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The Secret of the Isha
IT
IS
now several thousands of years since men ceased to study
Veda and Upanishad for the sake of Veda or Upanishad. Ever since the human mind
in India, more and more intellectualised, always increasingly addicted to the
secondary process of knowledge by logic and intellectual rationalism,
increasingly drawn away from the true and primary processes of knowledge by
experience and direct perception, began to dislocate and dismember the
many-sided harmony of ancient Vedic truth and paved it out into schools of
thought, a system of metaphysics, its preoccupation has been rather with the
opinions of later Sutras and Bhashyas than with the early truth of Scripture.
The Veda and Vedanta ceased to be guides to knowledge and became merely mines
and quarries from which convenient texts might be extracted regardless of
context, to serve as weapons in the polemic disputes of metaphysicians. The
inconvenient texts were ignored or explained away by distortion of their sense
or by depreciation of their value. Those that neither helped nor hindered the
polemical purpose of the exegete were briefly paraphrased or often left in a
twilit obscurity. For the language of the Vedantic writers ceased to be
understood; their figures, symbols of thought, shades of expression became
antique and unintelligible. Hence passages which when once fathomed reveal a
depth of knowledge and delicacy of subtle thought almost miraculous in its
wealth and quality seem to the casual reader today is a mass of childish,
obscure and ignorant fancies characteristic of an unformed and immature
thinking. Rubbish and babblings of humanity's nonage, an eminent Western scholar
has termed them, not perceiving that it was not the text but his understanding
of it that was rubbish and the babblings of ignorance. Worst of all, the
spiritual and psychological experiences of the Vedantic seekers were largely
lost to India as the obscurations of the Iron Age grew upon her, as her
knowledge contracted, her virtues diminished and her old
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spiritual valiancy lost its daring and its nerve. Not
altogether lost indeed for its sides of knowledge and practice still lived in
cave and hermitage, its sides of feeling and sensation, narrowed by a more
exclusive and self-abandoned fervour, remained, quickened even in the throbbing
intensity of the Bhakti Marga and the violent inner joys of countless devotees.
But even here it remained dim and obscure, shorn of its fullness, dimmed in its
ancient and radiant purity. Yet we think we have understood and possess however
it may be half the Vedas. The Upanishads! we have understood a few principal
texts and even those imperfectly; but of the mass of the Upanishads we
understand less than we do of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and of the knowledge
these great writings hold enshrined we possess less than we do of the wisdom of
the ancient Egyptians. Dabhram evāpi tvam vettha brahmaṇo
rūpam!
I have said that the increasing intellectualisation of the
Indian mind has been responsible for this great national loss. Our forefathers
who discovered or received Vedic truth, did not arrive at it either by
intellectual speculation or by logical reasoning. They attained it by actual
and tangible experience in the spirit, — by spiritual and psychological
observation, as we may say, and what they thus experienced they understood by
the instrumentality of the intuitive reason. But a time came when men felt an
imperative need to give an account to themselves and to others of this supreme
and immemorial Vedic truth in the terms of logic, in the language of
intellectual ratiocination. For the maintenance of the intuitive reason as the
ordinary instrument of knowledge demands as its basis an iron moral and
intellectual discipline, a colossal disinterestedness of thinking, — otherwise
the imagination and the wishes pollute the purity of its action, replace,
dethrone it and wear flamboyantly its name and mask; Vedic knowledge begins to
be lost and the practice of life and symbol based upon it are soon replaced by
formalised action and unintelligent rite and ceremony. Without Tapasya there can
be no Veda. This was the course that the stream of thought followed among us
according to the sense of our Indian tradition. The capacity for Tapasya belongs
to the Golden Age of man's first virility; it fades as humanity ages and the
cycle takes its way
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towards the years that are of Iron, and with Tapasya, the
basis, divine knowledge, the superstructure, also collapses or dwindles. The
place of truth is there taken by superstition, by irrational error that takes
its stand upon the place where truth lies buried and builds its tawdry and
fantastic palace of pleasure upon lost, concealed and consecrated foundations
and even the ruins of old truth as stones for its irregular building. But such
an usurpation can never endure. For since the need of man's being is truth and
light, the divine law, whose chief aspect it is that no just demand of the soul
shall remain always unsatisfied, raises up Reason to clear away Superstition.
Reason arrives as the Angel of the Lord, armed with her sword of double denial
(for it is the nature of intellectual Reason that beyond truth of objective
appearance she cannot confidently and powerfully affirm anything but must always
remain with regard to fundamental truth agnostic and doubtful, her highest word
of affirmation "probably", her lowest "perhaps"), — comes and cuts away whatever
she can, often losing herself also in a fury of negation, denying superstition
indeed, but doubting and denying even Truth because it has been a foundation for
superstition or formed with some of its stones part of the building. But at any
rate she clears the field for sounder work; she makes tabula rasa
for a more correct writing. The ancient Indian mind felt instinctively
— I do not say it realised or argued consciously —
the necessity, as the one way to avoid such a reign of negation; the necessity
of stating to the intellectual reason so much of Vedic truth as could still be
grasped and justify it logically. The Six Darshanas were the result of this
mighty labour. Buddhism, the inevitable rush of negation came indeed but it was
prevented from destroying spirituality, as European negation destroyed it for a
time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the immense and unshakeable
hold the work of the philosophers had taken upon the Indian temperament, so firm
was this grasp that even the great Masters of negation — for Brihaspati who
affirmed matter was a child and weakling in denial compared with the Buddhists,
—could not wholly divest themselves of this
characteristic Indian realisation that subjective experience is the basis of
existence, the objective only an outward term of that existence.
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But admirable and necessary as was this vast work of
intellectual systemisation, subtle, self-grasped and successful beyond parallel,
supreme glory as it is now held and highest attainment of Indian mentality, it
had from the standpoint of Vedantic truth three capital disadvantages.
(Incomplete )
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