Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  1. The Nyaya System

  A Hindu logician

  The first of the “Brahmanical” systems in the logical order of Indian thought (for their chronological order is uncertain, and they are in all essentials contemporary) is a body of logical theory extending over two millenniums. Nyaya means an argument, a way of leading the mind to a conclusion. Its most famous text is the Nyaya Sutra ascribed without surety to a Gautama dated variously between the third century before, and the first century after, Christ.63 Like all Hindu thinkers, Gautama announces, as the purpose of his work, the achievement of Nirvana, or release from the tyranny of desire, here to be reached by clear and consistent thinking; but we suspect that his simple intent was to offer a guide to the perplexed wrestlers in India’s philosophical debates. He formulates for them the principles of argument, exposes the tricks of controversy, and lists the common fallacies of thought. Like another Aristotle, he seeks the structure of reasoning in the syllogism, and finds the crux of argument in the middle term;* like another James or Dewey he looks upon knowledge and thought as pragmatic tools and organs of human need and will, to be tested by their ability to lead to successful action.64 He is a realist, and will have nothing to do with the sublime idea that the world ceases to exist when no one takes the precaution to perceive it. Gautama’s predecessors in Nyaya were apparently atheists; his successors became epistemologists.65 His achievement was to give India an organon of investigation and thought, and a rich vocabulary of philosophical terms.

  2. The Vaisheshika System Democritus in India

  As Gautama is the Aristotle of India, so Kanada is its Democritus. His name, which means the “atom-eater,” suggests that he may be a legendary construct of the historical imagination. The date at which the Vaisheshika system was formulated has not been fixed with excessive accuracy: we are told that it was not before 300 B.C., and not after 800 A.D. Its name came from vishesha, meaning particularity: the world, in Kanada’s theory, is full of a number of things, but they are all, in some form, mere combinations of atoms; the forms change, but the atoms remain indestructible. Thoroughly Democritean, Kanada announces that nothing exists but “atoms and the void,” and that the atoms move not according to the will of an intelligent deity, but through an impersonal force or law —Adrishta, “the invisible.” Since there is no conservative like the child of a radical, the later exponents of Vaisheshika, unable to see how a blind force could give order and unity to the cosmos, placed a world of minute souls alongside the world of atoms, and supervised both worlds with an intelligent God.66 So old is the “pre-established harmony” of Leibnitz.

  3. The Sankhya System

  Its high repute—Metaphysics—Evolution—Atheism—Idealism—Spirit—Body, mind and soul—The goal of philosophy—Influence of the Sankhya

  This, says a Hindu historian, “is the most significant system of philosophy that India has produced.”67 Professor Garbe, who devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that “in Kapila’s doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited.”68 It is the oldest of the six systems,69 and perhaps the oldest philosophical system of all.* Of Kapila himself nothing is known, except that Hindu tradition, which has a schoolboy’s scorn for dates, credits him with founding the Sankhya philosophy in the sixth century B.C.71

  Kapila is at once a realist and a scholastic. He begins almost medically by laying it down, in his first aphorism, that “the complete cessation of pain . . . is the complete goal of man.” He rejects as inadequate the attempt to elude suffering by physical means; he refutes, with much logical prestidigitation, the views of all and sundry on the matter, and then proceeds to construct, in one unintelligibly abbreviated sutra after another, his own metaphysical system. It derives its name from his enumeration (for this is the meaning of sankhya) of the twenty-five Realities (Tattwas, “Thatnesses”) which, in Kapila’s judgment, make up the world. He arranges these Realities in a complex relationship that may possibly be clarified by the following scheme:

  (1) A. SUBSTANCE (Prakriti, “Producer”), a universal physical principle which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces

  (2) I. Intellect (Buddhi), the power of perception; which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces

  (3) i. The Five Subtle Elements, or Sensory Powers of the Internal World:

