter patience, utter understanding To no weakness, no repugnance, no recoil even of the saint in us or the artist & poet in us, much less of our mere nervous & sensational parts or of the conventional mind with its fixed associations can we stop to listen, if we would attain Love & hate, joy & grief must not interfere to warp our knowledge All, all, all without exception is He . He breathes out sweetness upon us in the rose, He touches our cheeks with coolness in the Wind, He fills with His favouring breath the sails of the sailing-ship that carries our merchandise to its market, He tramples down into the Ocean depths the latest marvel & monstrosity of scientific construction in which travel the great ones of the world or in which our beloved are coming to our arms The wrong that is done to us, it is He that does it—and to whom is it done? To Himself The blow that is struck, is of His striking Brahman is the striker, Brahman the instrument, Brahman the stricken The insult that is cast on us, it is He that has flung it in our face The disgrace, the defeat, the injustice are of His doing That crime which we abhor, it is Brahman who has committed it,—it is our Self's, our own doing though we do it in another body For the least sin that is committed in the world, each one of us is as responsible as the sinner Our self-righteousness is a Pharisaical error, our hatred of the sinner & our contempt & loathing convict us of ignorance and limit, not increase our power to rectify or to help The seer, the freed & illuminated soul hates none, condemns nothing but loves all and helps all; he is sarvabhutahite ratah, his occupation
Page – 410 & delight are to do good to all creatures He is the Self seeing the Self in all, loving the Self in all, enjoying the Self in all, helping the Self in all That is the ethics & morality of the Vedanta. For what is the first result of this universal vision? Tato na vijugupsate Jugupsa is not merely fear but includes all kinds of shrinking, fear, disgust, contempt, loathing in the nerves, hatred in the heart, shrinking of dislike or reluctance from thing or person or action Raga & dwesha being the motives of all our ordinary feeling & action, jugupsa expresses that movement of recoil in the system which proceeds from dwesha of any kind,—the desire to protect ourselves against or ward off the unwelcome thing that presents itself to the mind, nerves or senses We see therefore how wide a field the promise of the Upanishad covers We shall not hate, fear, loathe, despise or shrink from anything whatsoever which the world can present us It is evident, if this is possible, how all that constitutes real misery will fall from the soul & leave it pure & blissful. We shall not have any contempt, hatred or disgust for any person, nor shall we fear anyone, however powerful or inimical; for in all we shall see Narayan, we shall know the Lord, we shall recognise ourself One equal regard will fall from us on the tiger & the lamb, the saint & the sinner, the tyrant who threatens us and the slave who is subject to our lightest caprice Squalor, sin, disease will not conceal from us the god within nor wrath & cruelty from us God's love working by strange ways under grotesque & fearful masks No sort of foulness or ugliness will repel us An universal charity, a wide & tolerant love, a calm & blissful impulse of beneficence to all will be the ethical first fruits of our realisation We shall make no distinctions, we shall be no respecters of persons We shall not despise the hut of the peasant nor bow down in the courts of the princes, neither shall we have wrath or scorn against the palace & partiality for the cottage All these things will be equal to us The touch of the outcaste will be the same to us as the sprinkling of holy water by the Brahmin—for how shall God pollute God? Every human or living body will be to us a temple & dwelling place of the most High None shall be to us vile or contemptible And yet
Page – 411 none shall be too sacred for us, too dear or too inviolable; for it is the house of our Friend & Playmate; nay, it is our own House, for the Lover is not different from the Beloved, & it is a house, jagat not sthanu, a thing that can be changed & has to be changed, for which therefore we shall have deep love, but no fettering attachment The sword of our enemy will have no terrors for us For enmity is a play of the Lord & death & life make up one of His games of hide & seek How shall God slay God? Even as our vision deepens, the touch of the sword shall be to us as much the kiss of His Love as the touch from the lips of a lover—one sharp, poignant & fierce, the other soft & wooing but the manner is the only difference For we shall have torn aside the grotesque & unreal mask of hatred & seen in the apparent fulfilment of enmity & evil, the real fulfilment of love & good By the divination of the heart & the vision of the higher knowledge we shall have found out the way of the Lord in His movement. And because we shall have found out His way & seen everywhere Himself, things also will cause no kind of shrinking in us