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"THE LIFE DIVINE"
A
COMMENTARY ON THE ISHA UPANISHAD
Foreword
VEDA
and Vedanta are the inexhaustible fountains of Indian spirituality. With
knowledge or without knowledge every creed in India, each school of philosophy,
out- burst 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 and Vaishnavism,
orthodoxy or heresy are merely so many imperfect understandings of Vedic truth
or misunderstandings of each other; they are eager half- illuminated attempts to
bring some ray of that great calm and perfect light into our lives and make of
the stray beam an illumination on our path or a finger laid on the secret and
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 by- path in their universal kingdom. These compositions of un- known antiquity are as the many breasts of the Eternal
Mother of Knowledge from which our succeeding ages have been fed and 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 in ancient terms, misleads most where it seems most easy and
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 a gross
misunderstanding of them. The old knowledge in the Vedas is to us, therefore, as
a mere wandering in a dark cavern 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 and
difficult mountain reaches and we only have it for our use at favourable points
where the forest
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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 besides and boast that theirs is the way and 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
and 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 and 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 and expression than such writings as the
Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka which contain
in their symbolic expressions, -
to us obscure and meaning- less,
disparaged by many as violently bizarre in idea and language and absurd in
substance, - more of the detail of old Vedic, Knowledge. The diction of the
Upanishad is for the most part plain and easy, the ideas expressed in it when
not wrested from their proper sense seem to be profound, yet lucid and straight-
forward. 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 thought has resulted
for us in a failure to grasp the rear and complete sense of the whole Upanishad.
We understand, more or less clearly, the separate sense of the different Slokas
but their true connection and 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 argu-
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ments 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 and perfectly stated by inspired expression in itself, in
relation to the others and in its place in the whole. Not only every Sloka but
every word in each Sloka has been perfectly chosen and perfectly placed. There
is a consummate harmony in the rhythm of the thought as well as in the rhythm of
the language and the verse. The result is a whole system of knowledge and
spiritual experience stated with the utmost brevity, with an epic massiveness
and 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 and the skill of a consummate architect of thought and
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. For the Isha at least does not support the Mayavada as is indeed evident
from the struggle and stress of difficulty in Shankara's own commentary which
reduces its fine thought and admirable expression to incoherence and slipshod
clumsiness. The error, however lofty, must be removed in order that the plain
and simple Truth may reveal itself. It is a system which still attracts the
abstract intellectuality in me and represents to me what I may call an
intervening and mediary truth which can never lose its validity. But when it
seeks to govern human thought and life, to perpetuate itself on the sole truth
of Vedanta, I feel that it is in conflict with the old Vedanta, stultifies the
Upanishad and endangers 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 subjective criticism of it in these commentaries. But that is not
possible. For it has so possessed men'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.
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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 and quarries for
the building of metaphysical systems. I hold them to have been arrived at by
revelation and spiritual experience, to be records of things seen, heard and
felt, dŗşţa, śruta, upalabdha, in the soul and to
stand for their truth not on logic which they transcend but on vision to which
they aspire. These supra-intellectual faculties by which they received the Veda
and developed its implications, dŗşţi, śruti and smŗti,
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.
In following this 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 Upanishad in the spirit of the
scholar, - not the pride of the Pandit dealing with words as he chooses, but the
humility of 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 and simple
meaning of the words has been therefore the first rule of my exegesis. Vidya and
Avidya are plain words with a well-ascertained sense; I cannot turn aside from
it to interpret them as knowledge of the gods and ignorance. Sambhūti,
asambhūti, vināśa are words with fixed
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meanings;
my interpretation must arise directly and simply from these meanings. The rhythm
and metre of the Upanishads, the balance of the sentences demand their place in
the interpretation; for chandas is of primary importance in all Veda; I
must not disturb that rhythm, metre and balance in order to get over a
philosophical difficulty. The anuụţup, of the Isha, for
instance, is Vedic in its form and principle and not classical; it demands, that
is to say, a stanza of two couplets and admits of sandhi in the middle of
the pāda but not between two pādas: I must not take
advantage of a possibility of sandhi between two pādas admissible
only, in the classical anuşţup
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 with- out 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 and 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 Upanishads and with this Upanishad
more than any other as a master of the Sruti and 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 has enslaved
men's thoughts about the Sruti to his victorious intellectual polemic, the Sruti
itself preserves its inalienable freedom, rising into its secret heights of
knowledge and being superior to the clouds and lightnings of the intellect
awaiting and admitting only the tread of the spirit, opening itself only to
experience in the soul and 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 and loftiness Shankara has no equal; he is not so supreme in breadth
and
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flexibility of understanding. His was a spirit visited with some marvellous
intuitions and realisation, 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 the
highest and a most marvellous intellectual achievement; in the former he is
attempting to conquer for... enlist an exclusive authority of the Sruti. A
commentary on the Upanishad 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
and 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 as Madhva, the Dwaita
commentator, who does not hesitate to turn the famous tat
tvam asi into atat tvam asi, "Thou art not that, O
Swetaketu", he goes far enough and uses a fa~al masterfulness. The Isha
especially, it seems to me, is vitiated by the defects of his method because in
the Isha the clear and apparent meaning of the text conflicts most decisively
with some of his favourite tenets. The great passage on Vidya and Avidya,
Sambhuti and 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 made" 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
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and
fix for us our gate of entrance and 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
and succession of thought in the text must exist by deficiency of understanding
and 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 and connectedly and with a perfect grasp of their
subject; for my own haste, ignorance and immaturity of spiritual experience has
al- ways 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 and then waiting for still more light.
Insufficient data, haste of conclusions, wilful reading 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 and 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 in his soul, he will find
that then 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 and its pure faculty of know- ledge, 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 and one with it, we get
those experiences which illumine and 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 and know by the supreme method,
it
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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 and form and offer to him the
truth we have found in the Sruti and the error we have imported in it to do both
with the truth and the error whatever He wills in His infinite power, love and
wisdom for the purpose of His eternal and infinite Lila.
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