by Will Durant
Such enlightenment cannot be won at a stroke; the aspirant must move towards it step by step, and no stage of the process can be understood by anyone who has not passed through the stages before it; one comes to Yoga only by long and patient study and self-discipline. The stages of Yoga are eight:
I. Yama, or the death of desire; here the soul accepts the restraints of ahimsa and Brahmacharia, abandons all self-seeking, emancipates itself from all material interests and pursuits, and wishes well to all things.100
II. Niyama, a faithful observance of certain preliminary rules for Yoga: cleanliness, content, purification, study, and piety.
III. Asana, posture; the aim here is to still all movement as well as all sensation; the best asana for this purpose is to place the right foot upon the left thigh and the left foot upon the right thigh, to cross the hands and grasp the two great toes, to bend the chin upon the chest, and direct the eyes to the tip of the nose.101
IV. Pranayama, or regulation of the breath: by these exercises one may forget everything but breathing, and in this way clear his mind for the passive emptiness that must precede absorption; at the same time one may learn to live on a minimum of air, and may let himself, with impunity, be buried in the earth for many days.
V. Pratyahara, abstraction; now the mind controls all the senses, and withdraws itself from all sense objects.
VI. Dharana, or concentration—the identification or filling of the mind and the senses with one idea or object to the exclusion of everything else.* The fixation of any one object long enough will free the soul of all sensation, all specific thought, and all selfish desire; then the mind, abstracted from things, will be left free to feel the immaterial essence of reality.†
VII. Dhyana, or meditation: this is an almost hypnotic condition, resulting from Dharana; it may be produced, says Patanjali, by the persistent repetition of the sacred syllable Om. Finally, as the summit of Yoga, the ascetic arrives at
VIII. Samadhi, or trance contemplation; even the last thought now disappears from the mind; empty, the mind loses consciousness of itself as a separate being;103 it is merged with totality, and achieves a blissful and godlike comprehension of all things in One. No words can describe this condition to the uninitiate; no intellect or reasoning can find or formulate it; “through Yoga must Yoga be known.”104
Nevertheless it is not God, or union with God, that the yogi seeks; in the Yoga philosophy God (Ishvara) is not the creator or preserver of the universe, or the rewarder and punisher of men, but merely one of several objects on which the soul may meditate as a means of achieving concentration and enlightenment. The aim, frankly, is that dissociation of the mind from the body, that removal of all material obstruction from the spirit, which brings with it, in Yoga theory, supernatural understanding and capacity.105 If the soul is cleansed of all bodily subjection and involvement it will not be united with Brahman, it will be Brahman; for Brahman is precisely that hidden spiritual base, that selfless and immaterial soul, which remains when all sense attachments have been exercised away. To the extent to which the soul can free itself from its physical environment and prison it becomes Brahman, and exercises Brahman’s intelligence and power. Here the magical basis of religion reappears, and almost threatens the essence of religion itself—the worship of powers superior to man.
In the days of the Upanishads, Yoga was pure mysticism—an attempt to realize the identity of the soul with God. In Hindu legend it is said that in ancient days seven Wise Men, or Rishis, acquired, by penance and meditation, complete knowledge of all things.106 In the later history of India Yoga became corrupted with magic, and thought more of the power of miracles than of the peace of understanding. The Yogi trusts that by Yoga he will be able to anesthetize and control any part of his body by concentrating upon it;107 he will be able at will to make himself invisible, or to prevent his body from being moved, or to pass in a moment from any part of the earth, or to live as long as he desires, or to know the past and the future, and the most distant stars.108
The sceptic must admit that there is nothing impossible in all this; fools can invent more hypotheses than philosophers can ever refute, and philosophers often join them in the game. Ecstasy and hallucinations can be produced by fasting and self-mortification, concentration may make one locally or generally insensitive to pain; and there is no telling what reserve energies and abilities lurk within the unknown mind. Many of the Yogis, however, are mere beggars who go though their penances in the supposedly Occidental hope of gold, or in the simple human hunger for notice and applause.* Asceticism is the reciprocal of sensuality, or at best an attempt to control it; but the attempt itself verges upon a masochistic sensuality in which the ascetic takes an almost erotic delight in his pain. The Brahmans have wisely abstained from such practices, and have counseled their followers to seek sanctity through the conscientious performance of the normal duties of life.110
5. The Purva-Mimansa
To step from Yoga to the Purva-Mimansa is to pass from the most renowned to the least known and least important of the six systems of Brahmanical philosophy. And as Yoga is magic and mysticism rather than philosophy, so this system is less philosophy than religion; it is an orthodox reaction against the impious doctrines of the philosophers. Its author, Jaimini, protested against the disposition of Kapila and Kanada to ignore, while acknowledging, the authority of the Vedas. The human mind, said Jaimini, is too frail an instrument to solve the problems of metaphysics and theology; reason is a wanton who will serve any desire; it gives us not “science” and “truth,” but merely our own rationalized sensuality and pride. The road to wisdom and peace lies not through the vain labyrinths of logic, but in the modest acceptance of tradition and the humble performance of the rituals prescribed in the Scriptures. For this, too, there is something to be said: cela vous abêtira.