We shall exceed the limitations of the senses & the ordinary aesthetic faculties,—we shall have gone beyond the poet & the artist We shall know why the sages have called Him sarvasundara, the All-Beautiful For things beautiful will have a more wonderful, intense, ecstatic beauty to us, but things foul, illshapen & ugly will also be to us beautiful, with a larger, more marvellous, more universal beauty than the artistic We shall exceed the limitations of the mind & heart & conscience; we shall have gone beyond the saint & the moralist For we shall no more be repelled by the sin of the sinner than by the dirt on our child who has fallen or wallowed in the mud of the roadside We shall know why the Lord has put on the mask of the sinner & the perfect purpose that is served by sin & crime in the world's economy, & while knowing that it has to be put aside or transformed into good, we shall not be revolted by it, but rather view it with perfect calm & charity This realisation, although it lifts us beyond the ordinary conceptions of morality & conventional ethics, does not incapacitate us for normal action, as
Page – 412 it might seem to the thought which holds all action impossible except that which proceeds from desire & liking & disliking Whatever morality the Vedantist practises will be based on a higher & truer ground than the ethics of the ordinary man in love, sympathy & oneness For an ethics proceeding in its practical action on contempt, dislike or repulsion is an immoral or imperfectly moralised ethics which seeks to drive out poison by poison & it has always failed & will always fail to eradicate sin & evil,—just as the ordinary methods of society have failed to eradicate or even diminish crime & vice, because its method & its spirit are ignorant & paradoxical Only perfect knowledge & sympathy can give perfect help and these are impossible without oneness. At the same time it is true that the jivanmukta is not governed by ordinary moral considerations He shrinks from no actions which the divine purpose demands or the divine impulse commands He has no wish to kill, but he will not shrink from slaying when it is demanded, for he is bound neither by the rajasic ahankara nor by the sattwic; sattwic obstacles to slaying are therefore taken from him and his knowledge delivers him both from the desire to take life which is the evil of hinsa [and] from the emotional horror of taking life & the nervous fear of taking life which are the rajasic & tamasic basis of outward ahinsa So also with other actions For this morality or dharma is of the soul & does not depend upon the action which is a mere outward symbol of the soul & has different values according to the times, the social ideas & environments, the religious creed or the actual circumstances To men who are not free a conventional morality is an absolute necessity, for there must be a fixed standard to which they can appeal It is as necessary for the ordinary practice of the world as a standard value of coin for the ordinary commerce of a country The coin has not really an immutable value; the pound is not perhaps really worth 15 Rs but fluctuates owing to circumstances; nevertheless to allow a fluctuating value is to bring a certain amount of confusion, uncertainty & disorder into finance & commerce Therefore the liberated man though he knows the truth will not contravene the
Page – 413 fixed rules of society unless he is impelled by divine command or unless the divine purpose is moving towards a change in the fixed morality Then, if it is the part given to him, he will act as fearlessly against social rules as under ordinary circumstances he will adhere firmly to the law of the environment in which he dwells For his one care & purpose will be to observe the divine purpose & carry out the divine will. Neither will events bring to him grief or disappointment, fear or disgust with things, because he follows that divine will & purpose in himself & in others, in the inner world & the outer, watching everywhere the play of the Self He has divined God's movement Disgrace & dishonour, obloquy & reproach cannot move him He is equal in soul to honour & dishonour, respect & insult, mana & apamana, because both come from himself to himself & not from another Success & failure are equal to him, since he knows that both are equally necessary for the fulfilment of the divine intention He will no more quarrel with them than with the cold of winter or the breath of the stormblast They are part of the jagat, part of God's play, of the Self's action on the Self He acquires a perfect titiksha or power to bear; he moves towards more than titiksha, towards an equal & perfect enjoyment. Such, then, are some of the practical fruits of the realisation of God as the Self in all existences & the Brahman containing all existences It raises us towards a perfect calm, resignation, peace & joy; a perfect love, charity & beneficence; a perfect courage, boldness & effectiveness of action; a divine equality to all men & things & equanimity towards all events & actions And not only perfect, but free We are not bound by these things we acquire Our calm does not stay us from even the most colossal activity, for the calm is within us, of the soul & is not an activity in the jagat, in the movement Our resignation is of the soul & does not mean acquiescence in defeat, but acceptance of it as a circumstance in the struggle towards a divine fulfilment; our peace & joy do not prevent us from understanding & sympathising with the trouble & grief of others; our love does not prevent an outward necessary sternness, our charity a
