Not being a scholar or a student of philosophy, I do not feel justified in writing a critical appreciation of a book dealing with the philosophy of the upaniShads. What I venture to do is to express my satisfaction at the fact that my friend, Professor Radhakrishnan, has undertaken to explain the spirit of the upaniShads to English readers.
It is not enough that one should know the meaning of the words and the grammar of the Sanskrit texts in order to realize the deeper significance of the utterances that have come to us across centuries of vast changes, both of the inner as well as the external conditions of life. Once the language in which those were written was living, and therefore the words contained in them had their full context in the life of the people of that period, who spoke them. Divested of that vital atmosphere, a large part of the language of these great texts offers to us merely its philosophical structure and not life's subtle gesture which can express through suggestion all that is ineffable.
Suggestion can neither have fixed rules of grammar nor the rigid definition of the lexicon so easily available to the scholar. Suggestion has its unanalysable code which finds its depth of definition in the living hearts of the people who use it. Code words philologically treated appear childish, and one must know that all those experiences which are not realized through the path of reason, but immediately through an inner vision, must use some kind of code word for their expression. All poetry is full of such words, and therefore poems of one language can never be properly translated into other languages, nay, not even re-spoken in the same language.
For an illustration let me refer to the stanza of Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', which ends with the following lines:-
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
All these words have their synonyms in our Bengali language. But if through their help I try to understand these lines or express the idea contained in them, the result would be contemptible. Should I suffer from a sense of race superiority in our own people, and have a low opinion of English literature, I could do nothing better to support my case than literally to translate or to paraphrase in our own tongue all the best poems written in English.
Unfortunately, the upaniShads have met with such treatment in some parts of the West, and the result is typified disastrously in a book like Gough's Philosophy of the upaniShads. My experience of philosophical writings being extremely meagre, I may be wrong when I say that this is the only philosophical discussion about the upaniShads in English, but, at any rate, the lack of sympathy and respect displayed in it for some of the most sacred words that have ever issued from the human mind, is amazing.
Though many of the symbolical expressions used in the upaniShads can hardly be understood to-day, or are sure to be wrongly interpreted, yet the messages contained in these, like some eternal source of light, still illumine and vitalize the religious minds of India. They are not associated with any particular religion, but they have the breadth of a universal soil that can supply with living sap all religions which have any spiritual ideal hidden at their core, or apparent in their fruit and foliage. Religions, which have their different standpoints, each claim them for their own support.
This has been possible because the upaniShads are based not upon theological reasoning, but on experience of spiritual life. And life is not dogmatic; in it opposing forces are reconciled - ideas of non-dualism and dualism, the infinite and the finite, do not exclude each other. Moreover the upaniShads do not represent the spiritual experience of any one great individual, but of a great age of enlightenment which has a complex and collective manifestation, like that of the starry world. Different creeds may find their sustenance from them, but can never set sectarian boundaries round them; generations of men in our country, no mere students of philosophy, but seekers of life's fulfilment, may make living use of the texts, but can never exhaust them of their freshness of meaning.
For such men the upaniShad-ideas are not wholly abstract, like those belonging to the region of pure logic. They are concrete, like all truths realized through life. The idea of brahma when judged from the view-point of intellect is an abstraction, but it is concretely real for those who have the direct vision to see it. Therefore the consciousness of the reality of brahma has boldly been described to be as real as the consciousness of an amlaka fruit held in one's palm. And the upaniShad says:-
yato vAco nivartante
aprApya manasA saha
Anandam brahmaNo vidvAn na
bibheti kadAcana
From Him come back baffled
both words and mind.
But he who realizes the joy of brahma is
free from fear.
Cannot the same thing be said about light itself to men who may by some mischance live all through their life in an underground world cut off from the sun's rays ? They must know that words can never describe to them what light is, and mind, through its reasoning faculty, can never even understand how one must have a direct vision to realize it intimately and be glad and free from fear.
We often hear the complaint that the brahma of the upaniShads is described to us mostly as a bundle of negations. Are we not driven to take the same course ourselves when a blind man asks for a description of light ? Have we not to say in such a case that light has neither sound, nor taste, nor form, nor weight, nor resistance, nor can it be known through any process of analysis ? Of course it can be seen; but what is the use of saying this to one who has no eyes ? He may take that statement on trust without understanding in the least what it means, or may altogether disbelieve it, even suspecting in us some abnormality.
Does the truth of the fact that a blind man has missed the perfect development of what should be normal about his eyesight depend for its proof upon the fact that a larger number of men are not blind ? The very first creature which suddenly groped into the possession of its eyesight had the right to assert that light was a reality. In the human world there may be very few who have their spiritual eyes open, but, in spite of the numerical preponderance of those who cannot see, their want of vision must not be cited as an evidence of the negation of light.
In the upaniShads we find the note of certainty about the spiritual meaning of existence. In the very paradoxical nature of the assertion that we can never know brahma, but can realize Him, there lies the strength of conviction that comes from personal experience. They aver that through our joy we know the reality that is infinite, for the test by which reality is apprehended is joy. Therefore in the upaniShads satyam and Anandam are one. Does not this idea harmonize with our everyday experience ?