6. The Vedanta System
Origin—Shankara—Logic—Epistemology—“Maya”—Psychology—Theology—God—Ethics—Difficulties of the system—Death of Shankara
The word Vedanta meant originally the end of the Vedas—that is, the Upanishads. Today India applies it to that system of philosophy which sought to give logical structure and support to the essential doctrine of the Upanishads—the organ-point that sounds throughout Indian thought—that God (Brahman) and the soul (Atman) are one. The oldest known form of this most widely accepted of all Hindu philosophies is the Brahma-sutra of Badarayana (ca. 200 B.C.)—555 aphorisms, of which the first announces the purpose of all: “Now, then, a desire to know Brahman.” Almost a thousand years later Gaudapada wrote a commentary on these sutras, and taught the esoteric doctrine of the system to Govinda, who taught it to Shankara, who composed the most famous of Vedanta commentaries, and made himself the greatest of Indian philosophers.
In his short life of thirty-two years Shankara achieved that union of sage and saint, of wisdom and kindliness, which characterizes the loftiest type of man produced in India. Born among the studious Nambudri Brahmans of Malabar, he rejected the luxuries of the world, and while still a youth became a sannyasi, worshiping unpretentiously the gods of the Hindu pantheon, and yet mystically absorbed in a vision of an all-embracing Brahman. It seemed to him that the profoundest religion and the profoundest philosophy were those of the Upanishads. He could pardon the polytheism of the people, but not the atheism of Sankhya or the agnosticism of Buddha. Arriving in the north as a delegate of the south, he won such popularity at the University of Benares that it crowned him with its highest honors, and sent him forth, with a retinue of disciples, to champion Brahmanism in all the debating halls of India. At Benares, probably, he wrote his famous commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, in which he attacked with theological ardor and scholastic subtlety all the heretics of India, and restored Brahmanism to that position of intellectual leadership from which Buddha and Kapila had deposed it.
There is much metaphysical wind in these discourses, and arid deserts of textual exposition; but they may be forgiven in
a man who at the age of thirty could be at once the Aquinas and the Kant of India. Like Aquinas, Shankara accepts the full authority of his country’s Scriptures as a divine revelation, and then sallies forth to find proofs in experience and reason for all Scriptural teachings. Unlike Aquinas, however, he does not believe that reason can suffice for such a task; on the contrary he wonders have we not exaggerated the power and rôle, the clarity and reliability, of reason.111 Jaimini was right: reason is a lawyer, and will prove anything we wish; for every argument it can find an equal and opposite argument, and its upshot is a scepticism that weakens all force of character and undermines all values of life. It is not logic that we need, says Shankara, it is insight, the faculty (akin to art) of grasping at once the essential out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the whole out of the part: this is the first prerequisite to philosophy. The second is a willingness to observe, inquire and think for understanding’s sake, not for the sake of invention, wealth or power; it is a withdrawal of the spirit from all the excitement, bias and fruits of action. Thirdly, the philosopher must acquire self-restraint, patience, and tranquillity; he must learn to live above physical temptation or material concerns. Finally there must burn, deep in his soul, the desire for moksha, for liberation from ignorance, for an end to all consciousness of a separate self, for a blissful absorption in the Brahman of complete understanding and infinite unity.112 In a word, the student needs not the logic of reason so much as a cleansing and deepening discipline of the soul. This, perhaps, has been the secret of all profound education.
Shankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle point never quite clearly visioned again until, a thousand years later, Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. How, he asks, is knowledge possible? Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the senses, and reveals not the external reality itself, but our sensory adaptation—perhaps transformation—of that reality. By sense, then, we can never quite know the “real”; we can know it only in that garb of space, time and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and understanding, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we can never objectively describe; our Way of perceiving will forever be inextricably mingled with the thing perceived.
This is not the airy subjectivism of the solipsist who thinks that he can destroy the world by going to sleep. The world exists, but it is Maya—not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an innate limitation, an Avidya, or ignorance, which is bound up with our very mode of perception, and to which, therefore, all flesh is heir. Maya and Avidya are the subjective and objective sides of the great illusion by which the intellect supposes that it knows the real; it is through Maya and Avidya, through our birthright of ignorance, that we see a multiplicity of objects and a flux of change; in truth there is only one Being, and change is “a mere name” for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirit, is the one universal reality, Brahman.
