Читать книгу The Story of Oriental Philosophy - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 10

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“WE are but broken lights of Thee” may be taken as the central point of the philosophy of the Upanishads, which was to be developed by the great commentators. But what is the Eternal Unchanging Light, reflected as it were in broken light on the reflectors of man’s experience? We must question what that is before we can decide what man is. This necessity is the reason of the already quoted Indian philosopher’s reply to Socrates, when the greatest of the Greeks asserted that his philosophy consisted in inquiries about the life of man.

“No one can understand things human who does not first understand things divine.” That understanding is the object of the Upanishads.

In the ancient Vedic stories of the passing of the soul, standing before the Throne of Brahman after death it makes the solemn and unshrinking assertion:

“Thou art the Self, and what thou art that am I.” There is but One.

Brahman is a neuter noun, neuter because the conception transcends all ideas of sex. But in India then and now, as in Europe at the present time, lower flights of thought could circle about the image of a personal God or gods having the attributes of humanity on a vaster scale. Such a God was and is conceived as possessing form or forms. Of such a God can be asserted the human emotions of love, pity, anger, jealousy, vengeance, and many more. He is comprehensive even in the most tangled flights of the theologians, because humanity could read humanity into what it worshiped. In the bewildering mazes of the Trinity of the Athanasian creed, for instance, the Father is felt as a dominant Sovereign, the Son as Love which reconciles and softens power, the Holy Spirit as an inspiration and consolation in the immensities.

So it is and was in India for those for whom the Vedantic philosophy was too high. There the most famous of the personal gods are Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu, Three in One and One in Three. Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu the Maintainer, Shiva the Destroyer, expressing the inevitable process by which worlds are brought into being, are sustained, and finally pass through destruction to other forms. To humbler intellects each of these often expresses all they can contain of godhead, and each has his uses. None is or was condemned by those who could perceive higher or other aspects.

“Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever way I reach him, all men are struggling through the paths which lead to Me,” says a Hindu scripture; and this truth the Upanishads fully realize. But they assert that eventually the flash of true realization destroys all doubts or lesser loves, fuses the plurality of Godhead into the One, and restores man instantly to knowledge of the truth that he himself is divine and that outside the circumference of the Divine nothing at all can have any existence.

But they teach also that the Absolute can never be defined. It eternally escapes the reason. They assert that when any quality, action or intelligence is suggested in relation to the Infinite the truth-seer will shake his head and say, “Not so. Not so.” For the clouded and fettered divinity in man can never stretch to the comprehension of its source, excepting only in the state known in the West as that of the higher or cosmic consciousness. And those who have thus beheld can make no report when they return to the earthly plane, because earthly words cannot cover that perception. Thus St. Paul says:

“And I knew such a man, whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell; God knoweth;

“How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

And in the same spirit a sage, asked by King Vashkali to explain the nature of Brahman, was silent, and when the question was repeated answered: “By my silence I answer but you cannot understand it. This Brahman is Peace. Quiet.”

How did this great conception begin? Except to scholars does it matter very greatly how such an idea shaped itself in the growing consciousness of man? It is Brahman, the Absolute Reality which none can apprehend but those who know Brahman. In what spirit must such knowledge be approached? How is that which has hitherto only realized itself as a finite creature to draw near to the assurance that it is infinite, that it is a wave of the infinite ocean, only lifted for a moment by a wind of illusion into a belief in difference?

Here the Upanishads are very explicit.

Intellect fails before the conception of Reality partly because intellect concerns itself with the little thoughts, dogmas, and creeds which play about like bubbles upon the surface of thought. Intellect also is the finite creature of the working of the human brain. It is so to speak mechanical. It fails, as speech fails, in the presence of the Real. Both intellect and speech depend upon the Real, but they are in a different category. They cannot be adjusted to this work of unification. Their very essence is differentiation. It is not because of them or through them that we can say, “that art thou.” With the finite universe about us, speech and intellect can deal, but not with the Truth which lies behind it.

At this point it is interesting to notice how true is this statement even of the utmost flights of modern science today. Would not its highest exponents admit that, “Veil after veil will rise, but there must be Veil after veil behind”?

Never for one instant have they touched the Ultimate Cause and it is probable they never can, along the road of the physical sciences, and that the only hope is where the Upanishads place it (together with the mystics of all the faiths) in the developed consciousness of man. For the Upanishads declare that there is within man a quality which, because it is in itself Reality, enables him to conceive it. It is a something divinely simple that entirely transcends reason. It does not use the words “true” or “false,” “ignorance” and “knowledge.” These are words made for and used by reason, and they can cover the ground reason is capable of covering. But no more. A man perceives Reality and can only say, “It is. I am.”

