Hindu philosophy popularly explained

Preface

Some of the papers embodied in this volume present: the substance of lectures delivered in various places in India in furtherance of the work in which the author has been engaged for years. Two of them—those on? the Sankhya Philosophy—appeared as articles in the Calcutta ; Review , and the paper on Yoga Philosophy in the Indian Evangelical Review • while the supplemental paper, written years ago, was published as an article in? the Methodist Quarterly , then edited by Dr. D. D. Whedon. The paper on 44 Hindu and Christian Philosophy Con¬ trasted ’ ’ was delivered as a lecture at Key East, under the auspices of the American Institute of Christian Phi¬ losophy. All the papers embodied are based on standard translations of original works, and present the leading principles of the schools in the words of their celebrated founders and champions. There are a few works of recognized merit on Hindu Philosophy in the English language, barring the translations utilized in this vol¬ ume ; but there is not one which makes such a copioususe of the original sources of information as the volume now presented to the public, or which is better adapted to give an insight into the contents of standard works on the six great systems of Hindu Philosophy, as well as to show'the similarity that subsists between its broad prin¬ ciples and those which modern philosophers are prone to represent as original, the peculiar outgrowth of tho

IV

PREFACE.

advanced thought of the nineteenth century. The writer’s humility trusts that the book may be of use to those who, whether missionaries and clergymen or mere lovers of literature, wish to have a bird’s-eye view of Hindu Philosophy without taking the trouble of going to the sources. The volume, if it be encouraged by the public here, will be followed by another of the same size on the Heterodox Systems of Hindu Philosophy.

Ram Chandra Bose.

Chapter I. The Sources Of Hindu Philosophy

It is very interesting to trace a noble river, through hundreds of miles of fertile land dotted with beautiful cities, thriving towns, and romantic villages, to where its broad sea-like expanse dwindles into a small, brawl¬ ing mountain stream. It ought to be, if it is not, much more interesting to trace a broad, expansive stream of philosophic thought, which has moulded and fashioned the inner life of a great though fallen people, and left its mark also on their outer life, to where its omnipo¬ tent influence is but faintly foreshadowed. India, as a country, presents an accumulation of differentiating marks, or such as are calculated to distinguish it from the other countries of the world. It has a unique con¬ figuration, unique features of beauty and grandeur, and a unique history. But the most remarkable thing one notices within its precincts is its universally adopt¬ ed, all-embracing, all-comprehensive pantheism.

Pantheism in other lands is the monopoly of a few gifted but misguided minds, and its influence is scarcely felt outside of very narrow and narrowing circles. In India, however, it is co-extensive with social or national

HIHDU PHILOSOPHY.

life, being held both by the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the high and the low. The miracle Western scholars scarcely expect to see realized, or transferred from the domain of possibility into the domain of fact, is a great nation of pantheists ; and this miracle is presented in all its entireness in India ! Here pantheism of a thoroughly spiritual type is preached and advocated, not only in temples of piety and halls of learning, but in places of public resort, in streets and thoroughfares ; not only in the seclusion of cloisters and cells, but amid the din and bustle of hives of industry and marts of commerce.

And it is very interesting to note that the phrase¬ ology in which it is couched, the imagery by which it is illustrated, and the arguments by which its positions are fortified, are all as old as itself is, or the many-sided, liydra-headed religion of which it professes to be the essential part. The turns of expression, which are to-day bandied backward and forward by the cham¬ pions of pantheism in India, were coined under the shade, so to speak, of a rich, sonorous, and remarkably flexible language, about two thousand five hundred years ago. The tropes and metaphors utilized to-day by our countrymen to set forth the essential features of their pantheistic belief were first pressed into such service about the time when the prophet Isaiah was de¬ nouncing with characteristic fervor the vices by which his beloved country, the vineyard of the Lord of Glory, was being ruined. And the varied lines of reasoning by which this dreamy system is now defended by them were first arrayed under its banner by their forefathers, long before the initiation of their present forms of wor¬ ship. India appears a scene of mental immobility, both when the backward condition of its arts is taken into

THE SOURCES OF HIHDU PHILOSOPHY.

consideration, and when the significant fact is realized that its rich literature has remained unimproved and unexpanded for ages untold.

