Читать книгу The Story of Oriental Philosophy - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 8

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WE now take up the beginning of the age of philosophy. The priestly caste to evolve strength later (as is the case with all priestly castes) to the hurt and danger of India was now firm in the saddle of its rights and powers. The Brahmin had become almost a living god. Yet it must be remembered that he was the repository of wisdom and holiness and that his dignity was real. He was custodian of all the people most valued, and they valued it with all their souls and strength. So far as we know there has never been a people in all the world’s history that in every class concerned itself so universally and profoundly with philosophy and the spiritual life.

They had now reached the stage where philosophy is seen to be latent in myth. This is the point at which the Upanishads developed from the Vedic hymns, and in them all the spiritual and intellectual life of India has its roots. The Upanishads are the end and logical development of the Vedas and are called the “Vedanta”—a name meaning the end or summing up of the Vedas. The word “upanishad” means “sitting near,” and thus suggests the moments of teaching when the pupils surrounded the Rishis or sages who taught them.

Are these Upanishads of more worth than the early sacred books of other nations? I am so certain that they are, knowing what I owe them, that I must buttress my conviction with a few of those of great thinkers and scholars of the principal European nations.

Max Müller quotes the German philosopher Schopenhauer as saying: “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life. It will be the solace of my death.” Max Müller himself adds:

“If these words of Schopenhauer’s require endorsement I shall willingly give it, as the result of my own experience during a long life devoted to the study of many philosophies and many religions. If philosophy is meant to be a preparation for a happy death, I know no better preparation for it than the Vedanta philosophy.”

Sir William Jones, the distinguished oriental and classical scholar, writes: “It is impossible to read the Vedanta or the many fine compositions in illustration of it without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same foundation with the sages of India.”

Victor Cousin, eminent philosophical historian of France, lecturing in Paris before a great audience of men said: “When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the Orient, above all, those of India, we discover there many a truth so profound and making such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which the European genius has sometimes halted that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.”

And to conclude with an august name, Schlegel, one of the greatest of German thinkers wrote: “Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason as set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant life and vigor of oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark against the full flood of sunlight. It is faltering, weak, and ever ready to be extinguished. What distinguishes the Vedanta from all other philosophies is that it is at once religion and philosophy. In India the two are inseparable.”

It will be owned that such books are worth study. Yet they need sifting for the average reader. There are many repetitions, necessary at a time when in the absence of books all knowledge had to be memorized. There are many Sanskrit words for which there are scarcely English equivalents, many primitive traces which have lost interest for the majority. These things must be pruned away before the great thought of the Upanishads can be presented to the West, but when this is done I think its majesty cannot fail to impress all to whom the mysteries of life and death are dear.

There are ten chief Upanishads. Their exact date cannot be given but the most widely held opinion assigns the earliest to a period from 800b.c. to 3000b.c. Certain of the most important follow after the life and teaching of the Buddha at about b.c.500. There is silence when the names of the authors of these early Upanishads are asked. They cared nothing for personal renown—so little that they permitted their wisdom to be attributed to deities and mythical sages. Biography therefore must come later. Yet certain names will always be remembered as associated with them—such sages as Yajna-valkya, such kings as Janaka. From the Upanishads spring all the ten philosophies of India.

Max Müller, Professor Radhakrishnan, and other scholars have divided the great philosophies of India into six systems. Behind them lies a vast reservoir of national philosophy springing from the sacred Vedic books, upon which all are founded and from which each thinker drew what he would, sometimes with variants so slight to a foreign mind as only to confuse issues. For popular understanding it is best to follow the main currents of thought, considering rather their essentials than their differences, though naturally this would not be the scholastic method. Our object is to obtain a clear and simple view of what has been described by those qualified to judge as the highest form of thought in the world—that of ancient India; and it may be truly said that this includes the diverging philosophies of modern India, except in so far as they have been swept into the vortex of modern western speculation.

