A Hindu Theology of Liberation

Not-Two Is Not One

Anantanand Rambachan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438454573
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduismus

Finalist for the 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, in the Constructive-Reflective category presented by the American Academy of Religion This engaging and accessible work provides an introduction to the Hindu tradition of Advaita Ved?nta and brings it into discussion with contemporary concerns. Advaita, the non-dual school of Indian philosophy and spirituality associated with ?a?kara, is often seen as "other-worldly, " regarding the world as an illusion. Anantanand Rambachan has played a central role in presenting a more authentic Advaita, one that reveals how Advaita is positive about the here and now. The first part of the book presents the hermeneutics and spirituality of Advaita, using textual sources, classical commentary, and modern scholarship. The book's second section considers the implications of Advaita for ethical and social challenges: patriarchy, homophobia, ecological crisis, child abuse, and inequality. Rambachan establishes how Advaita's non-dual understanding of reality provides the ground for social activism and the values that advocate for justice, dignity, and the equality of human beings.

Part One

1

The Quest for Fullness

Human Problem as Suffering

Although the description of the human problem as duḥkha (suffering) is prominently associated with the Buddhist tradition, this description is not unique. The characterization of the unliberated human condition as one of duḥkha is not unusual in the Hindu tradition. It is also an assumption of the Hindu tradition that the condition of duḥkha is undesirable, even unnatural, and can be overcome. One well-known Hindu prayer used often to conclude temple and home worship expresses the desirability and hope for freedom from suffering for all beings.

Sarve bhavantu sukhinaḥ / Sarve santu nirāmayaḥ

Sarve bhadrāni paśyantu / Mā kaścit duḥkha bhāgbhavet

May all be happy. May all be free from disease.

May all know that which is good. May no one suffer.1

In the famous Chāndogya Upaniṣad (Chapter 7) dialogue between the student, Nārada, and his teacher, Sanatkumāra, Nārada approached his teacher with the confession that he is in a condition of suffering (śoka) and requests a teaching that will take him beyond his suffering (śokasya pāram tārayatu).

The liberated state is represented consistently as one of freedom from duḥkha. Bhagavadgītā (6:23) characterizes the purpose and end of the religious life as “disassociation from association with sorrow.”2 The heaviest of sorrows, according to Bhagavadgītā (6:22), does not overwhelm the liberated person (duḥkhena guruṇāpi vicālyate). The liberated is strikingly described as resting happily (sukhaṁ) in the body, having gained a happiness that does not decay (sukhaṁ akṣayam aśnute).3 This is a joy grasped by the intellect and not born of contact between the senses and their objects. It is an unending joy that has its source in the recognition of the infinite (brahman).4 Knowledge of one’s identity with the limitless brahman constitutes liberation (mokṣa), and the Upaniṣads repeatedly use the word ānandam (bliss) to describe the nature of brahman.5 The teacher Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.3.32) speaks of brahman as supreme bliss and of all beings as living on a particle of this bliss. According to Nārada, in Chāndogya Upaniṣad (7.1.3), the infinite alone is bliss; there is no bliss in the finite. It is clear therefore that the Hindu tradition understands suffering to be characteristic of the unliberated human condition. It is overcome in knowing brahman as one’s self (ātmā). The state of liberation is the very opposite of suffering (duḥkha) and is spoken of as one of unending joy (ānandam).

The Universal Desire for Happiness

This desire to attain happiness and to avoid suffering is universal and intrinsic to human beings. The Dalai Lama describes it as having no boundaries and as needing no justification because it is “validated by the simple fact that we naturally and correctly want this …”6 Although the specific objects of desire may vary at different moments in the life of a single individual, the desire to be happy is constant. Similarly, there may be national or cultural variations regarding desirable objects and methods employed for attaining happiness. What is common in the various stages of a single life, across generations, cultures, and nationalities, is the urge to gain happiness (sukha) and to avoid suffering (duḥkha).

Swami Dayananda Saraswati, a contemporary teacher of the Advaita Vedānta tradition, distinguishes between cultivated and uncultivated desires and characterizes the desire for happiness as uncultivated or embedded in human nature.

Thus, we find that in addition to the basic urge to survive, there seems to be another basic urge that manifests in the mind. It can be expressed by saying, “I want to be full, complete, adequate, fulfilled, happy, self-possessed,” and so on. However one says it, it means the same thing. Unlike all cultivated desires for a specific end that one picks up in time, this one seems to come along with birth. No one has to be told that being full, happy, etc. is desirable.7

This uncultivated desire for fullness is the source of all transitory and culturally determined desires. The fact of it being intrinsic to human nature means also that it cannot, like transitory and cultivated desires, be given up. It will simply find expression in another form or guise. Duḥkha, in the Hindu tradition, is the expression of the frustration that arises from what the Dalai Lama speaks of as a natural and universal desire to be happy and our failure to fulfill this desire in a satisfactory and lasting manner. It is the consequence of not resolving the fundamental human want.

