1. Charm And Power Of The Upanishads Swami Ranganathananda R.K.Mutt

INSTITUTE BOOKLETS : 19

THE CHARM AND POWER

OF

THE UPANISADS

By

SWAMI RANGANATHANANDA

THE RAMAKRISHNA MISSION

INSTITUTE OF CULTURE

Gol Park, Calcutta 29

The Charm and Power of the Upaniṣads

is a special lecture delivered by Swami Ranganathananda, a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Secretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Calcutta, at the Institute's School of Humanistic and Cultural Studies on 20 September 1966.

The lecture, which appeared in the monthly Bulletin of the Institute for October 1966, forms the 'Introduction' to the Swami's forthcoming book The Message of the Upaniṣads, to be published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, early 1967.

The book will comprise the twenty-nine weekly lectures on the three Upaniṣads, Īśā, Kena, and Kaṭha, which he gave in the Vivekananda Hall of the Institute between 2 May 1962 and 19 January 1963, and which appeared in the Bulletin between August 1962 and August 1966 under the general title: 'Our Spiritual Heritage'.

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THE RAMAKRISHNA MISSION INSTITUTE OF CULTURE

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Copyright 1966

First Edition : 30,000 copies

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANIṢADS

THE Message of the Upaniṣads is a study, verse by verse, of three of the principal Upaniṣads, namely, Īśā, Kena, and Kaṭha. The first contains eighteen, the second thirty-five, and the third one hundred and nineteen verses. Though constituting a small portion of the total Upaniṣadic literature, they yet contain a lucid exposition of all the essential ideas of this immortal literature.

Scholars are divided as to the date of the composition of the Upaniṣads. Many of them are agreed, however, that most of the principal Upaniṣads belong to the period prior to the advent of Buddha in the seventh century before Christ. There are over two hundred Upaniṣads, many of them sectarian in character and palpably post-Buddhistic and even post-Śaṅkara.

THE PRINCIPAL UPANISADS

The principal Upaniṣads are accepted to

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be those which Śaṅkarācārya (A.D. 788-820) chose to comment upon; they are ten in number and are enumerated in the Indian tradition as follows: Īśā, Kena, Kaṭha, Praśna, Muṇdaka, Māṇḍūkya, Taittirīya, Aitareya, Chāndogya, and Bṛhadāraṇyaka.

According to some scholars, Śaṅkara also commented on an eleventh Upaniṣad, the Śvetāśvatara. In his commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra, he refers to four more, namely, Kauṣītakī, Jābāla, Mahānārāyaṇa, and Paiṅgala.

The Īśā Upanisad embodies in its very opening verse the central theme of all the Upaniṣads, namely, the spiritual unity and solidarity of all existence.

The Kena illumines the nature of knowledge by pointing out the eternal knower behind all acts of knowing, and purifies man's concept of ultimate reality of all touch of finitude and relativity by revealing its character as the eternal Self of man and the Self of the universe.

The Kaṭha holds a special fascination for all students of the Upaniṣads for its happy blend of charming poetry, deep mysticism, and profound philosophy; it contains a more

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unified exposition of Vedānta than any other single Upaniṣad; its charm is heightened by the two characters of its dialogue, namely, old Yama, the teacher, and young Naciketā, the student.

The Praśna, as its name implies, is an Upaniṣad of questions; each of its six chapters comprises a question asked by each of a group of six inquiring students on various aspects of Vedānta, and the answers given by their teacher, the sage Pippalāda.

The Muṇḍaka, after classifying all knowledge into parā, higher, and aparā, lower, and describing all science, art, literature, politics, and economics—in fact, all positive knowledge, the knowledge of the changeful many—as aparā, and boldly including even the holy Vedas and all sacred books in this category, proclaims that one knowledge as parā ‘by which the imperishable changeless reality of the One behind the many is realized’. And the Upaniṣad sings in ecstasy the glorious vision of the One in the many.

In the brief compass of its twelve verses of condensed thought, the Māṇḍūkya surveys the whole of experience through a study

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of the three states of waking, dream, and dreamless sleep, and reveals the Ātman, the true Self of man, the Turīya or the Fourth, as it puts it, as pure consciousness, eternal and non-dual.

It proclaims in its second verse the infinite dimension of man in a pregnant utterance—one of the four mahā-vākyas or ‘great utterances’ of the Upanisads: ayam ātmā brahma—‘This Ātman (Self of man) is Brahman.’

The Taittirīya, after majestically proclaiming that ‘the knower of Brahman attains the Supreme’: Brahmanvidāpnoti param, describes the five kośas or sheaths that enclose and hide Brahman, and demonstrates the technique of piercing these sheaths of relativity and finitude with a view to reaching the infinite and the eternal at the core of experience.

It also provides a scientific definition of Brahman as ‘That from which all these beings are born, by which, after being born, they live, and into which they merge when they cease to be’.

The Aitareya establishes the spiritual character of the Absolute through a discussion of the nature of the Self of man, and proclaims this truth in another of the four

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mahāvākyas (V.3): Prajñānam brahma:

'Brahman is pure Consciousness.'

The Chāndogya introduces us to charming truth-seekers like Satyakāma, Śvetaketu,

and Nārada, and outstanding spiritual teachers like Āruṇi, Sanatkumāra, and Prajā-

pati. Through several illuminating teacher-

student dialogues, the Upaniṣad helps us to

discriminate the reality of being from the

appearance of becoming. In a brief utterance, treated as another of the four mahā-

vākyas, it sings in refrain the divinity of

man: tat tvam asi—'That thou art.' It pre-

scribes a knowledge of this innate divinity

of man as the one remedy for the deeper

ills of life: tarati śokam ātmavit—'The

knower of the Ātman crosses all sorrow.'

In its profoundly human episode of the dis-

cipleship of Indra under Prajāpati, it in-

structs us in the true nature and technique

of man's spiritual quest and the blessings

that flow from spirituality. It is an impres-

sive account of man's spiritual education,

his growth from worldliness to spirituality. It

points out the limitations of materialism as

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a philosophy cf life and the evils that flow from it.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the longest of the Upaniṣads, is, as its name implies, a big (bṛhat) forest (araṇya) of philosophical thought and spiritual inspiration. Four outstanding personalities illumine its pages—two men and two women—Janaka, the philosopher-king, Yājñavalkya, the philosopher-sage, Maitreyī, the deeply spiritual wife of Yājñavalkya, and Gārgī, the vācaknavī, the 'gifted woman speaker and philosopher', who is foremost among the questioners of Yājñavalkya in philosophical debate. The Upaniṣad majestically expounds, through its fascinating dialogues conducted by these outstanding and other lesser personalities, the central theme of all the Upaniṣads, namely, the divinity of man and the spiritual solidarity of the whole universe in Brahman. It contains another of the four mahāvākyaṣ (I.4.10), namely, aham brahmāsmi—'I am Brahman', besides the ayam ātmā brahma of the Māṇḍūkya already referred to. It dares to characterize Brahman as 'the fearless', and presents its realization by man as the attainment, here and now, of the state

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of absolute fearlessness and fullness of de-

light.

FROM OBSCURITY TO PROMINENCE

It goes to the eternal credit of Śaṅkara

that, through his masterly commentaries on

the principal Upaniṣads, he brought out of

obscurity this immortal literature, as also the

great Bhagavad-Gītā, and made them ac-

cessible and intelligible to a wider audience;

and that audience has been steadily widen-

ing ever since, aided by the contributions of

subsequent commentators, thinkers, and

sages, until, in the present age, thanks to

the techniques of modern western civiliza-

tion, the whole world has become its actual

or potential audience. Apart from the great

western orientalists, whose translations and

expositions brought this and other books of

the Indian tradition to the attention of

scholars in East and West, it was from

Swami Vivekananda, the most authentic

voice of Vedānta in the modern age, that

vast masses of men and women in both the

hemispheres became drawn to the spiritual

charm and rational strength of this literature

and to a recognition of its relevance to man

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

in the modern age. In his lecture on 'Vedānta and Its Application to Indian Life', the Swami says (Complete Works, Vol. III, Eighth Edition, pp. 237-38) :

'Strength, strength is what the Upaniṣads speak to me from every page. This is the one great thing to remember, it has been the one great lesson I have been taught in my life. Strength, it says, strength, O man, be not weak. Are there no human weaknesses?—says man. There are, say the Upaniṣads, but will more weakness heal them, would you try to wash dirt with dirt? Will sin cure sin, weakness cure weakness. ... Ay, it is the only literature in the world where you find the word abhīh, 'fearless', used again and again; in no other scripture in the world is this adjective applied either to God or to man. ... And the Upaniṣads are the great mine of strength. Therein lies strength enough to invigorate the whole world. The whole world can be vivified, made strong, energized through them. They will call with trumpet voice upon the weak, the miserable, and the down-trodden of all races, all creeds, all sects, to stand on their feet and be free. Freedom —physical freedom, mental freedom, and spiritual freedom—are the watchwords of the Upaniṣads.'

Śaṅkara's commentaries on these Upaniṣads, especially on those of their passages pregnant with philosophical and spiritual import, are masterpieces of philosophical

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discussion illumined by deep spiritual insights. His masterly handling of the Sanskrit language in these commentaries gives us a prose which is marked by brevity and vigour, simplicity and poetic charm.

What the Upanisads Contain

In the Upanisads, we get an intelligible body of verified and verifiable spiritual insights mixed with a mass of myths and legends and cosmological speculations relating to the nature and origin of the universe. While the former has universal validity, and has a claim on human intelligence in all ages, the latter forswears all such claim. All positivistic knowledge contained in any literature, including religious literature, is limited and conditioned by the level of contemporary scientific knowledge. Modification, and even scrapping, of much of this knowledge due to subsequent advances has affected the truth-validity of much of man's literary heritage, including his religious and philosophical ones.

The spiritual insights of the Upanisads, however, are an exception to this tyranny of time. Subsequent scientific advances have

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INSTITUTE BOOKLETS : 19

THE CHARM AND POWER

OF

THE UPANISADS

By

SWAMI RANGANATHANANDA

THE RAMAKRISHNA MISSION

INSTITUTE OF CULTURE

Gol Park, Calcutta 29

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

not only not affected their truth-value but have, on the contrary, only helped to reveal the rational basis of their insights and enhance their spiritual appeal. This is no wonder, because these insights are the products of an equally scientific investigation into a different field of experience, namely, the world of man's inner life.