The Upanishads precede the teaching of Christ on this point by stating that only by divesting oneself of the panoply of reason does intuition become possible.

“Let a Brahmin renounce learning and become as a child.”

“Not by learning is the Self attained, nor by genius nor much knowledge of books.”

“It is unknown to those who know and known to those who do not know.”

Afterwards divine philosophy may perhaps base its conception of the world and life on what is perceived, as we see in the lives and teachings of the Buddha and the Christ, but neither the one nor the other attained his perception by learning. St. Paul was a learned man in his way, but his experience of the state of perception never came by that channel. It came in the blinding flash of light outside Damascus, toward which inward processes of simplification had doubtless long been tending.

But it may be said: “This is religion. What about philosophy?” I answer again in the words of the Indian philosopher. “He who does not understand the Divine—what can he know of human life?”

This knowledge does not contradict the highest human reason. It expands it in hitherto unknown directions by superadding another form of vision. It will enable us to reconcile opposites in philosophy, and see at what point light and darkness, ignorance and knowledge, good and evil, meet and are transcended by something including them all—in an identity the unilluminated consciousness is incapable of perceiving, or of admitting when others perceive it.

The true percipient will behold with perfect tolerance the worship of the personal God whether as Allah, Shiva, or Yahve. He knows these beliefs are all relatively true. They are not the whole truth, but they represent different stages or inns on the road of percipience, where the soul of man may put up for a night, and refreshed resume its upward way. Certainly the intellectual faculty finds its appointed place in this Identity as everything else does; but it is not the gate—far otherwise. Better the loving follies of the simplest belief than the iron ethics of dogmatic intellectualism.

Life, more life! is the cry. The Upanishads thirst for what will give the whole of life a new meaning, lifting it into the universal and making each thought and action of a man of the same vital import to the universe as the sweep of the mightiest planet upon its orbit. And as the planet evolves into order and harmony from chaotic forces, so the soul of man evolves into harmony and unity through the psychic evolution of many lives.

Did then these mighty thinkers believe, as certain Buddhist sects were to teach later, that the world as the senses conceive it is only mirage to dissolve into mocking sand and nothingness? No.

What they perceived is that there is identity. Nothing stands alone. The thing seen is also the seer. Objective and subjective are one. And this final truth, on which the sciences depend as does philosophy, was realized in India before the Buddha, before Plato.

Deussen, the great German scholar, says, and his utterance is well worth reading:

“If we strip this thought of the various forms—figurative in the highest degree and not seldom extravagant—in which it appears in the Vedantic texts, and fix our attention on it solely in its philosophical simplicity as to the identity of the Divine and the soul, the self and the self, 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 of mankind.

“We cannot look into the future; we do not know what revelations and discoveries await the restlessly inquiring human spirit, but 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 no deviation can possibly take place from it.

“If ever a general solution is reached of the great riddle that presents itself to the philosopher in the nature of things, the further our knowledge extends, the key can be found only where the secret of nature lies open to us from within, that is to say in our innermost self. It was here that for the first time the original thinkers of the Upanishads found it to their immortal honor, when they recognized our self, our inmost individual being, as the self, the inmost being of universal nature and of all her appearances.”

This agrees with what I expressed above—that the advance of the sciences must in future rest not on the extended knowledge but the extended consciousness of man, and that this can be attained only by realization that man is himself one with the Inmost Being. The conceptions of all the gods are derived from instincts that lead to guesses at this Inmost Being, and it underlies all the phenomena which surround us. Therefore in the highest teaching of the Upanishads these appearances are not what has been called in Europe maya (wrongly attributing to that word the meaning of “illusion”) but they are appearances uncompleted by full knowledge on our parts; and they are therefore wrongly seen and reported—which is a very different matter. To quote the New Testament instance of newly restored sight: “I see men as trees, walking.”

From this point in the development of Vedantic thought it becomes most interesting to observe its contacts with the conceptions and inspired guesses of modern science, such as those of Einstein and of the mathematicians who are dimly conceiving a new spatial consciousness, where Riemann, Hinton, Oumoff, and Lobachevsky have laid a trail.

It is not my purpose here to enter into this but there are readers who will perceive the points, as they loom through the dark of the centuries separating Vedantic thought from our own day. That thought penetrated to the Inmost Being of nature, saw it as the dynamo of the universe and humanity as a part of the dynamo—not subject to it, except in so far as every part is subject to the whole, but changeless, deathless, eternal, dynamic as the Source itself. And this conception and the enormous conclusions to which it led the thinkers of India have not yet been grasped by the western world.