Page – 414 just appreciation of men & motives nor does our beneficence hold back the sword when it is necessary that it should strike—for sometimes to strike is the highest beneficence, as those only can thoroughly realise who know that God is Rudra as well as Shiva, Chamunda Kali with the necklace of skulls no less than Durga, the protectress & Gauri, the wife & mother Our courage does not bind itself by the ostentations of the fighter, but knows when flight & concealment are necessary, our boldness does not interfere with skill & prudence, nor our activity forbid us to rest & be passive Finally our equality of soul leaves room to the other instruments to deal with each thing in the vyavahara according to its various dharma & utility, the law of its being & the law of its purpose. These are the perfect results of the perfect realisation But in practice it is difficult for these perfect results to be attained or for this perfect realisation to be maintained, unless after we have attained to it, we go farther & exceed it In practice we find that there is a flaw, somewhere, which causes us either not perfectly to attain or to slip back after we have attained The reason is that we are still removed by one considerable step from perfect oneness We have realised oneness of the self within & the self without, of the self in us & the self in all other existences But we still regard the jagat, the movement, as not entirely the Self—as movement & play of God, but not itself God, as action of the Lord, but not itself all the Lord expressed to Himself in His own divine awareness Therefore when things come to us, when action or event affects us, we have to adopt an attitude towards it as something different from ourselves, something that comes, something that affects us As the result of that attitude we have jugupsa We have realised oneness, but by what kind of realisation? By seeing,—anupashyati, by action of the seeing faculty in the buddhi or the feeling faculty in the heart—for both these things are vision Our realisation is a realisation of identity by attitude, not of absolute identity by nature, realisation through instruments of knowledge, not through our conscious being in itself Subtle as the distinction may seem, it is not really so fine as it appears; it makes a wide difference, it is of first rate
Page – 415 importance in its results For so long as our divine state depends on our attitude, the least failure or deficiency in that attitude means a waning of the divine state or a defect in its fullness So long as it rests on a continued act of knowledge in mind & heart, the least discontinuity or defect of that knowledge means a defect of or a falling from our divine fullness Only if identity with all existences has become our whole nature & being of our being, is the divine state perfected, is its permanent and unbroken enjoyment assured And so complete & exacting is the oneness of Brahman, so absolute is the law of this Adwaita that if even the name & form & the play & the movement are regarded as Brahman's & not themselves as Brahman, an element of bheda, difference & dissonance, is preserved which tends to prevent this absolute identity of being & preserve the necessity of attitude & the identity only through the instruments of knowledge. Therefore in his next verse the Rishi gives us a higher & completer realisation which includes the missing elements & perfects the Adwaita "He in whom Self & all existences have become one and perfectly he knoweth, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have pain who sees in all things oneness " If we read this verse loosely, we may err by taking it as a justification of that Adwaita which denies the sarvabhutani and affirms only the Atma In that case we shall have not only to translate "All existences have become Self", but to suppose that "become" means "disappeared into", "blotted themselves out in",—an extension of meaning which is justified by nothing, either in the language or in the context It is contradicted by the immediately following passage in which the Seer insists on the necessity of the simultaneous view of Vidya & Avidya, while the exclusion of the world & its existences can only be effected in the state of sleep or trance and would be broken every time the mind returned to the state of waking No such broken & truncated realisation is intended The Mayavada demands that every time we look out on the world & its creatures, we shall say "This is not Brahman, it is a dream, a lie"; Adwaita of the Isha demands that looking out on the world & its creatures we shall say "This is Brahman,
