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$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter IV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{brahman
soul
knowledge
upanishads
world
life
vedanta
nor
itself
salvation}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of India
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter IV

The Philosophical Systems

     Relation to the Veda - The Vedanta - Idealistic Monism of Cankara -
Metaphysics: Brahman as the Absolute - Theology: Brahman as Personal God - The
Higher and the Lower Knowledge - The Theistic Vedanta of Ramanuja - The
Pluralistic Realism of the Sankhya - The Yoga - Its Practical Methods - Other
Orthodox Philosophies - Atheistic Materialism.

     In the centuries during which the great heresies were flourishing in
India, and partly in opposition to them, the Brahmanic philosophies were
systematised - the monistic conception of the Upanishads, as the Vedanta; the
dualistic view of the universe with which Jainism and Buddhism have closer
affinity, as the Sankhya.  The Brahma-Sutras of Badarayana as expounded by
Cankara in the eighth century of our era present the Vedanta in the form which
has been most widely accepted in India; the oldest extant text of the rival
system is the Sankhya-Karika.

     The Vedanta professes to be based, not on speculation but on revelation;
it is the teaching of the Veda, specifically of the Upanishads, to which it
refers as irrefragable authority.  The Upanishads, however, proceeding from
many individual thinkers or schools of thought, naturally contain numerous
inconsistencies, not to say contradictions. These inconsistencies were most
keenly felt at the vital point, the nature of the Brahman.  On the one hand
Brahman is, ontologically, absolute being; on the other hand, Brahman is
pantheistically conceived as the ground of being, the soul of the universe, or
theistically as a personal god, the supreme Lord.

     The metaphysics of the Vedanta develops the first of these conceptions,
the higher doctrine of the Upanishads.  Brahman is the sole reality, without
attributes, distinctions, or determinations; of it nothing more can be said
than neti, neti - it is not anything that you can say of it - pure being.
This one reality is not material but spiritual, it is absolute intelligence;
intelligence is not an attribute of Brahman, which would be irreconcilable
with its simple unity, but its essence.  Its unknowableness lies in the fact
that it is universal subject without object; and for the same reason
consciousness, which implies the duality of subject and object, cannot be
predicated of it.  The true self of man (atman) is identical with the
universal Brahman (paramatman, the supreme self) - "That art Thou!" The world
of appearance owes its seeming existence to illusion (maya), as when our
senses are deceived by the art of a conjurer.  The illusion is objectively
conceived; Brahman is the great magician who projects it.  Man's individual
consciousness is an illusion of the same kind.  The essence of the illusion is
man's failure to distinguish the true self from the faculties of mind and
sense, the principle of life, the subtle body, and the substratum of moral
character, which seem to make him a person distinct from other persons and
things, an individual ego.

     Yet although the phenomenal world and the empirical ego are in a
metaphysical sense non-existent, a kind of reality is allowed to them, as the
experiences of a dream are real experiences though no reality corresponds to
them; ^1 but when nescience (avidya) is overcome, the semblance of reality
vanishes as the dream-reality when one awakes.  So long as the state of
nescience subsists, the round of death and birth continues; the only salvation
is the knowledge that the phenomenal world and the individual soul have no
true existence, the knowledge of the identity of Brahman-Atman.  Therewith the
thrall of deed is free, the round of death and birth is ended - "it cometh not
again." He is "saved in this life" (jivanmukta); and when the residue of
former deed is exhausted, the substrata of existence are dissolved into the
elements, and the soul is finally and for ever Brahman.

[Footnote 1: Cankara distinguishes the unreality of our waking world from that
of dreams: the latter is not co-ordinated in time, space, and causality.]

     Salvation cannot be gained by the works of the law nor by the striving
for moral perfection; knowledge alone saves.  This knowledge is the opposite
of all empirical knowledge in that in it the distinction of subject and object
vanishes.  It is not a doctrine that can be taught and accepted, even on the
authority of scripture, nor can it be reached by any effort of thought.  It is
an experience that comes like the new birth in the Gospel of John to him that
is born of the Spirit.  There are, indeed, means which help put a man in the
frame to attain this knowledge, but it is not the effect of these means, for
the Atman is superior to the category of cause and effect.

