Professor Radhakrishnan's work on Indian Philosophy, the first volume of which has recently appeared, meets a want which has long been felt. The Western mind finds a difficulty in placing itself at what I may call the dominant standpoint of Indian thought, a difficulty which is the outcome of centuries of divergent tradition, and which therefore opposes a formidable obstacle to whatever attempt may be made by Western scholarship and criticism to interpret the speculative philosophy of India. If we of the West are to enter with some measure of sympathy and understanding into the ideas which dominate, and have long dominated, the Indian mind, India herself must expound them to us. Our interpreter must be an Indian critic who combines the acuteness and originality of the thinker with the learning and caution of the scholar, and who has also made such a study of Western thought and Western letters as will enable him to meet his readers on common ground. If, in addition to these qualifications, he can speak to us in a Western language, he will be the ideal exponent of that mysterious philosophy which is known to most of us more by hearsay than by actual acquaintance, and which, so far as we have any knowledge of it, alternately fascinates and repels us.
All these requirements are answered by Professor Radhakrishnan. A clear and deep thinker, an acute critic and an erudite scholar, he is admirably qualified for the task which he has set himself of expounding to a 'lay' audience the main movements of Indian thought. His knowledge of Western thought and letters makes it easy for him to get into touch with a Western audience; and for the latter purpose he has the further qualification, which he shares with other cultured Hindus, of being a master of the English language and an accomplished writer of English prose.
But the first volume of Indian Philosophy contains over 700 closely printed pages, and costs a guinea; and it is not every one, even of those who are interested in Indian thought, who can afford to devote so much time to serious study, while the price, though relatively most reasonable, is beyond the means of many readers. That being so, it is good to know that Professor Radhakrishnan and his publisher have decided to bring out the section on The Philosophy of the upaniShads as a separate volume and at a modest price.
For what is quintessential in Indian philosophy is its spiritual idealism; and the quintessence of its spiritual idealism is in the upaniShads. The thinkers of India in all ages have turned to the upaniShads as the fountain-head of India's speculative thought. 'They are the foundations,' says Professor Radhakrishnan, 'on which most of the later philosophies and religions of India rest. ... Later systems of philosophy display an almost pathetic anxiety to accommodate their doctrines to the views of the upaniShads, even if they cannot father them all on them. Every revival of idealism in India has traced its ancestry to the teaching of the upaniShads.' 'There is no important form of Hindu thought,' says an English exponent of Indian philosophy, 'heterodox Buddhism included, which is not rooted in the upaniShads.' [ Bloomfield: The Religion of the Veda ] It is to the upaniShads, then, that the Western student must turn for illumination, who wishes to form a true idea of the general trend of Indian thought, but has neither time nor inclination to make a close study of its various systems. And if he is to find the clue to the teaching of the upaniShads he cannot do better than study it under the guidance of Professor Radhakrishnan.
It is true that treatises on that philosophy have been written by Western scholars. But the Western mind, as has been already suggested, is as a rule debarred by the prejudices in which it has been cradled from entering with sympathetic insight into the ideas which belong to another world and another age. Not only does it tend to survey those ideas, and the problems in which they centre, from standpoints which are distinctively Western, but it sometimes goes so far as to assume that the Western is the only standpoint which is compatible with mental sanity. Can we wonder, then, that when it criticizes the speculative thought of Ancient India, its adverse judgment is apt to resolve itself into fundamental misunderstanding, and even its sympathy is sometimes misplaced ?
In Gough's Philosophy of the upaniShads we have a contemptuously hostile criticism of the ideas which dominate that philosophy, based on obstinate misunderstanding of the Indian point of view - misunderstanding so complete that our author makes nonsense of what he criticizes before he has begun to study it. In Duessen's work on the same subject - a work of close thought and profound learning which deservedly commands respect - we have a singular combination of enthusiastic appreciation with complete misunderstanding on at least one vital point. Speaking of the central conception of the upaniShads, that of the ideal identity of God and the soul, Gough says, 'this empty intellectual conception, void of spirituality, is the highest form that the Indian mind is capable of.' Comment on this jugement saugrenu is needless. Speaking of the same conception, Deussen says, 'it will be found to possess a significance reaching far beyond the upaniShads, their time and country; nay, we claim for it an inestimable value for the whole race of mankind ... one thing we may assert with confidence - whatever new and unwonted paths the philosophy of the future may strike out, this principle will remain permanently unshaken, and from it no deviation can take place.' This is high praise. But when our author goes on to argue that the universe is pure illusion, and claims that this is the fundamental view of the upaniShads, he shows, as Professor Radhakrishnan has fully demonstrated, that he has not grasped the true inwardness of the conception which he honours so highly.
With these examples of the aberration of Western criticism before us, we shall perhaps think it desirable to turn for instruction and guidance to the exposition of the upaniShads which Professor Radhakrishnan, an Indian thinker, scholar and critic, has given us. If we do so, we shall not be disappointed. As the inheritor of a great philosophical tradition, into which he was born rather than indoctrinated, Professor Radhakrishnan has an advantage over the Western student of Indian philosophy, which no weight of learning and no degree of metaphysical acumen can counterbalance, and of which he has made full use. His study of the upaniShads - if a Western reader may presume to say so - is worthy of its theme.
The upaniShads are the highest and purest expression of the speculative thought of India. They embody the meditations on great matters of a succession of seers who lived between 1000 and 300 B.C. In them, says Professor J. S. Mackenzie, 'we have the earliest attempt at a constructive theory of the cosmos, and certainly one of the most interesting and remarkable.'