Page – 416 it is God, it is myself " There is a wide difference between the two attitudes The one rests a metaphysical & argumentative Adwaita on a tremendous essential Dwaita of Satya & Asatya, that which is true & that which is false; the other rests a practical Adwaita on an apparent Dwaita, all being Satyam, eternal Truth, but Truth seen & recurrent presenting itself to Truth seeing & persistent—the sthanu & the jagat, an apparent difference of appearance to knowledge, not an actual difference of essential reality & unreality Apart from this divergence, the language of the sloka is such as not to admit of the negation sought by the Mayavadin, but to contradict it I have not translated the verse literally yet, but now I give the literal translation, "In whom the Self (of him) verily knowing by vijnana has become all creatures, there what delusion, what grief, of him seeing wherever he looks (anu) oneness " It is evident that the Mayavadin's position vanishes The words are sarvani bhutani atmaivabhud—not sarvabhutani atmaivabhuvan—a singular verb demanding a singular subject Therefore it is the Self that becomes, not the bhutas; and we cannot say that this is the attitude of a man still ignorant, ajna, for it is the Self of one who knows entirely, has that knowledge which in the Upanishads is called vijnana & who has attained to the vision of oneness In him his Self has become all creatures Let us understand thoroughly the sense of this important sloka Yasmin, in whom The soul has become one with all existence, all existence it feels to be itself containing the creation & exceeding it,—therefore yasmin, not yasya In him his Self, that which he feels to be his true I has become all creatures Not only does he feel himself or perceive himself to be in all creatures as the divine presence in them & around them, but he is they,—he is each bhuta The word bhuta means that which has become as opposed to that which eternally is & it includes therefore name & form & play of mind & play of action The last barrier is broken; ahankara, the sense of separate self, utterly disappears & the soul is all that it sees or is in any way aware of It is not only the seer in all, but it is the seen; not only the Lord, but his habitation, not only Ish but jagat In fact, just
Page – 417 as the Lord himself, as Brahman itself becomes all things & all creatures in itself, just as all creatures are only Brahman's becomings, bhutani, just as Brahman is the ejat and the anejat, the moving & the unmoving, God & his world, so is it now with the soul that sees Of it too it can be said Tad ejati tannaijati It moves & it moves not, it is the near & the far, it is within all things & outside all things The man thus liberated undergoes a tremendous change of consciousness; he ceases to feel himself as within his body & feels rather his body as within himself & not only his but all bodies; he feels himself at the same time in his body & in all bodies not separately like a piece of water in a jar, but as an unity like one ether undivided in many vessels, & at the same time he feels that they are not in him nor he in them, but that this idea of within & without is merely a way of looking, a way of expressing to the mind a truth in itself beyond expression by space & time—just as we say "I have this in my mind" when we do not really intend to express any location in space but mean rather "This is my mental knowledge as it just now expresses itself " Pashya me yogam aishwaram For he now feels that these things in which & outside which he seems to be are himself, his becomings in the motion of awareness, jagat, bhutani This is the first important difference between the preceding realisation of knowledge & this fuller realisation of being His self has become all existences; they & he are all merely becomings of himself. But if this realisation is only by the heart through love or only by the purified reason through intellectual perception, then it is not the realisation which this shloka contemplates For so long as we have not become that which we are realising, realisation is not complete & its moral effects cannot be securely held For what use is it if we merely understand that all is one when if there is a touch from outside it, the body cries "Something has struck me, I am hurt" or the heart says "Someone has injured me, I am in grief" or the vital spirits cry "Someone means ill to me, I am in fear"? And if the heart realises, but the reason & other instruments fail, how shall we not, feeling one with the grief of others, fail to be crushed by them & overborne? The