     There are, however, as has already been observed, numerous passages in
the Upanishads in which Brahman appears, not as attributeless being, but as
the source of all light, the life from which all beings spring, the principle
of order in the universe, or as a personal god, the supreme Lord.  The latter
conception, relatively infrequent in the Upanishads, has a great place in the
systematic Vedanta.  Brahman is the creator of the world - its material as
well as its efficient cause - and the ruler of the world; the lot of the soul
in the round of rebirth is appointed by him in accordance with the deeds of a
former life; it is by his grace that the saving knowledge comes to men.  When
the Upanishads thus endow Brahman with various perfections, it is - so Cankara
interprets - as an object of adoration, and by way of accommodation to the
limitations of men's understanding. ^1 This lower knowledge of the Brahman
"with attributes" has its reward.  The soul that has attained it takes at
death the way of the gods to heavenly bliss, and progresses by stages toward
true knowledge and final deliverance; it is vastly better off than those who,
with no knowledge of Brahman at all, seek their good by the way of works, the
old Vedic sacrifices and observances, and fare when life is over by the "way
of the fathers" to the reward of their offerings in the moon; while those who
have neither knowledge nor good works atone for their misdeeds in hell, thence
to return to earth as beasts or as men of castes reckoned lower than beasts.

[Footnote 1: Cankara's distinction of the two Brahmans is more explicitly
anticipated in the Upanishads: "There are two manifestations of Brahman, the
one personal, the other impersonal; the personal is unreal, the impersonal is
real." (Maitri-Upanishad, VI, 3; cf. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, II, 3, 1.)]

     The lower, theological, knowledge cannot, however, bring salvation; for
at bottom it is not knowledge but ignorance which ascribes attributes and
personality to Brahman, and sets him, as creator and ruler, over against a
world of finite reality, and, above all, conceives him as another and a
stranger to the soul itself.

     A radically different system, also in the form of a commentary on the
Vedanta-Sutras of Badarayana, ^1 was expounded by Ramanuja (ca. 1100). The
author belonged to the Bhagavatas, or Pancaratras, an ancient - probably
pre-Buddhistic - sect which developed the pantheistic-theistic ideas in the
Upanishads into a philosophical theology.  In the evolution of Hinduism the
Bhagavatas identified their supreme lord with Vishnu, and contributed not a
little, it may be surmised, to the higher teachings of Vishnuism.  Ramanuja
rejects Cankara's distinctions of a higher and a lower Brahman and the
corresponding discrimination of higher and lower knowledge.  Brahman is the
one reality, but so far from being a metaphysical absolute, devoid of all
attributes, he is endowed with all perfections; intelligence is not his
essence, but his highest attribute. Brahman is all-embracing, all-pervading,
all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful, the opposite and the enemy of all
that is evil.  The external world of our experience and individual souls are
not the baseless fabric of a troubled dream, but constitute the body of the
Lord, of which he is the inner ruler.  The unity of Brahman is therefore not a
simplicity that excludes all distinctions, but a systematic unity which
embraces them all.  The passages in the Upanishads which seem to contradict
this view - the teachings on which the absolutist Vedanta of Cankara is based
- refer, according to Ramanuja, to the periods of world-involution, when
matter and souls subsist in Brahman in a germinal state; matter being
"unevolved," and without those qualities by which it is empirically known, and
the intelligence of disembodied souls being in a state of contraction, or
non-manifestation.  When this period, which we may call a resting-stage, is
over, the world is created again by the will of God; the "unevolved" matter
evolves and assumes the qualities with which we are familiar; the intelligence
of souls expands; they are united to material bodies according to their
deserts in former existences, and the round of death and birth begins again.

[Footnote 1: It is now generally admitted that Ramanuja is closer to the sense
of the sutras than Cankara.]

     From this endless cycle there is no deliverance by the works of the law;
but he who by the study of the Upanishads, by thinking on God and by love to
him, seeks the knowledge of Brahman is aided by the grace of the Lord to
attain it, and at death such a soul passes by the several stations on the way
of the gods to the world of Brahman, and there abides for ever in bliss,
sharing all the attributes of Brahman except only his cosmogonic functions.

