English
” the Vedantist gives a forceful reply : ‘The Jali is known in and through the same act of conscious¬ ness as the individual (5 H34 not because of any law of Association, as the psychologist of the mid-Victorian Association!st School would say, for the fact of association itself remains on that hypothesis unaccounted for, but because of the Ontological truth of the immanence of the Universal in the individual, of the identity Of the Dharmin and the Dharma Now, the cosmic sweep of the Dialectic of Relation—comprising, as it does, all the different kinds of relation including that of the knower and the known to which the arguments against relation necessarily apply, need not make us marvel, for it converges on the same result achieved by the Dialec¬ tic of bheda from the other side. But, as against the modus operandi of Satnkara in this regard, may not the Naiyayika, with the characteristic naivete of a realist, exclaim as William James did in a similar context: ‘ Relations relate in spite of Mr. Bradley ’ ? Is it not a purely gratuitous assumption that a relation must presuppose another relation to relate itself to the terms in relation? A relation, it will be urged, simply because it is a relation requires no other. The alleged dialectical difficulties are only self-created, as they spring from a radical miscon¬ ception regarding the nature of relation— namely, the treatment of relation as a tertium quid 300 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA co-ordinate and homogeneous with the terms related. Sumkara, however, would stick to his position, and re-assert in the faoe of this realistic argument that the Naiyayika cannot hereby claim to have proved his ease. He, being a Pluralist by profession, must needs begin with the discrete and independent parti¬ culars of experience, and as he proceeds to justify the relations as subsisting in between them, they must dver be found to be foreign and external to the nature of these particulars. Thus, he cannot help postula¬ ting Other relations and, therefore* slipping into the vicious regresSub ad infinitum. In criticism it may be urged, however* that Samkara’s polemic is valid only against Pluralism According to which all relations are necessarily external. But does it, it may be pertinently asked, apply with equal force against a system of Absolute Idealism in which there is recognition of internal relation, or better, self-relation on the part of the Absolute? Samkara leaves us unconvinced here. Indeed, the main point here is not how A came into Delation with B, but how A B started into existence at all. Difficulties arise equally in the case of deipkAra's monism as they did in the case of the pluralistic Nyaya. It is incumbent on Saipkara to show how any thing, on his hypothesis, comes to exist at all* no matter whether it is a homogeneous or undifferenced principle, or an identity-in-difference of distinguishable but inseparable members, ^nipkara seems to have cut the Gordian knot of rela¬ tion without being able to untie it,, and here at least. tUm&nuja’s stricture that the testimony of expOTi- THE DIALECTIC OF THE VEDANTA 201 ence is not on the side of Samkara’s undifferenced, irrelative Reality has a plausibility all its own. This is, as the critic of Samkara-VedAnta will triumphantly point out, the plague-spot or crying curse of every system of abstract monism; this is that vicious logic which leads straight into an Acosmism or Pantheism, pure and simple. Indeed, the repudiation of inherence as a relation which logically imports the abhedah ( ) or non-difference of Dharmah and Dharml, Jdti and Vyakti, Kdryyam and Kdranam, is perilously near a system of rigid Pantheism or Acosmism of the Parmenidean type. So vital issues are staked upon a right construction of this concept of abhedah which is not, as it has been generally supposed to be, the logic of Pantheism. The true logical significance of the concept of Abhedah(qpfe.) Ananyatvam ,(*pfpira*l) or Tadatmyam is hardly conveyed by the word ‘ identity ’ which has consequently been the prolific source of misconstructions heaped on Samkara or Bradley. Let Bradley speak for himself. “Where there is no diversity there is no identity at all, the identity in abstraction from the diversity having lost its character.” Again, “ there is no sameness of mere existence, for mere existence is a vicious ab¬ straction. And everywhere identity is ideal and con¬ sists in the transcendence of its own being by that which is identical. ’ ’* Passages may be quoted from Sainkara’s commentary to show that the concept of abhedah or ananyatvam as expressing the! relation of cause and effect is not one of abstract, colourless * Appearance and Reality, Appendix, ‘ Identity.