English
But the Self to which it appeals and offers allegiance is not the self, as ordinarily understood,—something finished and finite, meant to be possessed and en¬ joyed but something to be achieved with 4 effort and expectation,’ something 4 evermore about to be ’— selfhood being, as already noted, of the nature of a process rather than a state. It is thus a literal rendering of the Vedantic thesis— '* What I aspired to be And was not, comforts me A brute I might have been, but would not sink in the scale ” % * The Philosophy of the Upanishade, p. 803. *HE ETHICS OF THE VEDANTA 349 —namely, that man alone (as distinguished from the brute) has the exclusive privilege of exerting or energising towards the attainment of the summum bonum, the ne plus ultra of the per¬ fection of his existence.* Therein consists the true manhood of man as a moral being, also the perennial source of his inspiration and incentive to the lif<p-of strenuous moral endeavour. To that end, therefore, what is initially required is thq power to discrimi¬ nate between the good aqd the pleasant, the* pets'- 1 ferabje and the agreeable, with which the moral life ushers itself into .existence. In the famous phraseology of the Katha Upanisliad,f “ the good jis pne thing, and the pleasant is another—both holding* man in bondage to diverse ends. Of these, the good or the preferable being chosen conduces to the well-being of the agent, while the pleasant or the agreeable being selected, one is debarred from the summum bonum.” \ In this very incipient concept of &reyah{$tfi ;) one discovery the germ-plasm of that perfectionist ethics of Samkara- Vedanta which stops nothing short of the Absolute, the high- water mark, the ne plus ultra °f perfec¬ tion—wherein is given a quietus to all desiring and striving, there having survived no other desirable * v* *rfvim:—-Com. on B r had. Up., I.vi. 10. t Chap. I, valli ii, verse 1. vn**inw nni sat i 560 A SVStfteitATIC 8TUt>Y 07 THE VWDtXfk end excepting the oneness of Self* and, thus there having ^emerged the sense of self-realisedness or fulfilment of the supreme End of man ; i y mp t h ).t Such is the fullest import of the category of perfection as conceived in S amkara-Ved&nta—a category which rarely has justice administered to it in its application in the field of ethics and meta¬ physics. " The Absolute considered, as such,” sayst Bradley in the true spirit of A dvaita- Vedanta , ^ has of course no degrees; for it is perfect, and there can be no more or less in perfection.” Truly does Samkara claim as the special excellence of his system the fact that in the attainment of the know¬ ledge of the identity of the Self with Brahman, the ens perfectissimum as well as the ens realissimnm of the Mediaeval thinkers of Europe, the entire code of ethical duties is superseded and there ensues the feeling of self-realisedness. § With a truly Kantian emphasis Samkara opens the ethical enquiry with a rigid antithesis between the theoretical and practical reason, between the heteronomy of nature and the autonomy of the Spirit, as being the essential pre-requisite of morals. In the first place, it is authoritatively laid down that all actions determined by empirical motives and on V.S., II. i. 14. t Com. on V.S., IV. iii. 14. X Appearance and Reality, p. 359. - b wilt iwwwwwwj irwott Wr—Com. on 7.1 4* THE ETHICS OF THE VEDA NT4 851 uninspired by a vision of the supreme end must lead unto bondage, for all. such actions are motived by ignorance.* Hence what is initially needed is a complete breach with the life of unreflecting acquies¬ cence in nature-necessity—the realm of darkness or ignorance which is the prolific source of all evil, moral and metaphysical—and a thorough grounding in the knowledge of the supreme End which is the only pathway to liberation tWT ). The function of ethics as a science is to call for, at the very start, a ‘ turning round of the eye of the soul,’ a ‘ conversion ’ in the Platonic sense of the term, and to re-orient the whole hierarchy of means and ends in the light of the supreme end ( ), the End par excellence of human life. Its business, however, is not, as Samkara conceives it, to furnish ‘ copy-book headings ’ for the guidance of moral life or a codified list of duties and thus its function is neither legislative nor executive, but only infor¬ mative or enlightening (tmwf fin surer *1 g ). Man as a moral subject or agent cannot be com¬ mandeered, he has to be drawn. Not coercion, but persuasion is the only instrument of moral causation. Here emerges the most important postulate of ethics—freedom of the will on the part of man as a moral being. Before we proceed to tackle that issue—on which the verdict of Samkara-Vedanta is as un¬ ambiguous as it is authoritative—it will be worth * 'qfiTOT V* Com. on Bh&gavad - Gita, II. 11. tt * 352 A systematic study of the vedanta our while to discuss the question ot' the raw materials of moral life, the entire gamut cf natural appetites and inclinations on which alone, in all conceiva- bility, the proposed free will of man is to be exer¬ cised in deference to the dictates of moral reason. Granted that freedom of the will is the inalienable birth-right and natural legacy of man, there is no escaping from the position that the soi-disant free will cannot work in vacuo. Hence the importance and indispensable necessity of an original datum of non-moral impulses—instinctive preferences and aversions ( *T*lf H ) as the basic pre-supposition of the moral life; and no system of moral idealism or purism can possibly expunge this original evil or ignorance (%r*W: or srfaqT.)as the natural heritage of man without a veritable reductio ad absurduin or an ethical suicide. Call it an original taint ( ) or an ‘ original sin,’ the thing remains there, and has to be accepted, as such, in the very interest and efficiency of moral activity. This is the initial equipment with which the individual starts upon his career of moral probation. Now, ‘ man has been so constituted by the Creator with his senses outward¬ pointing that he naturally looks outward and never inwards. It is verily some wise man, hankering after the Life Eternal, that could attain to a vision of the inner Self only with averted eyes, that is to say, with his senses withdrawn from their native out¬ going operations.’* But to be so ruled by external * *3Tf*r snnw mafir t—Katha ZJpanishad. Chap. II, valli iv, verse 1. THE ETHICS OP THE VEDINTA 353 empirical ends is to incur bondage and be led astray from the path of rectitude that terminates eventually in the attainment of liberation. So urges Samkara,* “ a man acting intent on external things- and making the attainment of his own good or happiness and the repulsion or rejection of that which threatens the opposite, i.e., evil or unhappiness, the end, does not realise the summum bonum (although hanker¬ ing after it); ‘ the Self is to be intuited ’ and such other scriptural texts have the effect of weaning away such a man (as is bent on realising the summum bonum) from the nature-prompted im¬ pulse towards objects ruled by causal necessity and directing or impelling him along the (psychical) flow in the direction of the inward Self.” This is what constitutes, in Kantian language, the ‘ hetero- nomy of nature,’ so far man’s activity is determined solely by considerations of happiness, or unhappi¬ ness, that is, by ‘ pathological” motives, and this spells the bondage (w.) of man, the very negation of freedom, and thus an unmitigated evil alike' to Samkara and Rant. Accordingly, moral discipline or culture argues a violent wrenching of the mind, together with the entire sensory apparatus, from its natural outgoing activity, a resolute setting one’s face against the current of impulses and solicitations of sense, and thus a supreme almost superhuman * * fir vrfa sw ft jprrcfnv $ *r w v hvutv writ, wnflwmf WT$tf*r—Com. on V.S. I. i. 4. 45 354 A systematic study of the vedxnta effort in changing the current of natural inclinations in the direction of the inward Self.* It is along this path of self-discipline that man can hope to regain his Self—as he is in his essential nature— from which there has been a lapse. This process of erecting oneself above one’s self in order to attain one’s Self may appear to. be not a little confusing to the student of Advaita-Vedanta. But all doubts and discrepancies on this score may be set at rest by means of a faithful reproduction of Samkara’s own utterances on the matter. Every man is equipped ab initio with a stock of innate cravings and capacities surviving in him as the latent traces or dispositions of actions in a previous cycle of exist¬ ence and constituting a part of his psychical make¬ up. This is what Samkara calls the prakrti, the instinctive basis of the psychic continuum, express¬ ing itself invariably in certain organic cravings or peculiar likes and dislikes. In his commentary on a well-known couplet of the Bhagavad-Gita, f which seems at first to be an apothgosis of Prakrti with all the incidental ambiguities of Naturalism,— Samkara steers clear of the insidious doctrine, and, with unerring psychological insight, takes his stand upon this psychical fact and converts it into the substructure for his idealistic or rationalistic theory * nm wrtr wrrwftiPncW vfircfci: swrfN vmfa—Com. on Katha Up., IV. 1. t twffiufrnwft i Kpftl vrfvr yaifii Pun: W n —Chap. Ill, verse 88, ttfiE ETHICS OF THE VEDlNTA 366 to rest on.