SATYASYA SATYAM

By sheer speculation on the meaning of the facts of the external world, the Vedic thinkers had earlier arrived at a unitary conception of the universe, at a materialistic monism, through their concepts of avyakta, indeterminate nature, or prāṇa, cosmic energy. But the culminating point of their discoveries was the spiritual unification of all experience in the Ātman or Brahman: Brahmaivedaṁ viśvamidam variṣṭham—‘All this manifested universe is verily Brahman the Supreme’ (Muṇḍaka, II. 2. 12); idaṁ sarvaṁ yadayam ātmā—‘All this (manifested universe) is this Ātman’ (Bṛhadāraṇyaka, II. 4. 6); and tat etat brahma apūrvam anaparam anantaram abāhyam, ayam ātmā brahma sarvānubhūḥ—‘This Brahman is

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without a prior or a posterior, without interior or exterior; this Ātman is Brahman, the experiencer of everything’ (ibid., II. 5. 19).

If everything is the Ātman or Brahman, the universe of name and form cannot be an illusion. The Upaniṣads consider it as māyā; but this does not mean illusion. Māyā is a mere statement of fact, what we are and what we see around us. It refers to the inner contradictions involved in our experience of the world and in our knowledge of it.

These contradictions will remain, say the Upaniṣads so long as we remain at the sensate level, so long as we fail to take into account the Ātman, the Self behind the not-Self, the One behind the many.

Yet, all our experiences and knowledge in the sphere of māyā are experiences and knowledge of the Ātman, coming through the sense-organs. Hence they are not illusory, but true.

Man travels, says Swami Vivekananda, not from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from truth that is lower to truth that is higher.

Hence the Upaniṣads describe the world of the not-Self as ‘truth’ and the Self or

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

Ātman as ‘The Truth of truth’. This is conveyed in a significant passage of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka (II. 1. 20) :

Tasyopanisat satyasya satyamiti; prāṇā vai satyam; tesām esa satyam—‘Its (Ātman’s) intimate name is “the Truth of truth”; the cosmic energy (prāṇa) is, verily, truth; and This (the Ātman) is the truth of that.’

Elucidating this Vedāntic idea, Swami Vivekananda says (Complete Works, Vol. V, Seventh Edition, p. 272) :

‘There is really no difference between matter, mind, and Spirit. They are only different phases of experiencing the One. This very world is seen by the five senses as matter, by the very wicked as hell, by the good as heaven, and by the perfect as God.’

INQUIRY INTO THE ‘WITHIN’ OF NATURE

Pointing out the reason for this change in the field of search from the external to the internal, which occurred in ancient India, and its significance for human thought, Swami Vivekananda says (ibid., Vol. III, Eighth Edition, pp. 330-31) :

‘Just as the Greek mind, or the modern European mind, wants to find the solution of life

and of all the sacred problems of being by searching into the external world, so also did our forefathers; and just as the Europeans failed, they failed also. But the western people never made a move more, they remained there; they failed in the search for the solution of the great problems of life and death in the external world, and there they remained stranded. Our forefathers also found it impossible, but were bolder in declaring the utter helplessness of the senses to find the solution. Nowhere else was the answer better put than in the Upaniṣads: yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha—“From whence words, unable to reach, come back reflected, together with the mind ” (Taittirīya, II. 4); na tatra cakṣur-gacchati na vāg-gacchati—“There the eye cannot go, nor can speech reach ” (Kena, I. 3).

There are various sentences which declare the utter helplessness of the senses, but they did not stop there; they fell back upon the internal nature of man, they went to get the answer from their own soul, they became introspective; they gave up external nature as a failure, as nothing could be done there, as no hope, no answer, could be found; they discovered that dull, dead matter would not give them truth, and they fell back upon the shining soul of man, and there the answer was found.’

Posing the question how the West, which has undoubtedly been in the forefront of advance in several fields of knowledge from

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

the time of the Greeks, could lag behind

India in this field of inquiry these thousands

of years, Professor Max Müller answers

(Three Lectures on the Vedānta Philosophy,

London, 1894, p. 7):

'But if it seems strange to you that the old

Indian philosophers should have known more

about the soul than Greek or medieval or modern

philosophers, let us remember that however much

the telescopes for observing the stars of heaven

have been improved, the observatories of the soul

have remained much the same.'

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

All science is the search for unity.

Vedānta discovered this unity in the Ātman;

it followed its own method relevant to this

field of inquiry. But it illustrated its conclu-

sions with whatever positive knowledge was

available at the time. In recent centuries

this knowledge has been advanced radically

and vastly by modern science, the impact

of which on Vedānta, however, has been

most wholesome. In fact, Vedānta hopes

for and welcomes further radical advances

in modern science by which its own spiritual

vision of the One in the many may be

corroborated by positive scientific knowledge,

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

so that the spirituality of science and the spirituality of religion may flow as a united stream to fertilize all aspects of human life. Referring to this fact and hope in his 'Paper on Hinduism' read at the Chicago Parliament of Religions on 19 September 1893, Swami Vivekananda says (Complete Works, Vol. I, Eleventh Edition, p. 15):

'All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.'

Vedānta is thus both religion and philosophy. As religion, it discovers the truths of the inner world, and fosters the same discovery by others; and as philosophy, it synthesizes this science of the inner world with the other sciences of the outer world, to present a unified vision of total reality, and to impart to human life and character depth of faith and vision along with breadth of outlook and sympathy.

Religion, according to Vedānta, is super sensual knowledge; it is not supernatural,

but only supersensual. Vedānta does not speak of any supernatural revelation. What lies within the sphere of the senses is not the concern of religion; nor has it the competence for it, says Vedānta, for that is the field of the positive sciences, the verdict of which will always hold in this field in preference to the verdict of religion. 'Not even by a hundred statements of the Śruti (body of supersensual knowledge, or scripture), can fire become cold', says Saṅkara, because it goes against what has been ascertained by sense experience and positive knowledge. On the other hand, the positive sciences have no authority in the super-sensual field of experience. They overreach themselves when they pronounce judgements on subjects like soul and God; they may, and often are, competent to provide hints and suggestions; but the inquiry itself is the concern of another science, the science of religion. Clarifying the position of these two types of sciences, Swami Vivekananda says (Complete Works, Vol. VI, Sixth Edition, p. 81):

'Religion deals with the truths of the meta-physical world just as chemistry and the other

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

natural sciences deal with the truth of the physical world. The book one must read to learn chemistry is the book of (external) nature. The book from which to learn religion is your own mind and heart. The sage is often ignorant of physical science because he reads the wrong book—the book within; and the scientist is too often ignorant of religion, because he, too, reads the wrong book—the book without.'

SRUTI VERSUS SMRTI

The Upaniṣads are an impressive record of this 'reading of the book within'. The scriptures of every religion are such records. But all of them, except the Upaniṣads, contain also a good bit of extraneous matter, not only myths and legends and cosmological theories, which the Upaniṣads also contain, but also a large number of rules and regulations, with their do's and don'ts, to guide the individual and collective conduct and behaviour of their respective followers. The significance of these latter being merely local and temporary, they are not capable of universal application and are not relevant for all time; the fundamental message of all religions, however, derive from their central core of essential spiritual truths

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

which are universal and for all time. The Upaniṣads are the only sacred books which addressed themselves exclusively to the discovery of these essential spiritual truths and to leading man, irrespective of creed and race, to their realization in his own life. Indian tradition refers to the Upaniṣads, therefore, as Śruti, as contrasted with another class of religious literature known as Smṛti, including the Dharma Śāstra, to which it wisely left the work of forging social rules and regulations in the past, as it would leave it to the political constitutions and social consciences today. To the category of the Smṛti also belong the sacred books of all the historical religions, which derive their origin and authority from a personal founder. Thus, among India's sacred books, the Gītā, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana, and all the Purāṇas are classed as Smṛtis, besides Manu-smṛti, Yājñavalkya-smṛti, and similar other books of Hindu law. Excepting the Upaniṣads, all other scriptures of religions, in India and outside, contain a mixture of Śruti and Smṛti contents in varying proportions. That is why the Upaniṣads are treated as the one Śruti par excellence.

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The Sanatana Dharma: Its Uniqueness

The Sanatana Dharma: Its Uniqueness

This explains the very high authority and prestige of the Śruti in the Indian tradition; it derives from the verified and verifiable character of its truths and their universality. Accordingly, the Smṛti is always subordinate to the Śruti in spiritual matters. Smṛtis come and go; they change age after age; but the Śruti, according to the penetrating analysis of Saṅkara (commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra, I.1.2), contains vastutantrajñāna, 'knowledge of reality as it is', whereas Smṛti contains paraśantrajñāna, 'knowledge depending on the person', which 'can be modified or altered by human effort': kartum akartum anyathākartum śakyate. A Smṛti that sustained society in one age may choke it in another age. As socio-economic conditions change, laws and regulations need to be recast and reinterpreted. Otherwise, they result in strangling the social organism. If the bark that protects the tree fails to grow and expand along with the growth of the tree, it will choke the tree; and if it is a living tree, it will shed that bark and grow a new living bark for itself. Regarding all Smṛtis in general,

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Ramakrishna's pithy utterance correctly conveys the Indian idea: 'Mughal coins have no currency under the (East India) Company's rule.'

Much of the irrelevance of the world's religious traditions today proceeds from their inability to separate the Śruti, or the essential, from the Smṛti, or the obsolete, contents, the eternal spiritual truths from the historical socio-political dogmas, in these traditions, and their unwillingness to throw overboard the latter which have ceased to have any currency value in the changed conditions, and their incapacity to forge new Smṛtis in response to the new demands. Referring to this, the mathematician-philosopher, A. N. Whitehead, says (Science in the Modern World, p. 234) :

'Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.'

Historian Arnold Toynbee also stresses this point in his book, An Historian's Approach to Religion (pp. 262-64) :

'Thus, in our society in our time, the task of winnowing the chaff away from the grain in

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mankind's religious heritage is being forced upon us by a conjunction of social and spiritual circumstances. . . .

