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$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{upanishads
brahman
life
knowledge
universe
deeds
desire
existence
philosophy
gods}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of India
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter II: Part II

     Other cosmogonic myths in the Brahmanas put at the beginning of all
things a chaos of waters, on which Prajapati breathes like the wind; or the
waters produce a golden egg, from which Prajapati emerges; or he appears alone
on a lotus-leaf, amid the waters - a material principle is before the creative
god.  More metaphysical are the cosmogonies which put being or non-being at
the beginning and make the creator himself the outcome of a kind of evolution.

     The cosmogonic hymn (Rig-Veda, X, 129) goes a step further back, to a
time when there was neither being nor non-being.  It names no god, only "that
One" beside which was naught else.  The whence and the how of cosmogony are an
inscrutable mystery.  The gods, who themselves came into being only after this
world, know naught of it.  Only he who brought the creation into being -
whether he made it, or did not make it - he knows, or does he himself not
know?  The poet does not venture to decide whether the world was made, or
whether the One, the ground and cause of the universe, is a conscious agent.
A still different conception of the origin of all things is set forth in the
hymn of the Purusha (Rig-Veda, X, 90).  Man, as the microcosm, has often been
set over against the universe-macrocosm; here, on the contrary, the universe
is imagined as the infinite man.

     It is, however, not the varying forms these speculations take that here
concern us, but the fact that in many, and to our feeling often grotesque,
forms the poets and thinkers of this period are struggling to express
mythologically, theologically, or metaphysically, after their ability, the
idea that at the origin of all things, before heaven and air and earth, above
the whole pantheon of nature deities, there is one ground of being - one god,
some would say, and call him creator; to others it is the nameless One.  The
antecedents of monotheism, pantheism, monism lie crossed and tangled in these
early ventures at the riddle of the universe.

     In the progress of time a scheme of life was laid out to which in theory
every Aryan, that is, every member of the three upper castes, should conform.
In this scheme life was divided into four stages: The life of the student, in
which the boy attached himself to a teacher and learned the Vedas; the life of
the householder, in which, after the completion of his studies, the man
married, reared children, and fulfilled his duty in offering to the gods; the
life of the hermit, when, as age approached, abandoning his home for the
forest, he no longer actually performed most of the sacrifices, but gave
himself instead to reflection on the mystical significance of the ritual; and,
finally, the life of the ascetic, who no longer concerned himself about
offerings and sacrifice even in thought, but devoted himself to meditation on
the highest themes - the relation of the soul to the principle of the
universe.  It is for our purpose not essential to inquire how generally or how
strictly this systematisation was followed; hermits and mendicant ascetics
were many, and for them the external observances of religion chiefly or wholly
fell away, their place being taken by meditation and speculation.

     The subjects with which they occupied themselves and the substance of
their thinking lie before us in the Forest Books (Aranyakas) and the
Upanishads, of which the former are in theory the studies of the hermits, the
latter of the ascetics (Sannyasins).  The line between the two is not,
however, a sharp one; Upanishads are embedded in Aranyakas and the title
Upanishads sometimes covers an Aranyaka.  The name Upanishad (literally,
"session") means secret or esoteric teaching, mystery; and the Upanishads
contain, along with profound philosophical ideas, mystical speculations and
mysterious rites.  The older Upanishads are in prose, and usually in the form
of a dialogue in which one who possesses the higher knowledge explains to an
inquirer the nature of this knowledge and the way to attain it.  It is
noteworthy that the possessors of this knowledge are much more often laymen
than priests; and it has been inferred, not without probability, that the
Upanishad philosophy originated and was earliest cultivated, not among the
Brahmans, but in the other castes, especially among the nobility (Kshatriyas),
and was only subsequently adopted by the priesthood.

