The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian Metaphysics

Archibald Edward Gough

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415865807
• eBook ISBN: 9781136390647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2000. This is volume IX of 10 in the Oriental Series based on India and its language and literature and is concerned with a collection of the philosophy of the Upanishads and the ancient Indian metaphysics. Those interested in the general history of philosophy will find in this book an account of a very early attempt, on the part of thinkers of a rude age and race, to form a cosmological theory. The real movement of philosophic thought begins, it is true, not in India, but in Ionia; but some degree of interest may still be expected to attach to the procedure of the ancient Indian cosmologists. The Upanishads are so many " songs before sunrise, "— spontaneous effusions of awakening reflection, half poetical, half metaphysical, that precede the conscious and methodical labour of the long succession of thinkers to construct a thoroughly intelligible conception of the sum of things. For the general reader, then, these pages may supply in detail, and in the terms of the Sanskrit texts themselves, a treatment of the topics slightly sketched in the third chapter of Archer Butler's1 'first series of " Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy."

THE

PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS.

CHAPTER I.

THE ANTECEDENTS OF INDIAN METAPHYSICS—METEMPSYCHOSIS.

“The one spirit’s plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear ;

Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ;

And bursting in its beauty and its might,

From trees and beasts and men into the heavens’ light.”

—SHELLEY.

“Alors j’ai essayé de traverser la scène mobile du monde pour peéneétrer jusqu’au fond immuable, au principe inépuisable de la vie universelle. Là, je l’avoue, j’ai eu un moment d’éblouissement et d’ivresse ; j’ai cru voir Dieu. L’être en soi, l’être infini, absolu, universel, que peut-on contempler de plus sublime, de plus vaste, de plus profond ? C’est le dieu Pan, évoqué pour la confusion des idoles de l’imagination et de la conscience humaines. Mais ce Dieu vivant, que d’imperfections, que de misères il étale, si je regarde dans le monde, son acte incessant ! Et si je veux le voir en soi et dans son fond, je ne trouve plus que l’être en puissance, sans lumière, sans couleur, sans forme, sans essence déterminée, abîme ténébreux où l’Orient croyait contempler la suprême vérité, et où l’admirable philosophie grecque ne trouvait que chaos et non-être. Mon illusion n’a pas tenu contre l’évidence, contre la foi du genre humain. Dieu ne pouvait être où, n’est pas le beau, le pur, le parfait.”—VACHEROT.

The scope of the work.

IT is the purpose of the following pages to present the earliest types of Indian thought in the terms of the thinkers themselves, and in relation to the popular medium in which they had their life. The reader will be conducted along the first and only important stages of the history of Indian philosophy. The data are such that this history can only be worked out by looking at the form of the several cosmical conceptions, and finding out how they rise one out of another in the process of conflict and supersession. The earliest Indian notion of the totality of things is given in the Upanishads. These, the earliest records of Indian speculation, propound the miseries of metempsychosis, and the path of release from these miseries by recognition of the sole reality of the Self, and the unreality of the world and of all the forms of life that people it. They retain the popular religious imagery, and prescribe the purification of the mind, the renunciation of the world, the practice of rigid and insensible postures of the body, and prolonged meditative abstraction to reach the unity of characterless thought, as the several stages towards the recognition of the one and only Self, and ecstatic vision of, and re-union with it. This is the safe starting-point from which to follow the logical movement. The further progress of the history of Indian philosophy will rest on probabilities. Certainty as regards the chronological succession is beyond the reach of the Orientalist, and he has to be content with approximations to it. When everything is done, and the history of Indian philosophy has been fairly traced, the work will always remain little more than a preliminary and outlying portion of the general history of the human mind. The work will be an exhibition of the thoughts of thinkers of a lower race, of a people of stationary culture, whose intellectual growth stands almost apart from the general movement of human intelligence.

Indian philosophy the work of a lower race, of mixed Negrito, Tatar and Aryan blood.

A writer on the history of Indian philosophy has to deal with the mental produce of an unprogressive portion of mankind. Negroid aborigines, Tatar hordes, and successive Aryan swarms have severally contributed their blood to mould the Brahman theosophist. Like every other thinker, he is limited by the type of nervous mechanism he has inherited, by the ancestral conditions of his life, and by the material and spiritual present which environs him. It is under these limitations that he is to make himself what he is. As regards the limitations of race and hereditary nature, the greatest confusion has been introduced into the popular study of Indian matters by the term Aryan. This word has been fertile in every variety of fallacy, theoretical and practical. Before the work of thought begins in India the invading Aryan tribes have become Indo-Arians or Hindus. They have been assimilated to and absorbed into the earlier and ruder populations of modified Negrito and Tatar type, whom they at first fought against as the dark-skinned Dasyus, and made to till the soil and drudge for them as Śūdras.

