English
’ It is by the very nature of the case inevitable that this highest, the Brahman, with ‘ a cloud of unknow- * Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 429. 31 242 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA ing ’ on its face, the veritable Godhead of the mystics and philosophers like Eckhart and Plotinus, should perpetually elude our grasp, and finite personal God, the livara, as ‘ Brahman cast through the moulds of logic ’ should go on tabernacling among its humsln worshippers. Inspite of the fact that Samkara uses the epithets ‘ par am ’ ( and ‘ aparam ’ () the phrase ‘ lower God ’ to which Deussen has given currency, hardly does justice to Samkara in this regard. It may not unlikely give rise to the misconception that Samkara’s I&vara is not very far removed from ‘ a mere self-painting of the yearn¬ ing spirit ’ having ‘ no more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind ’—a travesty of the object of religious homage which was justly anathe¬ matized by Martineau in the ‘ Introduction ’ to his Study of Religion. But Samkara’s was far too astute and devout a mind not to have realised that such a ‘ gleaming ideal,’ howsoever attractive and appealing to our aesthetic susceptibilities, cannot ipso facto aspire to be the ‘ object ’ of religious sentiment and worship. Here, if anywhere, can we realise the underlying philosophical significance of vigraha (finm;) in all Hindu worship, even from a strictly Samkarite point of view. Samkara is sometimes defended in the matter of ‘ bowing down to idols ’—and that in strict consistency with his philosophical persuasion—on the ground that ■ idolatry ’ is ‘ a crying necessity of our nature.’ But the defence entirely misses the spirit underlying such procedure of the Advaitist. Nevertheless, for ISVARA AND BRAHMAN 243 the Advaitist of the Samkara-Vedanta type as well as for all else, it is by way of the ‘ gleaming ideal ’ that one feels the direct impact of, and communion with, ‘ the everlasting Heal ’—the ‘ abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls.’ The author of the Veddnta-paYibhdshd is, therefore guilty of no such sublime inconsequence, as is often alleged, in prefacing his philosophical inquiry with a bene¬ dictory invocation or salutation to the Deity, and thus fettering the very spirit of such enquiry by an advance statement on the nature of the object one is pledged to survey. It is in perfect accord with the tradition of Samkara-Vedanta—without compro¬ mising in the least the teachings of that school— that the author believes he can, and does, bow down to the Supreme Spirit who is made up of the very stuff of Being, Consciousness and Bites (“tfsStfil This very attitude or act of worship (nrefiT8fi<TT) is made possible, as the Sikhamani proceeds to justify, on the assump¬ tion of an irreducible and indispensable interval between the human and the divine, the worshipper and the worshipped ( ). In spite of radical divergences in respect of method and conclusion, Prof. Alexander’s treatment of the problem of * Deity ’ and ‘ the Religious Sentiment ’ and other minor problems kindred there¬ with, affords a fruitful comparison with the line of thinking pursued by Samkara-Vedanta. With ‘ the practical or. religious approach to God ’* a follower of the Samkara-Vedanta School, will go in enthuBias- * Alexander, * Space, Time and Deity,’ Vol. II, p. 841. 244 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA tic assent, and would perhaps concede the debatable issue: ‘what we worship, that is God.’* * * § He would, furthermore, accept that ‘ religion is faith in deity, or in God with the quality of deity,’ the object of the religious sentiment being, however, ‘ no mere imagination which corresponds to sub¬ jective and possibly illusory movement of mind,’t nor ‘ itself a value ’ ‘ for values are human inven¬ tions and deity is ultra-human.’| Following up two radically different lines of thought the philo¬ sopher of the Samkara-Vedanta School and Prof. Alexander seem to be envisaging the same demand of the religious consciousness so far as the latter holds that ‘ the qualified infinite is not merely ideal as implying, like all infinites, a conceptual element, but it is ideal because it is not actual ’§ and - thus there is no actual infinite, being with the quality of deity; but there is an actual infinite, the whole universe, with a nisus to deity; and this is the God of the religious con¬ sciousness, though that consciousness habitually forecasts the divinity of its object as actually realised in an individual form.’