So they accepted Absolute Being, which functions on all planes, in every form of existence and is pure essence, bliss, beauty, wisdom, instantaneous and spontaneous and yet a Process. And having said this, thought fell lamed on the threshold of discovery, and they could only repeat, “Not so. Not so,” knowing that all attempt at expression travestied the inexpressible.

Great indeed were these thinkers. They became, though human enough, half deified in the belief of India because of the wisdom with which they faced the conclusions implied in the stupendous recognition of the true place of man in the universe.

It will be interesting to give here the life-story of Shankara, the greatest commentator and elucidator of the thought of the Upanishads. I feel that in reading such a story it is unwise to smile at certain incidents; for it is easy to laugh at what one does not understand, and we have not followed the way these men trod. We believe such things to be impossible, but have not fulfilled the conditions which make them possible. Western mystics certainly have allied statements, and our accepted Scriptures corroborate them in some important points. At all events India has studied the science of the soul by practice and experiment in ways we have never tried.

Shankara’s very date is uncertain, but scholars give their vote for his birth in a.d.788 and at that we may perhaps leave it.

He was a Brahmin of Malabar and went early to a Vedic school where he was imbued with the Vedantic knowledge of the Universal Self. In the Hindu account of his life he is credited with miraculous feats of scholarship as a child and of vision as a saint. It is told that at the age of two he learned to read, at three he studied the Puranas and understood many portions of them by intuition. Here may be recalled the early wisdom of the Christ. His mother had practiced many austerities before his birth to gain the gift of a son from the favor of the gods, and Shankara’s devotion to her was very great. His story must be considered as that of a great adept in Yoga, as a prophet destined to lead his people to truth, and as a most learned man, though according to his horoscope he was fated to die in boyhood.

At the age of seven he returned from the house of his teacher and not long after his mother was seized with a dangerous illness. It is told that she fainted from the heat and that the child, by his power of Yoga—which must have been intuitive rather than disciplined if he possessed it at that age—caused the river to rise and cool the burning heat from which she suffered.

The fame of the young saint and yogin went far and wide over India, even as such would and does today, though there are none now who can lay claim to the towering genius of Shankara.

Messages came from the King of Kerala, offering gold and elephants if he would shed the light of his presence upon the court, and not content with sending these messages by a minister he came himself to pay reverence and plead his desire for a son, hoping that the Yoga of Shankara might open the way to his heart’s longing. The king received instruction on the discipline to be followed; and I may note that a chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is devoted to this subject, and for that reason is left either in Sanskrit or Latin. It gives directions as to food ceremonials and recitation of mantras, and prescribes the ritual to be followed before and after the birth of the child. These secrets are never publicly taught, but are verbally conveyed from master to disciple.

About this time a great Rishi (sage) foretold that the wonder boy would die at the early age of thirty-two, and it was perhaps this knowledge that determined him to renounce home-life and become a wandering sannyasin, or holy man who embraces the life of ascetic contemplation. This is a part of the discipline of a yogin. His mother wept bitterly desiring that he should marry and beget a son before resigning the world for the life of quiet. It is told that a miracle was needed to defeat her yearning and that it was forthcoming, for as he bathed, a crocodile caught his foot, and when her son and the bystanders assured her that the crocodile would not let him go until she herself released him, she consented though with bitter grief. Shankara gave her into the care of relations, and promising to return if she ever needed him melted into the wandering millions of India.

And now begins the interesting part of his short life. Wandering with his begging bowl through towns and forests, by lonely hills and wide rivers, he came at last as though drawn by one desire to a cave in a hill, on the banks of the holy Narbada River, where a saint named Govinda Yati had fixed his hermitage. With him Shankara became a pupil and received instruction concerning the Universal Self, which is named IT or Brahman. It was given in four great sentences:

“Knowledge is Brahman. The soul is Brahman. Thou art That. I am Brahman.”

Here again he manifested a great Yoga. One day when his teacher was lost in the trance of the higher consciousness Shankara calmed a furious tempest of rain, thunder, and lightning; and his master, returning to earthly consciousness, was overjoyed, and bade him go instantly to the holy city of Benares and receive the divine benediction.

So the young Shankara set forth in the yellow garment of the sannyasin, his face illumined by the twin lights of peace and power, going toward the sacred city, which is the goal of the highest Hindu pilgrimage. There many strange events met him. There his beloved friend and pupil Padmapada came to his class—the friend for whom he reserved his deepest thoughts and teachings.

