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Are You the One or Shall We Look for Another ?
Shankar versus Ramanuja in India
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Foreword
To ask “Why investigate the philosophy and belief systems of the Indian subcontinent from the medieval or any other period ? “ is not unreasonable. To answer this, I refer at first to The Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions promulgated by Vatican II. This acknowledges that the religions of advanced civilizations endeavor to answer the deep and perennial questions of man through well defined concepts and precise language. Hinduism in particular is recognized for its exploration of the divine mystery and its expression in the accurately defined insights of philosophy. In his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, John Paul II echoes this respect and states “A great spiritual impulse leads Indian thought to seek an experience which would liberate the spirit from the shackles of time and space and would
therefore acquire absolute value. The dynamic of this quest provides the context for great metaphysical systems.”
Clearly Indian philosophy is a source of knowledge and wisdom, which by its difference, independence and contrast as well as its similarity can deepen our own western understanding of man’s perennial search for completeness.
The possible areas of study are boundless. Here is a culture separated from the western tradition by vast reaches of ocean, deserts and the highest mountains in the world. By 900 BC scholars were fully developing the great metaphysical systems referred to by John Paul, as well as systems of logic and epistemology. Could these have been the seed for the flowering of western philosophy in Greece ? Certainly the Persian empire bridged the two cultures geographically and Plato’s philosophy seems distinctly Indian in many aspects. Alexander attempted to dialogue with Indian philosophers in his brief campaign there, and may have been previously aware of their existence. He opened the door to regular communication between the cultures, which even included the arrival of Buddhist missionaries in
Asia Minor, sent by the Buddhist King Ashoka-Mauryan in the third century B.C.
Medieval India has its parallels to Europe of the time. It was a distinctively feudal society, based on the caste system, of many principalities and nationalities vying for dominance. Religion was the foundation of life, order and learning. Conflicts, scholarship, saints and heretics were a plenty. It is a mirror image for us of man’s social, intellectual and spiritual development. While it may be surprising and unsettling at times, one does learn things by looking into a mirror.
A Note on Sanskrit: The use of Sanskrit terminology in this paper is not an affectation. This long tradition of Indian philosophy has a carefully developed vocabulary with precise meanings that do not translate well into English, much as the language of the Qur’an does not translate. For example, there is over-lap among the meanings of Brahman, Atman, purusha , for example, which in some senses would allow the use of the same English term “transcendental subject” but there is such a far greater difference in their complete meanings and in the precise circumstances of their usage in different schools that it would be inaccurate and confusing in any sense to use the translated term. The word pramana, on the other hand is does quite clearly mean “means of knowledge” but is a “technical” term referring to six specific, clearly defined means, not all of which are accepted by all schools. On a purely linguistic level, the orthography of Sanskrit and its sounds are not well represented by
the limited repertoire of our conventional Latin alphabet. For the sake of accuracy and to avoid confusion therefore, I have used the Sanskrit language and a bold italic font for such terms and for proper Sanskrit names. One cannot speak intelligently on Indian philosophy without a grasp of its Sanskrit vocabulary.
I. The Foundation and Direction of Indian Philosophy
About 3000 BC, the Indo-Aryan people began arriving in Northern India and initiated a process of conquest and assimilation of the native peoples and their religion. The distinctive features of the Indo-Aryan religion and world-view are expressed in a body of originally oral literature called the Vedas. (Veda means truth.) There are four Vedas, one for each of the key priests or agents of the Vedic sacrifices, wherein human ritual assists the divine power in maintaining the cosmos. The oldest and primary Veda is the Rg Veda, which is the absolute foundation of Indian philosophy, just as the book of Genesis is the foundation of Christian thought. All the subsequent Vedas, their associated works and philosophical speculation refer in some way back to this corpus. The Rg Veda predates formal Greek philosophy
and the Book of Genesis, being formally compiled around in the late second millennium BC.
To understand Indian thought, one must understand something of the Vedas. To that end, here is the Hymn of Creation.
“Neither nonbeing nor being was as yet,
Neither was airy space nor heavens beyond.
What was enveloped ? And where ? Sheltered by whom ?
And was there water ? Bottomless , unfathomed ?
Neither was there death nor immortality,
nor was there any sign then of day or night;
Totally windless, by itself, the One breathed;
Beyond that, indeed, nothing whatever was.
In the Principle darkness concealed darkness;
Undifferentiated surge was this whole world.