  (4) 1. Sight,

  (5) 2. Hearing,

  (6) 3. Smell,

  (7) 4. Taste, and

  (8) 5. Touch; (Realities (1) to (8) cooperate to produce (10) to (24))

  (9) ii. Mind (Manas), the power of conception;

  iii. The Five Organs of Sense (corresponding with Realities (4) to (8)):

  (10) 1. Eye,

  (11) 2. Ear,

  (12) 3. Nose,

  (13) 4. Tongue, and

  (14) 5. Skin;

  iv. The Five Organs of Action:

  (15) 1. Larynx,

  (16) 2. Hands,

  (17) 3. Feet,

  (18) 4. Excretory organs, and

  (19) 5. Generative organs;

  v. The Five Gross Elements of the External World:

  (20) 1. Ether,

  (21) 2. Air,

  (22) 3. Fire and light,

  (23) 4. Water, and

  (24) 5. Earth.

  (25) B. SPIRIT (Purusha, “Person”), a universal psychical principle which, though unable to do anything of itself, animates and vitalizes Prakriti, and stirs its evolutionary powers to all their activities.

  At its outset this seems to be a purely materialistic system: the world of mind and self as well as of body and matter appears entirely as an evolution by natural means, a unity and continuity of elements in perpetual development and decay from the lowest to the highest and back again. There is a premonition of Lamarck in Kapila’s thought: the need of the organism (the “Self”) generates the function (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), and the function produces the organ (eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin). There is no gap in the system, and no vital distinction in any Hindu philosophy, between the inorganic and the organic, between the vegetable and the animal, or between the animal and the human, world; these are all links in one chain of life, spokes on the wheel of evolution and dissolution, birth and death and birth. The course of evolution is determined fatalistically by the three active qualities or powers (Gunas) of Substance: purity, activity, and blind ignorance. These powers are not prejudiced in favor of development against decay; they produce the one after the other in an endless cycle, like some stupid magician drawing an infinity of contents from a hat, putting them back again, and repeating the process forever. Every state of evolution contains in itself, as Herbert Spencer was to say some time later, a tendency to lapse into dissolution as its fated counterpart and end.

  Kapila, like Laplace, saw no need of calling in a deity to explain creation or evolution;72 in this most religious and philosophical of nations it is nothing unusual to find religions and philosophies without a god. Many of the Sankhya texts explicitly deny the existence of a personal creator; creation is inconceivable, for “a thing is not made out of nothing”;73 creator and created are one.74 Kapila contents himself with writing (precisely as if he were Immanuel Kant) that a personal creator can never be demonstrated by human reason. For whatever exists, says this subtle sceptic, must be either bound or free, and God cannot be either. If God is perfect, he had no need to create a world; if he is imperfect he is not God. If God were good, and had divine powers, he could not possibly have created so imperfect a world, so rich in suffering, so certain in death.75 It is instructive to see with what calmness the Hindu thinkers discuss these questions, seldom resorting to persecution or abuse, and keeping the debate upon a plane reached in our time only by the controversies of the maturest scientists. Kapila protects himself by recognizing the authority of the Vedas: “The Vedas” he says, simply, “are an authority, si
nce the author of them knew the established truth.”76 After which he proceeds without paying any attention to the Vedas.

  But he is no materialist; on the contrary, he is an idealist and a spiritualist, after his own unconventional fashion. He derives reality entirely from perception; our sense organs and our thought give to the world all the reality, form and significance which it can ever have for us; what the world might be independently of them is an idle question that has no meaning, and can never have an answer.77 Again, after listing twenty-four Tattwas which belong, in his system, under physical evolution, he upsets all his incipient materialism by introducing, as the last Reality, the strangest and perhaps the most important of them all—Purusha, “Person” or Soul. It is not, like twenty-three other Tattwas, produced by Prakriti or physical force; it is an independent psychical principle, omnipresent and everlasting, incapable of acting by itself, but indispensable to every action. For Prakriti never develops, the Gunas never act, except through the inspiration of Purusha; the physical is animated, vitalized and stimulated to evolve by the psychical principle everywhere.78 Here Kapila speaks like Aristotle: “There is a ruling influence of the Spirit” (over Prakriti, or the evolving world), “caused by their proximity, just as the loadstone (draws iron to itself). That is, the proximity of Purusha to Prakriti impels the latter to go through the steps of production. This sort of attraction between the two leads to creation, but in no other sense is Spirit an agent, or concerned in creation at all.”79*