A strange story, not unfamiliar to western ears, is told of this friendship. Once Shankara, standing on the bank of the Ganges, called Padmapada to come to him from the opposite shore, and without fear Padmapada walked the shining surface, and wherever he set foot a lotus sprang from the depths, and from this grace came the name of Padmapada—or Lotus-Foot.

At Benares the young philosopher composed his masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of the world—his commentary on the Brahman Sutras—and not only this but his mighty commentary on the Upanishads and also on that Song of the Lord (the Bhagavad Gîta) which is known and loved even in the West.

It yet remains for western thinkers to gage the mind of Shankara though these commentaries have been brought before scholars by the devoted work of Max Müller, Radhakrishnan and others, including some distinguished Germans. His learning was vast, but it was informed by the spirit of the higher consciousness and the power of the yogin; and it is this combination which sets him apart even in India from the great scholar or the great yogin. It was said of him that in himself he combined all knowledge, all wisdom.

It was his habit to hold disputations and debates with learned men, and it was believed in India that one of the ancient and legendary sages, Vyasa, returned to life in the appearance of an ascetic Brahmin, to sift his learning by contradicting the propositions of his glorious commentary on the Brahman Sutras. But not even by unearthly wisdom could Shankara be conquered. Again like the young Christ in the Temple he answered and justified all, and for the prize of his victory received an addition of sixteen years to his life as ordained by his karma. This fulfilled the thirty-two years promised by the prophet.

Wandering on from Benares he came to the house of the learned Mandana Mishra, and there a hot argument took place between Shankara and his host, while the wife of Mandana Mishra stood by as umpire: a story which illustrates the higher position of women at the time. So wise was she that she was believed by many to be an incarnation of Saraswati, the Indian Athena. As she stood by, the fire kindled in her, and after the first debate was ended she invited him to dispute with her.

One may imagine the beautiful woman and the young scholar in stern debate; he, cold and calm; she, angry, baffled, casting about to find some rift in his shining armor. With a woman’s wit she found it and her sword flashed! What could the young ascetic know of the nature and spirit of earthly love? Not the spiritual love which is a part of Vedantic teaching—there he could foil her easily—but the love of man and woman.

She drove her question at him, and he was dumb. He could not answer. He begged a month in which to consider her question and left the house a beaten man for the first time in his life. A rather humorous dilemma!

Very anxiously he considered what to do? How could such a question be answered by a yogin in whom the sexual forces had been transformed into high and incomprehensible energies? How could his disciplined body, clean as a cup to hold the wine of the gods, be soiled by an earthly experience common to man and the lower planes of consciousness? Yet how could any sphere of knowledge be left unexperienced and unanswerable? Now comes a solution very strange to western thought, but a declared stage in the highest India Yoga.

As he wandered through the forest meditating the problem of Saraswati he beheld a king named Amaraka lying dead at the foot of a great tree, surrounded by mourners, men and women. Instantly the solution, the way, flashed upon the mind of Shankara.

It is believed to be within the power of the highly trained yogin to cast his spirit into the body of another, as we shall see in my chapter on the Yoga of Patanjali. Shankara knew that he could enter the corpse of Amaraka and so doing taste without wrong the experiences of a king. He committed his own empty shell to the charge of his pupils, and the corpse of Amaraka, enlightened and inspired by one of the greatest spirits that ever lived on earth, renewed its life to the joy of the mourners. They could not know. Their king had awakened from a death-like trance; but it was past, and this was all that concerned them. With song and shout they bore him back to the royal city.

It is told that the queen was bewildered by certain changes in the spirit and intellect of her husband. Yet the man was the same—who could doubt it? As a royal and loyal wife she met him, radiant with love and joy, and so on the highest earthly plane Shankara learned the lesson of earthly love—which is a stage also in the evolution of the soul. And he knew that he could answer the question of Saraswati. Not only so, but he wrote a treatise on that strange and fascinating subject which has been more studied in its delicacies and grossnesses in India than perhaps in any other country in the world.

But still the queen doubted, and the high ministers recognized the new greatness of the king. It is significant that an order was given, inspired by the queen, that every corpse to be found in the city should forthwith be burned to ashes and that the king should know nothing of this order. The heavenly bird they had caged for the glory and good of the kingdom must not be allowed to flit away again on his own ethereal errands. His body must be destroyed lest he should seize it and be gone.

Meanwhile his disciples, headed by the loyal Padmapada, longed for him. How could they live without him? Had he forgotten them in the queen’s arms? They set out to the city of King Amaraka in the guise of a group of singers who would perform before the king. Their petition was granted, and they were ushered into the hall hidden in gold garments and heavy head-dresses fringed and veiled with gold. And they sang of high things and noble until the courtiers were spellbound—believing the very music of the spheres was sounding in the palace. Had it become the dwelling of Indra, Lord of the Shining Ones? Were these the musicians who play for the rejoicing of the gods?