The pregnant point covered by the form matrix,
From conscious fervor, mightily, brought forth the One.
In the Principle, thereupon, rose desire,
which of consciousness was the primal seed.
Then the wise, searching within their hearts,
perceived that in non-being lay the bond of being.
Stretched crosswise as their line, a ray of glory.
Was there a below ? And was there an above ?
There were sowers of seeds and forces of might:
Potency from beneath and from on high the Will.
Who really knows, who could here proclaim
whence this creation flows, where is its origin ?
With this great surge the Gods made their appearance.
Who therefore knows from where did it arise ?
This flow of creation, from where did it arise,
whether it was ordered or was not,
He, the Observing,(Lord of Creation) in the highest heaven,
He alone knows, unless….He knows it not.
The Vedas and their associated texts are an enormous body of work. This excerpt gives a taste of its deep questioning, its bent for philosophical answers and sophisticated nuances of meaning. The desire to fully comprehend the knowledge and truth in the Vedas led to the birth of another body of work, The Upanishads, composed in the period of 1200 – 200 BC. These works were a conscious attempt to make coherent the doctrines contained in the Vedas and to pull them together into a metaphysical system; this enterprise reached its apex in the Bhagavadgita, the most recent and thorough of these works. There is some controversy over the meaning of the word Upanishad. Western scholars derive a meaning of “to sit down by” a teacher, whereas one Indian view, expressed by Shankar-acharya, relates it to the bliss of Brahman, the destruction of difference or ignorance. Because of the age of the Vedas, and for that matter of the Upanishads also, the change of language over time makes etymological
questions germane to Indian Philosophy.
The precise meanings of Vedic texts and those of the Upanishads are important because of their authoritative status in divine revelation; these texts are regarded as sruti, which means “heard”. They are believed to be the uncreated word of truth of The One, unauthored, eternal speech heard by the wise listeners, rshi, and transmitted by them to men.
In form of expression, the Upanishads are only more comprehensible than the Vedas, but not self explanatory. The ideas are expanded, often in the form of dialogues and parables. But these too require exegesis. Consequently the great scholars of India (including the two we shall look at in this paper) wrote either direct commentaries of the Upanishads or other works based on them, known as sutra’s. The ancient sutra’’s and the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics form a corpus of
secondary authority known as smrti, “remembered” truths authored by men.
The Vedas, then, become the criterion for dividing Indian thought into two different categories, astika ("it says yes", orthodox) and nastika ("it says no", heterodox), which respectively either accept or reject the Vedas. Of the nastika branch, the most significant philosophical system is Buddhism, which is (as we shall see) significant to our enquiry because it was by far the greatest challenge to sruti tradition, upon which the primeval caste system rested.
In the branch of astika six primary schools (darsanas) developed into complementary pairs, each division having its own particular philosophical emphasis and its own interpretations of Vedic texts, and to a certain extent its own terminology and/or definitions. Of some note is the nyaya school, which emphasizes logic and epistemology; its techniques are generally accepted and used by the other schools to establish the validity of their reasoning and conclusions. The school of yoga is generally recognized in
the west, but not at all known; it emphasizes ethics. As a metaphysical system, the antagonist to the system held by Shankar-acharya is the samkya school, which is essentially dualist and posits purusha and prakrti (subject/consciousness and object/nature & energy) as the two elements of reality; all prakrti consists of a trinity of the guna’s (qualities), which are sattva (potential consciousness), rajas (passion, the source of activity) and tamas (inertia, the source of opposition to activity) ; and the whole cosmos is engaged in a process of evolution. It was and is a very influential and widely accepted system. The system which bridges to our consideration is purva mimamsa (mimamsa = enquiry), whose main consideration is dharma (duty) and is firmly rooted in the Vedas. Our attention now will be on the school of uttara
mimamsa or vedanta, which grew out of this system.
All these systems focus on their respective considerations in order to bring their adherents to the state of moksha (liberation) from pain and the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. They differ greatly in how to accomplish this, in what it means to be liberated, and in how closely they adhere to the Vedas and sruti. While the first named teachers of these schools become apparent after the period of 700 BC, it is generally accepted that these teachers were merely codifying and expressing ideas and patterns of thought pre-existing them.