  Spirit is plural in the sense that it exists in each organism; but in all it is alike, and does not share in individuality. Individuality is physical; we are what we are, not because of our Spirit, but because of the origin, evolution and experiences of our bodies and minds. In Sankhya the mind is as much a part of the body as any other organ is. The secluded and untouched Spirit within us is free, while the mind and body are bound by the laws and Gunas or qualities of the physical world;81 it is not the Spirit that acts and is determined, it is the body-mind. Nor is Spirit affected by the decay and passing of the body and the personality; it is untouched by the stream of birth and death. “Mind is perishable,” says Kapila, “but not Spirit”;82 only the individual self, bound up with matter and body, is born, dies, and is born again, in that tireless fluctuation of physical forms which constitutes the history of the external world.83 Kapila, capable of doubting everything else, never doubts transmigration.

  Like most Hindu thinkers, he looks upon life as a very doubtful good, if a good at all. “Few are these days of joy, few are these days of sorrow; wealth is like a swollen river, youth is like the crumbling bank of a swollen river, life is like a tree on the crumbling bank.”84 Suffering is the result of the fact that the individual self and mind are bound up with matter, caught in the blind forces of evolution. What escape is there from this suffering? Only through philosophy, answers our philosopher; only through understanding that all these pains and griefs, all this division and turbulence of striving egos, are Maya, illusion, the insubstantial pageantry of life and time. “Bondage arises from the error of not discriminating”85—between the self that suffers and the Spirit that is immune, between the surface that is disturbed and the basis that remains unvexed and unchanged. To rise above these sufferings it is only necessary to realize that the essence of us, which is Spirit, is safe beyond good and evil, joy and pain, birth and death. These acts and struggles, these successes and defeats, distress us only so long as we fail to see that they do not affect, or come from, the Spirit; the enlightened man will look upon them as from outside them, like an impartial spectator witnessing a play. Let the soul recognize its independence of things, and it will at once be free; by that very act of understanding it will escape from the prison of space and time, of pain and reincarnation.86 “Liberation obtained through knowledge of the twenty-five Realities,” says Kapila, “teaches the one only knowledge—that neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist;”87 that is to say, personal separateness is an illusion; all that exists is the vast evolving and dissolving froth of matter and mind, of bodies and selves, on the one side, and on the other the quiet eternity of the immutable and imperturbable soul.

  Such a philosophy will bring no comfort to one who may find some difficulty in separating himself from his aching flesh and his grieving memory; but it seems to have well expressed the mood of speculative India. No other body of philosophic thought, barring the Vedanta, has so profoundly affected the Hindu mind. In the atheism and epistemological idealism of Buddha, and his conception of Nirvana, we see the influence of Kapila; we see it in the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu, in the Puranas* and the Tantras—which transform Purusha and Prakriti into the male and female principles of creation;88 above all in the system of Yoga, which is merely a practical development of Sankhya, built upon its theories and couched in its phrases. Kapila has few explicit adherents today, since Shankara and the Vedanta have captured the Hindu mind; but an old proverb still raises its voice occasionally in India: “There is no knowledge equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the Yoga.”89

  4. The Yoga System

  The Holy Men—The antiquity of “Yoga”—Its meaning—The eight stages of discipline—The aim of “Yoga”—The miracles of the “Yogi”—The sincerity of “Yoga”

  In a fair, still spot

  Having fixed his abode—not too much raised,

  Nor yet too low—let him abide, his goods

  A cloth, a deerskin, and the Kusha-grass.