     When we speak of the philosophy of the Upanishads, it must not be
imagined that they contain anything resembling a system, nor even that they
consistently develop certain fundamental conceptions.  They represent the
teachings of different thinkers or schools through a period of several
centuries; they go straight at the ultimate problems of metaphysics - the
nature of reality, the relation of appearance and reality and of the many to
the one.  The thinkers came to these questions from the mythological
cosmogonic speculations of their predecessors; their thinking, like that of
the earliest Greek philosophers, is often half-mythical; they express
themselves in mythical or ritualistic terms.  Without being conscious of it,
the same teacher sets forth views that seem to us to be inconsistent or even
irreconcilable.  The phrase, philosophy of the Upanishads, can therefore
signify only certain prevailing ways of envisaging the problems and a certain
general type of solution.

     The Upanishads find the ground of the universe, the one reality, in a
principle which is oftenest called Brahman.  The name has ritual associations;
it is connected with the god Brahmanaspati, or Brihaspati, who, we have seen,
at one stage in the priestly cosmogonic speculations or in certain priestly
circles was the creator of the world.  Other thinkers, more philosophically
minded, put in the place of the cosmogonic deity who somehow produced or
evolved a world out of his own substance a first principle, the self-existent
Brahman (neuter).  Thus, in the Catapatha-Brahmana (XI, 2, 3), in obvious
correction of the cosmogonic myth of Prajapati: ^1 "Brahman, verily, was in
the beginning this world.  It created the gods and assigned them the rule over
these worlds - Agni over this earth, Vayu over the atmosphere, Surya over the
heaven, and higher gods than these over the higher worlds.  As these worlds
here (earth, air, heaven) and these gods are manifest, so also are those
(higher) worlds manifest and their gods whom it set over them.  Itself (the
Brahman), however, retired to the half beyond" (i.e., beyond the sphere of
empirical reality).

[Footnote 1: See above, pp. 269 f.]

     This "self-existent Brahman," the one reality, is called also, with a
name of psychological origin, the Atman.  The word denotes the "self,"
sometimes in an empirical sense, the individual man; then, in a higher sense,
his true self, in distinction not only from the body but from the inner organs
of sense and cognition, which also are non-ego - in a word, the ideal self,
the essential being.  In this highest sense the word is used of the Brahman,
which is the ideal principle of the universe.

     The great mystery of the Upanishads is that the Atman in man is identical
with the Atman in the universe, the Brahman.  The soul of man is not a
particle, an emanation, of the universal principle, but is that principle,
whole and single.  Thus in the Chandogya-Upanishad (III, 14):

     "Verily the universe is Brahman.  Let him whose soul is at peace worship
it, as that which he fain would know.

     "Of knowledge, verily, is a man constituted.  As is his knowledge in this
world, so, when he hath gone hence, doth he become.  After knowledge, then,
let him strive.

     "Whose substance is spirit, whose body is life, whose form is light,
whose purpose is truth, whose essence is infinity - the all-working,
all-wishing, all-smelling, all-tasting one, that embraceth the universe, that
is silent, untroubled -

     "That is my spirit within my heart, smaller than a grain of rice or a
barley-corn, or a grain of mustard-seed; smaller than a grain of millet, or
even than a husked grain of millet.

     "This my spirit within my heart is greater than the earth, greater than
the sky, greater than the heavens, greater than all worlds.

     "The all-working, all-wishing, all-smelling, all-tasting one, that
embraceth the universe, that is silent, untroubled - that is my spirit within
my heart; that is Brahman.  Thereunto, when I go hence, shall I attain.  Who
knoweth this, he, in sooth, hath no more doubts.

     "Thus spake Candilya, Candilya." ^1

[Footnote 1: Translated by C.R. Lanman.]

     "The Brahman, the power which presents itself to us embodied in all
beings, which brings into existence all worlds, supports and maintains them,
and again reabsorbs them into itself, this eternal, infinite, divine power, is
identical with the Atman, with what, after stripping off all that is external,
we find in ourselves as our inmost and true being, our real self, the soul."
^2 For this identity of Brahman and Atman the pregnant formula is found in the
"great word," tat tvam asi, "That art Thou." ^3

[Footnote 2: Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, I, 2 (1899), 37.]

