The foundational non-scriptural text for the Ritualists, which encapsulated their ideas in seminal form – their prasthāna-vākya – is known as the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra of the legendary sage, Jaimini (200 B.C.E.–200 C.E.). This is a lengthy text (comprising 2621 sūtras in one well-known edition). The corresponding prasthāna-vākya of the Vedāntins is the Brahma Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa (ca. beginning of the Common Era), with which we have made acquaintance in Chapter 5. Note that, for some classical Vedāntins, e.g. Śanikara, Rāmānuja and Madhva, Jaimini's Mīmāṃsā Sūtra is not to be discounted as irrelevant. Though the Vedāntins regarded knowledge (variously interpreted) as decisive for attaining liberation (also variously interpreted), the performance of the sacred ritual, as we have seen, had its place. In one way or another, it was regarded as a stepping-stone to the attainment of liberating knowledge. This meant that Jaimini's Sūtra had authority as a kind of prasthāna-vākya, but an authority subordinate to that of the Brahmā Sūtra.
In fact, in the context of smṛti, the Vedāntins appealed variously to the authority not only of the two Sūtra collections mentioned, but also to that of the Sanskrit epics, especially the Bhagavad Gītā, selected Purāṇas, and even vernacular sources. Latter-day Vedāntins have been far more eclectic, ranging widely even into Western thought to construct their world-views (see below). Both schools of Mīmāṃsā engaged over time in sophisticated, technical debate about the scope and purport of language (śabda), the nature of a word (pada) and its role in a sentence (vākya), the relationship between language and its object (śabdārthasaṃbandha), and reliable ways (prāmaṇa) of arriving at certitude and truth. And thinkers within both camps could disagree substantively, within the parameters of their basic assumptions, among each other. Thus among the early Vedāntins, Śanikara argued that mokṣa or liberation was monistic, a state in which no differentiation of any kind was experienced; Rāmānuja contended that the ultimate goal of human existence was to dwell lovingly with and in a personal Supreme Being whose preferred name is Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa (a ‘panentheistic’ view), whereas for Madhva, mokṣa meant a starkly dualistic and loving communion with Viṣṇu or ‘God’ (on these three Vedāntins, see Lott 1980).
Both schools of Mīmāṃsā have wielded a pervasive and powerful influence in the Hindu intellectual tradition, not least through their views on language, and, as mentioned, divided further into sub-schools of thought. Two renowned sub-schools of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā are those of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (ca. seventh century) and Prabhākara (perhaps a junior contemporary).11 Under Vedānta, there have been a number of well-known sub-schools, some of which have divided further. These include traditions that developed over time from about the eighth century to the seventeenth under such luminaries as Śaṃkara, Rāmānuja, Madhva, Vedāntadeśika, Nimbarka, Vallabha and Caitanya (some of whom we have met earlier in the book).
Whilst it is the case that the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā as a tradition in its own right seems to have lost its vigour by about the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries, its linguistic insights having been absorbed and developed by other schools of thought, new forms of Vedānta have continued to appear. The Brāhmo Samāj in the nineteenth century, especially in Bengal which was in the vanguard of Hindu social and religious reform, had strong Vedāntic content in its various factions, and played its part in shaping the influential nationalist views of Swami Vivekananda, who sought among other things to construct a social ethic based on Upaniṣadic teaching (see Chapter 4). The thought of Sarvepalli Rādhākrishnan (1888–1975) was professedly Vedānta-based, as we have seen (Chapter 4), if also wide-ranging and eclectic. Though no school seems to have been initiated by his thought, his views were influential for much of the twentieth century, in particular as an apologia and statement of (a certain kind of) Hinduism (see Parthasarathi & Chattopadhyay 1989). On the other hand, the Bengali, Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), or Śrī Aurobindo as he is called, does have a distinctive following in India and elsewhere, with headquarters at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry on the east coast, south of Chennai (= Madras). Aurobindo's standpoint is called ‘Integral Yoga’:
The aim of Integral Yoga is to chart a path through progressively higher states of consciousness, culminating in the divinisation and perfection of both human beings and the material world. This philosophy is developed at length, but not always systematically, in Aurobindo's voluminous writings in English, the best known of which is probably The Life Divine.