Suffering as Mortality Anxiety

Duḥkha expresses itself existentially in a number of discernible ways. One of the ways that finds repeated mention in Hindu sacred texts is anxiety over the fact of human mortality. Anxiety over mortality is a fear that is unique to a self-conscious being able to reflect on the fact of finitude. No other animal, as far as we know, is endowed with the critical self-awareness that enables contemplation of the event of death before it occurs or that allows it to ponder the meaning of life in the face of its finitude. Anxiety about death was, for cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, the fundamental human problem. The human predicament, in his words, is “that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism; he is driven by the same craving to consume, to convert energy, and to enjoy continued existence. But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die.”8 The tragedy of our existence is our finitude, our fear of death and our “deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation.”9 Drawing on the work of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Becker identifies the underlying human anxiety as one that results from a consciousness of our animal limits. We are self-conscious animals.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.10

It is possible to disagree with Becker’s characterization of anxiety about death as constituting the human predicament by arguing for the priority of the desire to be happy and the fact that happiness seems to be thwarted by the reality of mortality. In other words, the threat of nonexistence adversely affects our ability to be happy. Death threatens to end and separate us from all that we associate with happiness.

Anxiety about death is at the heart of the question of Naciketas to his teacher Yama in Kaṭha Upaniṣad (1.1.20). Naciketas speaks of the doubt and uncertainty existing among human beings about existence or nonexistence after death and pleads for instruction about the truth of death. “Tell us,” he asks, “of that thing about which people entertain doubt in the context of the next world and whose knowledge leads to a great result” (1.1.29).11 Maitreyī, in the Bṛhadāraṇkaya Upaniṣad 2.4.1, turns down the offer of ample wealth in favor of an instruction for the attainment of immortality. “If indeed,” Maitreyī asks her teacher and husband, Yājñavalkya, “this whole earth full of wealth be mine, shall I be immortal through that … What shall I do with that which will not make me immortal? Tell me, sir, of that alone which you know (to be the only means of immortality).”12 Accumulating wealth does not resolve human anxiety about death and leaves us, as Naciketas observes in Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.1.27, unsatisfied.

The Bhagavadgītā 13:8 speaks of death (mṛtyu) as suffering in a list that includes birth, death, aging, and disease. The text invites the student to see repeatedly the defect (doṣa) of suffering (duḥkha) present in all four conditions and describes such seeing or understanding as constituting wisdom. This verse requires careful exegesis because it may be read as suggesting that existence itself is suffering and that freedom from suffering necessitates freedom from existence itself. Such an interpretation, however, is questionable in a tradition like Advaita, which affirms the possibility and primacy of liberation in life (jīvanmukti) and not at the end of existence in the world. Liberation does not free us from existence in the world or from aging, illness, and physical death. It promises to free from the mental and emotional suffering that these conditions may occasion. As we will see more clearly later, the Advaita tradition understands ignorance (avidyā) to be the root of human suffering and not birth itself. Duḥkha is properly understood to be a characteristic of the unliberated life and not of life itself. The Hindu emphasis in the analysis of suffering is on our emotional and psychological reactions to phenomena such as aging, illness, and death and not on identifying these with suffering. We should read the reference to birth as suffering in this verse and other similar ones as typical of the pairing that we find in Hindu texts. Death presupposes birth, and birth inevitably ends in death. Freedom from death implies freedom from birth. Bhagavadgītā 2:27 stated this insight earlier: “For that which is born, death is certain, and for that which is dead, birth is certain.”13

Suffering and the Transient Nature of Experiences

Another significant expression of duḥkha may be found in the transient quality of all pleasurable experiences. This is a particularly poignant manifestation of duḥkha because the search for pleasurable experiences is one of our primary modes of fulfilling the natural desire to be happy. Yet each experience of pleasure grants a transient satisfaction and fails us in our search for fullness and adequacy of self. The Bhagavadgītā (5:22) cautions, “Because those enjoyments that are born of contact (between the sense organs and desirable objects) are the sources of pain alone (duḥkhayonaya), and have a beginning and an end, Arjuna, the wise person does not revel in them.”14 Although more extensive in meaning and calling attention to the impermanence, flux, and change that characterize all reality, the Buddhist teaching on anicca (Sanksrit: anitya) certainly includes the fleeting nature of all pleasures. In the second noble truth, the Buddha associates duḥkha with “union with the unpleasing and separation from the pleasing.” Naciketas observes in Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.1.27 that all pleasures are ephemeral, and unrestrained indulgence wears down the senses and leaves us dissatisfied.

Krishna’s teaching in the Bhagavadgītā about the transient nature of pleasure follows logically from his statement that experiences with a beginning inevitably come to an end. As a subjective experience, pleasure is associated with our own classifications of objects and persons as desirable, undesirable, or neutral and the consequent development of likes (rāga) and dislikes (dveṣa) that condition our responses. In the gain of that which we regard as desirable and which conforms to our likes, we experience pleasure. The opposite occurs in the case of the undesirable object or person. Likes and dislikes are constantly shifting, objects and persons change, and, as Naciketas observed, the instruments of enjoyment decline and wane. Pleasures turn out to be capricious, leaving us wanting and incomplete. Understanding the fickle nature of pleasures leads to the state of informed detachment, quite different from a self-denial that is based on fear or the rejection of pleasures. It is described in Bhagavadgītā 2:64 as a state of freedom and tranquility that results from not coating objects in the world with subjective values based on likes (rāga) and dislikes (dveṣa) and thinking that such values are intrinsic to these objects. “One whose mind is controlled, moving in the world of objects, with sense organs that are under his or her control, free from likes and dislikes, attains tranquility.”15

Suffering as the Experience of Inadequacy

Anxieties about the hovering presence of death and the fleeting nature of pleasure are well-recognized forms of duḥkha. Less tangible, but no less real, is what Becker refers to as the “ache of cosmic specialness.”16 Describing it also as “the struggle for self-esteem” and for “limitless self-extension,” Becker notes its presence from earliest childhood and its reflection of the basic human condition. ...