'In the life of all higher religions, the task of winnowing is a perennial one because their historic harvest is not pure grain. In the heritage of each of the higher religions, we are aware of the presence of two kinds of ingredients. There are essential counsels and truths, and there are non-essential practices and propositions.

'The essential counsels and truths are valid at all times and places, as far as we can see through the dark glass of mankind's experience up to date. . . .

'But at the same time these same higher religions are historical institutions; and they have been making a transit through space-time in which, at every point-moment in their trajectory, they have been encountering the local and temporary circumstances of human life. . . .

'These accidental accretions are the price that the permanently and universally valid essence of a higher religion has to pay for communicating its message to the members of a particular society in a particular stage of this society's history.'

The philosophy and religion that India developed out of the Śruti bears, therefore, a significant title, namely, sanātana dharma, 'Eternal Religion'. It derives its authority from its truth-character and not from any

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person, be he a saint or even an incarnation; and the truth-character of a teaching demands that it be verifiable by all, irrespective of dogma, creed, and race, and at all times. It has, however, a high place for saints and incarnations as exemplars and teachers of the eternal truths of religion, and for the promulgators of social laws and regulations, be they holy or gifted individuals, as in the past, or institutions like the national legislatures or international organizations, as in the present.

Throwing light on this unique characteristic of the sanātana dharma as derived from the Upaniṣads, Swami Vivekananda says in his lecture on ‘The Sages of India’ (Complete Works, Vol. III, pp. 248-51) :

‘Two ideals of truth are in our scriptures; the one is what we call the eternal, and the other is not so authoritative, yet binding under particular circumstances, times, and places. The eternal relations between souls and God are embodied in what we call the Śrutis, the Vedas. The next set of truths is what we call the Smṛtis, as embodied in the words of Manu, Yājñavalkya, and other writers, and also in the Purāṇas, down to the Tantras. . . .

‘Another peculiarity is that these Śrutis have

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many sages as the recorders of the truths in them, mostly men, even some women. Very little is known of their personalities, the dates of their birth, and so forth, but their best thoughts, their best discoveries, I should say, are preserved there, embodied in the sacred literature of our country, the Vedas. In the Smṛtis, on the other hand, personalities are more in evidence. Startling, gigantic, impressive, world-moving persons stand before us, as it were, for the first time, sometimes of more magnitude even than their teachings.

'This is a peculiarity which we have to understand—that our religion preaches an Impersonal-Personal God. It preaches any amount of impersonal laws plus any amount of personality; but the very fountain-head of our religion is in the Śrutis, the Vedas, which are perfectly impersonal; the persons all come in the Smṛtis and Purāṇas—the great avatāras, incarnations of God, prophets, and so forth. And this ought also to be observed that except our religion, every other religion in the world depends upon the life or lives of some personal founder or founders. Christianity is built upon the life of Jesus Christ, Mohammedanism upon Mohammed, Buddhism upon Buddha, Jainism upon the Jinas, and so on. It naturally follows that there must be in all these religions a good deal of fight about what they call the historical evidences of these great personalities. If at any time the historical evidences about the existence of these personages in ancient times become weak, the whole building of

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the religion tumbles down and is broken to pieces. We escaped this fate, because our religion is not based on persons but principles. 'That you obey your religion is not because it came through the authority of a sage, no, not even of an incarnation. Kṛṣṇa is not the authority of the Vedas, but the Vedas are the authority of Kṛṣṇa himself. His glory is that he is the greatest preacher of the Vedas that ever existed. So with the other incarnations; so with all our sages.'

By Śruti is generally meant the Vedas; specifically, it means the Upaniṣads, they being the Vedānta, the anta, literally the end or concluding portion, but in a deeper sense, the very gist or essence, of the Vedas. The Vedas or Śrutis expound sanātana dharma, which means eternal religion. Indian spiritual tradition holds the Vedas as anādi, beginningless. Clarifying this idea in his address at the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, Swami Vivekananda says (ibid., Vol. I, pp. 6-7):

'It may sound ludicrous to this audience how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot

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it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul, and between individual spirits and the father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

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'The discoverers of these laws are called ṛṣis (sages), and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.'

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MEANING OF THE TERM UPANISAD

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That this is the traditional view is evident from what Śaṅkara says on the etymology of the term 'upanisad'. The term means 'knowledge received by the student 'sitting close to' the teacher. Explaining the derivation of the term in the introduction to his commentary on the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, Śaṅkara says:

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Kena punararthayogena upaniṣacchabdena vidyā ucyate, ityucyate. Ye mumukṣavo dṛṣṭānuśravikaviṣayavitṛṣṇāḥ santaḥ upaniṣacchabdavācyām vakṣyamāṇalakṣaṇām vidyām upasadya, upagamya, tannিষ্ঠhatayā niścayena śilayanti, teṣām avidyādeḥ saṁsārabijāsya viśaraṇāt, himsanāt, vināśanāt ityanena arthayogena vidyā upaniṣadityucyate--

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'By what etymological process does the term "upanisad" denote knowledge? This is now explained. Those who seek liberation, being endowed with the spirit of dispassion towards all sense objects, seen or heard of, and, approaching this knowledge indicated by the term "upanisad" presently to be explained, devote themselves to it with one-pointed determination—of such people, this knowledge removes, shatters, or destroys the avidyā (ignorance or spiritual blindness), which is the seed of all relative existence or worldliness. By these etymological connexions, "upanisad" is said to mean knowledge.'

And anticipating a possible objection, Śaṅkara continues:

Nanu ca upaniṣacchabdena adhyetāro granthamapi abhilapanti, upaniṣadam adhi-mahane, upaniṣadam adhyāpayāma iti ca. Nai-ṣa doṣaḥ; avidyādisamsārahetuviśaraṇādeḥ sadidhātvarthasya granthamātre asambha-vāt, vidyāyāṁ ca sambhavāt, granthasyāpi tādarthyena tacchabdatvopapatteḥ, āyurvai ghṛtam ityādivat. Tasmāt vidyāyāṁ tu-

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

khyayā vṛttyā upaniṣacchabdo vartate, grantha tu bhaktyā iti—

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

‘It may be urged that students use the term “upanisad” even to denote a book, as when they say “We shall study the Upanisad”, “We shall teach the Upanisad”.

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This is no fault; since the destruction etc. of the seed of worldliness, which is the meaning of the root sad (in upa-ni-sad), cannot be had from a mere book, but can be had from knowledge, even the book may also be denoted by that term, because it serves the same purpose (indirectly), as when we say that “clarified butter is verily life”.

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Therefore, the term “upanisad” primarily refers to knowledge, and only secondarily to a book.’

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Education involving the student ‘sitting close to’ the teacher means the most intimate student-teacher communion.

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The higher the knowledge sought, greater is this communion and greater the silence accompanying the knowledge-communication.

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These values reach their maximum when the knowledge that is sought and imparted is of the highest kind, namely, ātmajñāna or brahmajñāna, knowledge of the Ātman or

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Brahman, which, as Śaṅkara points out in his commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra (I. 1. 2) : anubhavāvasānatvāt bhūtavastuviṣayatvāt ca brahmajñānasya—‘finds its consummation in experience (or realization), since the knowledge of Brahman relates to a reality which is already existing’.

TRUTH VERSUS OPINION

TRUTH VERSUS OPINION

One of the fascinating features of the Upaniṣads is love of truth and its fearless quest. Referring to this, Robert Ernest Hume says in his book The Thirteen Principal Upaniṣads (p. 30, footnote) :

‘The earnestness of the search for truth is one of the delightful and commendable features of the Upaniṣads.’

In them we are always in the company of earnest students and teachers who discuss the central problems of all philosophy and religion with a sincerity and thoroughness, objectivity and detachment, rare in the history of philosophic thought. The Upaniṣads discovered very early in history what Thomas Huxley refers to as the difference between opinion and truth, between ‘I believe such and such’ and ‘I believe such and such to be true’. Says Huxley (quoted by J.

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Arthur Thomson in his Introduction to Science, p. 22):

'The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and feel, "I believe such and such to be true". All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act.'

A belief is true if it has stood, and can always stand, the test of experience, and not because it has been said by a man or written in a book. The essential Vedāntic truths belong to this category; they possess universal validity as they are verifiable by all men.

This is forcibly brought out by Saṅkara in a remarkable passage of his commentary on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad dealing with the validity of scriptural statements (I.4.7):

Na vākhyasya vastvanvākhyānam kriyānvākhyānam vā pramāṇyāpramāṇyakāraṇam. Kim tarhi? Niścitaphalavat vijñānotpādakatvam. Tat yatra asti, tat pramāṇam vākhyam; yatra nāsti, tat apramāṇam—

'The test of the validity of a sentence is not that it just states something about a thing or about an act. What (is it) then? (It is) its capacity to generate certain and

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fruitful knowledge. A sentence that has this is valid; while one that lacks it is invalid.' Such truths are far different from the private beliefs of an individual or a group, a sect or a church, held with all emotional intensity and projected for other people's acceptance with equal fervour. Such beliefs cannot claim 'the greatest reward' because they have not paid 'the heaviest penalty' involved in being subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of reason and being thrown open to universal verification. Referring to this unique characteristic of Vedānta, Romain Rolland says (The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, Third Impression, 1947, p. 196) :

'The true Vedāntic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their co-ordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe.'

THE MENTAL CLIMATE OF THE UPANISADS

I have referred before to the fearless quest

of truth characteristic of these Upaniṣads. Any reader of this literature cannot also escape being struck by the rational bent and speculative daring of these sages of ancient India.

The spirit of inquiry which possessed them led them to question experience, to question the environing world; it also led them to fearlessly question their gods and the tenets of their traditional faiths. In this latter field, they showed their uniqueness in contrast to the other gifted people of the ancient world, namely, the Greeks, who did not experience the same urge to subject their religions to that rational investigation which they so diligently and passionately applied to social and political phenomena, and in which their contributions were to become unique and lasting. The Upaniṣadic, and earlier, even the Vedic, sages did not also fear to doubt when rational, certain knowledge was difficult to come by. They illustrate the truth of the creative role of scepticism; in the pursuit of truth, such scepticism is but the prelude to rational faith.

