fate after death — belong to an earlier stage of philosophic development ; they manifestly ascribe to the soul a con- tinued individual existence. But mixed with texts of this class there are others in which the final absolute identification of the individual Self with the universal Self is indicated in terms of unmistakable plainness. 'He who knows Brahman and becomes Brahman ;' ' he who knows Brahman becomes all this;' l as the flowing rivers disappear in the sea losing their name and form, thus a wise man goes to the divine person.' And if we look to the whole, to the prevailing spirit of the Upanishads, we may call the doctrine embodied in passages of the latter nature the doctrine of the Upanishads. It is, moreover, supported by the frequently and clearly stated theory of the individual souls being merged in Brahman in the state of deep dreamless sleep.
It is much more difficult to indicate the precise teaching of the Upanishads concerning the original relation of the individual soul to the highest Self, although there can be no doubt that it has to be viewed as proceeding from the latter, and somehow forming a part of it. Negatively we are entitled to say that the doctrine, according to which the soul is merely brahma bhrantam or brahma mayopa- dhikam, is in no way countenanced by the majority of the passages bearing on the question. If the emission of the elements, described in the KMndogya, and referred to above, is a real process — of which we saw no reason to doubt— the ^iva atman with which the highest Self enters into the emitted elements is equally real, a true part or emanation of Brahman itself.
After having in this way shortly reviewed the chief ele- ments of Vedantic doctrine according to the Upanishads, we may briefly consider Ankara's system and mode of inter- pretation—with whose details we had frequent opportunities of finding fault — as a whole. It has been said before that the task of reducing the teaching of the whole of the Upa- nishads to a system consistent and free from contradic- tions is an intrinsically impossible one. But the task once being given, we are quite ready to admit that .Sankara's system is most probably the best which can be devised.
Introduction. Cxxu1
While unable to allow that the Upanishads recognise a lower and higher knowledge of Brahman, in fact the dis- tinction of a lower and higher Brahman, we yet acknowledge that the adoption of that distinction furnishes the inter- preter with an instrument of extraordinary power for reducing to an orderly whole the heterogeneous material presented by the old theosophic treatises. This becomes very manifest as soon as we compare vSahkara's system with that of Ram&nug-a. The latter recognises only one Brahman which is, as we should say, a personal God, and he therefore lays stress on all those passages of the Upani- shads which ascribe to Brahman the attributes of a personal God, such as omniscience and omnipotence. Those passages, on the other hand, whose decided tendency it is to represent Brahman as transcending all qualities, as one undifferenced mass of impersonal intelligence, Ramanufa is unable to accept frankly and fairly, and has to misinterpret them more or less to make them fall in with his system. The same remark holds good with regard to those texts which represent the individual soul as finally identifying itself with Brahman ; Rdmanu^-a cannot allow a complete identi- fication but merely an assimilation carried as far as possible. Sankara, on the other hand, by skilfully ringing the changes on a higher and a lower doctrine, somehow manages to find room for whatever the Upanishads have to say. Where the text speaks of Brahman as transcending all attributes, the highest doctrine is set forth. Where Brahman is called the All-knowing ruler of the world, the author means to propound the lower knowledge of the Lord only. And where the legends about the primary being and its way of creating the world become somewhat crude and gross, Hira/zyagarbha and Vira^* are summoned forth and charged with the responsibility. Of Wirkg Mr. Gough remarks (p. 55) that in him a place is provided by the poets of the Upani- shads for the purusha of the ancient ^/shis, the divine being out of whom the visible and tangible world proceeded. This is quite true if only we substitute for the ' poets of the Upanishads' the framers of the orthodox Ved&nta system — for the Upanishads give no indication whatever
CXX1V VEDANTA-stiTRAS.
1 The tjvara who allots to the individual souls their new forms of embodiment in strict accordance with their merit or demerit cannot be called anything else but a personal God. That this personal conscious being is at the same time iden- tified with the totality of the individual souls in the unconscious state of deep dreamless sleep, is one of those extraordinary contradictions which thorough-going systematisers of Vedantic doctrine are apparently unable to avoid altogether.