In one respect it is easier to write of Hindu philosophy than of any other; in another, far more difficult. The great Indian philosophers had a commendable system, unknown to the Greeks, of summing up their conclusions in a series of short aphorisms known as Sutras, which he who ran might read. Easy enough so far. But he who ran must have acquired the habit of thinking in high regions of the mind, more rarefied than the atmosphere of the peak of the mountain we call Everest, and the Indians Gaurishankar. There lies the difficulty.

And there is another profound difference between Indian philosophers and such a thinker as Aristotle. They will not for one moment admit that the life of man and therefore his consciousness can be bounded by logical reason. Man’s consciousness of self is not to be the foot-rule of the universe. The animal is conscious but not conscious of self. The average man is conscious of self; but above him, as far as he stands above the animal, is the man who is superconscious, who perceives an order of the universe before which self-consciousness stands dumb and dazzled. This utmost reach of thought is the basis of the six divisions of the philosophy of India.

Let us begin with the essentials upon which the six systems are at one. All accept the vast universe-rhythm which consists of Creation, Maintenance, and Dissolution. They conceive a universe without beginning.

The Books teach Darkness was at first of all,

With Brahm sole meditating in that night.

From that Thought the universe proceeds. For untold periods it subsists. Finally it is resolved again into the primeval dark. Much later this conception is symbolized in the parable of the Trinity of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Maintainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Does this re-solution of the universe compel a return to primal chaos and wasted eons of progress? By no means. From each “Night of Brahm,” as it is called when the rhythmic Breath is indrawn (if I may use such an illustration), the universe emerges remolded, but remolded of the stuff fructified or blasted in its last emergence. The history of universal evolution thus proceeds as steadily and rhythmically as the second act of a well-conceived play unfolds from the necessities of the first. Rightly considered this is a part of the vast history of the ascension of man along the path of realization. Realization of what? Of whom? That explanation is the object of the philosophies.

The six philosophies unite in their object. In all six this is the education of man in the realization of his part in the universe. Not in his village or city or country. True, he has his dharma, but the whole thing is on a far vaster scale than that conceived in Greece or in China; though in China Taoism had a cloud-driven glimpse of this issue, which I shall relate in its place. Aristotle and Confucius lay down the moralities by which a man may duly and rightly fill his place in the world. So and more does Plato. But the Indians aim at his place in the universe, and the difference is as great as the universe is greater than the planet we inhabit.

There is another essential on which the six systems agree. All accept the teaching of rebirth and preexistence. Plato accepted this doctrine also, possibly deriving it from Indian sources; and certain other Greek philosophers earlier and later have done the same. It seems indeed to have been an instinct of the human heart, for it is found not only in Asia but among many other races civilized and uncivilized. It has been traced in Africa. Cæsar in his history of the Gallic wars asserts that “the Druids inculcate this as one of their leading tenets that souls do not become extinct but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree spurred on to valor, laying aside the fear of death.”

It was held in Wales and Ireland also. The famous Welsh bard Taliesin sings in the sixth century:

“I was a speckled snake on the hill.

I was a dragon in the lake.

I was a herdsman.

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.”

And in Rome, we have Ovid declaring:

“Death, so-called, is but old matter dressed

In some new form. And in a varied vest

From tenement to tenement though tossed,

The soul is still the same, the figure only lost.”

Many of our modern poets and writers in the West could be quoted to the same effect—from Shakespeare (in his fifty-ninth sonnet) to the latest comers. It may be said that many of the greatest minds in the West have held it. To any Asiatic philosophic mind it was impossible to suppose that the soul of man began with conception or birth. Very early the Katha Upanishad declared:

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never.

Never the time it was not. End and beginning are dreams.

Deathless and birthless and changeless abideth the spirit forever.

Death cannot touch it at all, dead though the house of it seems.

In Radhakrishnan’s fine phrase: “The development of the soul is a continuous progress, though it is broken into stages by the baptism of death.”