II. The Vedanta
The uttara mimamsa or vedanta school of thought regarded dharma as a necessary but instrumental means in the attainment of moksha. Vedanta means “The end of the Vedas”, referring directly to the Upanishads , which it regards as the highest authority, as the fulfillment of the Vedas and their chronological terminus. As we have seen just in the short excerpt from the Rg Veda, the Vedas require interpretation and explanation. Since that is exactly what the Upanishads do, Vedanta concerns itself with the further explanation and understanding of those works, and in doing so adhering to the truths found therein; the essential means of attaining moksha is therefore knowledge, vidya. But it is a very specific, evaluative knowledge as we shall see.
The Upanishads as developments of the Vedas are obviously different from them in many respects and differ from each other as well . As sophisticated as the Vedas are for their time, they are essentially polytheistic and ritually oriented. The Upanishads tend to the monistic and therefore have to explain the gods, the empirical universe, the rituals, the conscious self and liberation; this is an ambitious undertaking. There are fourteen great Upanishads, including the Bhagavadg$ta, which the vedanta scholars consider in their formulations. Additionally, they look to another great source written in about 200 BC, the Brahma Sutra’s (or Vedanta Sutra’s) of Badarayana, who sought to codify the philosophy of this school in one work of 560 verses, seeking primarily to answer the question “What is the first cause of movement in nature ?” Not surprisingly this work elicited commentary and explanation as well. Differences in interpretation led to the controversy of the
medieval era which we will consider. But first we must look at another critical element which framed the problem.
Around 600 BC the great Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, preached a new egalitarian philosophy which broke with the theistic Vedic tradition with its caste system, priests and rituals and complex doctrines and promised moksha to all who could follow the eight-fold path to nirvana (no feeling). This great nastika movement grew over time and had great success, particularly among the educated. The Buddhist Mauryan dynasty ruled north-east India for centuries spanning the dawn of the common era. It was only the
arrival of Islam that eradicated Buddhism from the land of its birth. It was Buddhism then, which was the great threat to the great Truth, the Vedas, and the divine and social order. It was the movement to which all other philosophies had to speak and assert themselves. The vedanta, because of it's liberal interpretation of Vedic tradition, was the system best equipped to do this, but in so doing would bring suspicion of being nastika upon those who rose to the challenge.
One of these was Gaudapada, who wrote a commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad, a scholarly work which showed great familiarity with Buddhist thought and reconciled some of its concepts with the Vedic tradition in the system called advaita, which means “non-dualism”. Advaita vedanta posits the identity of Brahman and Atman, which for the moment we will call God and the Self. The precise use of the term “non-dualism” for this philosophy is significant, since the name rejects the concept of monism, the equivocal identity of God and the cosmos. Nevertheless, the implications of this advaita identification earned for Gaudapada ’s teachings the epithet “praccanam Bauddham”, Buddhism in disguise, because the fineness of his distinction was unconvincing to the orthodox sages. Gaudapada ’s foremost student was Govinda, who was the immediate teacher of Shankar-acharya, with whom we will be concerned in the rest of this paper.
Shankar-acharya , born a Brahmin, lived a brief life of 32 years. He became an ascetic sannyasi monk at age eight. He became a disciple of Govinda, and then while still a teenager he attracted disciples to himself on account of his reputation for wisdom, knowledge and holy life. At
this early age he wrote his commentaries of The Isa, Kena, Prasna, Mundaka, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chandogya, Svetasvatara & Brhadaranyaka Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita, the Brahma Sutra’s, several hymns and the Upadesasasri (The Thousand Teachings). He founded four monastic communities, which still survive, to carry on the knowledge he transmitted. His doctrine “held the fort” against Buddhism, attracted primarily the educated, and although not popular in the sense of widespread (due to it’s depth), influenced all the scholarship that followed him, and is generally regarded as the apex of Indian thought.
But we too want to know, his personal assurances aside, are the key elements of his thought astika or are they nastika (“Buddhism in disguise”) as his principle critic Ramanuja asserts. Is he faithful to the Vedic tradition or breaking new ground ?
III. The Advaita Vedanta of Shankar
To come to a reasonable conclusion on this matter, we shall look at three key elements of Shankar’s system. They are a.) the nature of Brahman, b.) the nature of man and the world and c.) the nature of knowledge.
