The Religion of Vedanta

If it were asked by [anyone] what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and essentially, we might answer in one word, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other races, we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have done, thought and said through these thousands of years of [our] race-history, behind all we are and seek to be, there lies concealed, the fount of our philosophies, the bedrock of our religions, the kernel of our thought, the explanation of our ethics and society, the summary of our civilisation, the rivet of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that this great source has given of its life-giving waters. Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism, through Christ and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonial, through Greek and German philosophy, through Sanscrit learning and

Page-180

The Philosophy of the Upanishads

I

PREFATORY

The philosophy of the Upanishads is the basis of all In[dian] religion and morals and to a considerable extent of H[indu] [?polity], legislation and society. Its practical importance to [our] race is therefore immense. But it has also profoundly [affected] the thought of the West in many of the most critical stages of [its] development; at first through Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers, then through Buddhism working into Essene, Gnostic and Roman Christianity and once again in our own times through German metaphysics, Theo-sophy, and a hundred strange and irregular channels. One can open few books now at all in the latest stream of thought without seeing the old Vedantism busy at its work of moulding and broadening the European mind, sometimes by direct and conscious impact as a force, more often by an unacknowledged and impalpable pressure as an atmosphere. This potent influence [in] modern times of a way of thinking many thousands of years old, is due to [a] singular parallelism between the fundamental positions arrived [at by] ancient Vedantism and modern Science. Science in its [researches] amid matter has stumbled on the basal fact of the [Unity] of all things; the Unity of all things is the rock on which the Upanishads have been built. Evolution has been discovered and [?analyzed] by Science; Evolution of a kind is implied at every turn [by] the Vedanta. Vedantism like Science[, but] after its own fashion, [is] severely conscientious in its logical processes and rigorously experimental; [Vedantism] has mastered physical and psychical laws which Science [is] now beginning to handle.

But the parallelism is no more than a parallelism[, there is] no real point of contact; for the Hindu or Southern Asiatic mind differs fundamentally in its processes from either [the] Teutonic or the Mediterranean. The former is diffuse and com[prehen]sive; the latter compact and precise. The Asiatic acquires a [...] and truer view of things in their totality, the European a more accurate and practically serviceable conception of their parts. [The] European seizes on an aspect and takes it for the whole; he is [a] fanatic of single ideas and the preacher

Page-181

of the finite: the Asi[atic] passes at once to the whole and slurs rapidly over the aspects; [he is] eclectic, inveterately flexible and large-minded, the priest of [the Infinite.] The European is an analytical reasoner proceeding from obs[ervations;] the Asiatic a synthetic diviner, leaping to intuitions. Even [when] both analyze, the European prefers to dissect his observation[s, the] Asiatic to distinguish his experiences: or when both [reason, the] European generalises and classifies what he has [observed,] the Asiatic masses into broad single truths what he [has seen] within. The one deals as a master with facts, but halts over [ideas and] having mastered an idea works round it in a circle; the other [masters ideas] unerringly [. . .] but stumbles among fact and applications. The mind of the European is an Iliad or an Odyssey, fighting rudely but heroically forward, or, full of a rich curiosity, wandering as an accurate and vigorous observer in landlocked seas of thought; the mind of the Asiatic is a Ramayan or a Mahabharat, a gleaming infinity of splendid and inspiring imaginations and idealisms or else an universe of wide moral aspiration and ever varying and newly-grouped masses of thought. The mind of the Westerner is a Mediterranean full of small and fertile islands, studded with ports to which the owner, a pr[ivate] merchant, eagerly flees with his merchandise after a little dashing among the billows, and eagerly he [dis]embarks and kisses his dear mother earth; the mind of the Eastern man is an Ocean, and its voyager an adventurer and discoverer, a Columbus sailing for months over an illimitable Ocean out of reach of land, and his ports of visit are few and far between, nor does he carry in his bottoms much merchandize you can traffick in; yet he opens for the trader new horizons, new worlds with new markets. By his intuitions and divinations he helps to widen the circles the European is always obstinately tracing. The European is essentially scientific, artistic and commercial; the Asiatic is essentially a moralist, pietist and philosopher. Of course the distinction is not rigid or absolute; there is much that is Asiatic in numbers of Europeans, and in particular races, notably the South Germans, the Celt and the Slav; there is much that is European in numbers of Asiatics, and in particular nations, notably the Arabs and the Japanese. But the fundamental divergence in speculative habits is ver,y noticeable, for in the things of the mind the South imposes its law on the whole Continent.