But realization of the truth can never be, where the eyes of the intelligence and of the soul are blindfolded by ignorance. Therefore the aim of the six philosophies, as of all philosophy, is to tear away that bandage and to show to the man the universe as it is. Then he will perceive his relation to it and be at peace.

While all the systems aim at a philosophy of ethics, ethics can and must be transcended by realization. Thus ethics are no end in themselves but simply a condition of the road upon which a man must travel—to the point where roads are no longer needed or possible, for there he develops wings. Meanwhile love (the great prison-breaker of selfish individuality), altruism, and cleansing of the heart are makers of the Road. Upon this point all systems are at one. They are at one also upon the rules of caste, such as I have described them in the Laws of Manu, and the division then given of the different stages of life, as the student, the householder, and the qualified ascetic.

The Buddhist philosophy, in some respects the most interesting of all, from its world-wide influence, must be treated separately. So we begin with the Upanishads and in them with the earliest Vedantist parables. In these is all Indian philosophy, as the wine is contained in the unripe grape. Were all the philosophy based on them to perish it could be reconstructed from those marvelous books, though I do not deny their defects in stating their grandeur.

The Upanishads turn from the bright picture of the outer world as presented by the senses to explore the inner and unseen. They do not deny the many gods, but make them as it were manifestations of the One.

“The Self-Existent pierced the openings of the senses, so that they turn outward, therefore man looks outward, not inward into himself. Some wise man, however, with closed eyes and desiring immortality saw the Self hidden behind it.”

It followed from this attitude that in the Upanishads formal and ritual religion does not hold a very high place. It must exist, for ritual worship is an end to many people, and in a certain sense is the scaffolding upon which divine philosophy must be built. But the thinkers of the Upanishads beheld these proceedings with the irony of those who have transcended ritual and for whom it has lost meaning. There were times when they permitted themselves to mock at the respectably established verities of the religion of the multitude and even of the Brahmins. As an example: the syllable aum or om was held in the highest veneration, for reasons to be given later, and magical properties were ascribed to it. At this and at what it represented the embryo philosophy of the Upanishads mocked when it was so minded, as in the following example:

“Next, the Aum of the dogs! Vaka had gone forth to study the Vedas. To him appeared a white dog. Other dogs approached it and said: ‘O Lord, pray for abundance of food for us. We desire to eat it.’

“To them answered the white dog: ‘Come here to me, tomorrow morning.’

“As those who wish to pray through the hymns assemble to set to their work, so did the little dogs come together and march like a procession of priests, each holding the tail of the one in front and barking out:

“‘Aum! let us eat. Aum! let us drink. Aum! may the resplendent Sun who showers rain and grants food to all mortals grant us food. O Lord of food, bestow food upon us. Deign to grant it.’”

There was little fear of the priests in such utterances.

The thinkers of the Upanishads had a very different food in view from that so satirized and on which the average Brahmin dwelt so tenderly; and while they could respect the Brahmin who manifested the ideal consecrated in him, they could also perceive that it was the ideal only which was the consecration, and that certain qualities transcend caste, whatever the Brahmins might teach. Hear the strange story of Jabala, relic of a primitive time when a wife might be offered to the honored guests of her husband:

“Satyakama Jabala asked of his mother Jabala:

“‘I wish to dwell with a teacher as a pupil in Brahma-lore. Of what caste am I?’ (It was needful that should be known.)

“She answered:

“‘My son, I do not know. During my youth when I conceived you I attended on many guests who frequented my husband’s house and I had no way of asking. So I know not of what caste you are. Jabala is my name, and Satyakama yours. You must therefore call yourself “Satyakama, son of Jabala” when asked.’

“He went to Haridrumata of the Gautama clan and said:

“‘I approach your venerable person that I may abide with you as a pupil in Brahman lore.’

“The teacher asked.

“‘Of what caste are you?’

“He answered:

“‘I do not know this. My mother said, “In my youth when I conceived you I was attending upon many. You are Satyakama, son of Jabala!”’

“Then said the other:

“‘None but a Brahmin could answer thus, for you have not departed from the truth. I will invest you with the Brahminical rites. Do you, child, collect the necessary sacrificial wood.’”