  There, setting hard his mind upon the One,

  Restraining heart and senses, silent, calm,

  Let him accomplish Yoga, and achieve

  Pureness of soul, holding immovable

  Body and neck and head, his gaze absorbed

  Upon his nose-end, rapt from all around,

  Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent

  Upon his Brahmacharya vow, devout,

  Musing on Me, lost in the thought of Me.†

  On the bathing-ghats, scattered here and there among reverent Hindus, indifferent Moslems and staring tourists, sit the Holy Men, or Yogis, in whom the religion and philosophy of India find their ultimate and strangest expression. In lesser numbers one comes upon them in the woods or on the roadside, immovable and absorbed. Some are old, some are young; some wear a rag over the shoulders, some a cloth over the loins; some are clothed only in dust of ashes, sprinkled over the body and into the mottled hair. They squat cross-legged and motionless, staring at their noses or their navels. Some of them look squarely into the face of the sun hour after hour, day after day, letting themselves go slowly blind; some surround themselves with hot fires during the midday heat; some walk barefoot upon hot coals, or empty the coals upon their heads; some lie naked for thirty-five years on beds of iron spikes; some roll their bodies thousands of miles to a place of pilgrimage; some chain themselves to trees, or imprison themselves in cages, until they die; some bury themselves in the earth up to their necks, and remain that way for years or for life; some pass a wire through both cheeks, making it impossible to open the jaws, and so condemning themselves to live on liquids; some keep their fists clenched so long that their nails come through the back of the hand; some hold up an arm or a leg until it is withered and dead. Many of them sit quietly in one position, perhaps for years, eating leaves and nuts brought to them by the people, deliberately dulling every sense, and concentrating every thought, in the resolve to understand. Most of them avoid spectacular methods, and pursue truth in the quiet retreat of their homes.

  We have had such men in our Middle Ages, but we should have to look for them today in the nooks and crannies of Europe and America. India has had them for 2500 years—possibly from the prehistoric days when, perhaps, they were the shamans of savage tribes. The system of ascetic meditation known as Yoga existed in the time of the Vedas;90 the Upanishads and the Mahabharata accepted it; it flourished in the age of Buddha;91 and even Alexander, attracted by the ability of these “gymnosophists” to bear pain silently, stopped to stud
y them, and invited one of their number to come and live with him. The Yogi refused as firmly as Diogenes, saying that he wanted nothing from Alexander, being content with the nothing that he had. His fellow ascetics laughed at the Macedonian’s boyish desire to conquer the earth when, as they told him, only a few feet of it sufficed for any man, alive or dead. Another sage, Calanus (326 B.C.), accompanied Alexander to Persia; growing ill there, he asked permission to die, saying that he preferred death to illness; and calmly mounting a funeral pyre, he allowed himself to be burned to death without uttering a sound—to the astonishment of the Greeks, who had never seen this unmurderous sort of bravery before.92 Two centuries later (ca. 150 B.C.), Patanjali brought the practices and traditions of the system together in his famous Yoga-sutras, which are still used as a text in Yoga centers from Benares to Los Angeles.93 Yuan Chwang, in the seventh century A.D., described the system as having thousands of devotees;94 Marco Polo, about 1296, gave a vivid description of it;95 today, after all these centuries, its more extreme followers, numbering from one to three million in India,96 still torture themselves to find the peace of understanding. It is one of the most impressive and touching phenomena in the history of man.

  What is Yoga? Literally, a yoke: not so much a yoking or union of the soul with the Supreme Being,97 as the yoke of ascetic discipline and abstinence which the aspirant puts upon himself in order to cleanse his spirit of all material limitations, and achieve supernatural intelligence and powers.98 Matter is the root of ignorance and suffering; therefore Yoga seeks to free the soul from all sense phenomena and all bodily attachment; it is an attempt to attain supreme enlightenment and salvation in one life by atoning in one existence for all the sins of the soul’s past incarnations.99