     The dualistic philosophy was earlier systematised than the monistic
doctrine.  For a long time, it seems, regarded as heretical because of its
divergence from the main tendencies of Brahmanic thought, it was later counted
as one of the orthodox systems, which means that it gained currency among the
Brahmans and was fortified with proof-texts from the Upanishads; and not only
the epic but the law-books plainly show that in the early centuries of our era
it was widely accepted.  The essential features of the Sankhya system have
been briefly set forth above. ^1 It is a pluralistic realism, recognising on
the one side an eternal universal matter, on the other eternal individual
souls.

[Footnote 1: See p. 277.]

     The primary substance is a subtle matter, not perceptible by the keenest
sense; its existence is proved by the necessity of positing an ultimate
uncaused, or, more exactly, a producer that is not a product. This substance
is one, infinite, and eternal.  It is composed of three constituents, the
upsetting of whose equilibrium - occasioned by the proximity of souls, as iron
is drawn to a magnet without the magnet's doing anything to draw it - is the
cause of the evolution of worlds, and whose presence in varying proportion
gives their character to all things. The soul is eternal and unchangeable; it
is in its essence spiritual, pure intelligence; no attributes or qualities can
be ascribed to it; it is a kind of monad absolute.  Not only perception and
sensation, but all psychical processes and experiences, including the
self-consciousness which refers these phenomena to an ego, are not affections
or activities of the soul, but functions of a psychical mechanism, the origin
and construction of which are minutely described.  This mechanism, which
belongs wholly to the realm of the material (prakriti), is not an organ or
instrument of the soul, nor does it produce impressions on the soul; nor,
finally, is there a psycho-physical parallelism between the two.  The soul is
entirely unaffected by what thus goes on about it.

     In the "evolved," or actual, state of the universe the absolute soul is
always associated with a psychical mechanism, and with an ethereal body
composed of subtle material elements which in turn produce the common matter
of which bodies consist.  The source and substance of the misery of life, the
ground of the endless succession of rebirths, is that the soul confounds
itself, the true self, with the empirical self thus constituted, mistakenly
imagining that it is actor or sufferer in the tragedy of existence, as though
a crystal on which the image of a red hibiscus flower falls should deem that
it was itself red.  The salvation of the soul is the knowledge of itself as
metaphysical, not as empirical ego.  This dissociation makes an end at once of
suffering and of the doing which is the germ of future suffering: "It is not
I, it is not mine." When the residuum of deeds done in the time of ignorance
is exhausted, the gross body dissolves into the earthly elements; the ethereal
body, the psychical mechanism, the individuating principle which manifests
itself in self-consciousness, and the emanated intelligence, return into the
"unevolved" state of the primal substance out of which they sprang; and the
soul remains for ever the absolute monad soul it really is, subject without
object, pure spiritual intelligence without consciousness, as in the bliss of
an eternal dreamless sleep.

     This emancipation cannot be achieved by works; the Vedic offerings and
ceremonies have not even a paedagogic use, nor do they lead to a lower and
temporary blessedness in the heavens of the gods, as in the Vedanta; the whole
"work branch" of the Brahmanic religion is rejected.  Deeds of humanity and
charity do not further a man in the way of salvation; for deeds, good as well
as bad, must bear their appropriate fruit in another embodiment.  Only
philosophy conducts to the goal.  The guidance of a teacher who has attained
salvation in this life is of great use, but the knowledge itself is an
intuition, not a tradition nor a conclusion of reason.

     Whereas the Brahmanic Vedanta restricts salvation to the three high
castes, whose members alone can fulfil the condition of Veda study, the
Sankhya, like the great heresies, excludes no class or condition of men; the
Cudra can achieve emancipation as well as the Brahman.

     The system is highly intellectualistic; it undertakes to solve the
problem of life by purely rational means.  But it was far too profound and
abstruse for the ordinary mind, and many who accepted it in theory sought a
shorter and surer road to the saving intuition of the soul's true nature, and
found it in the teaching and practice of Yoga.  The name and thing are far
older than the philosophical systems; in the later Upanishads it appears as a
means of realising the unity of the soul with the universal soul, Brahman, and
the essential features of the Yoga method already appear in these texts; but
the systematised Yoga of Patanjali (second century B. C.) ^1 attaches itself
to the Sankhya, and accordingly presents itself as a means of realising the
isolation of the soul from all that is not self, the whole realm of material
reality.  It is an interesting evidence of the rising tide of Hindu theism
that the Yoga Sutras, while adopting the atheistic metaphysics of the Sankhya,
introduce, illogically and superfluously, an otiose personal god.  This god is
not employed to account for the origin of matter and souls, nor for their
association; he neither requites men's deeds nor delivers them from the
inexorable natural law of retribution; nor, finally, is salvation a return to
him and union with him; he is at most a paradigm of a blissful soul untouched
by the evils of ignorance, egoism, love, hate, and attachment to life, or by
deeds and their consequences.

