The Philosophy of the UpaniShads - An Introduction

[Guest guest]

Greetings:

 

In his introduction to the book by Dr. Radhakrishnan, Edmond Holmes (an

English poet and philosopher) points out the importance of this

translation undertaken by the Indian philospher with great credentials

for scholarship and language skills.

 

Enjoy!

 

--

Ram Chandran

Burke, VA

 

--\

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AN INTRODUCTION BY EDMOND HOLMES to The Philosophy of the upaniShads

,Edited with Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes by S.

Radhakrishnan , Harper Collins Publishers, India (Available in Book

Stores in USA).

 

Professor Radhakrishnan's work on Indian Philosophy, the first volume of

which has recently appeared, meets a want which has long been felt. The

Western mind finds a difficulty in placing itself at what I may call the

dominant standpoint of Indian thought, a difficulty which is the outcome

of centuries of divergent tradition, and which therefore opposes a

formidable obstacle to whatever attempt may be made by Western

scholarship and criticism to interpret the speculative philosophy of

India. If we of the West are to enter with some measure of sympathy and

understanding into the ideas which dominate, and have long dominated,

the Indian mind, India herself must expound them to us. Our interpreter

must be an Indian critic who combines the acuteness and originality of

the thinker with the learning and caution of the scholar, and who has

also made such a study of Western thought and Western letters as will

enable him to meet his readers on common ground. If, in addition to

these qualifications, he can speak to us in a Western language, he will

be the ideal exponent of that mysterious philosophy which is known to

most of us more by hearsay than by actual acquaintance, and which, so

far as we have any knowledge of it, alternately fascinates and repels

us.

 

All these requirements are answered by Professor Radhakrishnan. A clear

and deep thinker, an acute critic and an erudite scholar, he is

admirably qualified for the task which he has set himself of expounding

to a 'lay' audience the main movements of Indian thought. His knowledge

of Western thought and letters makes it easy for him to get into touch

with a Western audience; and for the latter purpose he has the further

qualification, which he shares with other cultured Hindus, of being a

master of the English language and an accomplished writer of English

prose.

 

But the first volume of Indian Philosophy contains over 700 closely

printed pages, and costs a guinea; and it is not every one, even of

those who are interested in Indian thought, who can afford to devote so

much time to serious study, while the price, though relatively most

reasonable, is beyond the means of many readers. That being so, it is

good to know that Professor Radhakrishnan and his publisher have decided

to bring out the section on The Philosophy of the upaniShads as a

separate volume and at a modest price.

 

For what is quintessential in Indian philosophy is its spiritual

idealism; and the quintessence of its spiritual idealism is in the

upaniShads. The thinkers of India in all ages have turned to the

upaniShads as the fountain-head of India's speculative thought. 'They

are the foundations,' says Professor Radhakrishnan, 'on which most of

the later philosophies and religions of India rest. ... Later systems of

philosophy display an almost pathetic anxiety to accommodate their

doctrines to the views of the upaniShads, even if they cannot father

them all on them. Every revival of idealism in India has traced its

ancestry to the teaching of the upaniShads.' 'There is no important form

of Hindu thought,' says an English exponent of Indian philosophy,

'heterodox Buddhism included, which is not rooted in the upaniShads.' [

Bloomfield: The Religion of the Veda ] It is to the upaniShads, then,

that the Western student must turn for illumination, who wishes to form

a true idea of the general trend of Indian thought, but has neither time

nor inclination to make a close study of its various systems. And if he

is to find the clue to the teaching of the upaniShads he cannot do

better than study it under the guidance of Professor Radhakrishnan.

 

It is true that treatises on that philosophy have been written by

Western scholars. But the Western mind, as has been already suggested,

is as a rule debarred by the prejudices in which it has been cradled

from entering with sympathetic insight into the ideas which belong to

another world and another age. Not only does it tend to survey those

ideas, and the problems in which they centre, from standpoints which are

distinctively Western, but it sometimes goes so far as to assume that

the Western is the only standpoint which is compatible with mental

sanity. Can we wonder, then, that when it criticizes the speculative

thought of Ancient India, its adverse judgment is apt to resolve itself

into fundamental misunderstanding, and even its sympathy is sometimes

misplaced ?

