English
35 274 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA between the two?—Well, the point is, it will be replied, not the fulfilment of any purpose or end, external or internal, but just this absence of con¬ straint or determination from without or within. Can, in that circumstance, it is* to be seriously questioned, the sense of ‘ play ’ or 4 Ilia ’ itself be maintained, apart from the question of its desira¬ bility in a human or even a Divine context? It is no unmeaning paradox but an all-important truth, that play ceases to be play unless we choose to play in earnest, that is, to abide by the rules of the play. You may either choose to play or not, but once you choose to play, you cannot play in any way you choose. At first sight it may appear to be playing with words only; or, at most a truism too obvious to need a specific mention. Unfortunately, these truisms, which so often pass unacknowledged, and that for well-recognised psychological causes, are none the less true, for the non-recognition of which we have to pay dearly so often. Had this truism been so readily and universally acknowledged, an Absolut¬ ist of the eminence of Bradley would not have cared to dispel the misconceptions and prejudices with which it has been found beset even among the philosophi¬ cally instructed. To the question: “What is play? ” Bradley makes the initial reply: “ It is activity, we may say, so far as that is felt to be unconstrained. Play is thus incompatible vith foreign control, and again it is further opposed to earnest.. .For, wherever I am in earnest, my activity is defined by an end...Play is thus activity spon¬ taneous and agreeable and qualified by the absence ISVAEA AS CREATOR AND CREATION AS LILA %ll> * of compulsion or earnest.”* Then he proceeds, by way of delineating strictly the nature of ‘ play,’ to differentiate it from such ‘ spontaneous ’ or natural activity ’ as ‘ we can find everywhere in the young, and we may even* imagine it, if we please, as exist¬ ing in a perfect mind ’; and, as he lays down con¬ clusively, ‘ apart from a felt contrast, I could not myself call it an experience of play...Where there is play, felt as play, I shall suppose the more or less remote contrast with a more or less withdrawn earnest. I shall assume the presence of a more or less specified sense of something, more or less pre¬ eminent or in the background, which is felt as control or limit. Restraint, whether as what is forced on me or as what matters, I shall take there¬ fore as a necessary element implied in play.’t We can hardly ever do justice to Samkara if we construe the creative act ) conceived as Vila, in a purely exclusive or negative reference, following in the wake of the Sutrakdra who has somewhat definitely chalked out the line of all future inquiry into this problem of creation in his cryptic utterances on the point. In order to get at the true sense of Vila, we have to place it in the context of all those passages which purport to be explanatory of the Vedantic theory of creation, and elicit from the consensus of these the true philosophic import of Ilia without allowing ourselves to be influenced by considerations of local value, or stipulating in advance, out of scrupulous regard for objectivity and * Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 50-61. t Ibid, p. 61. 276 A S^STBMAtaC STUDY OB T&E VEDlNTA $ authenticity, the sense in which it has to be accepted finally. Even from contextual criticism we can gather, if we care to, the sense in which he desires it to be understood; and it is incumbent on everyone, who undertakes the ambitious task of a faithful exegesis on Samkara’s pronouncements, to super¬ sede, in strict fairness or fidelity to the great com¬ mentator, the letter, the definite commitments, of his commentary in favour of the spirit, the implied meaning, thereof. In the first place, by accentuat¬ ing the total absence of any constraint or determina¬ tion exercised by an operative end or purpose in the definition of llld, what Samkara does not mean to imply—which the statement by force of its negative construction may not unreasonably mean—is a creative spontaneity which is hardly distinguishable from the capricious act of a libertine or the random movements of the insane. Indeed, the meticulous care with which the great Acaryya expunges all human elements from the conception of llld in order to make it applicable to the Most High whose nature, as an Omniscient Being (^psnj;), of immeasurable or superhuman power (nqftl44trafa0> is altogether in¬ comprehensible and unknown to us (as Sir William Hamilton would also say), has a remarkable affinity to the attempt made by Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel towards the close of the last century. It is an attempt, symptomatic of a syncretist move¬ ment, ‘ to erect religious faith on philosophical scepticism ’ (as Hume described it with an anticipa¬ tory accuracy a century earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion), or to exalt, in other 1SVARA AS CREATOR AND CREATION AS LILA 27' words, Authority and Revelation at the expense of human reason and understanding. Demea, as one of the characters in the * Dialogues ’ and the fittest re¬ presentative of this movement of rigid, inflexible orthodoxy, proceeds in this regard on lines very similar to those of Samkara : “ Though we piously ascribe to him every species of perfection,.. .we ought never to imagine that we comprehend the attributes of this divine Being, or to suppose that his perfec¬ tions have any analogy or likeness to the perfection of a human creature. Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge : these we justly ascribe to him because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to those qualities among men.” This is, indeed, the very same insidious method of argument invariably employed by a section of mystics who, in their horror of the blasphemy of anthropomorphism or antlyoposophy, backed by a devout zeal to exalt the notion of the Deity or God¬ head with ‘ the cloud of unknowing ’ on its face, end by defeating their own aim. Having pinned their faith to the via negativa, the ‘ nescio ’ ‘ nescio ’ or even ‘ n’eii, n’eti ’ as the exclusive approach to the Supreme Ineffable or the ‘ Divine Darkness,’ they fail to attain their objective because of that ‘ vaulting ambition Which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side.’ Here, as elsewhere, extremes meet; and it is difficult to see wherein the mystic 278 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA adoration of the Ineffable differs from the Agnostic’s prayer to the Ignoramus et Ignorabimus in Frederic Harrison’s classical travesty of it: “Ox"! love us, help us, make us one with thee.’’ This underlying similarity between the mystic and the agnostic posi¬ tion does not, however, escape the penetrative in¬ sight of David Hume, and Cleanthes, ‘ the philoso¬ phical tlieist ’ of the ‘ Dialogues ’ makes the perti¬ nent observation : “ The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes of which we can have no comprehension; but if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just and adequate, and correspon¬ dent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. Is the name with¬ out any meaning of such mighty importance? Or how do you Mystics, who maintain the absolute in¬ comprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who assert that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible? ” In thus studiously steering clear of the inevit¬ able anthropomorphism of the religious attitude—as specifically indicated by his repudiation of all human analogy from the concept of Vila —flamkara seems to have been drawn perilously near the seductive mysticism of a negative variety which, by carrying the process of sublimation beyond a specific point, stultifies its own aim, and lands itself in sheer empti¬ ness. But Samkara, be it noted with care, commits no such sublime inconsequence. A sturdy champ¬ ion of Rationalism, offering nevertheless unstinted allegiance to Revelation, S&inkara did not pursue the ruinous policy of exalting the one at the expense I8VARA AS CREATOR AND CREATION AS LILA 279 of the other. It is a theme too large to be entered upon here*, but none can gainsay the point that the wonderful blend and balance of the two achieved by Samkara and brought to bear on the solution of the specific problems of philosophy is without an historic parallel in the whole range of Indian philo¬ sophy—with faint approximations to it only in the systems of Thomas Aquinas or Abelard in the West. As a case in point, it is his innate rationalism that leads to an instinctive preference of a rationally guided activity to a supposedly higher type of totally undetermined activity, which is suspiciously similar to the action of the insane. This is the standing vice of all orthodox theology which, in its besotted loyalty to an inflexible orthodoxy, persuades itself that the greater is the interval or disparity between the human and the Divine nature, the more edifying and adorable the Deity is. The same tendency of the human mind lies at the root of that insensate craving for a miracle-working God who as Omni¬ potent and Omniscient can do the impossible—make or unmake the eternal truths at will, or make evil good and vice versa by the issue of arbitrary decrees —overriding alt the laws of rationality or morality.