When they sought for the truth of the external universe, they found it baffling; in-

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quiry only deepened the mystery. The nāsa-dīya-sūkta of the Ṛg-Veda records the impact of this mystery on the ancient Indian mind in language at once fascinating and provoking. That mind discovered early, as modern thinkers are slowly discovering to-day, that the mystery of the external world will only deepen and not diminish, in spite of advancing knowledge, if the mystery of the inner world of man is not tackled. For a complete philosophy of reality, there is need to have data from both the fields of experience, the outer and the inner.

Modern science has become aware of the influence of the datum of the observer on the knowledge of the observed data. If the self as knower is inextricably involved in the knowledge of the not-self, of the known, an inquiry into the nature of the self and the nature of knowledge becomes not only a valid but also an indispensable and integral part of the scientific investigation into the nature of reality. As remarked by Sir Arthur Eddington (Philosophy of Physical Science, p. 5) :

'We have discovered that it is actually an aid in the search for knowledge to understand the nature of the knowledge which we seek.'

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The Upaniṣads, therefore, were far in advance of human thought when they decided to dedicate themselves to the tackling of the inner world. By their emphasis on inner penetration, by their whole-hearted advocacy of what the Greeks centuries later promulgated in the dictum ‘Man, know thyself’, but at which they themselves stopped half-way, the Upaniṣads not only gave a permanent orientation to Indian culture and thought, but also blazed a trail for all subsequent philosophy in East and West.

The Upaniṣads do not disclose any details as to the personal histories of their thinkers; but they provide us with a glimpse of the working of their minds; we can study in this literature the graceful conflict of thought with thought, the emergence of newer and newer thought more satisfactory to reason and more in accord with experience at deeper levels, and the rejection of the less adequate ones without a tear. Hypotheses are advanced and rejected on the touchstone of experience and reason, and not at the dictate of a creed. Thus thought forges ahead to unravel the mystery of man and the universe in which

he finds himself; and we can watch this developmental movement of thought and, if we are sensitive enough, also experience, in the words of the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (III, 2. 8), this onward march of being carried along in its current to the one ocean of truth and beauty and delight, and realize our oneness with the One behind the many:

Yathā nadyah syandamānā samudre'astam் gacchanti nāmarūpe vihāya;

Tathā viddān nāmarūpāt vimuktah parāttparam் puruṣamupaiti divyam—

'Just as rivers, as they flow, merge in the ocean giving up their (separate) names and forms, so the knowing one, freed from (separateness arising from) name and form, attains the luminous supreme Self, which is beyond (even) the (other) supreme (name-ly, nature in its undifferentiated state).'

The Upaniṣads reveal an age characterized by a remarkable ferment, intellectual and spiritual. It is one of those rare ages in human history which have registered distinct break-throughs in man's quest for truth and meaning and which have held far-reaching

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consequences for all subsequent ages. The mental climate of the Upanisads is saturated with a passion for truth and a similar passion for human happiness and welfare. Their thinkers were 'undisturbed by the thought of there being a public to please or critics to appease', as Max Müller puts it (Three Lectures on Vedānta Philosophy, p. 39). They considered no sacrifice too heavy in their quest for truth, including not only earthly pleasures and heavenly delights, but also what is most difficult to achieve and what every truth-seeker is called upon to achieve, namely, the sacrificing of pet opinions and pleasing prejudices. Referring to this characteristic of the Upanisads in his book Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, Max Müller says (p. 182) :

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'It is surely astounding that such a system as the Vedānta should have been slowly elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a system that even now makes us feel giddy, as in mounting the last steps of the swaying spire of a Gothic cathedral. None of our philosophers, not excepting Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, or Hegel, has ventured to erect such a spire, never frightened by storms or lightnings. Stone follows on stone after regular succession after once the first step has been made, after

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once it has been clearly seen that in the beginning there can have been but one, as there will be but one in the end, whether we call it Ātman or Brahman.'

An impressive procession of students and teachers, earnest and sincere; a moving record of their animated discussions and graceful thought conflicts here in small groups and there in large assemblies; a flight of thought now and then into sublime heights of experience recorded in songs of freedom and delight, graceful and direct; an effective use of beautiful metaphors and telling imageries serving as feathers to its arrows of thought in flight; a singular absence of an atmosphere of coercion, open or veiled, secular or sacred, inhibiting the free pursuit of truth or its communication; the constant summons to man to verify for himself the truths placed before him for his acceptance; and the treatment of man as man and not as cut up into creeds, races, and sex—these Upaniṣads with the enduring greatness and strength of a perennial philosophy and the beauty and charm of an immortal literature. Unlike philosophies elsewhere and other

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systems here, Vedānta is a living philosophy; and from the time it was first expounded in that dim antiquity down to our own times, it has been the spiritual inspiration behind the vast and varied Indian cultural experiment.

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The Upanisads and Indian Culture

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Without understanding the Upaniṣads, it is impossible to get an insight into Indian history and culture. Every subsequent development of philosophy and religion in India has drawn heavily on the Upaniṣads.

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The path of bhakti or devotion to a personal God, the path of karma or detached action, and the synthesis of all spiritual paths in a comprehensive spirituality, expounded by the Gītā, are all derived from the Upaniṣads. The Gītā is described as brahmavidyāntargata yogaśāstra—' the science (and technique) of yoga derived from the science of Brahman '.

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Emphasizing this pervasive influence of the Upaniṣads on Indian religions, Swami Vivekananda says (Complete Works, Vol. III, pp. 230-31) :

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'In the Upaniṣads, also, we find all the sub-

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sequent development of Indian religious thought. Sometimes it has been urged without any grounds whatsoever that there is no ideal of bhakti in the Upaniṣads. Those that have been students of the Upaniṣad know that that is not true. There is enough of bhakti in every Upaniṣad, if you will only seek for it; but many of these ideas which are found so fully developed in later times in the Purāṇas and other Smṛtis are only in the germ in the Upaniṣads. The sketch, the skeleton, was there, as it were. It was filled in in some of the Purāṇas. But there is not one full-grown Indian ideal that cannot be traced back to the same source—the Upaniṣads.’

In the words of Bloomfield (The Religion of the Veda, p. 51) :

‘There is no important form of Hindu thought, heterodox Buddhism included, which is not rooted in the Upaniṣads.’

Every creative period in India’s long history has behind it the impact of this Vedāntic inspiration in a concentrated measure. The drying up of this fount of inspiration, similarly, has always seen the setting in of the low tide of her culture and life. The ages of the Gītā, Buddha, and Śaṅkara in the past, and of Sri Rama-krishna and Swami Vivekananda in the present, are such landmarks in India’s

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ancient and modern history. It is the energy of this strengthening and purifying philosophy of Vedānta, coupled with the energy of modern science and technology, that Swami Vivekananda has released for recreating India in the modern age. That Vedāntic energy could not be confined to India only, but has flowed out first to the West, and later to the East as well, to recreate the life of modern man.

The Upaniṣads are thus the perennial spring of strength and creativity. This creativity and strength derive from their vision of man as the Ātman, the eternal, infinite dimension of the human personality. Their theme is freedom of the human spirit and their message is fearlessness and love and service. They summon men and women everywhere to this mighty adventure of freedom and fearlessness, love and service, and to the realization, by each man or woman, of his or her essential spiritual nature, and the transcendence of the limitations of finitude. They explain every great movement—social, political, or religious —nay, the phenomena of life itself, as an expression of the urge to freedom inherent

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in every organism—the struggle of the Infinite caught up in a cell or in a body,

in a social scheme or a political system, in a religious dogma or a philosophical creed,

in a texture of relations or the network of relativity itself. Hence their constant

summons to man is to wake up and march on: ‘Arise! Awake! and stop not till the

goal is reached!’ as conveyed by Swami Vivekananda, adapting the powerful words

of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad: Uttiṣṭhata jāgrata prāpya varān nibodhata.

To the Upaniṣads India owes almost all the brighter sides of her life and culture. To

them she owes her impressive record of active toleration within her borders and the

uniformly peaceful and benevolent nature of her foreign relations in the field of religion.

To them she owes the singular absence of aggressive political and military policies and

programmes on her part towards other nations during her millennia of history. To

them she owes the periodical renewal of her national springs of life when they seem

all but choked and about to dry up. To them also she owes the absence of the heavy

hand of an all-powerful church and the

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tentacles of an inescapable dogma on the national life and mind, allowing for the emergence and unhampered functioning, in succeeding periods, of free, creative, and universal spirits who came to purify and reactivate the dormant spirit of the people, who were received by the Indian people and given divine honours, unlike the hostility and persecution with which spiritual innovators were, and still are, received in all Semitic religions in the absence of the blessing of the impersonal background which the Upanisads had provided for the Indian religions, and whose procession down the ages is an impressive feature of India's long history.