Page – 418 lower organs must also consent to the absolute sense of oneness or no sure and perfect result can be gained How is this to be done? By the force of the vijnana, our ideal self Therefore the Upanishad adds "vijanatah", when he knows, not by ordinary knowledge, jnanam, or by intellectual knowledge, prajnanam, but by the ideal knowledge, vijanatah. What is this vijnana? Vedantic commentators have identified it with buddhi; it is, they think, the discriminating intellect or the pure reason But in the psychological system of the Veda intellectual vichara, reason, even pure reason, is not the highest nor does it lead to the highest results The real buddhi is not in mind at all, but above mind For beyond & behind this intellect, heart, nervous system, body, there is, says the Veda, a level, a sea of being out of which all these descend & here take form, a plane of consciousness in which the soul dwells by the power of perfect truth, in a condition of pure existence of knowledge, satyam, pure arrangement of its nature in that knowledge, ritam or vratam, pure satisfying wideness in being of that knowledge-nature, brihat This is the soul's kingdom of heaven, its ideal state, immortality, amritatwam All things here are in the language of [the Vishnu Purana] vijnanavijrimbhitani; they live here in fragments of that wide & mighty truth, but because of bheda, because they are broken up & divide truth against truth, they cannot enjoy Truth of knowledge, Truth of Nature, Truth of being & bliss, but have to strive towards it with much failure, pain & relapse But if man can rise in himself to that plane and pour down its knowledge upon the lower system, then the whole system becomes remoulded in the mould of the vijnana Man can get himself a new heart, a new mind, a new life, navyam ayu, even a new body, punah kritam This whole system will then consent & be compelled to live in the truth—& that truth to which vijnana itself is the door, is Brahman as Sacchidananda All things here will be Sacchidananda This is the second superiority of this high realisation as this shloka describes it, that it is vijanatah, attained not by intellectual discernment or feeling of the heart or concentration of the mind, not depending therefore on any state such as sushupti or on any attitude, but
Page – 419 itself determining the attitude, & attained through direct ideal knowledge with the result of becoming all that is in our being, not merely the mind or thought or feeling, in our very nature The practical consequence will be that body, mind & heart will no longer admit any bahyasparsha, but will utterly feel that nothing can come to them, nothing touch them but only Brahman To every touch there will be but one response from heart & mind & nerve alike—"This is Brahman " Nanyat pashyati, nanyach chrinoti They will see nothing else, hear nothing else, smell nothing else, feel nothing else, taste nothing else, but only Brahman Of such a state it can be truly & utterly said, & not merely relatively, not subject to any qualification, ekatwam anupashyatah. That oneness is the oneness of Sacchidananda, one being, one knowledge, one bliss, being that is consciousness, knowledge that is identity, both of them in their essence & reality bliss,—therefore not three separate qualities, but one existence, even though presented to the intellect as a trinity, yet always one Whatever therefore is felt, seen, heard, thought, it will be bliss that is felt, bliss that is seen, bliss that is heard, bliss that is thought—a bliss which is in its essence & inseparably existence & knowledge For the intellect we have to use all three words, for on the level of our mental action these three are or seem to be divided & different from each other, but to the illumined being of the Jivanmukta there is no difference, they are one It is ekatwam It is Brahman The highest heights of this realisation are, indeed, not easily attained, but even on its lower levels there is a perfect freedom & an ineffable joy Swalpam apyasya dharmasya To these levels, tatra, neither fear, nor grief, nor illusion can come Tatra ko mohah kah shoka ekatwam anupashyatah How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, to whose eyes wheresoever they turn all things are one? For grief is born of illusion, shoka proceeds from moha, & the essence of moha is that bewilderment, that stultification of the conscious mind by which we forget oneness By forgetting oneness, the idea of limitation is fixed on our being; by limitation comes the idea of not being this, not having that; from this idea arises the desire
Page – 420 to be this, to have that; by the disappointment of desire comes disappointment, dislike of that which disappoints, hatred & anger against that which withholds, fear of that which gives contrary experience—the whole brood of earthly ills Moha shouts "Here is one I love, she is dying"; "Here is one who will kill me, I am terrified"; "Here is a touch too strong for me to bear, it is pain " "This is virtue, that is sin; if I do not gain one I am lost, if I fall into the other I shall suffer by God's wrath & judgment This is fair, that is foul This is sweet, that is bitter This I have not which another has, I must have it, even if it be depriving him of his possession " But he who sees oneness sees only Sacchidananda, only bliss that is conscious being Just as the mind that has taught itself to see only matter everywhere, says even of mind & soul, even of itself, It is not mind, it is not soul, it is matter, just as it sees everywhere only the play of matter upon matter, in matter, by matter, so the liberated soul says of body & nerve & mind, It is not mind, it is not body, it is not nerve, it is Brahman, it is conscious existence that is bliss and so he sees everywhere this bliss only & the play of bliss upon bliss, in bliss, by bliss Ananda is the term through which he reconciles himself with the world Into delight his soul is delivered, by delight he supports in himself the great world movement & dwells in it, in delight he is for ever one with, yet plays with God. _____