(first listed pub. 1914–19;revised edition 1939–40)12
Another Vedānta-inspired organization, with branches around the world, but with its headquarters in Belur on the west bank of the Hugli river (about an hour's drive north of Kolkata in West Bengal), is the Rāmakrishna Math (‘monastery’) and Mission which Swami Vivekananda helped establish in the name of his guru Rāmakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–86). Doctrinally, the monks of this order profess to be Advaita Vedāntins and defer to the philosophical-theology formulated by Śaṃkara.
The next two schools of thought, Nyāya and Vaiṣeśika, may also be taken together. (iii) Nyāya is usually translated as ‘Logic’ or ‘Reasoning’, and is the system of thought that defines the methods and objectives of the ‘proper use of reason’. Jonardon Ganeri (2001:7) quotes a story told by Bhīṣma, a character in the Mbh., about the deva Indra appearing in the form of a jackal (12.173.45–8):
I used to be scholarly [says Indra], a reasoner [haituka], a scorner of the Veda. I was point-lessly fond of critical inquiry [ānvīkṣikī] and the science of argument [tarka-vidyā]. I used to make declarations on the basis of logic; in assemblies, speaking with reasons, I harangued the brahmins and was rude during the Vedic recitations. I was an unbeliever, sceptical about everything, and though stupid, I thought myself wise. The status of a jackal that I have obtained is the result ... of my misdeeds.
Ganeri goes on to point out that ‘It is not that ... reason as such is condemned, but only its capricious use. The “reasoners” ... use reason to criticise the scriptures, but have no doctrines of their own ... [T]he proper use of reason should be to support, and not to undermine, one's beliefs, goals and values’ in light, one may add, of what is thought to be Vedic teaching (op.cit. 8). This is the goal of Nyāya as a system, whose prasthāna-vākya is Gautama Akṣapāda's Nyāya Sūtras (third–fifth century C.E.?), as also Vatsyayana's important commentary on this work, the Nyāyabhāṣya (fifth century), and possibly Uddyotakara's Nyāyavārttika (sixth century), ‘a defence of the system in response to Buddhist logic’ (W. Johnson's Dictionary of Hinduism, under ‘Nyāya’).
Nyāya seeks to determine what valid cognition (pramā) is, as also its object (prameya, or that-which-is-to-be-ascertained), by valid means of knowing (pramana, which in Nyāya are four: perception (pratyaksa), inference (anumāna), analogy (upamāna) and verbal testimony, including scriptural testimony (śabda)), through the removal of doubt (saṃśaya), ignorance and false cognition (avidyā). This is achieved by honest debate with a view to arriving at the truth (satya) of what the Veda teaches. Thus there are opposing views – those of the nāstikas or ‘nay-sayers, viz. unbelievers (the Buddhists, Jainas, and Materialists, for instance) who say that the śruti ‘is not’ (na+asti = nāsti) true – which must be refuted.
Nyāya history is divided into two phases. The Old School represents the first phase; in the fourteenth century the logician Gageśa's momentous Tattvacintāmaṇi or ‘The Jewel of Inquiry into Reality’ established the New School or Navya-Nyāya, of which Bengal became a stronghold in the course of time. As the Nyāya system developed over the centuries through debate not only with the nāstikas but also with other systems of ‘orthodox’ or āstika thought, it formulated powerful insights about the proper use of reason which were adopted as standard philosophical assets by Hindu thinkers in general, and which indeed, through the work of such modern interpreters as Bimal Matilal, Arindam Chakrabarti, Jonardon Ganeri, John Vattanky and Jaysankar L. Shaw, have given rise to the prospect of fruitful
comparative study with relevant Western traditions of thought.
(iv) Vaiṣeśika is usually paired with Nyāya. Vaiṣeśika comes from viṣeśa, which means ‘(a) particular’, something distinctive. Hence Vaiṣeśika as a system of thought is concerned to identify the distinctive, irreducible particulars of reality, or fundamental categories of reality (padārtha). ‘The Vaiṣeśika system is pluralistic realism ... which emphasizes that the heart of reality consists in difference’ (C. Sharma 1964:176). Thus, traditionally, it has an ontological emphasis, which in time was paired philosophically with Nyāya's epistemological realism (probably from about the tenth–twelfth centuries). Vaiṣeśika recognizes and defends seven separate categories of reality, each irreducible to the others: substance (dravya);quality (guṇa); action (karma);class or universal (sāmānya); that which distinguishes an individual substance from another similar individual substance, viz. that which makes an individual substance identical with itself and distinct from other similar individual substances (viṣeśa);13 intrinsic inseparable relation (samavāya), e.g. the relation between the part and the whole, the particular and the universal, and the viṣeśa and its substance – this too is a separate padārtha or category of reality; and absence or abhāva (this category was formally added later in the tradition).