Had the influence of our national pantheism been confined to our own country, and not felt anywhere else, still, universal and all-powerful as its sway has for ages been within its limits, an attempt to trace it to its original source would have appeared very desirable. But we have reason to believe that its influence has not been thus confined. The varied forms of pantheistic belief, which flourished in schools of philosophy, if not in thoroughfares and market-places, in Western coun¬ tries in ancient times, have confessedly a dash of Orientalism about them ; and if not traceable to its direct influence, a common origin of all these phases of thought and of those associated with it must be sought in some Eastern region which brought speculative phi¬ losophy to the birth in some prehistoric age. Its influ¬ ence, however, is most assuredly noticeable in the dis¬ quisitions, and even in the phraseology in which the idealistic and pantheistic speculations of modern times are embodied. Pantheism certainly appears in these days in a new garb, and in forms more apparently rational and really attractive than it did in days long since gone by, but the likeness of the ectypes of the day to the archetypes of ancient times is so obvious that their essential identity is one of those facts which cannot possibly be ignored. At all events, it may safely be assumed that Indian pantheism has, besides moulding and fashioning the varied phases of our national life, largely influenced the more advanced philosophic notions of the age. An attempt, therefore, to trace it through successive phases of development to its original sources is doubly important, even more so

HUsTDlJ PHILOSOPHY.

than an attempt to trace the requirements of modern jurisprudence to the well-known code of Justinian.

Fortunately an attempt of this description is not likely to end in failure. Certain documents of unim¬ peachable integrity have come down to us from a remote antiquity, and in them we may discover the germs not only of the universally adopted pantheism of our country, but of the varied systems of philosophic thought, which it has either swallowed up and assimi¬ lated to its own nature, or overcome and thrown into the shade. These are the Upanishads, or philosophical treatises attached to the Yedas. Each of the four Yedas, on which the Hindu concentrates his present homage and retrospective veneration and builds up his hopes of prospective bliss, consists of three parts—the Mantra, the Brahmana, and the Upanishad. The hymns, prayers, and doxologies, which form its initial and certainly the most fascinating part, make up its Mantra division ; and the ceremonial directories, which have to be consulted when the oblations and sacrifices associated with the hymnology, are actually brought to the altar, constitute its Brahmana portion. The TJpanishad or concluding portion embodies the philosophy by which the occult meaning of the hymnology and the ritual is inquired into, ascertained, and set forth. The word Upanishad, like many words of a doubtful origin, has been variously interpreted by Oriental scholars, and an array of fanciful etymologies has been presented 1 in connection with it. But the meaning of the word is plain—viz., that which destroys the sense-bred igno¬ rance, which the hymnology and the ritual it explains are fitted to nourish and mature.

Every Yeda has its Mantras or hymns of prayer and praise, its Brahmanas or ceremonial directories or ritual

THE SOURCES OE HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

guide-books, and its Upanishads or philosophical trea¬ tises of an explanatory and discursive character. The number of the hymns may be fixed, if not with the strictest accuracy, at least with a close approximation to truth. A few of the hymns may have been lost, buU\ the vast body has come down almost as it existed in primitive times. But the number of the supplementary treatises, by which their right use and occult meaning are indicated, cannot possibly be fixed, owing specially to Oriental proneness to exaggeration. Lists are pre¬ served, such as may encourage the belief that the num¬ ber of the Upanishads alone exceeded two hundred and thirty, but only a few of these are now extant ; and the complete disappearance of the rest cannot be satis¬ factorily explained except by representing their alleged numerical bulk and strength as apocryphal, Hor is it at all necessary to plunge ourselves into learned dis¬ quisitions for the purpose of arriving at an approximate conclusion with reference to the original number of these treatises, as the few commented on by Sankar Acharya, one of the acutest thinkers and most volumi¬ nous writers India every saw, are represented by all parties as the most important ; and these are, properly speaking, the sources of Hindu Philosophy.

The eleven Upanishads commented upon by Sankar Acharya may be divided into two classes, the major and the minor ; the two larger Upanishads and the nine smaller ones. It is possible that two or three of the smaller of these treatises were extant before the appearance of the larger ones ; but the logical precision by which they are as a body characterized, together with their lucidness of arrangement and coherence of thought, speaking of course comparatively, leads us to assign to their composition a date posterior to that of

HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

the more bulky and certainly the more important docu¬ ments in an archaeological point of view.