[Footnote 3: Chandogya-Upanishad, VI, 8, 7 f.]

     Men had long thought of the highest blessedness as an endless life
hereafter in the abode and company of the gods.  For this external conception
of blessedness the Upanishads substitute oneness with God in the fullest
meaning of the word, not a union to be realised after death, but a present and
eternal reality.  This is the new doctrine of salvation which makes an epoch
in the history of philosophy and religion in India.

     In its purest form the "identity of Brahman-Atman," to use their own
phrase for it, is consistent idealistic monism.  But the innate realism of the
human mind, the necessity of clothing abstract thought in figurative or
traditional language, the difficulty of the cosmical problem from this
standpoint, and the inheritance of earlier speculations upon it, combine to
give to the enunciation of the teaching in many passages either a theistic or
a pantheistic turn which in the later Upanishads, under the influence of the
rising religious movement of Hinduism, predominates.  This development, as
well as the systematisation of the Upanishad philosophy in the Vedanta school,
will engage us later.

     In the Upanishads appears for the first time the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls, which thenceforward fills so great a place in the
religions of India.  Belief in the re-embodiment of human souls in men or
animals is wide-spread among savages, and was doubtless nothing new in India.
What is characteristic in the Upanishads is that man's character and lot in
this life is determined by his deeds in a former existence, and that what he
now does in like manner determines what he shall be in a future existence.  An
inquirer asks Yajnavalkya, When after death a man's bodily organism is
dissolved into the elements, what becomes of the man? "Take me by the hand, my
dear Artabhaga; we must talk about this by ourselves, not here in the
assembly.  So they went out and conversed with each other, and what they spoke
of was works, and what they praised was works.  Verily by good works a man
becomes good, evil by evil." The meaning is clear in another utterance of
Yajnavalkya: "According as a man acts and behaves, so he is born; he who does
good is born as a good man, he who does evil is born as a bad man; by holy
works he becomes holy, wicked by wicked. Therefore, it is said: Man is wholly
made up of desire; as his desire is so is his insight; as his insight, so are
his deeds (karman); according to his deeds so is his destiny."

     The predetermination of character and destiny appears in these passages
as an esoteric teaching, a mystery not to be discussed in public. It is
improbable that the origin of the popular belief is to be traced to these
philosophical circles.  The emphasis in the vulgar doctrine of transmigration
is not on the moral predisposition that a man inherits from his own character
in a former existence, but on a retribution in kind which his deeds have
incurred, a species of automatic talio, by which, for example, a greedy man
may return as a pig, and the like.  The caste, sex, condition, and fortune of
every man is determined by his former deeds under an inexorable law of cause
and effect.  Speaking anthropomorphically, we may call this sequence
retributive; in reality it is not reward or punishment dealt out by divine
justice, but the inflexible causal nexus of the universe itself; yet the
quality in men's deeds which prescribes their issues is fundamentally moral.

     The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is harmonised with the older
belief in heaven and hell by making heaven and hell only temporary states of
retribution between successive embodiments of the soul; this combination is
found in the Upanishads, in the lesson of the Five Fires, ^1 just as the
corresponding conceptions are combined by Plato in the tenth book of the
Republic.

[Footnote 1: Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, VI, 2; Chandogya-Upanishad, V, 3-10.]

     The prevalence of this belief in an endless series of lives upon each one
of which man entered laden with the deeds of his previous life gave to the
problem of salvation in India a new meaning and a new urgency: How can man
escape this eternally revolving wheel of birth and death?  Men seek in
philosophy a saving knowledge; they demand of religion henceforth, not that it
shall satisfy them with life, but that it shall save them from endless lives.