 

In Gough's Philosophy of the upaniShads we have a contemptuously hostile

criticism of the ideas which dominate that philosophy, based on

obstinate misunderstanding of the Indian point of view -

misunderstanding so complete that our author makes nonsense of what he

criticizes before he has begun to study it. In Duessen's work on the

same subject - a work of close thought and profound learning which

deservedly commands respect - we have a singular combination of

enthusiastic appreciation with complete misunderstanding on at least one

vital point. Speaking of the central conception of the upaniShads, that

of the ideal identity of God and the soul, Gough says, 'this empty

intellectual conception, void of spirituality, is the highest form that

the Indian mind is capable of.' Comment on this jugement saugrenu is

needless. Speaking of the same conception, Deussen says, 'it will be

found to possess a significance reaching far beyond the upaniShads,

their time and country; nay, we claim for it an inestimable value for

the whole race of mankind ... one thing we may assert with confidence -

whatever new and unwonted paths the philosophy of the future may strike

out, this principle will remain permanently unshaken, and from it no

deviation can take place.' This is high praise. But when our author goes

on to argue that the universe is pure illusion, and claims that this is

the fundamental view of the upaniShads, he shows, as Professor

Radhakrishnan has fully demonstrated, that he has not grasped the true

inwardness of the conception which he honours so highly.

 

With these examples of the aberration of Western criticism before us, we

shall perhaps think it desirable to turn for instruction and guidance to

the exposition of the upaniShads which Professor Radhakrishnan, an

Indian thinker, scholar and critic, has given us. If we do so, we shall

not be disappointed. As the inheritor of a great philosophical

tradition, into which he was born rather than indoctrinated, Professor

Radhakrishnan has an advantage over the Western student of Indian

philosophy, which no weight of learning and no degree of metaphysical

acumen can counterbalance, and of which he has made full use. His study

of the upaniShads - if a Western reader may presume to say so - is

worthy of its theme.

 

The upaniShads are the highest and purest expression of the speculative

thought of India. They embody the meditations on great matters of a

succession of seers who lived between 1000 and 300 B.C. In them, says

Professor J. S. Mackenzie, 'we have the earliest attempt at a

constructive theory of the cosmos, and certainly one of the most

interesting and remarkable.'

 

What do the upaniShads teach us ? Its authors did not all think alike;

but, taking their meditations as a whole, we may say that they are

dominated by one paramount conception, that of the ideal oneness of the

soul of man with the soul of the universe. The Sankrit word for the soul

of man is Atman, for the soul of the universe Brahman. 'God's dwelling

place,' says Professor Radhakrishnan in his exposition of the philosophy

of the upaniShads, 'is the heart of man. The inner immortal self and the

great cosmic power are one and the same. Brahman is the Atman, and the

Atman is the Brahman. The one supreme power through which all things

have been brought into being is one with the inmost self in each man's

heart.' What is real in each of us is his self or soul. What is real in

the universe is its self or soul, in virtue of which its All is One, and

the name for which in our language is God. And the individual soul is

one, potentially and ideally, with the divine or universal soul. In the

words of one of the upaniShads: 'He who is the Brahman in man and who is

that in the sun, these are one.'

 

The significance of this conception is more than metaphysical. There is

a practical side to it which its exponents are apt to ignore. The unity

of the all-pervading life, in and through its own essential spirituality

- the unity of the trinity of God and Nature and Man - is, from man's

point of view, an ideal to be realized rather than an accomplished fact.

If this is so, if oneness with the real, the universal, the divine self,

is the ideal end of man's being, it stands to reason that

self-realization, the finding of the real self, is the highest task

which man can set himself. In the upaniShads themselves the ethical

implications of their central conception were not fully worked out. To

do so, to elaborate the general ideal of self-realization into a

comprehensive scheme of life, was the work of the great teacher whom we

call Buddha.

