English
’f It is no mere in- * wfawwft n*nafr— Com. on Bribed. Up., III. 8. Intro. t Com. on Brihad. Up., U. 1. ii and zx. 168 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA voluntary concession wrung out of a quondam Revelationist, but it is a statement fully in keeping with the main drift of Vedantic epistemology. The Absolute, however, requires no criterion, no proof, being itself the logical prius of all proofs or criteria of truth. “ It is upon Self,” as observes Samkara, “ that the whole structure of evidences or proofs is based (Rgl^ fe sqaiq re iq qccn^ ), and thus it is proved or established previous to all proofs.” * It is thus self-evident and self-evidencing. It is Reality as the terminus ad quem of all pursuit of truth, and from this standpoint we recognise ihe force of the dictum : verum index sui or that truth is its own criterion. All our aims and aspirations, theoretical or practical, are fulfilled in this highest experience man is capable of. If this revelation of Reality in its wholeness, which serves as the bed¬ rock of all evidence and certitude is explained away as an illusion or a phantom of creative imagination, Samkara would readily meet the contingency with the remark that if it be an illusion, then that illusion is the truth itself. We can have no other criterion of truth. * Com. on y,8., n, 8. vii. LECTURE VI The Dialectic of the Vedanta In the prolegomena to hi a metaphysics (WTO*ITO*l), Samkara has, with unerring philoso¬ phical insight, made common experience the settled point of departure in the philosophic ‘ voyage of discovery ’—the veritable Pilgrim’s Progress of philosophy. “ Although,” to quote the very opening words of the prolegomena, ‘ ‘ a mutual transference of the qualities of the Ego and the Non- Ego (the meum and the tuum ) which are prima facie opposed to one another as light and darkness is obviously wrong, yet in mankind the use of judg¬ ments such as * I am this,’ ‘ This is mine ’ condi¬ tioned by false knowledge in the form of coupling the true (the Ego, the Subject) and the untrue (the Non-Ego, the Object) is inborn, thus transferring the very being and qualities of the one to the other on account of a failure of the power to discriminate things that are discrete in their nature.” Now, the real problem of philosophy, indeed the great problem of Samkara- Vedanta, is the search after the truly obvious—not the immediate which is insistent with its claims on our recognition. It springs from the demand to be logical; and the immediate so far as it is the primary datum, the naive apprehension, cannot, for aught we know, stand the scrutiny of logic. Sgmkara does not, as is usual with the 22 170 * SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA average philosophic thinker, succumb to the lure of the specious philosophical ultimates—the supposed solid irov <rr<a of ‘ fact,’ ‘ life ’ or * self,’—but runs the whole gamut of our experience in search after the truly real, which alone is the truly obvious. The way to achieve this is to take up a definite attitude towards experience; while to persist in clinging to our initial standpoint is to be debarred from the City of God and to rot in the City of Des¬ truction (faifcrem ). What Samkara proposes to do herein is simple enough. Even at the risk of a truism, Samkara exhorts us to begin, in our attitude to experience, by putting the very central thing in the centre, and respecting the claim of the obvious which is too often neglected. We all speak glibly of ‘ Self ’ and pretend to be fully conversant therewith, but few are in possession of the truth about it, says Samkara. Indeed, we can very well hazard the paradox that in life the greatest truths are assented to, but not believed. Hence what is necessary is a * transvaluation,’ but not a transcendence of the whole realm of experience—not to seek the Real behind or beyond it, but as the informing life and spirit thereof. We certainly feel error everywhere and yet, again, we have a hold on truth. Herein lies the ‘ secret ’ of the dialectic of the Vedanta. (i) Dialectic of Experience. The question of crucial importance^ in meta¬ physics is undoubtedly the nature of the Given. (THE DIALECTIC OP THE VEDANTA 171 Before entering upon the discussion as to what is actually given in experience, it is profitable to enquire into the presuppositions of experience as formulated by the Advaita School of Vedanta. It is instructive to note here parenthetically that the Satnkarite acceptance of the term ‘ Experience ’ or Gaitanyam ( ) as identical with Reality or Brahman ( ) is substantially in agreement with the Bradleyan view of it as distinguished from con¬ sciousness. ‘ To my mind,’ says Bradley, ‘ con¬ sciousness is not co-extensive with experience ’; for, consciousness, in the narrow sense, as the state in which we experience a not-self, invariably carries with it the implication of ‘ subject and object ’ as correlated in experience ’ while experience is a totality ‘ which includes the correlation, ’ there being ‘ even experience in feeling where self and not-self are not yet present and opposed.’ The distinction in question is best expressed by the Vedantic distinc¬ tion between pure Og<s, ) and stratified consciousness, be¬ tween knowledge as a timeless Reality and manifes¬ tation of such knowledge which belongs to time, specifying in each of the latter the metaphorical extension of the meaning of the term ‘ conscious¬ ness ’ or ‘ knowledge.’ All determinate knowledge involves, as the V edantaparibhashd has it, a tripar¬ tite stratification of pure consciousness : pramdtr- caitanyam ) or determinate self-con¬ sciousness, corresponding to the ‘ subject ’ of European philosophy, vrtti-caitanyam ( ) or modes of consciousness and vishaya-caitanyam ( ) or the empirical object. 1^2 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA Now, as regards the ultimate postulates or prin¬ ciples of Experience, the first to be noted is that no philosophical criticism (jfar, q^*JT) is worth the name unless it can account for ordinary experience ( gtar s rarcTC ) This is hinted at by Samkara in his prolegomena, and was later taken up in earnest by Sriharsha with a difference of emphasis. The appeal here, it is to be further noted, is not merely restricted to enlightened opinion—the opinion of the ‘ expert ’ judges (ifapwO as in J- S. Mill—but extended to what is known as ‘ vulgar ’ experience or common sense (wWwfafa:, sflfrufa fa:). Second¬ ly, the twin principles—rather the positive and negative aspects of one and the same principle--of aiTCprarro: and postulate that there is a world and that the world as Appearance must be accounted for. This is what the Germans seek to convey by that expressive compound word Welt¬ anschauung of which an exact English equivalent is lacking. Indeed is the reductio ad absurd- urn of a system of philosophy and is frequently made use of by Samkara in his polemics against rival systems of thought. In his commentary on Hasta- malakam , a metrical work of apocry¬ phal origin (although ascribed by some to one of Saipkara’s immediate disciples bearing the same name), Saipkara (whose authorship of the comment¬ ary, however, is contested on inconclusive evidence) illustrates the importance of the postulate of opRf thus : ‘ if the opponent were to call for evid¬ ence as to the self-luminousness of Atman, we should assert (that the evidence in question is) the fact of We dialectic op the vedanta 178 experience—the universally experienced fact of ap¬ pearance of the world.- Here knowledge, together with the rest of the universe, being the object of knowledge, is not self-revealing (i.e., unconscious), and, as such, it unmistakably follows that the world as Appearance presupposes the illuminating power of the Atman like that of the sun,—just as the sun being self-revealing reveals the world itself, so is verily the supreme Self.’* It is interesting to note that Vacaspati Mi6ra (to select one from amongst many others of the Advaitic persuasion) employs in a similar context in the Bhamatl the same postulate : “ Is that principle unconscious or self-luminous which brings about the revelation of the objective world and in whose medium the objects and, the Self reveal themselves? If unconscious, both would in- distinguishably be referred to as unconscious, there being left no way to distinguish in whose light which shines and thus would the entire world be dark to us.”t Once again : ‘ Of a certainty is to be ad¬ mitted a directly self-conscious Self for without its manifestation all else would remain unmanifest and * nj far n*, appprarm tfa ip:, aprq jramft tfn fafaii aafa wfasJRfuwt, aar efafli aid nawpiial app[ w a mwfa wi i ai id'I Ri —a ww ia Pl i t dtseprtmn*: afanria awrr a a faf aw: arimrrft ar i wKwnwaufa awifafa arftt*t ftf nanSla afaifai<i afa anpnwplfrwt apra: I—On Sarpkara’s Introduction to Ved&nta- sutrat. 174 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA thus would ensue the unknowability of the world.’* Next in importance is the postulate of validity or veracity of consciousness as the source of our knowledge of the Real, as Vacaspati Mi6ra puts it ( This he states more ex¬ plicitly in the Bhamatl : ‘ ” i.e., ‘ intelligence or consciousness has an innate aptitude for truth.’t It affords not an inapt compari¬ son in respect of functional similarity with the Cartesian postulate of ‘ veracitas Dei ’ or the Humean ‘ instinct.’ The last, though not the least - important, is the postulate of —that the world as manifold is to be accounted for, instead of being explained away, as is often done by Absolute monists or Advaitists on the pretext of explanation of the same.