“Maitreyi!” said Yajnavalkya, “lo, I am about to wander forth from this state. Let me make a final settlement for you and that Katyayani.”
Then spake Maitreyi: “If, now, Sir, this whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I now thereby be immortal?”
“No, no!” said Yajnavalkya. “Of immortality there is no hope through wealth.”
Then spake Maitreyi: “What should I do with that through which I may not be immortal? What you know, Sir—that, indeed, explain to me.”102
The theme of the Upanishads is all the mystery of this unintelligible world. “Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go? O ye who know Brahman, tell us at whose command we abide here. . . . Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements be considered the cause, or he who is called Purusha”—the Supreme Spirit?103 India has had more than her share of men who wanted “not millions, but answers to their questions.” In the Maitri Upanishad we read of a king abandoning his kingdom and going into the forest to practice austerities, clear his mind for understanding, and solve the riddle of the universe. After a thousand days of the king’s penances a sage, “knower of the soul,” came to him. “You are one who knows its true nature,” says the king; “do you tell us.” “Choose other desires,” warns the sage. But the king insists; and in a passage that must have seemed Schopenhauerian to Schopenhauer, he voices that revulsion against life, that fear of being reborn, which runs darkly through all Hindu thought:
“Sir, in this ill-smelling, unsubstantial body, which is a conglomerate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears, rheum, feces, urine, wind, bile and phlegm, what is the good of enjoyment of desire? In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death, disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of desires? And we see that this whole world is decaying like these gnats, these mosquitoes, this grass, and these trees that arise and perish. . . . Among other things there is the drying up of great oceans, the falling-away of mountain-peaks, the deviation of the fixed polestar, . . . the submergence of the earth. . . . In this sort of cycle of existence what is the good of enjoyment of desires, when, after a man has fed upon them, there is seen repeatedly his return here to the earth?”104
The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless; it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and this reason. “Not by learning is the Atman (or Soul of the World) attained, not by genius and much knowledge of books. . . . Let a Brahman renounce learning and become as a child. . . . Let him not seek after many words, for that is mere weariness of tongue.”105 The highest understanding, as Spinoza was to say, is direct perception, immediate insight; it is, as Bergson would say, intuition, the inward seeing of the mind that has deliberately closed, as far as it can, the portals of external sense. “The self-evident Brahman pierced the openings of the senses so that they turned outwards; therefore man looks outward, not inward into himself; some wise man, however, with his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the self behind.”106
If, on looking inward, a man finds nothing at all, that may only prove the accuracy of his introspection; for no man need expect to find the eternal in himself if he is lost in the ephemeral and particular. Before that inner reality can be felt one has to wash away from himself all evil doing and thinking, all turbulence of body and soul.107 For a fortnight one must fast, drinking only water;108 then the mind, so to speak, is starved into tranquillity and silence, the senses are cleansed and stilled, the spirit is left at peace to feel itself and that great ocean of soul of which it is a part; at last the individual ceases to be, and Unity and Reality appear. For it is not the individual self which the seer sees in this pure inward seeing; that individual self is but a series of brain or mental states, it is merely the body seen from within. What the seeker seeks is Atman,* the Self of all selves, the Soul of all souls, the immaterial, formless Absolute in which we bathe ourselves when we forget ourselves.
This, then, is the first step in the Secret Doctrine: that the essence of our own self is not the body, or the mind, or the individual ego, but the silent and formless depth of being within us, Atman. The second step is Brahman,* the one pervading, neuter,† impersonal, all-embracing, underlying, intangible essence of the world, the “Real of the Real,” “the unborn Soul, undecaying, undying,”110 the Soul of all Things as Atman is the Soul of all Souls; the one force that stands behind, beneath and above all forces and all gods.
Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him. “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
He answered, . . . “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Six.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“Two.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“One and a half.”
“Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
“One.”111
The third step is the most important of all: Atman and Brahman are one. The (non-individual) soul or force within us is identical with the impersonal Soul of the World. The Upanishads burn this doctrine into the pupil’s mind with untiring, tiring repetition. Behind all forms and veils the subjective and the objective are one; we, in our de-individualized reality, and God as the essence of all things, are one. A teacher expresses it in a famous parable:
“Bring hither a fig from there.”
“Here it is, Sir.”
“Divide it.”
“It is divided, Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“These rather fine seeds, Sir.”
“Of these please divide one.”
“It is divided, Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Nothing at all, Sir.”
“Verily, my dear one, that finest essence which you do not perceive—verily from that finest essence this great tree thus arises. Believe me, my dear one, that which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. Tat tvam asi—that art thou, Shwetaketu.”
“Do you, Sir, cause me to understand even more.”