A. Brahman, the absolute, is the neuter form of Brahma, the creator god of later (as opposed to
early Vedic) Hinduism, who is part of the triad with Vishnu, the maintaining god and Shiva, the god who ends each cycle of creation. The Brahman of Shankar bears little resemblance to any such theistic concept. As the absolute, it is beyond all logical categories and is, for all intents and purposes, a synthesis of the samkya‘s concepts of purusha and prakrti, subjective consciousness and objective energy. Brahman is “that omniscient, omnipotent cause from which proceed the origin, subsistence and dissolution of this world, which world is differentiated by names and forms.” (Names are concepts, words; forms are physical realities.) “Brahman is pure consciousness”, thought thinking itself, and Sat-Chit-Ananda, existence-intelligence-bliss (the classical vedanta definition.) Shankar regards these concepts as circumstantial, not real definitions, which state merely empirical truth, valid only in the time and space of the world. Brahman in itself is beyond names and forms and is said
to be nirguna, that is “devoid of qualities”, which has serious implications for knowledge. So for Shankar, Brahman exists in two objective aspects, absolute truth and empirical truth.
This peculiar (for us) concept is exposed in the Indian thought experiment of the rope-snake, used by many philosophers. What is really a piece of rope appears in dim light to be a snake. The effect on the observer will be that of a snake; it looks and feels like a snake and will be treated like a snake. But its absolute reality is rope. We will see this experiment again in regard to the concept of knowledge.
B. Man and the world are understood in relation to Brahman. Atman is the word for the conscious self, man in the world. Like Ibn Sina’s “flying man”, consciousness is the proof of the self’s existence; one can doubt anything else, but not the doubter. Atman is the essence of subject, that deepest
part of our being which remains after death, and yet it is also the agent of activity here before death. This is because Atman exists on two levels, the universal and the individuated atman. This is much like the purusha of the samkya school mentioned above (and there is "interscholastic" debate as to whether they are equivocal terms.) The individuated atman self is bound up with buddhi, the mind's faculty of perception, until it (the self) achieves moksha.
Moksha reveals the crux of Shankar’s central thesis. Moksha is achieved only by Brahmavidya, certain, evaluative knowledge of the truth of Brahman; and that startling truth is that Brahman and Atman are one and the same. That conscious self, that deepest you, is the absolute, and yet is somehow different in this world from the absolute, as the sea-foam is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the ocean depths. This is the theory of
difference-non-difference (bhedabhedavada).
What then of the empirical world that the self experiences ? The world is bound in categorical space and time, it is contingent being, changing and perceived and perceivable. It is not ultimate reality. If Brahman is one and all , how is there a world ? On another level of perception, it is the snake-rope. The world is an effect of Brahman, as foam on the sea, or a jar made of clay earth, but still of Brahman, though made distinct. So although the empirical world exists, it is only in this particular sense, in that it is the real perception of one perceiving.
Otherwise, ontologically, it is maya , illusion. Avidya, ignorance, makes us see the world as absolutely real, and in fact is Shankar’s preferred term for the world of phenomena, being an objective state as opposed to maya , which is more subjective and variable in substance. (Is my illusion the same as your illusion ? Yet we are both ignorant of the same truth.)
C. Knowledge and perception are clearly of critical importance. They are the way to truth and moksha by way of that special knowledge, Brahmavidya. It is apparent, however, by the condition of man that this knowledge is not obvious or easily come by. It is different from empirical knowledge, which though not empty (asat) is false (anrta) , is irrelevant. Reality exists on two levels, the absolute level, paramartha, and vyavaharika, the reality of phenomena; each level has its concomitant knowledge. Brahmavidya is arrived at thru bhakti, religious devotion, and pursuit of knowledge to achieve that specific end. This is an instrumental, unique process, that requires a spiritual guide, a guru jivanmukti ("released while living") who has achieved this knowledge in life and who knows the deep meaning of sruti. The pramanas for Brahmavidya are the testimony of scripture and saksatkara, intuition. This knowledge then is self-realization as Brahman (Jesus said “The Father and I are
One.”) and seeing the world for what it is. (Note the similarity of this concept to our "Grace.")
A critical element here is apophatic knowledge. “Not by speech, not by mind, not by sight can He be apprehended. How can He be comprehended otherwise than by one’s saying ‘He is’?” Silence is a vehicle to come to know Brahman.
This brief summary of three key elements of Shankar-acharya‘s philosophy give some basis for the praccanam Bauddham criticism. God is here an impersonal being, indeed almost a state, into which the liberated soul is merged. The empirical world is illusionary. Release comes from an ethical path simple in concept, though difficult in execution. All of these elements can be regarded “in contempt” of the four Vedas (which emphasize complex rituals and a multitude of Gods who are quite distinct from each other and humans) and in some form can be seen in the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha.
To be continued by ???
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