Introduction. Cxxv
of the soul, we have already remarked above. And although the Maya doctrine cannot, in my opinion, be said to form part of the teaching of the Upanishads, it cannot yet be asserted to contradict it openly, because the very point which it is meant to elucidate, viz. the mode in which the physical universe and the multiplicity of individual souls originate, is left by the Upanishads very much in the dark. The later growth of the Maya doctrine on the basis of the Upanishads is therefore quite intelligible, and I fully agree with Mr. Gough when he says regarding it that there has been no addition to the system from without but only a development from within, no graft but only growth. The lines of thought which finally led to the elaboration of the full-blown Maya theory may be traced with considerable certainty. In the first place, deepening speculation on Brahman tended to the notion of advaita being taken in a more and more strict sense, as implying not only the ex- clusion of any second principle external to Brahman, but also the absence of any elements of duality or plurality in the nature of the one universal being itself; a tendency agreeing with the spirit of a certain set of texts from the Upanishads. And as the fact of the appearance of a manifold world cannot be denied, the only way open to thoroughly consistent speculation was to deny at any rate its reality, and to call it a mere illusion due to an unreal principle, with which Brahman is indeed associated; but which is unable to break the unity of Brahman's nature just on account of its own unreality. And, in the second place, a more thorough following out of the conception that the union with Brahman is to be reached through true knowledge only, not unnaturally led to the conclusion that what separates us in our unenlightened state from Brahman is such as to allow itself to be completely sublated by an act of knowledge ; is, in other words, nothing else but an erroneous notion, an illusion. — A further circumstance which may not impossibly have co-operated to further the de- velopment of the theory of the world's unreality will be referred to later on1.
1 That section of the introduction in which the point referred to in the text
CXXvi VEDANTA-S<JTRAS.
We have above been obliged to leave it an open question what kind of Vedanta is represented by the Vedanta-sutras, although reason was shown for the supposition that in some important points their teaching is more closely related to the system of Ramanu^a than to that of Sarikara. If so, the philosophy of vSaiikara would on the whole stand nearer to the teaching of the Upanishads than the Sutras of Badaraya^a. This would indeed be a somewhat un- expected conclusion — for, judging a priori, we should be more inclined to assume a direct propagation of the true doctrine of the Upanishads through Badaraya^a to 6an- kara — but a priori considerations have of course no weight against positive evidence to the contrary. There are, more- over, other facts in the history of Indian philosophy and theology which help us better to appreciate the possibility of B^daraya^a's Sutras already setting forth a doctrine that lays greater stress on the personal character of the highest being than is in agreement with the prevailing tendency of the Upanishads. That the pure doctrine of those ancient Brahminical treatises underwent at a rather early period amalgamations with beliefs which most pro- bably had sprung up in altogether different — priestly or non-priestly — communities is a well-known circumstance ; it suffices for our purposes to refer to the most eminent of the early literary monuments in which an amalgamation of the kind mentioned is observable, viz. the Bhagavadgita. The doctrine of the Bhagavadgita represents a fusion of the Brahman theory of the Upanishads with the belief in a personal highest being — Krishna, or Vishnu — which in many respects approximates very closely to the system of the Bhagavatas ; the attempts of a certain set of Indian commentators to explain it as setting forth pure Vedanta, i. e. the pure doctrine of the Upanishads, may simply be set aside. But this same Bhagavadgita is quoted in Badaraya;za's Sutras (at least according to the unanimous explanations of the most eminent scholiasts of different schools) as inferior to 5ruti only in authority. The Sutras,
is touched upon will I hope form part of the second volume of the translation. The same remark applies to a point concerning which further information had been promised above on page v.
Introduction. Cxxv11
moreover, refer in different places to certain Ved antic por- tions of the Mahabharata, especially the twelfth book, several of which represent forms of Vedanta distinctly dif- fering from ^Sankara's teaching, and closely related to the system of the Bhagavatas.
Facts of this nature — from entering into the details of which we are prevented by want of space — tend to mitigate the prima facie strangeness of the assumption that the Vedanta-sutras, which occupy an intermediate position between the Upanishads and .Sankara, should yet diverge in their teaching from both. The Vedanta of Gaiu/apada and Sankara would in that case mark a strictly orthodox reaction against all combinations of non-Vedic elements of belief and doctrine with the teaching of the Upanishads. But although this form of doctrine has ever since Sankara's time been the one most generally accepted by Brahminic students of philosophy, it has never had any wide-reaching influence on the masses of India. It is too little in sym- pathy with the wants of the human heart, which, after all, are not so very different in India from what they are elsewhere. Comparatively few, even in India, are those who rejoice in the idea of a universal non-personal essence in which their own individuality is to be merged and lost for ever, who think it sweet ' to be wrecked on the ocean of the InfiniteV The only forms of Vedantic philosophy which are — and can at any time have been — really popular, are those in which the Brahman of the Upanishads has somehow transformed itself into a being, between which and the devotee there can exist a personal relation, love and faith on the part of man, justice tempered by mercy on the part of the divinity. The only religious books of widespread influence are such as the Ramayan of Tulsidas, which lay no stress on the distinction between an absolute Brahman inac- cessible to all human wants and sympathies, and a shadowy Lord whose very conception depends on the illusory prin- ciple of Maya, but love to dwell on the delights of devotion
1 Cosi tra questa
Immensita s9 annega il pensier mio, E il naufrago m' e dolce in questo mare.
Leopardi.
cxxviii vedanta-s6tras.
to one all-wise and merciful ruler, who is able and willing to lend a gracious ear to the supplication of the worshipper.