This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one unchanging Soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct personalities are bound up with body and matter, they belong to the kaleidoscopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and change, is the very essence and reality of us, that Atman which we share with all selves and things, and which, undivided and omnipresent, is identical with Brahman, God.113
But what is God? Just as there are two selves—the ego and Atman—and two worlds—the phenomenal and the noumenal—so there are two deities: an Ishvara or Creator worshiped by the people through the patterns of space, cause, time and change; and a Brahman or Pure Being worshiped
by that philosophical piety which seeks and finds, behind all separate things and selves, one universal reality, unchanging amid all changes, indivisible amid all divisions, eternal despite all vicissitudes of form, all birth and death. Polytheism, even theism, belongs to the world of Maya and Avidya; they are forms of worship that correspond to the forms of perception and thought; they are as necessary to our moral life as space, time and cause are necessary to our intellectual life, but they have no absolute validity or objective truth.114
To Shankara the existence of God is no problem, for he defines God as existence, and identifies all real being with God. But of the existence of a personal God, creator or redeemer, there may, he thinks, be some question; such a deity, says this pre-plagiarist of Kant, cannot be proved by reason, he can only be postulated as a practical necessity,115 offering peace to our limited intellects, and encouragement to our fragile morality. The philosopher, though he may worship in every temple and bow to every god, will pass beyond these forgivable forms of popular faith; feeling the illusoriness of plurality, and the monistic unity of all things,* he will adore, as the Supreme Being, Being itself—indescribable, limitless, spaceless, timeless, causeless, changeless Being, the source and substance of all reality,† We may apply the adjectives “conscious,” “intelligent,” even “happy” to Brahman, since Brahman includes all selves, and these may have such qualities;116 but all other adjectives would be applicable to Brahman equally, since It includes all qualities of all things. Essentially Brahman is neuter, raised above personality and gender, beyond good and evil, above all moral distinctions, all differences and attributes, all desires and ends. Brahman is the cause and effect, the timeless and secret essence, of the world.
The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in the secret found. To be one with God means, for Shankara, to rise above—or to sink beneath—the separateness and brevity of the self, with all its narrow purposes and interests; to become unconscious of all parts, divisions, things; to be placidly at one, in a desireless Nirvana, with that great ocean of Being in which there are no warring purposes, no competing selves, no parts, no change, no space, and no time.* To find this blissful peace (Ananda) a man must renounce not merely the world but himself; he must care nothing for possessions or goods, even for good or evil; he must look upon suffering and death as Maya, surface incidents of body and matter, time and change; and he must not think of his own personal quality and fate; a single moment of self-interest or pride can destroy all his liberation.119 Good works cannot give a man salvation, for good works have no validity or meaning except in the Maya world of space and time; only the knowledge of the saintly seer can bring that salvation which is the recognition of the identity of self and the universe, Atman and Brahman, soul and God, and the absorption of the part in the whole.120 Only when this absorption is complete does the wheel of reincarnation stop; for then it is seen that the separate self and personality, to which reincarnation comes, is an illusion.121 It is Ishvara, the Maya god, that gives rebirth to the self in punishment and reward; but “when the identity” of Atman and Brahman “has become known, then,” says Shankara, “the soul’s existence as wanderer, and Brahman’s existence as creator” (i.e., as Ishvara) “have vanished away.”122 lshvara and Karma, like things and selves, belong to the exoteric doctrine of Vedanta as adapted to the needs of the common man; in the esoteric or secret doctrine soul and Brahman are one, never wandering, never dying, never changed.123
It was thoughtful of Shankara to confine his esoteric doctrine to philosophers; for as Voltaire believed that only a society of philosophers could survive without laws, so only a society of supermen could live beyond good and evil
. Critics have complained that if good and evil are Maya, part of the unreal world, then all moral distinctions fall away, and devils are as good as saints. But these moral distinctions, Shankara cleverly replies, are real within the world of space and time, and are binding for those who live in the world. They are not binding upon the soul that has united itself with Brahman; such a soul can do no wrong, since wrong implies desire and action, and the liberated soul, by definition, does not move in the sphere of desire and (self-considering) action. Whoever consciously injures another lives on the plane of Maya, and is subject to its distinctions, its morals and its laws. Only the philosopher is free, only wisdom is liberty.*
It was a subtle and profound philosophy to be written by a lad in his twenties. Shankara not only elaborated it in writing and defended it successfully in debate, but he expressed snatches of it in some of the most sensitive religious poetry of India. When all challenges had been met he retired to a hermitage in the Himalayas, and, according to Hindu tradition, died at the age of thirty-two.124 Ten religious orders were founded in his name, and many disciples accepted and developed his philosophy. One of them—some say Shankara himself—wrote for the people a popular exposition of the Vedanta—the Mohamudgara, or “Hammer of Folly”—in which the essentials of the system were summed up with clarity and force:
Fool! give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires from thy heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is gained by thy Karma. . . . Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or of youth; time takes all away in a moment. Leaving quickly all this, which is full of illusion, enter into the place of Brahman . . . . Life is tremulous, like a water-drop on a lotus-leaf. . . . Time is playing, life is waning—yet the breath of hope never ceases. The body is wrinkled, the hair grey, the mouth has become toothless, the stick in the hand shakes, yet man leaves not the anchor of hope. . . . Preserve equanimity always. . . . In thee, in me and in others there dwells Vishnu alone; it is useless to be angry with me, or impatient. See every self in Self, and give up all thought of difference.125