So even caste, even the teaching of the Vedas, was not sacrosanct in the eyes of the teachers of the Upanishads. The Vedas were sacred, yes, but that sight which could look through the self of man to the Universal Self was more sacred still. They shared the feeling which was to be expressed later, that “the worshipers of the Absolute are the highest in rank; second to them are the worshipers of the personal God; then come the worshipers of the Incarnations like Rama, Krishna, Buddha; below them are these who worship ancestors, deities, and sages, and lowest of all are the worshipers of the petty forces and spirits.” And again: “The wise man finds his God in himself.” That is, in the realization of the Absolute, of which he is a part. This therefore was the highest form of knowledge. They said:

“Two kinds of knowledge are to be known, the higher and the lower. The lower knowledge is that given by certain Vedas. The higher knowledge is that by which the Absolute is apprehended.”

The problem of the Upanishads is therefore the cause and the realities of life and death. Their thinkers strove to find the way of understanding to the infinite and central Truth which is infinite existence and pure bliss. A famous Upanishad prayer is:

From the unreal lead us to the Real,

From darkness lead us to Light.

From death lead us to Immortality.

But even this high ideal fell a little below that of later Vedantic philosophy, in which any possible interpretation of immortality as “heaven” was felt to be a little vulgar and suited only to conceptions associated with that of a personal God. Philosophy looked higher and further.

Knowledge must begin by philosophical understanding of the self of man. It must pass from the objective, which all could see and about which all could reason, to the deep subjective self, felt as a dim stirring within, to be gained only by the love and intuitions of wisdom. Philosophy, not revelation, was the aspiration of the Upanishads.

“The soul within me; it is lighter than a corn, a barley, a mustard seed, or the substance within it. The soul within me is greater than this earth and the sky and the heaven and all these united. That which performs and wills all, to which belong all sweet juices and fragrant odors, which envelops the world and is silent and is no respecter of persons, that is the soul within me. It is brahm.”

When this conception was rooted in belief it demanded definition. There is a most interesting story in the Chandogya Upanishad where Prajapati, Lord of Creation—being approached by Indra, representative of the Shining Ones, the Angels, and Virochana, representative of the Dark Ones, the Demons—is questioned by them as to what is the true, the real Self, which inhabits the body of man. Prajapati is a personal divinity. He begins by a statement:

“The Self free from sin, from age, and death, and grief, and hunger, and thirst, which desires nothing but the Desirable and imagines nothing but what it should imagine, that is the object of our search. He who has searched out that Self and comprehends it obtains complete beatitude.”

So the two served Prajapati for thirty-two years (after the manner prescribed for pupils in the Laws of Manu) and then came to demand knowledge as their reward. I condense:

Testing the two he desires them to look in the eye. The image seen there, is not that the Self?

They took his meaning not as that of the person within who sees through the eye but as the image reflected in the pupil; and Prajapati, seeing this, commanded them both to dress and adorn themselves in their best and to look into a pail of water and report what they saw.

Both answered: “We see the Self, a picture even to the hair and nails.”

Prajapati reflected within himself: “They both go away without having seen the Self, and whichever of the Shining Ones or Dark Ones follows this doctrine will perish.”

And Virochana, his shallow mind satisfied, went away and preached to the Dark Ones that the self alone is to be worshiped and served, and that he who does this gains the best of both worlds—this and the next. But Indra, on his way to preach this doctrine to the Shining Ones, saw a difficulty and paused. He returned to Prajapati.

“Sir, as this self is well adorned when the body is finely adorned, clean when this body is cleaned, so it will be blind and lame if the body is blind and lame, and perish as the body perishes. I see no good in this teaching. This is not the Eternal Self.”

[Note that the word Self (with a capital) applies in Indian philosophy to Brahm or Brahman—as distinguished from Brahma the Creator—the Universal Cause and only Self. Without a capital it refers to the so-called individual self of man.]