The second movement of the Upanishad is finished In his first movement the Rishi advanced four propositions,—that the purpose of our existence is the fulfilment of God in the world, realising that the Lord & his movement alone exist, He is the only inhabitant, His movement the only cause of the forms in which He inhabits; secondly that the golden rule of life is to enjoy all God's movement or God in all his movement but only after the renunciation of demand & desire, for only so can it all be enjoyed; thirdly, that life & action in this world are intended, must be maintained & do not interfere with divine freedom
Page – 421 & bliss; fourthly, that any self-marring movement leads only to confusion & darkness here & beyond & not to our divine realisation In order to lay down on a firm basis his justification of these teachings, he shows us first that God & the world are one, both are Brahman & therefore the world also is our divine Self compassing by a certain divine power movement of action & phenomenon in its still unmoving Self & without parting with its superiority to the movement, on this basis he shows us that existence & bliss not only can be made one, but if we realise this one Brahman who is our divine Self & God (antar asya sarvasya), all existence must necessarily become bliss & cannot be anything else; grief & fear & dislike & delusion have no farther place in us It is to this realisation we shall arrive by realising God as we give up desire, renounce everything to Him and enjoy the world in Him & by Him, as His movement, as His enjoyment For we shall then realise that all beings are one with ourself, the renunciation of desire will become possible and we shall not shrink from anything in life, because we shall know that it is God & his movement Finally, the high & complete realisation will be ours in which the very cause of desire & demand will disappear & all will be utterly the Self, God, Brahman, Sacchidananda. _____
Chapter V
A question may arise It is true then that enjoyment of all things here in oneness is possible; that renunciation of desire & self-surrender are the way & the realisation of the Lord in all forms & movements & self-surrender to him the method,—involving also action according to His will, enjoyment according to His will But when the final realisation is accomplished, when oneness is utterly attained, then what farther need of enjoyment & action? The goal is realised, let the method be abandoned Why keep the distinction of God & the world, why act any more in
Page – 422 the world when the purpose of action is accomplished? It may still be possible, it is not necessary; it is not even desirable Lose yourself in Sacchidananda, if not the impersonal unconditioned Brahman Is it not that in which the vision of oneness logically culminates? Therefore not only the golden rule of conduct has to be justified, but the teaching of a liberated activity has to be justified It is this to which the Sage next proceeds He is about to establish the foundations of action in the liberated soul, to show the purpose of the One & the Many,—to reconcile Vidya & Avidya in God's supreme & blissful unity The eighth verse is the introductory & fundamental verse of this movement.
Page – 423 APPENDIX
[1]
[Bracketed and struck through in the manuscript See the footnote on page 378 ]
From the choice of terms in this opening line certain intellectual consequences arise which we have to accept if we wish to understand the teaching of the Upanishad First, the Personality of God & His unity Not only is the impersonal God one Brahman without a second, but the Personal God is one without a second There is no other person besides God in the universe Whatever different masks He may wear, from house to house of His habitation, it is always He The disguises may be utterly concealing He may manifest as Brahma & Vishnu, Surya & Agni or as the Yaksha & the Pishacha; he may dwell here as the man or dwell here as the animal; he may shine out as the saint or lust in Himself as the criminal; but all these are He
[2]
[Written on a separate sheet of the manuscript See the footnote on page 378 ]
The world & God What is the world? It is jagati, says the Rishi, she who is constantly moving The essence of the world is not Space nor Time nor Circumstance which we call Causality—its essence is motion Not only so, but every single force & object in it is of the same nature, it is a jagat, a knot of habitual motion The ancient Hindus knew that the earth moves & therefore the earth also was designated in ancient times by a number of words meaning motion of which jagati itself is one—ga, go, jagati, ila They knew of the physical movement of the universe They would not have rejected the scientific hypothesis which sees in every object a mass & arrangement, a sort of cosmos of anus,