     The Upanishads have the secret of salvation in the oneness of
Brahman-Atman.  For him who has attained this knowledge the illusion of
separate individuality is dissolved with all its consequences.  He is free
from all desire - what can he wish who is all? - his former deeds are consumed
like rushes in the fire; deeds done after the achievement of knowledge adhere
to him no more than water to the lotos-leaf.

     "He who is without desire, free from desire, his desire attained, whose
desire is set on Self (Atman), his vital breath does not pass out, but Brahman
is he, and in Brahman is he absorbed.  As the verse says:

     "When all the passion is at rest
     That lurks within the heart of man,
     Then is the mortal no more mortal,
     But here and now attaineth Brahman.'

As a serpent's skin, dead and cast off, lies on an ant-hill, so lies this body
then; but the bodiless, the immortal, the life is pure Brahman, is pure
light." ^1

[Footnote 1: Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, IV, 4, 6.]

     The idealistic monism of the Upanishads is not the only solution of the
problem of the universe which Indian thinkers propounded in those centuries.
Both Jainism and Buddhism are indebted to a philosophy which, at variance with
the Upanishads, maintained the objective reality of the phenomenal world,
ascribing to forces inherent in the primary substance underlying this world
not only the eternal flux of nature but our own thoughts and feelings, and, on
the other hand, by definition excluded the soul, or ego, from this sphere of
changeful activity.  Such a philosophy is known to us later in the Sankhya
system, and there is good reason to believe that its fundamental doctrines
antedate the rise of the great heresies.

     The system is dualistic.  On the one side is the primary substance,
Prakriti, eternally active and productive, the source and seat of all change;
and, on the other side, a vast number of individual souls (Purusha), simple,
eternal, unchangeable.  Each of these souls, so long as it has not attained
deliverance, is enswathed in a subtle body, which in turn produces in each
successive existence the coarse material body.  This bondage, and with it all
the misery of existence, is the consequence of a rooted error by which the
soul imagines itself to be affected by the changes in the Prakriti; it is
broken for ever when man becomes aware that the soul is but a passive
spectator of the play in which it deemed itself actor and sufferer - the
saving knowledge is the knowledge, not of identity, as in the Vedanta, but of
absolute diversity.

     This system is atheistic: the popular gods are only souls, like others,
which in the round of rebirths are for the time being in the Deva state; for a
supreme god (Icvara, lord) the system has no use nor place. The evolution and
involution of worlds is caused by the disturbance or re-establishment of
equilibrium among the three constituents, or components, of the primary
substance.  The conception of existence is much more pessimistic than in the
Upanishads.  Life is nothing but pain and sorrow, and endless other lives will
be the same.  In consequence, this philosophy is more conscious of its mission
to save men from the eternal misery of existence, and impresses on those who
have found the great salvation to bring others into the way.

     The attainment of union with the Brahman or the severance of the true
self from all that is not self was sought, not alone by profound reflection,
crowned in a supreme moment by intuitive certainty, but by the use of various
means believed to conduce to the desired end or to produce states favourable
to its achievement.  Among these means ascetic self-mortification has a large
place.  It is a common belief that privations and inflictions which produce
abnormal psychical states bring supernatural knowledge and supernatural
powers; they have been employed in many higher religions for the attainment of
an ecstatic experience the character of which is predetermined by expectation.
Ascetism has had another significance where pessimistic conceptions of life
have obtained. If existence is itself an evil, then the extinction of desire,
which is the bond of attachment to existence, is the logical remedy.  This is
peculiarly true where desire (the will to be) is the cause of rebirth, or
where desire as the motive of action is the ultimate cause of the burden of
deeds which man carries from one life to another.

     There are other methods of inducing trance states, of which sitting
immobile in certain postures, the management of breathing, and certain
exercises for the suspension of sensation and the suppression of mental
activity are the most important.  At a later time these methods are
systematised in the Yoga, but in essentials the method is very old; it had a
place in Buddhism from the beginning.