“So it is. Live with me for another thirty-two years,” said Prajapati. And at the end of that time he said:

“He who moves about happy in dreams, he is the Self, the Immortal, the Fearless. He is Brahman [or Brahm].”

And Indra was about to return to the Shining Ones with this doctrine when again he paused and returned.

“Sir, it is true that the dream-self is not blind or lame though the body may be both. Yet in dream also that self is pain-conscious and weeps. I see no good in that doctrine. Here is not the Eternal Self.”

“So it is indeed, Maghavat [Indra]. Live with me for another thirty-two years.”

And at the end of this time Prajapati said:

“When a man in perfect sleep sees no dream, that is the Self, the Immortal, the Fearless. That is Brahman.”

But Indra was growing wiser.

“In that state a man does not know that he is ‘I’ nor anything that exists. It is utter annihilation. I see no good in this.”

“Live with me another five years and you shall know.”

Then at the end of five years Prajapati said to Indra: “This body is mortal, and death holds it. But it is the abode of that Self which is immortal and bodiless. When in the body, by thinking ‘This body is I’ the Self is fettered by pleasure and pain. But when a man knows himself apart from the body, then neither pleasure nor pain touches him more. The eye is but the instrument of seeing. The self who knows, ‘Let me see this,’ it is the Self. He who knows, ‘Let me think this,’ he is the Self; the mind is but the divine Eye. He who knows that Self and understands it, obtains all worlds and all desires.”

Thus said Prajapati; yea, thus said Prajapati.

This is surely a wonderful passage for such an antiquity. As Max Müller points out it enters into the minds of few even of philosophers to ask what the ego is, what lies behind it and is its real substance. But here is the question asked and answered. The body is but a garment for the soul; age is a changing garment; the baby of eight weeks develops into the man of eighty and is yet the same. Nationality, all outer things, are garments to be discarded; and behind them abides the Eternal Self unchanged, traveling toward its inevitable goal.

The story faces life. Now let us take a story from the Upanishads which faces death.

There is a youth, Nachiketas, who through a sudden anger of his father is sent to the House of Yama—the god of death. Yama is away at the time of his arrival and on returning finds to his horror that a young Brahmin has waited for three days without receiving food or any of the rites of hospitality. The gods themselves are shamed by such an oversight.

He speaks with grave courtesy:

“O Brahmin, because you, a guest to be venerated, have waited in my house for three nights without food, therefore be salutation to you and welfare to me! Now choose three boons in return for those three nights you spent without hospitality.”

What will Nachiketas choose?

“O Death, as the first of my three boons I choose that my father’s anger toward me be appeased and that he may remember me as his son.”

“Through my favor he will remember you with love as before. He will sleep happily at night, and free from anger he will see you when released from the jaws of death.”

Nachiketas speaks again:

“In the place of heaven is no fear of any kind; beyond all grief all rejoice in the place of heaven. You, O Death, know the heavenly fire of the sacrifice by which heaven and immortality must be gained. Reveal it to me as my second boon.”

“I know the heavenly fire, Nachiketas. Know that that fire is placed in the cavity of the heart.”

He gives directions which Nachiketas repeats.

Satisfied, the magnanimous Lord of Death speaks to him:

“I grant another boon. That fire shall be called after your name. Take also this many-colored chain. Now choose the third boon, Nachiketas.”

The youth considers:

“There is this question. Some say the soul exists after the death of man. Some that it does not. On this I desire knowledge from you. This is my third boon.”

Then said Death, starting back in alarm:

“This question was inquired into even by the gods; hard is it to understand. Subtle is its nature. Choose another boon, Nachiketas. Do not compel me to this. Release me from this boon!”

Nachiketas replies:

“There is no other boon like this. There is no other speaker like to you.”

Death protests passionately:

“Choose sons and grandsons living a hundred years. Choose herds of cattle, elephants, gold, and horses. Choose the wide-spread earth, and live what years you will. Be a king. Over the great earth I will make you enjoyer of all desires. Nay, even the beautiful maidens of heaven with their chariots and instruments of music—such as are not to be gained by mortal men—you shall be served by them. I will give them to you. Only ask me nothing of the state of the soul after death.”