And today she is on the threshold of another such creative era of history in the wake of an unprecedented new manifestation of the Vedāntic spirit and energy in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda— Sri Ramakrishna, of whom Rabindranath Tagore, in a tribute paid during Sri Ramakrishna Birth Centenary in 1937, sang in his charming Bengali:

Bahu sādhaker bahu sādhhanār dhārā dhyāne tomār milita hoyeche tārā,

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Tomār jivane asīmer lilāpathe nūtan tīrtha rūp nilo e jagate, Deśvideśer pranām ānila tāni, sethāi amār pranati dilām āni—

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'The diverse courses of spiritual seeking of millions of spiritual seekers—they have all mingled in your meditation. The limitless expanse of your blessed life has assumed the form of a new tīrtha, place of pilgrimage, in this world. Which draws the salutations (of seekers) from India and abroad, To which I add my own salutation';

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of whom Kazi Nazrul Islam, Bengal's revolutionary Muslim poet, sang: Mandire masjide gīrjāy pūjile brahme sama śraddhāy; Tava nām-mākhā prem-niketane bhariyāche tāi trisamsār—

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'Thou didst worship God with equal fervour in temple, mosque, and church; for which reason the whole world is filled with the reservoir of Love that Thou art';

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and Swami Vivekananda, about whom Rabindranath Tagore said (Prabāsī, Vol. 28, p. 286):

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Ādhunik kāle bhāratavarṣe Vivekānanda i ekti mahat vānī pracār karchilen, seṭi kono ācāra-gaṭa nai. Tini deśer sakalke deke bolechilen, tomāder sakaleri madhye brahmer śakti; daridrer madhye devatā tomāder sevā cān. Ei kathāṭi yuvakder cittake samagrabhāve jagiyeche. Tāi ei vānīr phal deśer sevāi āj vicitrabhāve vicitratyāge phaleche. Tār vānī mānuṣke jakhani sammann diyechhe, takhani śakti diyeche—

'In recent times in India, it was Viveka-nanda alone who preached a great message which is not tied to any do's and don'ts. Addressing one and all in the nation, he said: In every one of you there is the power of Brahman (God); the God in the poor de-sires you to serve (Him). This message has roused the heart of the youths in a perva-sive way. That is why this message has borne fruit in the service of the nation in diverse ways and in diverse forms of renunciation. His message has, at one and the same time, imparted dignity and respect to man along with energy and power';

and of whom Kazi Nazrul Islam sang:

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Nava bhārate ānile tumi nava ved,

Muche dile jāti-dharmer bhed;

Jive īśvare abhed ātmā jānāile uccāri—

‘You brought to New India a new Veda,

and washed away her stain of separateness

of religions and castes by proclaiming from

the house-tops the inherent divinity of man.’

Romain Rolland calls Sri Ramakrishna and

Swami Vivekananda Pater Seraphicus and

Jove the Thunderer, whose beneficent im-

pact is already being felt by the spiritual

seekers of all religions.

The Upanisads and Western

Christianity

Christianity in the West is already expe-

riencing, under the impact of the modern

challenge, an unprecedented ferment and

questioning, resulting in a sincere quest, on

the part of the various Christian denomi-

nations, for the universal spiritual content

of the Christian religion underlying its de-

nominational specialities and exaggerations,

and forging thereby an oecumenical Chris-

tian unity. The success of this noble quest

will entirely depend on increasing emphasis

on the Śruti aspects of Christianity and the

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

soft-pedalling of its Smṛti elements. And this is what is being done by the denominations concerned, and with very hopeful results. It is difficult to isolate, from among the complex factors, the Vedāntic contribution to this healthy development. If its content derives from the inescapable world conditions created by modern science and technology, its stimulus and direction can largely be traced to the silent but powerful influences proceeding from the spread of Vedāntic ideas in the West in the wake of the tumultuous ovation that greeted Swami Vivekananda when he addressed the historic Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Said he in that memorable address (Complete Works, Vol. I, p. 18):

'To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? 'They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

'It is the same light coming through glasses

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of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation, But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in his incarnation as Kṛṣṇa: “ I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.”

No clearer and more authentic pronouncement on the nature and scope of the spiritual core of religions, on their Śruti aspects, has ever been uttered. And giving us an insight into the shape of things to come, he said later in that address (ibid., p. 19) :

‘... If there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the Gold it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Kṛṣṇa and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brāhminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Moham-medan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being, from the lowest growelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in ave of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion

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which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centred in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature.

And addressing the final session of the Parliament, he uttered these prophetic words in conclusion (ibid., p. 20) :

'If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possession of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: "Help and not Fight", "Assimilation and not Destruction", "Harmony and Peace and not Dissension".

'His words are great music', remarks Romain Rolland about Vivekananda's utterances (The Life of Vivekananda, p. 162). Vivekananda set to music the tune that was haunting the ears of millions in the modern world, the tune of human unity and equality,

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tolerance and love, the tune of the divine in the heart of man.

The Life of Swami Vivekananda by his Eastern and Western Disciples quotes the following contribution from Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, one of the foremost poetesses and writers of America, to the New York American of 26 May 1907, giving her impressions of Swami Vivekananda; though a bit long, it bears reproduction in this context, as it provides a glimpse of the impact of the message of Vedānta on thinking people in the West (pp. 394-95) :

'Twelve years ago I chanced one evening to near that a certain teacher of philosophy from India, a man named Vivekananda, was to lecture a block from my home in New York.

'We went out of curiosity (the man whose name I bear and I), and before we had been ten minutes in the audience, we felt ourselves lifted up into an atmosphere so rarified, so vital, so wonderful, that we sat spell-bound and almost breathless, to the end of the lecture.

'When it was over we went out with new courage, new hope, new strength, new faith, to meet life's daily vicissitudes. "This is the Philosophy, this is the idea of God, the religion, which I have been seeking", said the man. And for months afterwards he went with me to hear

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Swami Vivekananda explain the old religion and to gather from his wonderful mind jewels of truth and thoughts of helpfulness and strength. It was that terrible winter of financial disasters, when banks failed and stocks went down like broken balloons and businessmen walked through the dark valleys of despair and the whole world seemed topsy-turvy—just such an era as we are again approaching. Sometimes after sleepless nights of worry and anxiety, the man would go with me to hear the Swami lecture, and then he would come out into the winter gloom and walk down the street smiling and say: “It is all right. There is nothing to worry over.” And I would go back to my own duties and pleasures with the same uplifted sense of soul and enlarged vision.

‘When any philosophy, any religion, can do this for human beings in this age of stress and strain, and when, added to that, it intensifies their faith in God and increases their sympathies for their kind and gives them a confident joy in the thought of other lives to come, it is a good and great religion. … ‘We need to learn the greatness of the philosophy of India. We need to enlarge our narrow creeds with the wisdom religious. But we want to imbue them with our own modern spirit of progress, and to apply them practically, lovingly, and patiently to human needs. Vivekananda came to us with a message. … “I do not come to convert you to a new belief”, he said. “I

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stimulus are to be sought in the spiritual core of the world's religions.

UPANISADS AND INDIAN CHRISTIANITY

Christianity in India is practically coeval with Christian history itself. Indian Christian tradition traces the origin of the Christians of Kerala, the south-west state of India, to a visit of St. Thomas, a direct disciple of Jesus Christ, in the first century of the Christian era. From then to this day, Christianity in India, as also Judaism, which also reached Kerala about the same time, followed by Zoroastrianism, which reached western India eight centuries later, have been protected, cherished, and nourished by the mother-heart of Hinduism under the inspiration of the spiritual vision of the Vedāntic sages.

Western Christian penetration, both in its Catholic and Protestant forms, began from the sixteenth century under the most unChristian auspices of western imperialism and colonialism. After four centuries of co-existence of a dogmatic and intolerant Christianity with an all-inclusive and tolerant Hinduism, during which a silent give-and-take pro-

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which the writer highlights the need for Christianity to open itself to the influences of Vedānta (quoted by S. Radhakrishnan in his The Principal Upaniṣads, p. 19, 'Introduction', footnote) :

'Christianity in India needs the Vedānta. We missionaries have not realized this with half the clearness that we should. We cannot move freely and joyfully in our own religion, because we have not sufficient terms and modes of expression wherewith to express the more immanent aspects of Christianity. A very useful step would be the recognition of certain books or passages in the literature of Vedānta as constituting what might be called an Ethnic Old Testament. The permission of ecclesiastical authorities could then be asked for reading passages found in such a canon of Ethnic Old Testament at divine service along with passages from the New Testament as alternatives to the Old Testament lessons.'

In the 'Introduction' to his book, Christianity as Bhakti Mārga, published as early as 1926 by The Christian Literature Society for India, as the first book of its 'Indian Studies Series', the author, A. J. Appasamy, M.A.(Harvard), D.Phil.(Oxon), an eminent Indian Christian, writes:

'In attempting to understand how Christianity is likely to relate itself in the coming years to

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Indian thought and become a living force in the country, I am inclined to think that it will lay much emphasis on mystic experience.

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Emphasizing that this mystic orientation of Indian Christianity will be of the bhakti type, the author says further on:

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'When we speak of interpreting Christianity in its relation to the spirit of India's religious genius, we have to remember that India's religious genius has expressed itself in systems of philosophy, religious practices, and sacred books often most diverse. The immediate task which lies before India Christians anxious to make clear to themselves and to others the relation between the real spirit of Christianity and the real spirit of India's religious life is that of choice. We have to decide what particular form of religious life in India is best suited for this purpose. As there are many types of religious thought in India, an inevitable consequence of the attempts of Christian thinkers to adjust the expression of their religious experience to the terms and ideas familiar to India would be the development of many types of Indian Christianity.'

THE UPANISADS AND INDIAN ISLAM

The influence of the Upaniṣads on Indian Islam has not been very profound in the past. Even though Sufism, the mystical offshoot of Islam, owes much to the Upani-

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ṣads, Islam as a whole, which has been generally hostile to its own offshoot as to all non-Islamic faiths, has remained largely unaffected.

Prophet Mohammed was a deep lover of God and man. And he has breathed this double love into the Koran. Below are given a few verses taken from the English translation of the Koran by Al-Haj Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar.

The following three verses singing the glory of God can be found repeated in any number of verses in the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. The opening verses of the Koran possess rare spiritual majesty and beauty:

(We commence) with the name of God, The most Merciful (to begin with), The most Merciful (to the end).

All praise belongs to God, Lord of all the worlds, The most Merciful (to begin with), The most Merciful (to the end).

Master of the day of Judgment. Thee alone do we serve, And Thee alone do we ask for help.

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Guide us on the right path,

The path of those upon whom be Thy

blessings,

Not of those upon whom be (Thy) wrath,

Nor of those who are lost.

In verse 255 of Chapter 2, we read about

the power and glory of God:

God!

There is no deity but He,

The Ever-living,

The All-sustaining:

Slumber overtakes Him not,

Nor sleep.

To Him belongs

What is in the heavens,

And what is in the earth.

Who is there to second anyone before Him

Except with His authority?

He knows what is in front of them,

And what is behind them;

And they encompass nothing of His

knowledge

Except what He pleases;

And His power extends over the heavens

and the earth;

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And the guardianship of these tires Him not,

And He is

The Uppermost,

The Highest.