Nyāya-Vaiṣeśika recognizes four types of absence: (i) the absence of something before it is produced (prāgabhāva), e.g. the absence of the jar before the potter made it, to give a stock example; (ii) the absence of something after it is destroyed (dhvaṃsābhāva), e.g. there is no jar as such once it has been broken; (iii) reciprocal absence (anyonyābhāva), ‘which is only another word for distinction (bheda) between two objects each having its own identity and which finds expression in judgements like “The jar is not the cloth”, “A is not B”’ (Hiriyanna 1970:238); and (iv) eternal absence (atyantābhāva): e.g. an unproduced jar; in so far as there is no basis in reality for affirming the existence of this object, it is eternally absent. These descriptions provide the simplest of examples of the analytical bent of the Nyāya-Vaiṣeśika system; especially with the New School or Navya Nyāya, the attempt at the semantic analyses of concepts could be ferociously relentless. No doubt these endeavours would be subject to ongoing discussion and criticism in terms of modern philosophical insights, but presently we shall try and gain an idea of what lies behind this intellectual project.
Tradition designates the savant Kaṇāda (perhaps contemporary with the Buddha, ca. the fifth–fourth century B.C.E.) as the founder of Vaiṣeśika. Almost nothing is known about him. To Kaṇāda is attributed the system's source-text, the Vaiṣeśikasūtra; its present formulation is dated to about the beginning of the Common Era. In about the sixth century, Praśastapāda produced his PadāRtha-dharma-saṃgraha, ostensibly a commentary, but actually a careful restatement of the system which functions as an enlarged prasthāna-vākya. In fact, the whole Nyāya-Vaiṣeśika enterprise consists of a long tracery of commentary and sub-commentary of amazing complexity, with particular works acting variously as primary and secondary com-mentarial departure-points for different commentators.
(v) Next we come to Sāṃkhya, one of the oldest systems of thought so far as its roots are concerned, and supposedly founded by the sage Kapila, though its extant source-text, the Sāṃkhya-Kārikā (a short work of about 70 verses attributed to ĪśvaraKṛṣṇa), is dated to the third–fourth centuries C.E. The Sāṃkhya-Kārikā speaks of two fundamental principles of reality, each qualitatively different from the other: PuruṣA or ‘spirit’ and Prakṛti (pronounced for all practical purposes as ‘prakriti’) or ‘material energy’. We are already familiar with the term puruṣa from the late g Vedic hymn to the Cosmic Man or Person (i.e. the PuruṣA Sūkta, 10.90) mentioned in Chapter 5. In the hymn the concept is not dealt with philosophically, of course, though it does seem to apply to a single personal source of reality with an unfathomable transcendent dimension.14 It must have taken centuries for this idea to metamorphose into the more technical concept of the Kārikā. Whereas the category of Puruṣa contains an indefinite number of individual puruṣas in Sāṃkhya thought (there is a puruṣa for every sentient existent, but there are also countless purmas in the liberated state), Prakṛti in its pristine state is a single principle of undifferentiated being that progressively differentiates into 23 sub-principles or modifications, often misleadingly called ‘evolutes’.