 

This statement may seem to savour of paradox. In the West the idea is

still prevalent that Buddha broke away completely from the spiritual

idealism of the upaniShads, that he denied God, denied the soul, and

held out to his followers the prospect of annihilation as the final

reward of a righteous life. This singular misconception, which is not

entirely confined to the West, is due to Buddha's agnostic silence

having been mistaken for comprehensive denial. It is time that this

mistake was corrected. It is only by affiliating the ethics of Buddhism

to the metaphysics of the upaniShads that we can pass behind the silence

of Buddha and get into touch with the philosophical ideas which ruled

his mind, ideas which were not the less real or effective because he

deliberately held them in reserve. This has long been my conviction; and

now I am confirmed in it by finding that it is shared by Professor

Radhakrishnan, who sets forth the relation of Buddhism to the philosophy

of the upaniShads in the following words: 'The only metaphysics that can

justify Buddha's ethical discipline is the metaphysics underlying the

upaniShads. ... Buddhism helped to democratize the philosophy of the

upaniShads, which was till then confined to a select few. The process

demanded that the deep philosophical truths which cannot be made clear

to the masses of men should for practical purposes be ignored. It was

Buddha's mission to accept the idealism of the upaniShads at its best

and make it available for the daily needs of mankind. Historical

Buddhism means the spread of the upaniShad doctrines among the people.

It thus helped to create a heritage which is living to the present day.'

 

Given that oneness with his own real self, which is also the soul of

Nature and the spirit of God, union with the ultimate is the ideal end

of man's being; the question arises: How is that end to be achieved ? In

India, the land of psychological experiments, many ways to it were tried

and are still being tried. There was the way of jnAna, or intense mental

concentration. There was the way of bhakti, or passionate love and

devotion. There was the way of yoga, or severe and systematic

self-discipline. These ways and the like of these might be available for

exceptionally gifted persons. They were not available, as Buddha saw

clearly, for the rank and file of mankind. It was for the rank and file

of mankind, it was for the plain average man, that Buddha devised his

scheme of conduct. He saw that in one's everyday life, among one's

fellow men, there were ample opportunities for the higher desires to

assert themselves as higher, and for the lower desires to be placed

under due control. There were ample opportunities, in other words, for

the path of self-mastery and self-transcendence, the path of

emancipation from the false self and of affirmation of the true self, to

be followed from day to day, from year to year, and even - for Buddha,

like the seers of the upaniShads, took the reality of re-birth for

granted - from life to life. He who walked in that path had set his face

towards the goal of his own perfection, and, in doing so, had, unknown

to himself, accepted the philosophy of the upaniShads as the ruling

principle of his life.

 

If this interpretation of the life-work of Buddha is correct, if it was

his mission to make the dominant idea of the upaniShads available for

the daily needs of ordinary men, it is impossible to assign limits to

the influence which that philosophy has had and is capable of having in

human affairs in general and in moral life of man in particular. The

metaphysics of the upaniShads, when translated into the ethics of

self-realization, provided and still provides for a spiritual need which

has been felt in divers ages and which was never more urgent than it is

to-day. For it is to-day, when supernatural religion is losing its hold

on us, that the secret desire of the heart for the support and guidance

which the religion of nature can alone afford, is making itself felt as

it has never been felt before. And if the religion of nature is

permanently to satisfy our deeper needs, it must take the form of

devotion to the natural end of man's being, the end which the seers of

the upaniShads discerned and set before us, the end of oneness with that

divine or universal self which is at once the soul of all things and the

true being of each individual man. In other words, it is as the gospel

of spiritual evolution which Buddha, true to the spirit of the

upaniShads, preached 2,500 years ago, [ It was the gospel of spiritual

evolution which Christ preached in a later age, to a different audience

and through the medium of other forms of thought. Such at least is my

earnest conviction. Of the two pivotal sayings, 'I and my Father are

one,' and 'Be ye perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is

perfect,' the former falls into the spiritual idealism of the

upaniShads, the latter into line with the ethical idealism of Buddha.

The notation, as might be expected, is different: but the idea and the

ideal are the same. ] and it is for a re-presentation of the same

gospel, in the spirit of the same philosophy, that the world is waiting

now.