Verse 25 of Chapter 3 sings the majesty of God:

Say, 'O God! Master of the kingdom,

Thou givest the kingdom to whom Thou pleasest,

And Thou snatchest the kingdom from whom Thou pleasest;

And Thou exaltest whom Thou pleasest,

And Thou abasest whom Thou pleasest;

In Thy hand is all good:

Thou art capable of doing all Thou pleasest'.

The Koran contains specific mention that salvation is not the monopoly of the Muslims.

Verse 62 of Chapter 2 says:

As to those who believe (in the Quran),

And the Jews,

And the Christians,

And the Sabians—

Whoever believes in God

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And the future day

And does good,

For such, then, there is a reward with

their Lord,

And there shall be no fear on them,

Nor shall they grieve.

The Koran insists that the only condition

to be fulfilled to obtain divine mercy is good

life and good deeds and not subscription to

a creed (ibid., 2, 177) :

There is no virtue in your turning your

faces

Towards the East or the West,

But virtuous is he who believes in God,

And (in) the future day,

And (in) the messenger-spirits,

And the Book,

And the Prophets;

And he who gives his wealth, in spite of

his love for it,

To the near of kin,

And the orphans,

And the needy,

And the wayfarer,

And the beggars,

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And in ransoming the slaves;

And who keeps up the prayer,

And pays the stated alms;

And those who fulfil their covenants

when they covenant;

And the persevering ones

In hardship,

And injury,

And in time of war;

These are the truthful,

And these! They are the reverent.

The prophet had set a high example of

tolerance and respect in his dealings with

non-Muslims. Verse 256 of Chapter 2 of

the Koran upholds religious toleration and

fellowship:

Let there be no compulsion in religion,

The right patl. has surely been made

distinct from the wrong,

Then whoever disbelieves in the

transgressor,

And believes in God,

He has, then, got hold of the firm handle,

No breaking therefor:

And God is Hearing, Knowing.

Verse 135 of Chapter 4 (also verse 8 of

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Chapter 5) emphasizes justice and equity in inter-personal relations:

O ye who believe!

Be maintainers of justice,

Witnesses for the sake of God,

And though it be against yourselves,

Or your parents,

And your relations.

Whether a person be rich or poor,

Then God is nearer to them (than you),

Therefore follow not (your) low desires

lest you do not do justice.

And if you distort (the evidence),

Or keep away,

Then, surely, God knows well what you do.

These and other verses of the Koran proclaim truths which are eternal and universal; they constitute, in the language of Indian spiritual tradition, the Śruti content of Islam. This is Islam as a path to God. There is also another aspect of Islam as a way of life in society. This constitutes the large Smṛti content in the Koran, the group of ideas and values which the prophet gave to his people to weld them into an Arab nation. This is of

60

limited application, as it constitutes its personal laws and social rules and regulations—all those elements that form the socio-political content of a religion. No scripture can legislate on these for all time and for all peoples. The laws that were beneficial to the Arabs of the seventh century A.D. may not be beneficial to the Indians or Indonesians, Europeans or Americans, and strangely enough, even to the Arabs themselves of the twentieth century. Progressive Arab states today are wisely modifying them in response to the demands of the modern age.

But the spiritual message of the Koran, its teaching which shows man a path to spiritual realization, is eternal and universal. In periods of dynamic social changes, every religion needs to be subjected to a reinterpretation process, ‘a winnowing process’, in the words of Toynbee referred to earlier, with emphasis on its spirit and a soft-pedalling of its letter, a greater stress on the eternal and less on the historical, so that it may emerge reconstructed to meet the challenge of the new age; for ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’, as the

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New Testament puts it. If this is not done, the religion concerned becomes a procrustean bed, twisting the personalities of its followers.

The Sufi movement in Islam, arising from the contact of Islam with Christian mysticism and pre-Islamic Iranian spiritual traditions, sought to emphasize its Śruti content, its non-historical elements, its eternal spiritual core; here Islam as a path to spiritual realization shines most. It found a welcome soil first in Mesopotamia and Iran, then in India, where it became powerfully influenced by Vedānta. But everywhere it had to face fierce opposition and persecution from orthodox Islam, which was centred in a rigid allegiance to its Smṛti contents, including its parochial socio-political ideology and programmes, initiated more often by ambitious rulers and ruthless military adventurers. Socio-political ideologies uninspired by high moral and spiritual values tend to nourish the lower self of man from which proceed selfishness and intolerance, violence and war. The first object of every religion is to check and discipline this lower self of man. But instead of that, instead

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of religion elevating the socio-political ideology to its own level, it is itself brought down to the level of the other, and functions as its handmaid. This phenomenon afflicted Islam from too close an association with real-politik, as it also afflicted Christianity after Constantine. The saints of Islam—the lovers of God and man—became muted and the voice of Islam was sounded by ignorant zealots, and by war-minded conquerors, un-Islamic and worldly to the core, in search of loot and power and pleasure, who used and abused the name of Islam to cover their own worldly propensities.

Indian contact with Islam was through Muslim Arab merchants and missionaries during the first four centuries after the birth of Islam. This phase represented the normal form of inter-religious and inter-national contact resulting in mutual benefit from a peaceful give-and-take process. It was also the period when Islam reached the height of its power and glory, with the Arab national mind keen for the acquisition of, and warmly hospitable to, new ideas, and taking freely from Greco-Roman, Iranian, and Indian cultures.

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But from early thirteenth century, all this changed. Dissensions and corruption set in in the wake of imperial power and luxury, which overwhelmed the simple desert Arab; and the Mongol invasions in the middle of that century finally destroyed the hegemony of Arab Islam. Islamic learning and culture suffered a terrible eclipse, which was to continue for centuries together. The conquerors, and other central Asian groups in their wake, adopted Islam or, rather, adapted Islam to their own low cultural standards and purposes. When reason and love of truth were dethroned, the 'letter of the law' triumphed, and reactionary orthodoxy entered into unholy alliance with military adventurers, blessing their violent deeds and converting them into a succession of holy wars and jehads with the seal of religious approval.

This was the second phase of Islamic contact experienced by India from about the twelfth century onwards, when India and its religions were systematically battered in the name of that religion which had, during the preceding centuries, nourished a culture and a political state which had

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freely learnt from Indian knowledge and wisdom and had been the torch-bearer of science and humanism. The history of India and the character of Indian Islam and Hindu society would have been different if Islam had come to India in this second phase as in that first phase, as a friend and in peace. This is one of the crucial might-have-beens of human history. It would then have contributed its equalitarian social gospel to the purification of the caste-ridden social edifice of Hinduism. Hinduism would have gladly learnt these lessons from it, whilst imparting its own Vedāntic outlook and tolerance to the sister faith. But the fact that Islam in its most effective forms came to India through ignorant zealots and militant conquerors, through what Nietzsche terms 'violence of deed and demeanour', made Islam an eyesore to the Hindu mind. It is one of those sad chapters in inter-cultural contacts which yielded bitter fruits, but which, in a different form, would have been fruitful of great results for the religion and culture of mankind.

This second phase, therefore, has written a sad chapter in the history of India, whose

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

far-reaching evil effects constitute the most serious challenge to Indian wisdom today. And India is facing this stupendous task with the strength and dynamism, far-sight and foresight of her Upaniṣadic heritage.

All the lofty ideas of love of God and man, justice and equity in human relations, equality between man and man, and toleration and respect for other faiths—in short, all the Śruti aspects of Islam, which are the nurseries of the progressive trends of a religion, became submerged in successive waves of bigotry and intolerance. Hindus and their saints were not the only victims of this reactionary Islam; Muslims themselves, including some of Islam’s lovable saints, holding progressive spiritual views or upholding rational socio-political ideas and programmes, became subjected to persecution, torture, and death. And yet, much give and take and cross-fertilization of the two cultures did take place; and mystics and saints did not fail to arise from time to time during this period, as witnesses to the eternal and universal values embedded in the Islamic religion, thus demonstrating the vitality of its Śruti aspect. The period also

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

saw the occasional appearance of a king or an emperor, with forward-looking state policies, such as the early Mughals and Sher Shah. Such saints and rulers have always responded to the spiritual beauty and depth of Indian wisdom as expressed in Vedānta. Hindu tolerance continued in the midst of Muslim intolerance because that tolerance was the product of a spiritual vision and philosophical conviction bequeathed by the Upaniṣads, which had become an inseparable part of the Indian outlook and way of life. There is a uniqueness about Indian toleration in that it has always been the product of religious faith, unlike the toleration developed by the modern West resulting from its waning of faith in religion. Explaining this Indian approach, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan says (Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 317):

'Toleration is the homage which the finite mind pays to the inexhaustibility of the Infinite.'

Muslim chroniclers themselves have noted this strange phenomenon of Hindu tolerance in the midst of Muslim intolerance. Dr. Radhakrishnan quotes (ibid., p. 312) the

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following passage from Murray's discoveries and Travels in Asia (Vol. II, p. 20) in which the author gives the remarks of a Muslim ambassador from Persia to the court of the Hindu ruler of Calicut in Kerala:

'The people (of Calicut) are infidels; consequently I (Abdul Razak Berni, Ambassador from the court of Persia about the middle of the fifteenth century) consider myself in an enemy's country, as the Mohammadans consider everyone who has not received the Koran. Yet I admit that I meet with perfect toleration, and even favour; we have two mosques and are allowed to pray in public.'

Even the bigoted chronicler of Aurangzeb's reign, Khafi Khan, felt compelled to give high tributes to Shivaji, the Hindu ruler of the South, who cherished Hindus and Muslims alike and cared for their holy places with equal solicitude, even while resisting tooth and nail the policy of systematic oppression of the Hindus zealously practised by the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb. The same cultured attitude and policy were adopted by Guru Gobind Singh in the Punjab during his relentless struggle against the intolerance and oppression of this emperor who saw at his death in 1707 the

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

dismemberment of the mighty Moghul empire due to his own follies. Says historian S. N. Sen in his The Military System of the Marathas (p. 18) :

'In India religious intolerance has been very rare and Shivaji's conception of a Hindu empire was in no way identified with religious persecution. He enlisted in his army seven hundred (Muslim) Pathan deserters from Bijapur, at least three of his naval commanders were Muslims by faith, and he venerated the Muhammadan saint, Sheikh Muhammad as he venerated the Hindu saints Tukaram and Ramdas. He granted inām lands for "the illumination of, and food offerings to, the shrines of Muhammadan saints, and Muslim mosques were maintained by state allowance". Only once in his eventful career did he fail to respect the asylum given by a Muhammadan saint to some fugitives, but he never failed to show due respect to the holy scriptures of the Muslims. And Khafi Khan, who delights in showering the most opprobrious epithets . . . on him, is yet constrained to admit that "he made it a rule that whenever his followers went plundering, they should do no harm to the mosques, the Book of God, or the women of anyone. Whenever a copy of the sacred Koran came into his hands, he treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussalman followers. When the women of any Hindu or Muhammadan were taken prisoners by his men, and they had

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no friend to protect them, he watched over them until their relations came with a suitable ransom to buy their liberty." (Elliot and Dawson, History of India, Vol. II, pp. 254, 256, 262, and 269).'