Each puruṣa is characterized as unchanging pure consciousness (caitanya) and bliss. Prakṛti, on the other hand, is intrinsically mutable, and develops not only into what we call matter but also into those mental states we describe as sensations, emotions, passions, and thought. Thus for Sāṃkhya, not only physical states but also everyday acts of awareness, fall into the category of Prakṛti or ‘materiality’. These acts of awareness are not intrinsically ‘conscious’ in the way Puruṣa is. They are ‘conscious’ by analogy; they appear to be conscious only in so far as they reflect the true consciousness of Puruṣa, just as the moon, which is not a source of light by itself, appears as such only in so far as it reflects the light of the sun.15
Prakṛti is made up of three inter-dependent and inseparable constituents or guṇas (often translated as ‘qualities’), known as sattva, rajas and tamas, which manifest through distinctive properties. On the physical level, sattva generates such properties as brightness and lightness, rajas produces change, motion, etc., while tamas gives rise to weight, inertia, momentum, and so on. Mentally, intelligence comes from sattva, passion and quick-wittedness from rajas, and dullness and stupidity from tamas. Finally, morally and spiritually, from sattva arise wisdom, compassion and similar qualities, from rajas vigour, courage etc., and from tamas obtuseness, perversity and so on. Note that although sattva is generally rated as the ‘highest’ of the three guṇas, the other two have qualities that are not without their uses. Thus, on the physical level, if there were no weight (which derives from tamas), gravity could not operate, and very few visible objects would remain at rest, or if there were no biological tendency to restrain physical development (again a property of tamas), trees and humans would, thanks to rajas, grow, and grow – and grow. Similarly, without the effects of rajas, psychologically and morally, we could not demonstrate courage and self-sacrifice. So the bad press with which the latter two are sometimes dismissed in the literature is not always justified.16
Classical Sāṃkhya – the Sāṃkhya formulated in the Kārikā – teaches that at the beginning of each cycle of world-production, the ‘proximity’ of Puruṣa to Prakṛti (these are but figurative expressions to which we are forced to take recourse, since neither space nor time existed then as we know it) ‘causes’ Prakṛti to differentiate progressively from its simple pristine state into 23 further agencies of being that give rise to the principles of material existence and empirical awareness.17 The human being is a composite of a single puruṣa and of Prakṛti, disposed to act according to the preponderance of the guṇa that his or her past karma has determined. Life's cards may have been dealt out to us, but how we play them is up to us. It is up to us to decide whether we will build up more good or bad karma in this life, with its consequences in a future re-birth, or whether we will strive to escape the cycle of life and death once and for all. Sāṃkhya morality is not deterministic.
Though the puruṣa is essentially pure and unchanging consciousness, and therefore not properly describable as an agent – it is a ‘witnessing’ self (sākṣī) rather than an active self (kartā) – in conjunction with its prakritic complement, that is, by virtue of being a component of the human composite, it may be described (figuratively) as an experiencer (duṣkhī) of the overwhelming suffering of composite existence. Actually, it is the human composite that is the subject of various forms of agency. Since this subjecthood results from a conflation of true puruṣaic consciousness and reflected prakritic awareness, it gives rise congenitally to a false centre of consciousness. Our ‘I-awareness’ is illusory and delusive to some exten
t, and the goal of human existence is to detach our puruṣa from its prakritic complement by a rigorous discipline of introspective meditation through which we eliminate step by step and in reverse order the effects of the ‘evolution’ of Prakṛti, accompanied by a lifestyle of minimal action (so as to minimize the possibility of building up fresh karma). In fact, by the discerning wisdom (Sāṃkhya) of such a discipline, we will burn up our accumulated karma and at death attain kaivalya, or the ‘aloneness’ of relationless, puruṣaic self-containment. The puruṣa has returned permanently to its pristine state. There is no talk of ‘God’ or a supreme Puruṣa in classical Sāṃkhya.
Whatever one may think of the attractiveness of this goal and the means to attain it – historically, it seems, Sāṃkhya had very few practitioners, though its ascetic ideals were not infrequently put on a pedestal in Sanskritic tradition – Sāṃkhya categories of thought have had an immense influence in the history of Hinduism to the present day. The dualistic categories of puruṣa and Prakṛti and their basic characteristics, and the concept of the guṇas, are pervasive in Hindu tradition, and have been borrowed and assimilated or otherwise developed in many other systems of thought. Thus the Bhagavad Gītā, as we have indicated in an earlier chapter, has ‘theologized’ the Sāṃkhya categories of Puruṣa and Prakṛti (including the guṇas) in the context of a robust theism (Kṛṣṇa being the supreme and creative Puruṣa, with individual conscious agents and the material world being reckoned as his ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ Prakṛtis, respectively), and other systems of thought have made similar adjustments, e.g. in Śākta and Tantric traditions, the Goddess or Devi both transcends and yet is a manifestation in some way of Prakṛti.
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