The two larger Upanishads are the Chhandogya and the Brihad Aranyaka, the former belonging to the Sama Veda, and the latter to the collection of the Yajur Veda, called Vajasaneyi or white ; and their composition is traced by general consent to a period prior to the appearance.of Buddha on the stage of his¬ tory. They have many legends in common, related almost in the same words ; and this fact, if not any¬ thing else or anything partaking of the nature of ex¬ ternal evidence, may justify the presumption that one of them was written before the other. But the question, Which is the earlier of these two documents? cannot be solved any more than the length of the interval be¬ tween the composition of the one and that of the other can be ascertained. The features of similarity in thought and expression noticeable, together with the want of system characteristic of both, tend to confirm the views of those learned scholars who represent them as contemporary documents based on sources of infor¬ mation now lost, or on traditions and legends current at the time when they were both composed by inde¬ pendent writers.

As it is our intention to analyze in this paper the contents of these two hoary documents, let us present the evidences of a high antiquity we have noticed in the course of a careful perusal, with pencil in hand, in consecutive order. The translations we shall utilize are that of the “ Chhandogya, ” by Dr. Bajendra Ball Mittra, and that of “ Brihad Aranyaka,” by Dr. Boer.

And first of all let it be observed that the imagery presented is, together with the forms of expression, emphatically archaic. The truths presented are cer-

THE SOURCES OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

tainly of a recondite character, but the images pressed into service are of the simplest order. The fire pro¬ duced by the attrition of two pieces of wood, the spokes issuing from the nave of a wheel, the athlete running a race, cows suckling their calves, leaves attached to the branches and the stocks, a bow strung, an arrow let fly, a flaming fire, a rolling car, a bellowing ox, a drop of water on a lotus leaf—such are the images which flit across our minds as we turn page after page of these ancient books. A favorite storehouse of figures is the beehive and the honey squeezed from it, which is now the best of gods, then the best of sacred writings, and anon the best of ceremonial observances. It is cer¬ tainly not proper to lay great stress on this feature of these Upanishads, inasmuch as the polite literature of our country, its poetry and romance, does not seem to have gone very far beyond the archaic stage of develop¬ ment. But yet, as the speculations of its philosophic age were characterized by a remarkable stiffness of style, the frequency with which such simple images occur in these documents, together with the flexibility of their style, is an indubitable proof of great antiquity.

And this may be said also of the want of artistic finish manifested by the legends related, and the clumsy way in which these are arranged, and the truths incul¬ cated are presented. Not to speak of the remarkable brevity and conciseness which characterized the pro¬ ductions of what might in India be called the age of philosophy, the minor Upanishads are ahead of the major in the terseness of their style, in the concatenated order in which their contents are presented, and in the absence from them of mythical stories, such as are of a puerile character.

Akin to this sort of evidence is that based on the

HIXDU PHILOSOPHY.

longevity of the persons referred to, and in that pre¬ supposed in the division of life into distinct periods presented in chap, iii., sec. 16, of the Chhandagaya Upanishad. Man is in this part represented as Yajna or sacrifice, and the different periods of his fife are thus indicated. The first twenty-four years of his life, during which he is under the special protection of the Yashus or the fire-gods, are the matin sacrifice. The period between the twenty-fourth and the forty-fourth year of his fife is the midday oblation ; and during these years his presiding deities are the Rudras or storm-gods. The afternoon sacrifice is the period intervening be¬ tween the forty-fourth and the eighty-fourth year of his life, when he is under the special guidance of the Aclityas or sun-gods. The closing period, which in the case of a devotee, Mahidasa, son of Itara, extended from the eighty-fourth to the one hundred and six¬ teenth, may be represented as the evening sacrifice, though it is not characterized as such, and the deities protecting it are not named. It is, however, distinctly stated that the person who knows the significance of the first three periods of life will live for one hundred and sixteen years. All this betokens general longevity, which is an incontestable proof of great antiquity, though, so far as we are aware, no stress has been laid upon it by Oriental scholars.