Islamic intolerance, as we have seen, is not the fruit of Islam as such, but of its fundamentalist interpretation, of its mixing up of religion with parochial and exclusive tribalism and political nationalism. Islam, as history shows, has also exhibited, in its progressive variety, the finest tolerance in the lives of several of its saints and laymen, kings and states. In the context of the modern world, the mind and face of that fundamentalist Islam wear the look of a long-vanished age. But there is also the mind and face of this progressive Islam which is today struggling to work out a new Islamic yugadharma, the dharma for this yuga or age, as Indian thought puts it. This latter Islam has already begun to move the minds and hearts of millions in several Arab states. The conflict between the two types of Islam shows itself essentially as a conflict between reactionary and progressive forces, between rigid backward-looking and

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THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

resilient forward-looking ideologies, the former viewing Islam as a finished and final Smṛti, exclusive and intolerant of all other Smṛtis, and the latter viewing it in the light of its Śruti elements and the scientific and humanistic thought of the modern age, and striving to forge a new Islamic Smṛti in tune with what is eternal in Islam and with the spirit of modern enlightenment.

Modern Indian Islam, except in small groups here and there, has so far escaped this conflict in any serious form due, among other things, to the encouragement and support given by the foreign British government, in the interest of its own self-perpetuation, to all reactionary forces in Indian Islam, and to the frenzied upheaval which preceded and led to the partition of India in 1947; these abnormal circumstances helped to nourish and sustain the ideology of that backward-looking Islam.

But the conflict between the progressive and the reactionary is bound to invade Indian Islam also as it has invaded Arab Islam.

Due to the exigencies of its birth, Pakistani Islam may experience it somewhat later.

Earlier or later, no religion or society today, be it Muslim, Christian, or

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Hindu, can escape the inquisitive, and often irreverent, questioning and peering by increasing sections of its intelligent youths, both girls and boys, educated and nurtured in modern thought. The searchlight of critical thought will soon be systematically directed by thoughtful Indian Muslims on their religious traditions with a view to finding out what is essential, and separating what is obsolete, in them, as it was directed earlier by free-minded Christians on Christianity and free-minded Hindus on Hinduism.

When this becomes a barrage, either of two things may result: the onset of a reforming zeal which, for want of insight into, and faith in, the higher spiritual dimensions of religion, will begin to secularize Islam by reforming its obsolete elements, and end in reforming away Islam itself, and converting it into a mere social reform programme, into a mere worldly ideology, as has happened in the case of protestant Christianity; or else, the setting in of a process of creative adjustment in which the eternal and universal spiritual message of Islam will be increasingly

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liberated, the forces of which tending to align with the kindred forces of her sister faiths with a view to providing the bread of religion to the spiritually hungry modern Muslim youth who refuses to be fed on the stones of exclusive and outworn dogmas and creeds.

This search for the essential and casting away of the non-essential is a hoary tradition in Islamic spirituality. Dr. Bhagawan Das refers (Essential Unity of All Religions, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Edition, 1960, p. 100) to the verse in the famous Masnavi, which is accepted in the Muslim world generally as next only to the Koran in holiness, in which the author, Maulānā Jalāl-Ud-din Rūmi describes in beautiful Persian the purpose of his work as precisely this:

Man Ze Qurān maghz rā bardāstam, Ustukhān peṣe sagān andakhtam—

When this is done with regard to the

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Koran today, the scope of the Smṛti aspect of Islam, such as personal laws and social rules relating to marriage, inheritance, etc., will be subjected to rational scrutiny and become wisely relegated to the care of political constitutions and parliamentary social legislations and to the enlightened social consciences of the respective nations, on the one hand, and of the various legislative organs of the international community, on the other.

The two courses above enumerated mean either the secularization of religion or the spiritualization of the secular life of man; the latter will meet the contemporary demand for the toning up of the secular life of man in terms of the essential core of spiritual truths imbedded in religion.

Whatever may be the future course of Islam in other countries with respect to these two alternatives, the course of Indian Islam will be determined not only by the spiritual forces arising from within itself, but also by its environing forces, the forces proceeding from the total Indian social situation, conditioned, among other things, by the hoary Indian culture with a spiritual

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base and a spiritual direction. And these forces, so far as religion is concerned, are the forces arising from the strengthening, purifying, and unifying philosophy and vision of the Upanisads. Many scholars and thinkers of Islam and Hinduism, past and present, have expressed the conviction that the spiritual core of Islam is perfectly in tune with this philosophy and vision, and that some of the practical achievements of Islam, such as social equality, are more so than similar achievements of Hinduism itself.

The closer alignment now of these two kindred spiritual forces will help not only in the evolution of a progressive modern Indian national society, free, equalitarian, and spiritually oriented, but will also result in the evolution of a distinctively Indian Islam stamped with the Indian spiritual genius, and in the development of Islamic democracy into human democracy.

The revivalist movements in Indian Islam have so far been politically inspired and motivated, backward-looking, and productive of bitter fruits. They have done everything to suppress the redeeming forces of the spirituality of Islam and its close kinship

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with Hindu and Christian spirituality. But Indian Islam cannot long escape the modern impact; it is bound, before long, to pass through a process of inner ferment and questioning under the stimulus of expanding modern education and the nourishment provided by the free atmosphere of Indian democracy. These two circumstances offer the supreme opportunity to every Indian religion to bring the highest and best out of itself. When Indian Islam begins to avail of this opportunity, it will capture a forward-looking mood and temper and that dynamic capacity for assimilation of new ideas which it manifested in the Middle East in the heyday of its glory under the Caliphate. This is bound to bring the higher mind of Islam under the spell of Vedānta, and of its dynamic modern expression in Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, as it fell under the spell of classical Greek thought and higher Persian thought in that earlier period. It will then experience a pervasive revival and reconstruction of a truly spiritual character in tune with the enlightenment and progressive spirit and demands of the modern age. It can be predicted

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that such a reconstruction of Indian Islam will see the appearance of new commentaries and other types of studies on the Koran in the light of the Upaniṣads. Vivekananda believed that the modern renaissance in India will result in a happy synthesis of the spiritual streams of Vedānta and Islam, a consummation which was fervently wished for, and achieved in a small way, by the saints and laymen of both the religions even during the unpropitious times of the Middle Ages. This is the glorious future before Indian Islam today.

THE UPANISADS AND INDIAN SECULARISM

The Cross and the Crescent have always been at loggerheads with each other all over the world. This is in for a profound change in the Indian context today. When Indian Christianity and Indian Islam will achieve their spiritual self-discovery, they will issue forth as distinct national and international spiritual forces, in harmony with each other and with the other world religions. To India herself, this will be the consummation of that process which Viveka­nanda refers to as 'the union of her scattered

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spiritual forces’. The Indian Constitution and the Indian state are passionately wedded to the ideal of freedom—freedom of thought and conscience and freedom to profess and practise the faith of one’s choice, and even freedom to live without a faith. And freedom is the one condition of growth, says Swami Vivekananda. In the passionate words which he uttered in the course of his lectures on ‘Practical Vedānta’ delivered in London in 1896 (Complete Works, Vol. II, p. 336) :

‘We should, therefore, follow reason and also sympathize with those who do not come to any sort of belief, following reason. For it is better that mankind should become atheist by following reason than blindly believe… on the authority of anybody. What we want is progress, development, realization. No theories ever made men higher. No amount of books can help us to become purer. The only power is in realization and that lies in ourselves and comes from thinking. Let men think. A clod of earth never thinks; but it remains only a lump of earth. The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals. I believe in reason and follow reason having seen enough of the evils of authority, for

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I was born in a country where they have gone to the extreme of authority.'

The freedoms granted and guaranteed by the Indian state are meant to ensure the all-round growth of the Indian people through stimulation of their thinking and initiative. They seek to convert India into a vast laboratory of human development for a seventh of the human race, in a milieu of freedom and equality and the sacredness of the human personality.

This is the meaning of India declaring herself a secular state. The vast majority of those who met in the Constituent Assembly in Delhi and voted the Indian constitution in 1949 were religious and not irreligious. And yet, they adopted the principles and policies of a secular constitution for their deeply religious country. We should not fail to note the significance of this. In the words of Dr. Radhakrishnan (Recovery of Faith, p. 202) :

'Though faith in the supreme is the basic principle of the Indian tradition, the Indian state will not identify itself with or be controlled by any particular religion. . . . This view of religious impartiality, of comprehension and forbearance,

has a prophetic role to play within the national and the international life. ... The religious impartiality of the Indian state is not to be confused with secularism or atheism. Secularism as here defined is in accordance with the ancient religious tradition of India. It tries to build up a fellowship of believers, not by subordinating individual qualities to the group mind but by bringing them into harmony with each other. This dynamic fellowship is based on the principle of diversity in unity which alone has the quality of creativeness.'

A secular state so conceived, one that is not wedded either to religious indifference or anti-religious atheism, but impartially promotes all religions, believing in the spiritual dimension of the human personality over and above his sensate nature, is a unique phenomenon 'with a prophetic role to play', as remarked by Dr. Radhakrishnan.