|| There is much here that answers to the characterisation of siujuna ‘ qualified ’ or determinate Brahman as obtaining in the Samkara-Vedanta School; but, then, there is a complete parting of the ways so far as Prof. * Ibid, p. 341. t Ibid, p. 377. f Ibid, p. 409. § Ibid, p. 364. || Ibid, pp. 361-62. ISVAKA AND BKAHMAN *245 Alexander tries to follow up resolutely that ‘ practi¬ cal ’ approach ‘ with a metaphysical inquiry ’ on the ground that ‘ were it not on the other hand for the speculative or reflective justification, the God of religious sentiment would have no sure root in things. Religion leans on metaphysics for the justification of its indefeasible conviction of the reality of its object; philosophy leans on religion to justify it in calling the possessor of deity by the religious name of God.’* Far from envisaging the ‘ practical ’ approach to the God of religious senti¬ ment with a metaphysical grounding of the same, Samkara-Vedanta is definitely chary of a meta¬ physical or speculative justification of the concept of a Saguna Bradman or Ihara which is believed to be superseded and rendered nugatory by the philosophical Absolute, the unqualified, indeter¬ minate Brahman ( ) which is, verily like Bradley’s Absolute, indescribable except as a cluster of negations—‘ neither personal nor moral nor beautiful nor true.’ Or, as Bradley brings out the inherent inconsistency in religious consciousness : “ We may say that God is not God, till he has become all in all, and that a God which is all in all is not the God of religion. God is but an aspect and that must mean but an appearance of the Absolute. ”t This position he re-affirms in his latest bookf with the words : “ A God that can say to himself ‘ I ’ as against you and me, is not in my * Ibid, p. 842. t Appearance and Reality (2nd ed.), p. 448. | Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 432. 246 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA judgment defensible as the last and complete truth for metaphysics; ’ ’ nevertheless he retains the notion all the same, not ‘ as satisfying our last intellectual demands ’* but as ‘ required in practice by the highest religion,’f for, after all, in this view ‘ the essence of religion is practical.’| It is rather unfortunate, as even Mr. A. E. Taylor, one of the most ardent of Bradley’s advocates, held in one ®f the commemorative notices on Bradley, that Bradley should ha*rc treated ‘ religion ’ as something exclu¬ sively practical. By so doing he was unquestion¬ ably opening the door to that unhappy disruption between the theoretical and the practical which, as tracing its descent from its modern exponent, Im¬ manuel Kant, reached its climax in Ritschl’s * repu¬ diation of metaphysics ’ and the anti-metaphysical campaign carried on by IJitschlianism in the interest of religious beliefs. Such an apparently effective weapon for the salvage of religious beliefs against the encroaching tide of Rationalism and Agnosticism really nurtures a seed of weakness within it, and this we have learned, through a slow and painful process, from the instructive errors of the past. The salutary lesson which the history of religion has imparted to us is that a house divided against itself cannot stand ; and, further, ‘ man cannot find rest by trying to balance himself thus first on one leg and then on another.’ If one were to read between the lines, one would decipher such *Ibid, p. 433. t Ibid, p. 438. t Ibid, p, 449, ISVARA AND BRAHMAN 247 an anti-metaphysical and practical emphasis put upon' religious belief and worship in Samkara’s own observations on the point. Take, for example, the famous commentary (on II. i. 14) of the Vedanta-Sutras where we are told that ‘ I^vara is limited by the unreal modifications of names and forms.but what the scriptures set forth is the transcendence of the practical relation between the (moral) governor and the governed on the plane of transcendent Reality and the restriction of this relation of the governor and the governed to the empirical plane or plane of practice.’* Having pursued the thought cf the master, the author of the Vedanta-paribhaslia has brought the point into clearer relief thus : ‘ ‘ Rut the texts bearing on Saguna Brahman, and read in the context of wor¬ ship, have reference only to the attributes ascribed, in dependence on the form of worship, and not to an intrinsically qualified or determinate Brah¬ man.”! The instrumental relation, in which the worship of Saguna Brahman stands to the intuition of indeterminate Brahman, has been further sub¬ stantiated by a typical quotation from the Vedanta- kalpataru of Amalananda Swami, flourishing about the middle of the thirteenth century (1260 A.D. approximately) and following close upon the foot- * v wPrcnam rwsstarasTtafarTt . vrwfawumfKitat- Com. on V.S.. II. i. 14. 248 A systematic stddy of the vedanta steps of Saipkara and Vacaspati Mi^ra of the Vedanta school. Says our author, “ Even the worship of Saguna Brahman is contributory, by way of securing one-mindedness, to the immediate intuition of Brahman devoid of all modification or characterisation.