And the king heard, and the silver arrows found his heart. With great gifts and in silence he dismissed the musicians, and in doubt and dismay they retreated. But that night the sleep of King Amaraka deepened into the sleep that has no dawn, and that night Shankara opened his eyes among his rejoicing disciples—wiser, gladder than of old, as one to whom no page of human experience has been closed. And returning with his disciples he answered the question of Saraswati and went on his way.

It is told that a little later by the power of his yoga he knew that his beloved mother was dying, and traveling by that power as one who runs a race with death he came to her side. She implored him to share his light with her, and very patiently unbending to her ignorance he tried to instruct her in the great Brahman knowledge, over which death has no dominion. She could not understand more than that Love underlies Law. For her his experiences and knowledge were too high, but thus quieted and holding the hand of her son she entered the peace.

Then ensued a difficulty. Like the Greek gods the purity of the yogin or sannyasin must not be tarnished by contact with death. Yet in his great love for her he would not be shut out from the last observances, and confronted the angry disapproval of relatives and friends. Did he not know that he himself was a divine—a flaming fire in which all impurity could be burned up as her body would be? He raised his right hand, and a tongue of fire shot from it which consumed her body into ashes as it lay, and there was a great silence.

He passed from place to place doing deeds of power, debating, spreading the great Vedantic knowledge, composing treatise after treatise to make clear the revelations of the Upanishads. So at last he came to Kashmir and to a temple with four portals of which one, the southern, had never been opened. Could it have been that mysterious little temple of Pandranthan, which stands beyond the great curving bend of the Jhelam that has given the sweeping design for so many decorations? I have thought this should be, even when I knew it could not.

The priests would not suffer the entrance of the austere young scholar until they had examined him as to his life—in which indeed their scrutiny could find no flaw. But when he entered the temple, pacing quietly with downcast eyes, the voice of the goddess Saraswati was heard as a great cry.

“Omniscient you are. There is no knowledge which escapes you. But in this holy place more is required. The man who enters this sanctuary must never have lain in the arms of a woman. What then is your case?”

Shankara answered, still with downcast eyes:

“This body is pure. It has never lain in the arms of a woman. It is clean from brow to heel.” And he passed into the sanctuary.

A very little more toil was left to him, and he had then entered his thirty-second year which he knew limited the time allowed to him in this incarnation. Anandagiri relates the end:

“In the city of Kanchi, the place of absolution, as he was seated he absorbed his gross body into the subtle one and became Existence, then destroying this subtle one he became pure reason; then, attaining to the world of Ishvara [the personal God], with full happiness completed like a perfect circle, he passed on into the Intelligence which pervades the Universe, and in this he still exists. And the Brahmins of the place and his pupils and their pupils, reciting the Upanishads and the Song Celestial and the Brahman Sutras, then excavated a grave in a very clean place and making due offerings to his body raised a tomb.”

They buried him but did not burn him; for so pure is the body of a yogin that it needs no purifying flame.

I have told this story as it is told in India and not after the manner of western scholars, who cautiously confine themselves to an account of his young asceticism and scholarship. It can be taken on that plane, and there also it will mean much. Perhaps to some it may mean more. But I prefer to take it as it is told in the love and worship of his own land; surely the strangest story of a philosopher that ever was told in any. I have given it, though it dates so long after the Vedas and earlier Vedanta, because it undoubtedly gives the type of man to whom we owe them. The lives of those men can never be recovered, except in so far as they may or may not be the originals of some of the wonderful stories of the oldest Upanishads such as I have quoted and reluctantly left unquoted. But in Shankara we see their living likeness.

One should not end this chapter without some words of his own which may help to send students to his books:

“Owing to the appearance of a rope in the twilight it seems to be a serpent. In the same way the unhappy condition of the individual soul is imposed upon it by want of realization. When the illusion of the serpent is dispelled by the admonition of a friend only the familiar rope remains. So, by the admonition of my own Master I am no longer the individual soul but the Immutable Self that is the Seer. I am the Supreme Bliss. Such a man lives in bliss because his mind is freed from all contrasts (of happiness and misery, gain and loss, etc.), ever pure, devoid of my-ness and I-ness, always contented, steady in thought, imperturbable, cleansed of all illusions.”

His Century of Verses is a very beautiful little devotional book. His philosophy is an exercise for the highest intellect.