“So be it, my dear one.”112
This almost Hegelian dialectic of Atman, Brahman and their synthesis is the essence of the Upanishads. Many other lessons are taught here, but they are subordinate. We find already, in these discourses, the belief in transmigration,* and the longing for release (Moksha) from this heavy chain of reincarnations. Janaka, King of the Videhas, begs Yajnavalkya to tell him how rebirth can be avoided. Yajnavalkya answers by expounding Yoga: through the ascetic elimination of all personal desires one may cease to be an individual fragment, unite himself in supreme bliss with the Soul of the World, and so escape rebirth. Whereupon the king, metaphysically overcome, says: “I will give you, noble Sir, the Videhas, and myself also to be your slave.”118 It is an abstruse heaven, however, that Yajnavalkya promises the devotee, for in it there will be no individual consciousness,119 there will only be absorption into Being, the reunion of the temporarily separated part with the Whole. “As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man,
freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all.”120
Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity. We shall find this philosophy of the Upanishads—this monistic theology, this mystic and impersonal immortality—dominating Hindu thought from Buddha to Gandhi, from Yajnavalkya to Tagore. To our own day the Upanishads have remained to India what the New Testament has been to Christendom—a noble creed occasionally practised and generally revered. Even in Europe and America this wistful theosophy has won millions upon millions of followers, from lonely women and tired men to Schopenhauer and Emerson. Who would have thought that the great American philosopher of individualism would give perfect expression to the Hindu conviction that individuality is a delusion?
Brahma
If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings.
CHAPTER XV
Buddha
I. THE HERETICS
Sceptics—Nihilists—Sophists—Atheists—Materialists—Religions without a god
THAT there were doubters, even in the days of the Upanishads, appears from the Upanishads themselves. Sometimes the sages ridiculed the priests, as when the Chandogya Upanishad likens the orthodox clergy of the time to a procession of dogs each holding the tail of its predecessor, and saying, piously, “Om, let us eat; Om, let us drink.”1 The Swasanved Upanishad announces that there is no god, no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation, no world; that the Vedas and Upanishads are the work of conceited fools; that ideas are illusions, and all words untrue; that people deluded by flowery speech cling to gods and temples and “holy men,” though in reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog.2 And the story is told of Virocana, who lived as a pupil for thirty-two years with the great god Prajapati Himself, received much instruction about “the Self which is free from evil, ageless, deathless, sorrowless, hungerless, thirstless, whose desire is the Real,” and then suddenly returned to earth and preached this highly scandalizing doctrine: “One’s self is to be made happy here on earth. One’s self is to be waited upon. He who makes himself happy here on earth, who waits upon himself, obtains both worlds, this world and the next.”3 Perhaps the good Brahmans who have preserved the history of their country have deceived us a little about the unanimity of Hindu mysticism and piety.
Indeed, as scholarship unearths some of the less respectable figures in Indian philosophy before Buddha, a picture takes form in which, along with saints meditating on Brahman, we find a variety of persons who despised all priests, doubted all gods, and bore without trepidition the name of Nastiks, No-sayers, Nihilists. Sangaya, the agnostic, would neither admit nor deny life after death; he questioned the possibility of knowledge, and limited philosophy to the pursuit of peace. Purana Kashyapa refused to accept moral distinctions, and taught that the soul is a passive slave to chance. Maskarin Gosala held that fate determines everything, regardless of the merits of men. Ajita Kasakambalin reduced man to earth, water, fire and wind, and said: “Fools and wise alike, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not.”4 The author of the Ramayana draws a typical sceptic in Jabali, who ridicules Rama for rejecting a kingdom in order to keep a vow.
Jabali, a learned Brahman and a Sophist skilled in word,
Questioned Faith and Law and Duty, spake to young Ayodhya’s lord:
“Wherefore, Rama, idle maxims cloud thy heart and warp thy mind,
Maxims which mislead the simple and the thoughtless humankind? . . .
Ah, I weep for erring mortals who, on erring duty bent,
Sacrifice this dear enjoyment till their barren life is spent,
Who to Gods and to the Fathers vainly still their offerings make.
Waste of food! for God nor Father doth our pious homage take!
And the food by one partaken, can it nourish other men?
Food bestowed upon a Brahman, can it serve our Fathers then?
Crafty priests have forged these maxims, and with selfish objects say,
“Make thy gifts and do thy penance, leave thy worldly wealth, and pray!”