As Professor Huxley says, “The old Sanskrit literature proves that the Aryan population of India came in from the north-west at least three thousand years ago. In the Veda these people portray themselves in characters that might have fitted the Gauls, the Germans, or the Goths. Unfortunately there is no evidence whether they were fair-haired or not. India was already peopled by a dark-complexioned people, most like the Australian aborigines, and speaking a group of languages called Dravidian.” These races were Negroid indigenes recruited with Tatar blood. “They were fenced in,” he proceeds, “on the north by the barrier of the Himālayas; but the Aryans poured in from the plains of Central Asia over the Himalayas into the great river basins of the Indus and the Ganges, where they have been in the main absorbed into the pre-existing population, leaving as evidence of their immigration an extensive modification of the physical characters of the population, a language, and a literature.”

The Aryan infusion scanty.

Following Dr. Latham and Mr. Norris, Dr. Carpenter points out that it is only by an error that the ordinary Hindu population are supposed to be the descendants of this invading branch of the Aryan stock. “The influence,” he says, “of the Aryan invasion upon the language and population of Northern India was very much akin to that of the Norman invasion upon those of England.” This analogy, it must be remarked, is superficial, and fails in a most important point. The Norman invaders were not of a higher stock than the English, the Saxons, and the Anglo-Danes ; the Aryan immigrants into India underwent a progressive deterioration through climatic influences and intermixture with low and melanous races akin to the Bhils, the Kols, and Sonthals of the present day. “The number of individuals of the invading race was so small in proportion to that of the indigenous population as to be speedily merged in it, not, however, without contributing to an elevation of its physical characters ; a large number of new words having been in like manner introduced, without any essential change in the type of the original languages,” the various dialects of Northern India. “And thus the only distinct traces of the Aryan stock are to be found in the Brahmanical caste, which preserves, though with great corruption, the original Brahmanical religion, and keeps up the Sanskṛit as its classical language. It is certain, however, that this race is far from being of pure descent, having intermingled to a considerable extent with the ordinary Hindu population.”

Low thoughts in high words the difficulty of the Orientalist.

In treating of Indian philosophy, a writer has to deal with thoughts of a lower order than the thoughts of the everyday life of Europe. Looking at the language he inherits and the general medium of intelligence in which he lives, the thoughts of the European are rich with the substance of Hebrew, Greek, and Christian culture. It is to be noted also that such rudiments of philosophic thought as are to be found in the Indian cosmologies are embedded in masses of religious imagery of a rude and inartistic kind. We are treading the rock-cut temples of Ellora, not the Parthenon. The great difficulty lies in this, that a low order of ideas has to be expressed in a high order of terms, and that the English words suggest a wealth of analysis and association altogether foreign to the thoughts that are to be reproduced. Translation from a lower to a higher language is a process of elevation. However vigilant he may be, a writer on Indian philosophy will find it hard to say neither too much nor too little,—to present the facts as he finds them without prejudice and without predilection. It is all but impossible to place oneself in the position of the ancient Indian sages,—to see things as they saw them, and to name them in the names they gave them. The effort is nothing less than an endeavour to revert to a ruder type of mental structure, to put aside our hereditary culture, and to become for the time barbarians.

Stationary and progressive order contrasted.