* 26 202 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA identity—“ identity in abstraction from diversity.” It means simply what it directly stands for, viz., ‘ non-different,’ i.e., the * effect ’ is not different from ‘ the cause ’ (in respect of its essence). A paraphrasing of ‘ non-different ’ as ‘ identical ’— an apparently innocuous procedure—is the ‘ original sin ’ in the matter of interpreting Satpkara’s texts. In the first place, Samkara clearly states in his com¬ mentary on Brahma-sutras, H. 1. vi: ” On the hypothesis of absolute sameness, moreover, the cause- effect relation itself is destroyed^ TOffo- fqqrPQTPSf ircNft ) • Next he proceeds to allay all misunderstanding bearing on this topic by his express repudiation of the suggested ‘ identity’ : “ (The term has been used), not with a view to their identity but with a view to the denial of a reality (on the part of the effect) other than that of the cause ( <HiH<U P \ *1 T^nfwimfa). ’ ’ That is why Saipkara’s system goes by the name of ‘Advaitavadah’ n^j), i.e., non-dualism* and not ‘ Aikyavadah ’ (tfcfWRS), i.e., a system of abstract or absolute monism. The Vedantaparibhasha in the context of the logic of Perception substantiates this point further by the usage of the term (‘^i^:’) in the true sense : ” ‘ the non-difference from the knower ’ verily is not (tantamount to) their virtual identity, but the denial (on the part of the object) of a reality other than that of the knower ’ ’ (TOTW^t TOTS- . In the face of such outspoken * Cf. Edmond Holmes, * A Defence of Pantheism 9 in the Hibbert Journal , April, 1926. THE DIALECTIC OF THE VEDANTA . 203 utterances, the perverse interpretation of ‘ abhedah ’ as ‘ identity ’ betrays a lamentable ignorance of the contextual criticisms that are to be found in the literature of the Samkara-Vedanta School. Vacas- pati MiiSra, who is regarded by common consent as a notable exponent of Samkara-Vedanta, pursues the tenour of the master’s logic to the following effect: “ Neither are the earthen vessels different, nor non- different, nor even, both different and non-different from earth, but are in reality, indescribable or in¬ definable ^ aR: * *T fiWIT: fi|PE|fpypfo lT ^). This trend of thought was taken up in right earnest and developed in a negative direction by Sriharsha, another re¬ nowned protagonist of this school, so that he ended by metamorphosing the Advaitavadah () of Samkara into a Philosophy of the Indefinable or Anirvdcyavadah This he achieved by assigning central importance in his system to the notion of individuality ( or ) of a thing which always eludes the grasp of universals. No universal or even system of univer- sals can possibly exhaust the infinite variety of the individual, and to recognise this inaccessibility of the individual is, in Sriharsha’s opinion, the deeper philosophical significance of that recondite principle of Mdyd which is sadasadbhyamanirvacaniya That this was the true drift of Saipkara’s doctrine of Maya as indefinable, Sriharsha does not for a moment call into question. True it is that Samkara does in some places speak of the ‘ individual ’ and * individuality,’ as, for 204 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP TflE VEDlNTA example, in course of his commentary on the Taittiriya Up. VII. 8 (jnpT^q&t, ) “Verily that is the essential nature or individuality (of a being) which is not dependent on anything else. Whatever is dependent on anything else is not its individuality—for that being absent, this (so-called) individuality will be gone ’’ (gff tra HPinfaf ihtw ira|} strati, *i rm; *reimft and dwells at length on the distinction be¬ tween ‘ individuality ’ or ‘ essential nature ' (<?HSWl) and ‘ accidental, derivative or ad¬ jectival nature ’ of a thing. But he has never brought the idea into prominent relief. What Sriharsha’s dialectic has taught us—no matter whether we agree with all his findings or not—is that we are not to be dismayed at the revelation of the nature of things as the home of countless contra¬ dictions. Our logic must be attuned to the nature of things, and not the things stretched on the Pro¬ crustean bed of our abstract formal logic or meta¬ physical predilections. Samkara rightly observes that ‘ the union of contradictories is not denied of pheno¬ menal objects, it is denied only of the noumenon, the simple, eternal object. ’* It is in the light of such a methodological principle that one can best hope to appraise the full significance of the relation of abhedah or ananyatvam as distinguished from aikyam (xfewj). ‘ identity of contradictories, the * fiw fircwwqft ew ft !utSu% n — Bfhad&rapyaka Upanishad Bhashyam, Ch. V, 1st BtHkmapa, TfiE DIALECTIC 0E TflE VEDINtfA 206 identity is known through recognition; the relatiou of identity is nothing but the identical thing.