What do the upaniShads teach us ? Its authors did not all think alike; but, taking their meditations as a whole, we may say that they are dominated by one paramount conception, that of the ideal oneness of the soul of man with the soul of the universe. The Sankrit word for the soul of man is Atman, for the soul of the universe brahman. 'God's dwelling place,' says Professor Radhakrishnan in his exposition of the philosophy of the upaniShads, 'is the heart of man. The inner immortal self and the great cosmic power are one and the same. brahman is the Atman, and the Atman is the brahman. The one supreme power through which all things have been brought into being is one with the inmost self in each man's heart.' What is real in each of us is his self or soul. What is real in the universe is its self or soul, in virtue of which its All is One, and the name for which in our language is God. And the individual soul is one, potentially and ideally, with the divine or universal soul. In the words of one of the upaniShads: 'He who is the brahman in man and who is that in the sun, these are one.'
The significance of this conception is more than metaphysical. There is a practical side to it which its exponents are apt to ignore. The unity of the all-pervading life, in and through its own essential spirituality - the unity of the trinity of God and Nature and Man - is, from man's point of view, an ideal to be realized rather than an accomplished fact. If this is so, if oneness with the real, the universal, the divine self, is the ideal end of man's being, it stands to reason that self-realization, the finding of the real self, is the highest task which man can set himself. In the upaniShads themselves the ethical implications of their central conception were not fully worked out. To do so, to elaborate the general ideal of self-realization into a comprehensive scheme of life, was the work of the great teacher whom we call Buddha.
This statement may seem to savour of paradox. In the West the idea is still prevalent that Buddha broke away completely from the spiritual idealism of the upaniShads, that he denied God, denied the soul, and held out to his followers the prospect of annihilation as the final reward of a righteous life. This singular misconception, which is not entirely confined to the West, is due to Buddha's agnostic silence having been mistaken for comprehensive denial. It is time that this mistake was corrected. It is only by affiliating the ethics of Buddhism to the metaphysics of the upaniShads that we can pass behind the silence of Buddha and get into touch with the philosophical ideas which ruled his mind, ideas which were not the less real or effective because he deliberately held them in reserve. This has long been my conviction; and now I am confirmed in it by finding that it is shared by Professor Radhakrishnan, who sets forth the relation of Buddhism to the philosophy of the upaniShads in the following words: 'The only metaphysics that can justify Buddha's ethical discipline is the metaphysics underlying the upaniShads. ... Buddhism helped to democratize the philosophy of the upaniShads, which was till then confined to a select few. The process demanded that the deep philosophical truths which cannot be made clear to the masses of men should for practical purposes be ignored. It was Buddha's mission to accept the idealism of the upaniShads at its best and make it available for the daily needs of mankind. Historical Buddhism means the spread of the upaniShad doctrines among the people. It thus helped to create a heritage which is living to the present day.'
Given that oneness with his own real self, which is also the soul of Nature and the spirit of God, union with the ultimate is the ideal end of man's being; the question arises: How is that end to be achieved ? In India, the land of psychological experiments, many ways to it were tried and are still being tried. There was the way of jnAna, or intense mental concentration. There was the way of bhakti, or passionate love and devotion. There was the way of yoga, or severe and systematic self-discipline. These ways and the like of these might be available for exceptionally gifted persons. They were not available, as Buddha saw clearly, for the rank and file of mankind. It was for the rank and file of mankind, it was for the plain average man, that Buddha devised his scheme of conduct. He saw that in one's everyday life, among one's fellow men, there were ample opportunities for the higher desires to assert themselves as higher, and for the lower desires to be placed under due control. There were ample opportunities, in other words, for the path of self-mastery and self-transcendence, the path of emancipation from the false self and of affirmation of the true self, to be followed from day to day, from year to year, and even - for Buddha, like the seers of the upaniShads, took the reality of re-birth for granted - from life to life. He who walked in that path had set his face towards the goal of his own perfection, and, in doing so, had, unknown to himself, accepted the philosophy of the upaniShads as the ruling principle of his life.
If this interpretation of the life-work of Buddha is correct, if it was his mission to make the dominant idea of the upaniShads available for the daily needs of ordinary men, it is impossible to assign limits to the influence which that philosophy has had and is capable of having in human affairs in general and in moral life of man in particular. The metaphysics of the upaniShads, when translated into the ethics of self-realization, provided and still provides for a spiritual need which has been felt in divers ages and which was never more urgent than it is to-day. For it is to-day, when supernatural religion is losing its hold on us, that the secret desire of the heart for the support and guidance which the religion of nature can alone afford, is making itself felt as it has never been felt before. And if the religion of nature is permanently to satisfy our deeper needs, it must take the form of devotion to the natural end of man's being, the end which the seers of the upaniShads discerned and set before us, the end of oneness with that divine or universal self which is at once the soul of all things and the true being of each individual man. In other words, it is as the gospel of spiritual evolution which Buddha, true to the spirit of the upaniShads, preached 2,500 years ago, [ It was the gospel of spiritual evolution which Christ preached in a later age, to a different audience and through the medium of other forms of thought. Such at least is my earnest conviction. Of the two pivotal sayings, 'I and my Father are one,' and 'Be ye perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,' the former falls into the spiritual idealism of the upaniShads, the latter into line with the ethical idealism of Buddha. The notation, as might be expected, is different: but the idea and the ideal are the same. ] and it is for a re-presentation of the same gospel, in the spirit of the same philosophy, that the world is waiting now.