Page – 424 atoms in constant movement with regard to [each] other But the movement here contemplated is not, as we see in the fifth verse, tad ejati & the eighth verse, sa paryagat, movement of matter, but of divine being & conscious force of which matter is only an appearance But for the present, the Rishi is content to envisage the world as a world of motion & multitude In essence the kshobha or formative movement called active Prakriti, in universality it is this force ordering & arranging its objects by motion, jagati; in detail it is a multitude of single objects, forces, ideas, sensations etc, all in their nature motion of this moving universe, jagat, the apparently motionless stone no less than the ever circling & rotating earth In this motion, in the objects, forces, sensations created by it He dwells who is its Lord
[3]
[Written in the top margin of two pages of the manuscript Point of insertion not marked See the footnote on page 380 ]
Moreover we must realise the Lord in others as one with Him in ourselves Then we shall not need to covet any man's possessions "Do not covet" says the Sage "the possession of any man whomsoever " Dhanam means any kind of possession whatever, not only material wealth—neither the glory of the king, nor the wealth of the merchant, nor the temperament of the sage, nor the strength of elephants, nor the swiftness of eagles For whom are we envying, whose goods are we coveting? Ourselves, our own goods If we realise divine unity, we can enjoy them as perfectly in another's experience as in our own Moreover, being divine in power ourselves we can get them whenever our supreme self wills without anyone else in the world being the poorer for our gain There must be no demand, no coveting Not when or if the mind wills, but when or if He wills
Page – 425 [4]
[Written separately; point of insertion not marked See the footnote on page 380 ]
Practically, therefore, the renunciation demanded of us is the renunciation by the lower unreal & incomplete self, mind, senses, vitality, intellect, will, egoism of all that they are & seek to our real, complete & transcendental Self, the Lord And that renunciation we make not by substituting another demand, the demand to be rid of all these things & released from the fulfilment of His cosmic purpose, but in order the better to fulfil His purpose & enjoy Him utterly in His movement, in all experience & all action that He in us & through us is manifesting & perfecting For that which we have to enjoy is not only Ish but jagat,—for as we shall see both are one Brahman & by enjoying Him entirely we must come to enjoy all His movement, since He is here as the Lord of his own movement For this reason the word Ish has been selected as the fundamental relation of God to ourselves & the world—the master of all our existence to whom we renounce, the Lord who for his purposes has made & governs the world—for in this relation of "Lord" he is inseparable from His movement It is a relation that depends on the existence & play of the world of which He is the ruler & master Envisaging the ruler, we envisage that which he rules, the habitation for the sake of the inhabitant indeed, but still the habitation We get therefore in this first verse of the Upanishad the foundations of the great principle of activity with renunciation with which the teaching of the Gita begins & the still greater principle of atmasamarpana or entire surrender to God, the uttamam rahasyam with which it culminates We get the reason & spirit of the command to Arjuna from which all the moral teaching of the Gita starts & to which it returns, jitva shatrun bhunkshva rajyam samriddham, the command of activity, the command of enjoyment—but activity for God only, yajnartham, without ahankara, enjoyment in God only, mayi sannyasya, without desire or attachment, neither demanding what He does not take
Page – 426 for Himself in us, nor rejecting what He is here to enjoy, whether the enjoyment be of victory or defeat, of the patched loin cloth of the beggar or the imperial crown
[5]
[Written in a different notebook; beginning lost or point of insertion unknown Related thematically to Draft A of "The Life Divine" ]