There is no hereafter, Rama, vain the hope and creed of men;
Seek the pleasures of the present, spurn illusions poor and vain.5
When Buddha grew to manhood he found the halls, the streets, the very woods of northern India ringing with philosophic disputation, mostly of an atheistic and materialistic trend. The later Upanishads and the oldest Buddhist books are full of references to these heretics.6 A large class of traveling Sophists—the Paribbajaka, or Wanderers—spent the better part of every year in passing from locality to locality, seeking pupils, or antagonists, in philosophy. Some of them taught logic as the art of proving anything, and earned for themselves the titles of “Hair-splitters” and “Eelwrigglers”; others demonstrated the non-existence of God, and the inexpediency of virtue. Large audiences gathered to hear such lectures and debates; great halls were built to accommodate them; and sometimes princes offered rewards for those who should emerge victorious from these intellectual jousts.7 It was an age of amazingly free thought, and of a thousand experiments in philosophy.
Not much has come down to us from these sceptics, and their memory has been preserved almost exclusively through the diatribes of their enemies.8 The oldest name among them is Brihaspati, but his nihilistic Sutras have perished, and all that remains of him is a poem denouncing the priests in language free from all metaphysical obscurity:
No heaven exists, no final liberation,
No soul, no other world, no rites of caste. . . .
The triple Veda, triple self-command,
And all the dust and ashes of repentance—
These yield a means of livelihood for men
Devoid of intellect and manliness. . . .
How can this body when reduced to dust
Revisit earth? And if a ghost can pass
To other worlds, why does not strong affection
For those he leaves behind attract him back?
The costly rites enjoined for those who die
Are but a means of livelihood devised
By sacerdotal cunning—nothing more. . . .
While life endures let life be spent in ease
And merriment; let a man borrow money
From all his friends, and feast on melted butter.9
Out of the aphorisms of Brihaspati came a whole school of Hindu materialists, named, after one of them, Charvakas. They laughed at the notion that the Vedas were divinely revealed truth; truth, they argued, can never be known, except through the senses. Even reason is not to be trusted, for every inference depends for its validity not only upon accurate observation and correct reasoning, but also upon the assumption that the future will behave like the past; and of this, as Hume was to say, there can be no certainty.10 What is not perceived by the senses, said the Charvakas, does not exist; therefore the soul is a delusion, and Atman is humbug. We do not observe, in experience or history, any interposition of supernatural forces in the world. All phenomena are natural; only simpletons trace them to demons or gods.11 Matter is the one reality; the body is a combination of atoms;12 the mind is merely matter thinking; the body, not the soul, feels, sees, hears, thinks.13 “Who has seen the soul existing in a state separate from the body?” There is no immortality, no rebirth. Religion is an aberration, a disease, or a chicanery; the h
ypothesis of a god is useless for explaining or understanding the world. Men think religion necessary only because, being accustomed to it, they feel a sense of loss, and an uncomfortable void, when the growth of knowledge destroys this faith.14 Morality, too, is natural; it is a social convention and convenience, not a divine command. Nature is indifferent to good and bad, virtue and vice, and lets the sun shine indiscriminately upon knaves and saints; if nature has any ethical quality at all it is that of transcendent immorality. There is no need to control instinct and passion, for these are the instructions of nature to men. Virtue is a mistake; the purpose of life is living, and the only wisdom is happiness.15
This revolutionary philosophy of the Charvakas put an end to the age of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It weakened the hold of the Brahmans on the mind of India, and left in Hindu society a vacuum which almost compelled the growth of a new religion. But the materialists had done their work so thoroughly that both of the new religions which arose to replace the old Vedic faith were, anomalous though it may sound, atheistic religions, devotions without a god. Both belonged to the Nastika or Nihilistic movement; and both were originated not by the Brahman priests but by members of the Kshatriya warrior caste, in a reaction against sacerdotal ceremonialism and theology. With the coming of Jainism and Buddhism a new epoch began in the history of India.
II. MAHAVIRA AND THE JAINS
The Great Hero—The Jain creed—Atheistic polytheism—Asceticism—Salvation by suicide—Later history of the Jains
About the middle of the sixth century B.C. a boy was born to a wealthy nobleman of the Lichchavi tribe in a suburb of the city of Vaishali, in what is now the province of Bihar.* His parents, though wealthy, belonged to a sect that looked upon rebirth as a curse, and upon suicide as a blessed privilege. When their son had reached his thirty-first year they ended their lives by voluntary starvation. The young man, moved to the depths of his soul, renounced the world and its ways, divested himself of all clothing, and wandered through western Bengal as an ascetic, seeking self-purification and understanding. After thirteen years of such self-denial, he was hailed by a group of disciples as a Jina (“conqueror”), i.e., one of the great teachers whom fate, they believed, had ordained to appear at regular intervals to enlighten the people of India. They rechristened their leader Mahavira, or the Great Hero, and took to themselves, from their most characteristic belief, the name of Jains. Mahavira organized a celibate clergy and an order of nuns, and when he died, aged seventy-two, left behind him fourteen thousand devotees.