The self of mine that limits my truth within myself confines me to a narrow idea of my own personality. When through some great experience I transcend this boundary I find joy. The negative fact of the vanishing of the fences of self has nothing in itself that is delightful. But my joy proves that the disappearance of self brings me into touch with a great positive truth whose nature is infinitude. My love makes me understand that I gain a great truth when I realize myself in others, and therefore I am glad. This has been thus expressed in the IsopaniShad:-
yas tu sarvANi
bhUtAni Atmany evAnupasyati
sarvabhUteShu cAtmAnaM tato
na vijugupsate
He who sees all creatures in
himself,
and himself in all creatures, no longer
remains concealed.
His Truth is revealed in him when it comprehends Truth in others. And we know that in such a case we are ready for the utmost self-sacrifice through abundance of love.
It has been said by some that the element of personality has altogether been ignored in the brahma of the upaniShads, and thus our own personality, according to them, finds no response in the Infinite Truth. But then, what is the meaning of the exclamation: 'vedAhametam puruSham mahAntam'. 'I have known him who is the Supreme Person'. Did not the sage who pronounced it at the same time proclaim that we are all amRhtasya putrAh, the sons of the Immortal ?
Elsewhere it has been declared: tam vedyam puruSham veda yathA ma vo mRhtyuh parivyathAh. Know him, the Person who only is to be known, so that death may not grieve thee. The meaning is obvious. We are afraid of death, because we are afraid of the absolute cessation of our personality. Therefore, if we realize the Person as the ultimate reality which we know in everything that we know, we find our own personality in the bosom of the eternal.
There are numerous verses in the upaniShads which speak of immortality. I quote one of these:-
eSha devo visvakarmA
mahAtmA
sadA janAnAm hRhdaye sanniviShThaH
hRhdA manIShA manasAbhikLhpto
ya etad vidur amRhtAs te bhavanti
This is the God who is the
world-worker, the supreme soul,
who always dwells in the heart of all men,
those who know him through their mind, and the
heart
that is full of the certainty of knowledge,
become immortal.
To realize with the heart and mind the divine being who dwells within us is to be assured of everlasting life. It is mahAtmA, the great reality of the inner being, which is visvakarmA, the world-worker, whose manifestation is in the outer work occupying all time and space.
Our own personality also consists of an inner truth which expresses itself in outer movements. When we realize, not merely through our intellect, but through our heart strong with the strength of its wisdom, that mahAtmA, the Infinite Person, dwells in the Person which is in me, we cross over the region of death. Death only concerns our limited self; when the Person in us is realized in the Supreme Person, then the limits of our self lose for us their finality.
The question necessarily arises, what is the significance of this self of ours ? Is it nothing but an absolute bondage for us ?
If in our language the sentences were merely for expressing grammatical rules, then the using of such a language would be a slavery to fruitless pedantry. But, because language has for its ultimate object the expression of ideas, our mind gains its freedom through it, and the bondage of grammar itself is a help towards this freedom.
If this world were ruled only by some law of forces, then it would certainly have hurt our mind at every step and there would be nothing that could give us joy for its own sake. But the upaniShad says that from Anandam, from an inner spirit of Bliss, have come out all things, and by it they are maintained. Therefore, in spite of contradictions, we have our joy in life, we have experiences that carry their final value for us.
It has been said that the Infinite Reality finds its revelation in Ananda-rUpam amRhtam, in the deathless form of joy. The supreme end of our personality also is to express itself in its creations. But works done through the compulsion of necessity, or some passion that blinds us and drags us on with its impetus, are fetters for our soul; they do not express the wealth of the infinite in us, but merely our want or our weakness.
Our soul has its Anandam, its consciousness of the infinite, which is blissful. This seeks its expression in limits which, when they assume the harmony of forms and the balance of movements, constantly indicate the limitless. Such expression is freedom, freedom from the barrier of obscurity. Such a medium of limits we have in our self which is our medium of expression. It is for us to develop this into Ananda-rUpam amRhtam, an embodiment of deathless joy, and only then the infinite in us can no longer remain obscured.
This self of ours can also be moulded to give expression to the personality of a business man, or a fighting man, or a working man, but in these it does not reveal our supreme reality, and therefore we remain shut up in a prison of our own construction. Self finds its Ananda-rUpam, which is its freedom in revelation, when it reveals a truth that transcends self, like a lamp revealing light which goes far beyond its material limits, proclaiming its kinship with the sun. When our self is illuminated with the light of love, then the negative aspect of its separateness with others loses its finality, and then our relationship with others is no longer that of competition and conflict, but of sympathy and co-operation.
I feel strongly that this, for us, is the teaching of the upaniShads, and that this teaching is very much needed in the present age for those who boast of the freedom enjoyed by their nations, using that freedom for building up a dark world of spiritual blindness, where the passions of greed and hatred are allowed to roam unchecked, having for their allies deceitful diplomacy and a widespread propaganda of falsehood, where the soul remains caged and the self battens upon the decaying flesh of its victims.