It is more appropriately termed the Vedāntic state, for the inspiration behind it is the tolerant all-embracing Upanisadic tradition. No such secular state has existed in history, ancient or modern, either in the East or in the West, including India. In Indian history, we come across great states dedicated, no doubt, to toleration and inter-religious fellowship, but also committed to one

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particular faith. In western history, on the

other hand, we come across states which

hold the scales even between its diverse

faiths, itself uninterested in all of them,

except politically. This is specially true of

the Roman Empire, the various cults and

religions of which, in the cynical remark of

Gibbon, 'were all considered by the people

as equally true, by the philosophers as

equally false, and by the magistrates as

equally useful'. The United States of

America comes closest to the Indian concep-

tion, where the separation of church and

state co-exists with a general commitment

to God and religion. But the American

political philosophy does not claim any

insight into, and is unconcerned with, the

faith of the individual as such, but is con-

cerned only with its social expression in his

or her conduct and behaviour. It is the

presence of this insight and its integration

with man's external life that makes Vedānta

a complete philosophy which has the courage

and capacity to see life steadily and see it

as a whole.

The New Testament dictum, 'Give

unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and

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unto God that which is God's', is only a working principle at its best. It leaves man as a denizen of two unreconciled worlds, either of which may encroach, or be encroached by, the other, to the detriment of human progress and well-being. Both have happened in history. Whatever be the justification for this dualism of God and Caesar in the past, it is utterly irrelevant in the modern age with its unprecedented enlightenment and progress, when no aspect of human experience is left out of the scrutiny of reason, and when there is a growing international integration of the human communities. The philosophy of 'Caesar and his dues' and the philosophy of 'God and His dues' need to be comprehended in an integral philosophy of total experience, in a unifying vision of man and nature. We need a philosophy which bridges the gulf between action and contemplation, work and worship, the secular and the sacred. This is Vedānta, which Swami Vivekananda preached in East and West alike at the end of the last century. Highlighting its unifying vision, Sister Nivedita (Miss Margaret Noble) writes ('Introduc-

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tion: Our Master and His Message', Com-

plete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol.

I, p. xv):

'The many and the One are the same Reality,

perceived by the mind at different times and in

different attitudes.

'It is this which adds its crowning significance

to our Master's life, for here he becomes the

meeting-point, not only of East and West, but

also of past and future. If the many and the

One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not

all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes

of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of

creation, which are paths of realization. No

distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular.

To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce.

Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as

stern a trust as to quit and to avoid.

'This is the realization which makes Viveka-

nanda the great preacher of karma (detached

action), not as divorced from, but as expressing

jñāna (Self-knowledge) and bhakti (love of God).

To him, the workshop, the study, the farmyard,

and the field are as true and fit scenes for the

meeting of God with man as the cell of the monk

or the door of the temple. To him, there is no

difference between service of man and worship

of God, between manliness and faith, between true

righteousness and spirituality.'

The search for such a philosophy will be-

come insistent day by day; and it will draw

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all thinking people, be they Hindus, Christians, or Muslims, or others, within India or abroad, into the orbit of Indian thought and to the charms of the philosophy and spirituality of its undying source, the Upanisads.

THE UPANISADS AND THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

The modern world is in the grip of various ideologies, of which the most effective ones are those which are most narrow and exclusive. Up to the modern period, religion, especially those of the Semitic family—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, were the nurseries of these exclusive and narrow ideologies. But in the modern period, as religions are wisely shedding this vice of narrowness and exclusiveness, it has moved over to the socio-political fields. The eclipse of liberal ideologies in these fields is one of the more glaring features of the twentieth century. Calm and clear reason has all but disappeared from vast segments of man's socio-political ideologies; they seem to be under the grip of the blind attachments, fears, and hatreds of his collective

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unconscious. It is a heartening sign of the second half of this century that man's collective reason, organized in international groups and associations, is waging a slow but successful struggle to tame the blind forces of his collective unreason in these fields. Set-backs there may be; but nothing can thwart permanently the onward march of this struggle; for it is the manifestation of the time spirit. Behind it is the dynamic energy of that scientific reason and enlightenment of the modern age whose impact is already evident in the field of religion, for which it provided the milieu and the stimulus to struggle to liberate itself from the blind forces of man's collective unreason, and make it function in the light of reason.

Scientific deliberations are generally conducted in a calm atmosphere, and differences of opinion are tolerated. This was absent in the field of religion due to the very initial divorce of reason from religion. This is changing fast. Encounters between religions are increasingly taking place today in an atmosphere of decreasing emotional temperatures. This dawn of sanity in inter-

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religious relationships is a priceless gift of reason as expressed in Vedānta and modern thought. It is reasonable to expect that the light of reason will eventually succeed in conquering unreason, and in introducing sanity, in the socio-political fields as well. It may take longer, as these fields are the arenas of man's search for power and pleasure, largely at the dictates of the blind forces of his lower sensate nature. When reason succeeds in establishing a measure of sanity in this field, democracy, which up-holds human dignity and equality and which has been under constant threat from these underground forces of human nature, will become firmly established as the best political and social value and technique. The struggle for sanity will continue till the position with respect to ideologies will become reversed, so that, unlike now, the most effective ones will be those which are most broad and inclusive.

But this needs the ministrations not only of scientific reason, but also of Vedāntic reason; for the latter alone has the capacity to purify the emotional springs of man's energies, centred in his worldly and religious aspirations,

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

of all their narrowness and exclusiveness, retaining intact, at the same time, their intensity and dynamism. This our scientific reason is unable to do by itself; when it eliminates narrowness, it tends to destroy also the energy of the emotions in the process.

Hence the contribution of the Upaniṣads in bringing about this great consummation is going to be vital and pervasive. Ideals and ideologies are vital to human life and achievement; they give direction to powerful human emotions. Without their help, man becomes flabby and ineffective, and often blunders all along.

If a man with ideals commits a thousand mistakes, says Vivekananda, a man without ideals will commit ten thousand mistakes. Hence the dictum of Vivekananda: Let sects multiply; but sectarianism must go. Narrowly conceived ideals have done as much harm as good in religion and politics.

Intensity was obtained at the cost of extensity; extensity, on the other hand, has always resulted in a reduction of intensity. The current flows fast in a narrow stream. When the river broadens, the current loses in intensity.

This has been the dual choice before man

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with respect to ideologies. The modern age is in search of ideologies which yield the fruit of maximum character. This signifies, according to Vedānta, the simultaneous presence of intensity and extensity. Vivekananda presented Vedānta as a fearless philosophy of life which helps man to frame ideologies for himself combining 'the intensity of the fanatic with the extensity of the materialist'. It derives its intensity from its inward spiritual penetration and its extensity from its outward human concern, in both of which it upholds reason as the guide. Such an ideology gives, in the words of Vivekananda, a character 'deep as the ocean and broad as the skies'. Vedānta considers this as the true line of human evolutionary advance. And it has given to the modern age the example of such a character in Sri Ramakrishna, who was not only the very personification of the intensity of religion, but also encompassed, in his infinite sympathy, atheists and agnostics along with believers belonging to the world's diverse and often mutually hostile religions.

THE CHARM AND POWER OF THE UPANISADS

The Upanisads and the Modern Crisis

The modern world is experiencing a far-reaching re-assessment in all aspects of human life and thought. Initiated and sustained by the positive sciences and modern technology, this process began as an intellectual movement but soon developed into a dynamic socio-political force. In its methods and results, it was as much a destructive force as a constructive one. It lifted man from many fears and uncertainties of his primitive past and landed him in new and more gnawing fears and uncertainties.

It destroyed many a fable and myth and superstition imbedded in his past traditions, and challenged, and continues to challenge, the credentials of every one of his beliefs and practices in the moral, religious, socio-economic, and other fields of his life.

These are solid gains; but they are not enough; they have ‘lengthened the ropes’ without, however, ‘strengthening the stakes’; as the Bible puts it. The tree of life has branched wide without correspondingly rooting deep. In the modern achievement, the sciences of nature have far outstripped the sciences of man, leaving man puny and

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unstable, with his centre of gravity always outside of himself. Moral and spiritual values emerge only from the sciences of man. Referring to this imbalance, the bitter fruits of which are found in the shallowness and sterility of much of modern intellectualism and in the widespread cynicism among the intellectuals, Bertrand Russell says (The Scientific Outlook, pp. 278-79) :

'Man has been disciplined hitherto by his subjection to nature. Having emancipated himself from this subjection, he is showing something of the defects of slave-turned-master. A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous. So long as it is present, science, having delivered man from bondage to nature, can proceed to deliver him from bondage to the slavish part of himself.'

This 'respect for what is best in man', and the science which will 'proceed to deliver man from bondage to the slavish part of himself', is what the Upaniṣads developed ages ago in India in her adhyātma-vidyā, in her 'science of the inner world of man, in her 'science of human possibilities', in the words of Julian Huxley.

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on which the light of the Ātman shines is far different from the intellect which is in thrall to the sense-organs. These two groups of sciences—the sciences of outer nature and the sciences of inner nature—need to pool their resources together to advance man on the evolutionary path of total fulfilment.

'Take religion away from human society and what remains is a forest of brutes', says Swami Vivekananda. Echoing this conviction in the concluding portion of his Autobiography, astro-physicist R. A. Millikan says:

'It seems to me that the two great pillars upon which all human well-being and human progress rest are, first, the spirit of religion, and, second, the spirit of science—or knowledge. Neither can attain its largest effectiveness without support from the other. To promote the latter, we have universities and research institutions. But the supreme opportunity for everyone with no exception lies in the first.'

Without the spiritual nourishment coming from religion, the phenomenal progress of the modern age has become wobbly in its movement and blind in its course.

LEAD KINDLY LIGHT

The 'wheel of modern progress' revolves

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he predicted:

'I believe that the influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century.'

Concluding his treatment of India in Our Oriental Heritage (written in 1935), the first volume of his series on The Story of Civilization, the American philosopher and historian, Will Durant, says (p. 633) :

'One cannot conclude the history of India as one can conclude the history of Egypt, or Babylonia, or Assyria; for that history is still being made, that civilization is still creating. . . .

'It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy, and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all, our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future. As invention, industry, and trade bind the continents together, or as they fling us into conflict with Asia, we shall study its civilizations more closely, and shall absorb, even in enmity, some of its ways and thoughts. Perhaps, in return for conquest, arrogance, and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul,'

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