It will be well to bear in mind the characters of an unprogressive as contrasted with the characters of a progressive, variety of the human race. These are tendencies engrained in the nervous system, and transmitted from generation to generation. They are hereditary, inborn habitudes, and no one can foresee how far they will give way before foreign influences, or be modified by them. The contrast between the lower and the higher human varieties, between the stationary and the advancing social orders, is instructively set out by the historian Grote. “The acquisition of habits of regular industry, so foreign to the natural temper of man, was brought about in Egypt and Assyria, in China and Hindustan, before it had acquired any footing in Europe ; but it was purchased either by prostrate obedience to a despotic rule, or by imprisonment within the chain of a consecrated institution of caste. Even during the Homeric period of Greece these countries had attained a certain civilisation in mass, without the acquisition of any high mental qualities or the development of any individual genius. The religious and political sanction determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties, and his place in society, without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the agent himself.” Grote in the next place speaks of the Semitic races, the Jews, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, of their individual impulse and energy, as also of their strenuous ferocity of character, and then contrasts all these races with the “flexible, many-sided, and self-organising Greek, not only capable of opening, both for himself and for the human race, the highest walks of intellect and the full creative agency of art, but also gentler by far in his private sympathies and dealings than his contemporaries on the Euphrates, the Jordan, or the Nile.” And elsewhere he points out that in no city of historical Greece did there prevail either human sacrifices or deliberate mutilation, such as cutting off the nose, ears, hands, feet, and so forth, or castration, or selling of children into slavery, or polygamy, or the feeling of unlimited obedience towards one man ; all of these being customs which might be pointed out as existing among the contemporary Carthaginians, Egyptians, Persians, Thracians, and other peoples.

Indian thought is a tropical philosophy of mention.

The Orientalist will have to look in the face this fact of the inferiority of the hereditary type of Indian character. His work may be hard and unproductive, but at least it is necessary to a full and complete survey of the products of the human mind. He has much to do and little to claim as regards the value of his labours, and he will not demur to the judgment of Archer Butler : “It presents a fearful contrast to observe the refinement to which speculation appears to have been carried in the philosophy of India, and the grossness of the contemporary idolatry, paralleled in scarcely any nation of the earth, as well as the degraded condition of the mass of the people, destitute of active energy, and for the most part without a shadow of moral principle to animate the dull routine of a burthensome and scrupulous superstition. The aim of human wisdom is the liberation of the soul from the evils attending the mortal state. This object is attempted by one modification or other of that intense abstraction which, separating the soul from the bonds of flesh, is supposed capable of liberating it in this life from the unworthy restrictions of earthly existence, and of introducing it in the next to the full enjoyment of undisturbed repose, or even to the glories of a total absorption into the divine essence itself. In all this we may detect the secret but continual influences of a climate which, indisposing the organisation for active exertion, naturally cherished those theories which represent the true felicity of man to consist in inward contemplation and complete quiescence.”

The social antecedents of Brahmanism and Buddhism.

A few words must be said about the social state that preceded the rise of Indian philosophy. In using the word philosophy, it is to be taken loosely, as designating a large amount of pictorial conception covering an inner nucleus of rudimentary ideas. We are dealing with religion as well as with metaphysics. In India religion and metaphysics have grown up in one promiscuous growth, and have never had a separate life. They cannot be disengaged from each other, and we can seldom point to such and such an item in any structure as philosophical, and such and such another item as religious. A few words only can be given to an explanation of the social order that preceded the rise of the Brahmanical and Buddhist forms of thought and faith, and the reader must refer for further information, if he needs it, to the writings of Professor Max Müller and Dr. John Muir. Let us, then, station ourselves in the communities in which the Rishis lived, the seers that saw and fashioned the Vedic hymns. The Indian tribes have already reached a settled state of order and prosperity. They are gathered together in farms, in huts of sun-dried mud, and houses of stone, in hamlets and in fenced towns, under village chiefs and Rajas. The outward aspects of their life are not unlike those of the rural India of to-day. The same villages, the same thatched huts of the peasantry, with mud-walled yards for cattle, and the same square courts and stuccoed garden-houses of the village chiefs and princelets. There is the same silence, broken only by the creaking pulleys of the village well and the occasional bark of village curs, the same green mantle on the stagnant wayside pools, the same square tank ; the sunlight glinting as to-day through the delicate foliage of the tamarind, the glossy leaves of the peepul, and the feathery tufts of the bamboo. There is the same overpowering glare upon the surface of the earth, and there are the same liquid depths of overarching blue overhead, but the horizon is fringed with jungle, and the levels are grassy and less arid than to-day, for the forests are dense and widely spread, and the rainfall is more abundant. In such surroundings, for the most part tranquil and dreamlike, but at times terrific with shocks of tropical storm and rain, the Indians of the Vedic age till their rice and barley, irrigate their fields with watercourses, watch the increase of their flocks and herds, and make a hard or easy livelihood as blacksmiths, wheelwrights, bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter I.
• Chapter II.
• Chapter III.
• Chapter IV.
• Chapter V.
• Chapter VI.
• Chapter VII.
• Chapter VIII.
• Chapter IX.