We shall therefore expect to find, as we do find, that Vedantic

Page-182

Evolution and Monism are very different things from Evolution and Monism as European Science understands them. European thought seizes on Evolution as manifested in the outward facts of our little earth and follows it into its details with marvellous minuteness, accuracy and care. The Vedanta slurs over this part of the scheme with a brief acknowledgement, but divines the whole course of Evolution in the Universe and lays down with confident insight its larger aspects in the inward facts of the soul. In its Monism also Vedanta is far more profound and searching than the European scientific observer, for while the latter is aware only of this gross material world and resolves everything into the monism of gross Matter, the Vedanta, which is perfectly aware that gross matter can all be resolved into a single principle, does not pause at this discovery; it has pursued its investigations into two other worlds which surround & interpenetrate ours like two concentric but larger circles, the psychic or dream world of subtle Matter and the spiritual or sleep world of causal Matter, each with its own monistic unity; these three parallel monisms it resolves into a Supreme, Absolute and Transcendent Unity which is alone real and eternal. To the Indian consciousness at least these are no mere speculations; they are conclusions based on the actual experiences and observations of investigators who had themselves entered into these inner and yet wider worlds. The good faith of their observations cannot seriously be doubted and their accuracy can only be impugned when Science itself consents to explore the same fields of being whether by the methods hitherto practised in the East or by any other adequate means of its own invention.

We need not expect in the Upanishads a full statement of the facts on which its more grandiose statements of religious and philosophic truth are built, nor should we hope to find in them complete or reasoned treatises marshalling in a comprehensive and orderly manner the whole scheme of Vedantic philosophy. That is seldom the way in which the true Asiatic goes to work. He is a poet and a divine in the real sense of the word. His peculiar faculty is apparent in the very form of his philosophic books. The Aphorisms, that peculiarly Indian instrument of thought, by which our philosophers later on packed tons of speculation into an inch of space, give only the fundamental illuminations on which their philosophy depends. The Exegeses (Karikas) of Gaudapada and others are often a connected and logical array of concise and pregnant thoughts each carrying its burden of

Page-183

endless suggestion, each starting its own reverberating echo of wider and wider thought; but they are not comprehensive treatises. Nor can such a term be applied to the Commentaries (Bhashyas) of Shankara, Ramanuja and other powerful and original minds; they are, rather, forceful excursions into terse and strenuous logic, basing, strengthening, building up, adding a wing here and a story there to the cunning and multiform, yet harmonic structure of Indian thought. Nowhere will you find an exhaustive and systematic statement of a whole philosophy interpreting every part of the universe in the terms of a single line of thought. This habit of suggestiveness & reserve in thought leaves the old philosophies still as inspiring and full of intention and potential development as when the glowing divinations and massive spiritual experiences stored in the Upanishads were first annealed & hammered into philosophic form. It is the reason of the Vedanta's surprising vitality, of the extent to which it enters and the potency with which it governs Indian life, in a way that no European philosophy except recently the Evolutionary has entered into or governed the life of the West. The European metaphysician has something in him of the pedagogue, something indeed of the mechanic, at least of the geometrician; his philosophies are masterpieces of consistent logic, admirable constructions of a rigid symmetry. But their very perfection militates against the vitality of the truth they set forth; for Life is not built on the lines of consistent logic, Nature does not proceed on the principle of a rigid symmetry: even where she seems most formal she loves to assert herself in even the slightest, just perceptible, perhaps hardly perceptible deflection from a strict correspondence. Nothing indeed can live permanently which has not in itself the potentiality of an unending Evolution; nothing — nothing finite at least — is completely true which is not incomplete. The moment a poem or work of art becomes incapable of fresh interpretation, or a philosophy of fruitful expansion or a species of change & variety, it ceases from that moment to be essential to existence and is therefore doomed, sooner or later, to extinction. The logical intellect may rebel against this law and insist passionately on finality in truth,* but it rebels vainly; for this is the law of all life and all truth.

* Observe for instance the phenomenon of Theosophy. The Western intellect seizes upon the profound researches of the East into the things behind the veil, the things of the soul & spirit[,] researches admirably firm in the outline of their results but incomplete in detail — and lo and behold! everything is arranged, classified, manualized, vulgarized, all gaps filled in, finality insisted on and the infinite future with its infinite possibilities and uncertainties audaciously barred out of its heritage.

Page-184

This is the secret of the Upanishads and their undying fruitfulness. They are, to begin with, inspired poems,—not less so when they are couched in prose form than when they are poured into solemn and far-sounding verse, — grand and rhythmic intuitions where the speakers seem to be conveyors only of informing ideas cast out from a full and complete vision in the eternal guardian Mind of the race. The style in which they are couched is wonderfully grave, penetrating and mighty, suffused with strange light as if from another world, its rhythms unequalled for fathomless depth of sound and the rolling sea of solemn echoes they leave behind them. Here only in literature have philosophy and poetry at their highest met together and mingled their beings in the unison of a perfect love and understanding. For the Upanishads stand, as poetry, with the greatest productions of creative force and harmonic beauty. As philosophy, they have borne the weight of three millenniums of thought and may well suffice for an equal period of future speculation. But exhaustive and balanced exposition is not to be expected; you must piece together their glowing jewels of thought if you would arrive at the forced symmetry of a system; and perhaps to the end of the world different minds will construct from them a different mosaic. To the systematic intellect this inevitably detracts from their philosophic value, but to the Indian mind, flexible, illimitable, unwilling to recognize any finality in philosophy or religion, it enhances their claim to reverence as Scriptures for the whole world and for all time to come.

Page-185