[Footnote 1: If Patanjali be identified with the grammarian.  A recent critic
dates the Yoga Sutras in the fifth century A. D.]

     The essence of the Yoga, as defined in the sutras, is the suppression of
the intellectual functions (the psychical apparatus and all its operations
belonging, it will be remembered, to the sphere of the non-ego - Prakriti);
only so is the emancipation of the ego to be achieved.  The method has eight
stages.  The first two, the observance of five prohibitions and five
commandments, are not essentially different from the moral and ascetic
discipline of other Indian ways of salvation.  To these succeed the
cultivation of postures and the regulation of breathing - in later hand-books
of the Hatha-Yoga thirty-two salutary postures are enumerated and illustrated,
and breathing exercises practicable only in the mythical anatomy of the
Hindus.  The retraction of the senses follows, compared to a tortoise drawing
his head and limbs back into his shell.  So far the external stages.  The
higher discipline comprises the binding of the thoughts, concentrated
meditation, and absorption.  By the last a trance is meant, in which the
absolute isolation of the soul is realised. In short, the Yoga is an elaborate
method, partly physiological and partly psychological, of inducing abnormal
psychical states.

     In freeing himself completely from the natural world with its laws and
from the sphere of natural causation altogether, the Yogin becomes, logically,
a supernatural being endowed with all manner of occult powers which, because
they transcend the category of cause and effect, we call magical; these fruits
of his efforts are detailed at length in the sutras. Marvellous tales are told
of the performances of some of the practitioners of these arts.

     There are three other philosophical systems which are classed as orthodox
because they acknowledge the authority of the Vedas.  The Mimansa is related
to the works prescribed in the Veda, that is, the ritual and ceremonial
elements in it, as the Vedanta to the knowledge revealed in its philosophy,
and is largely occupied with a casuistic discussion of the fruits, or
benefits, accruing from observing the various rites and ceremonies.  The Nyaya
is essentially a system of logic and eristic; the Vaiceshika an atomistic
philosophy of nature.  In opposition to all these schools stood the Carvakas,
thoroughgoing materialists, who regarded the soul (intellect) as a mere
product of the combination of the four elements which constituted the body, as
intoxicating spirits are a product of fermentation.  There is, therefore, no
soul distinct from the animated body, which is the real ego; and when the body
is dissolved at death the soul ceases to be; there is nothing beyond this life
to hope or fear.  The Vedas are drivel, and dishonest drivel at that, the
Brahmans a brainless and unmanly lot, who make their living by preying on the
superstitions of their fellows.  The pleasure of the senses is the highest
good, the true end of human life, and the wise man will not let himself be
kept back from these pleasures by the fact that earthly pleasures are
accompanied by pain; the art of living consists in taking the pleasures and
leaving the pains; as, when a man eats, he rejects the scales and bones of
fish and the husks of rice - he does not give up eating because fish have
bones and rice has husks!

     The Carvakas have been called by other names indicative of their
opinions, such as Nastikas, that is, those who say (of the soul) na asti (non
est), and Lokayatas, those who do not look beyond this world.  Their views
were revived in more recent times by a sect who named themselves Cunyavadins,
or nihilists, their one comprehensive doctrine being, all is emptiness.
"Theism and atheism, Maya and Brahma, all is false, all is error." Heaven and
earth, sun and moon, the gods, religion, the teacher and his pupil, "the
individual and the species, the temple and the god, the observance of
ceremonial rites and the muttering of prayers, all is emptiness.  Speech,
hearing, and discussion are emptiness, and substance itself is no more."
Virtue and vice are equally unreal.  "Take during the few days of your life
what the world offers you.  Enjoy your own share, and give some of it to
others." Hindus and Moslems are two leaves of one tree; these call their
teachers Mollahs, those term them Pandits - two pitchers of one clay!