Will Nachiketas be tempted by these great offers? He answers:

“These things are of yesterday. All the glory of the senses wears out, O End of Man! Short is the life of all. Keep for yourself your horses and the like, your dance and song! How should man rest satisfied with wealth? Having wealth and seeing Death, how can we live but at your pleasure? The boon I choose is what I asked. What man living in the world, knowing he decays and dies while beholding the changeless Immortals, can rejoice in beauty or love or care for long life? I ask no other boon but that which concerns the soul. I ask the hidden knowledge.”

Then Death, seeing himself face to face with a man indeed, speaks at last; the truth shall be revealed.

“The good is one thing; the pleasant, another. Both chain man. It is well with him who chooses the good. He who chooses what is pleasant misses the object of man. But you, Nachiketas, considering the objects of desire, have abandoned them. You have not chosen the road of wealth, upon which so many perish. You desire knowledge. For He, the Soul, is inconceivably more subtle than the subtle. By no reasoning can this thought be reached. Only when a Teacher teaches can it be learned, dearest friend. But you are stedfast and persevering in the truth. May we have other seekers like to Nachiketas!

“You are the seeker of Him who is hard to see, who dwells in the mysteries, who is hidden in the caverns of the heart and the impenetrable thicket. When a man has heard and accepted this, and has stripped off all sense of right and wrong, when he has attained to That Subtle One, then he rejoices. I see in Nachiketas a dwelling whose door is open for Him.”

Says Nachiketas:

“Then make known to me this thing you see which differs from virtue and vice, differs from the whole of effects and causes, differs from past and present and future.”

Death answers:

“The soul is not born nor does it die. It is not produced from anyone nor does it produce. It is unborn, eternal, timeless, ancient. It is not slain when the body is slain. If the slayer thinks he slays or the slain that he is slain, both err. The soul is neither slain nor slays.

“The Self that lodges in the heart of each man is smaller than the small, greater than the great. The man whose will is at rest sees Him and is freed from sorrow; through the serenity of the senses he sees the glory of the Self. Who but I can know that divine Self is joyful—yet above joy. He is bodiless yet dwells in things incarnate. He is permanent yet dwells in things impermanent. He is the All-Pervading. Know the embodied soul is the rider, the body is the car, intellect is the charioteer, and mind is the reins. The senses, they say, are the horses, and the objects of sense the roads. If a man is without wisdom and uncontrolled, his senses are like the vicious horses of the charioteer.

“If a man is without wisdom and impure, he does not attain to his Home but goes on the road of birth and death. If a man has wisdom he attains that Home from which he does not return again to birth.

“Higher than the senses are their objects, higher than these objects is the mind, higher than the mind is Intelligence. Higher than Intelligence is the Great Self. Higher than the Great Self is the Unmanifested. Higher than the Unmanifested is the Soul. Higher than the Soul is nothing! That is the goal.

“Arise! Awake! Receive your boons. Understand! Hard is the way, having the sharp edge of a razor. But he who has understood the Nature of Brahm [the Universal Self] is freed from death.”

The wise who says and hears this eternal tale which Nachiketas received and Death related is honored in the world of Brahma.

Here ends this great and ancient story, wonderful in its knowledge and insight, set forth at a time when it seems little less than a marvel that such an analysis should be produced. Clear and beautiful it shines as the face of Nachiketas, the youth in the dark House of Death—to be the foundation of mighty thoughts and great philosophies. For what the teaching of Death conveys to Nachiketas is nothing less than that “when the sun has set, when the moon has set, and the fire is extinguished, the Self alone is Light.” And why?

Because, as is told in another brief parable of the Upanishads with which I will end this chapter, the soul is itself the Universal. It is no child of the Divine but the Divine itself; imprisoned in flesh but divine—the changeless, the immortal.