[.....] existence, lies the justification of all that is said in the scriptures of the liberated & perfected soul He who would be free in this world, must be detached from it, though belonging to it, above it though in it, above it in his inward conscious self-being, though in it in his outward action of Nature He must combine with a blissful enjoyment of all things in the world, a joyous indifference to all things in the world He must be not un-mundane but supramundane, not inhuman but superhuman In all his acts he must have in his soul the loud laughter, the attahasyam, of Kali He must love with that inner laughter, slay with that laughter, save with that laughter, himself perish or reign, take joy or take torture with that secret & divine laughter For he knows that the whole world is but a divine play of the eternal Child-God Srikrishna with Himself in the playground of His self-existence All this he cannot have unless in the roots of his conscious being he feels not concealed or subliminal, but manifest & always present to him, the Bright, Calm, Unconcerned, Unbound, Unrelated Divine Existence. This Pure Existence is not only an impersonal state of divine being, it is God Himself in His pure personality For in all the divine manifestation, there is always this double aspect of Personality & Impersonality God Impersonal manifests Himself, both in the universe & transcendent of the Universe, transcending it as infinite pure Existence, infinite pure Consciousness, infinite pure Delight, the triune Sachchidananda of our Scriptures, entering world existence He manifests in it all this quality of existence, variation of Consciousness, multiplicity of
Page – 427 delight which with its changes, perversities & apparent self-contradiction makes up the marvellous web of the world But He is also, transcending existence, the infinite Pure Existent, the infinite Pure Conscious, the infinite Pure Blissful,—not anyone, no person or individual, for He alone is, but still neither a mere abstraction or state of Being Entering into world existence, He is All-being, God, Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Kali, Allah, the Mighty One, the Humble, the Loving, the Merciful, the Ruthless These things are aspects of Himself to His own consciousness Just as Sacchidananda is Triune,—not three, but One,—for when we enter deep into the Trinity we find only Unity since Existence is Consciousness & nothing but Consciousness, & Consciousness is Delight & nothing but Delight, so the Personal & Impersonal God are Biune, not two, but one, since when we enter into the depths of this Biune, we find only Unity, Existence nothing but the Existent, the Existent nothing but Existence The distinction between them is a necessary convention or arrangement of His truth for world manifestation; it does not amount to a difference The metaphysician fixes his concentration of Will in Knowledge only on the Impersonal & pursuing it through the world & beyond, he affirms the Impersonal God but tends to deny the Personal The devotee, fixing his concentration on the Personal & pursuing it through the world & beyond, affirms the Personal God but tends to deny or ignore the Impersonal Both affirmations are true, both denials are false Neither is one greater than the other, the Impersonal than the Personal, just as in the Personal, Shiva is not greater than Vishnu, nor Vishnu than Shiva, nor the All-Being than Krishna or Kali Such exaggerated distinctions are the errors of partial or selective Yoga fastening on aspects & ignoring the true being of God in His self-manifestation We must accept, for our perfection's sake, the multitude of His aspects & even of His divine impersonations, but we must not make them an excuse for breaking up the inalienable unity of God.
Page – 428 |
) establishes, sets in its place & manages For the root dha has always the idea of arrangement, management, working out of things.
)
does not in Vedic Sanscrit always imply entire opposition, it suggests a new
circumstance or suggests an additional fact or a different point of view The
new circumstance introduced in this verse is the idea of the Atman The
knowledge that the impersonal Brahman is all, need not of itself bring peace
& a joyous activity; for the all includes sorrow, includes death, fear,
weariness, disgust Matariswan in establishing action, has also established
reaction He has established that inequality between the force acting & the
force acted upon, that want of harmony which is the cause of pain, recoil,
disintegration, mutual fear & oppression We may recognise that all these are
one coordinated movement in a single existence, are themselves all one
existence but how does that help us if in the movement itself there are
these inequalities, these discords, these incapacities which impose on us so
much that is painful & sorrowful? We may be calm, resigned, stoical, but how
can we be free from pain & sorrow? It is here that Mayavada comes in with
its great gospel of liberation "All this discord" it says in effect "is not
Brahman, it is Maya, it is an illusion, a dream, it does not exist in the
pure Atman That is the unmoving; the movement is a cosmic nightmare
affecting the mind only Renounce life, take refuge in the pure,
unconditioned, dreamless Atman, mind will dissolve, the world will vanish
from you as a dream vanishes & with the world its pain, its useless
striving, its miserable joys, its ineffugable sorrow " That is an escape,
but it is not the escape which the Seer of the Upanishad meditates for us He
holds to his point "All this is Brahman, the movement no less than the
moving " A few may escape by the wicket gates of the Buddhist & the
Mayavadin Not by denial of fundamental Vedantic truth is mankind intended to
be saved.