The gods mentioned in these disquisitions are those of the Yedas, not those of any post-Yedic period. The productive and destructive energies of nature, which appear under various names to have monopolized the worship of our unsophisticated ancestors of simple Yedic times, are the divinities around which the legends, speculations, and reasonings of these venerable documents revolve. And their number is set forth

THE SOURCES OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

therein with the same indefiniteness which in the Rig Yeda makes it impossible for us to fix it. In one of the many dialogues embodied, their number is given as no less than “ three and three thousand.” It, how¬ ever, shrinks in the same dialogue into “three and three hundred,’’ then into “thirty and three,” then into “ six,” then into “three,” and ultimately into “one.” But, as in the Rig Yeda, “ thirty-three” is the number for which special partiality is shown when the spirit of philosophical generalization is held in abeyance for a moment ; and they are the eight Yashus, or various forms of the Fire-god, the eleven Rudras or forms of the Storm-god, and the twelve Adityas or forms of the Sun-god, besides Indra and Prajapati, representing perhaps heaven and earth. The God Brahma appears in these treatises either as the quintessence of all essences, or as in the Rig Yeda, not certainly as the first person of the Hindu Triad. The all but perfect identity of the pantheon herein dis¬ closed with that of which glimpses are presented in the Yedas, particularly in the earliest of these venerable books, as also its dissimilarity to that set up in post- Yedic times, cannot but be regarded as an incontest¬ able proof of great antiquity.

The ceremonies referred to in these disquisitions are emphatically Yedic ceremonies, not those which were initiated in post-Yedic times. The Aswamedha, or the sacrifice of the horse, the crowning sacrifice of the simple times pictured in the Yedas, is not only alluded to again and again, but graphically described, ex¬ plained, and philosophized upon, specially in the open¬ ing section of the Brihad Aranyaka, in which the supreme greatness of the animal sacrificed, and its iden¬ tity with Prajapati, the lord of creatures, are shown by

HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

means of analogies and metaphors, the former far¬ fetched and the latter incongruous. The Somayajna, or the sacrifice of the Soma or moon-plant, which is prominently brought forward in all the Yedas, and which is the stock theme of one of them, the Sama Yeda, is the subject of innumerable allusions and many disquisitions in these treatises. The Pasu-medha, or animal sacrifices of an inferior order, are also referred to, and the great sacrifice called Purush-medha, or the sacrifice of the Lord of creatures for the good of those who are now gods but were once men, is also alluded to. Indeed an attempt is obviously made in these books to merge the varieties of the sacrifices enumer¬ ated in the Yedas into the supreme sacrifice of the supreme Being for the supreme good of the universe, as well as to sublimate the Yeclic pantheon into one per¬ vasive spiritual substance.

The literature alluded to is, like the pantheon dis¬ closed and the ritual embodied, Yedic. The first three Yedas, Rig, Yajur, and Sama, have numerous refer¬ ences made to them ; and the last, Atharva, is also alluded to, though rarely. But not a single book extant in post-Yedic times is referred to. Exception may be taken to this statement, based on the two well-known passages in the two Upanishads, in which “ Ithases and Purans” are mentioned along with the Yedas, and the branches of literature embodied in or closely associated with them. And certainly if these two generic names were made to include the books now comprehended by them, the objection would be both well-grounded and unanswerable. But these names had a meaning in primitive times very different indeed from what they bear now. The name “ Ithases, 5 which now includes the epic poems, comprehended in

THE SOURCES OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

the age of the Upanishads the legendary lore embodied in the Yedas ; while by the Purans were understood the varied cosmogonies and theogonies found in those venerable records, not the obscene literature and my¬ thology from which the senseless forms of worship now prevalent in our country derive their sanction and sanctity.

And lastly, the crude, undeveloped and unsystematiz<ed form in which caste appears in these treatises is an irrefragable argument in favor of their high antiquity. The four original castes are mentioned distinctly and emphatically, not merely hinted at, as in the Rig Veda ; but they do not appear separated from one an¬ other by broad and well-defined lines of demarcation, or guarded each by a network of iron rules. On the contrary, the relative position of the orders, especially of the two higher ones, appears left in uncertainty rather than defined with precision. There are doubtless passages which clearly show that the Brahmins were rising, slowly but surely, up to the ascendency they have for ages and centuries enjoyed ; but passages are not wanting fitted to show that they were often beaten by their rivals, the Kshetryas, in their attempt to scale the summit of sacerdotal power and authority. The opening section of chap. ii. of the Brihad Aranyaka presents a dialogue between a proud, self-complacent and self-sufficient Brahmin, by name Gargya, and a really learned and therefore humble Kshetrya, Ajatasatru, the moral of which is the abandonment by the former of his ridiculous pretensions to knowledge and Ms enrolment as a pupil of the latter. Such a thing )uld have been an impossibility if the caste system

1 been matured, as it subsequently was in the age of iVLanu.

HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

But there is a dialogue in the Chhandogya eminently fitted to show that in occult, divine knowledge the Kshetrya was most decidedly ahead of the Brahmin. A Brahmin lad goes to Jaivali, the king of Panchala, of course a Kshetrya, and has five test questions regard¬ ing the condition of the dead and ethereal regions put to him. Unable to answer them, he returns to his father and teacher chagrined, and solicits instruction on those points. The father confesses his ignorance and repairs to the court of the learned king for instruction. The king receives him hospitably, but feels afflicted when informed of his motive. However, after much hesitation, he expresses his wish to teach him in these significant words : “ Since you have thus inquired, and inasmuch as no Brahmin ever knew it before, hence of all people in the world the Kshetryas alone have the right of imparting instruction on this subject.”

The high antiquity of these documents having been established, it remains for us to analyze their contents.. A word or two, however, on their style and the age they portray would be a fitting preface to such analy¬ sis. We have already had occasion to speak of the extravagances of diction by which these treatises are, along with the entire body of Sanscrit literature, char¬ acterized. Transitions of the harshest kind from one pronoun to another, from one figure of speech to an¬ other, from one train of thought to another, and from one line of reasoning to another, along with the ellipti¬ cal nature of the sentences in general, throw an air of obscurity over many of the passages on which the main argument hinges ; while metaphors and allegories both incongruous and far-fetched add to the mystification. But the most repellent features of the disquisitions embodied are tiresome repetitions, phonetic analogies,

THE SOURCES OE HIHDU PHILOSOPHY.

grotesque flights of the imagination, and inaccurate reasonings.

Examples of all these varieties of defects cannot be presented within the limits which we must prescribe to ourselves ; but the following two strings of figures, one culled from the Chhandogya and the other from the Brihad Aranyaka, are pre-eminently fitted to set forth the sort of extravagance we have to wade through while perusing these books. Of the great Universal soul it is said that “ The heaven is the head, the sun is the eye, the wind is the breath, the sky is the trunk, the moon is the fundament, and the earth is the feet. The altar is his breast, the sacrificial grass constitutes the hair of his body, the household fire forms his heart, the Annoharyapachana fire forms his mind, Ahavarya fire his face.” The exordium of the Brihad Aranyaka sets forth the greatness of the sacrificial horse in these words : “ The sun is the eye ; the wind, the breath ; the fire, under the name Yaiswanara, the open mouth ; the year, the body of the sacrificial horse ; the heaven is the back ; the atmosphere, the belly ; the earth, the footstool (hoof); the quarters, the sides; the seasons^ the members ; the months, the half months, the joints ; day and night, the feet ; the constellation, the bones ; the sky, the muscles ; the half-digested food, the sand ; the rivers, arteries and veins ; the liver and spleen, the mountains ; the herbs and trees, the various kinds of hair. The sun as long as he rises, the forepart of the body ; the sun as long as he descends, the hind part of the body. The lightning is like yawning ; the shaking of the members is like the rolling of the thunder.” Decency leads us to throw the veil over the concluding portion of this series of grotesque metaphors and similes.

The utter contempt for matters of fact, associated in

HINDU PHILOSOPHY.

these treatises with the wildest flights of speculation, is not perhaps a defect confined to Oriental Philosophy, it being discoverable in the writings of philosophers who in reasoning never appear egregiously at variance with the approved rules of logic. But the facility with which day-dreams are presented herein as facts of phi¬ losophy, or science in general, is peculiarly Oriental. The arteries, for instance, “ of the heart” are said in the Chhandogya to “ exist in a brown ethereal fluid, yea, in a white, a blue, a yellow, a red ethereal fluid.” They are in the other Upanishad divided into two classes, the good and the bad, and the number of the good ones given is 72,000 ! But we shall have to refer to this tendency to present dreams as established facts when we speak of the eschatology of these books ; and so we need not allow ourselves to be detained here by this feature of extravagance.

The age depicted in the IJpanishads has justly been called an age of inquiry, of incipient rather than matured speculation. The gods worshipped, originally forces of nature, were many, and clothed with attri¬ butes by no means godlike ; the forms of devotion util¬ ized were apparently puerile and meaningless ; and the ceremonies reduced to practice were both cumbersome and absurd. The mind naturally recoiled from the surroundings of a pantheon so unworthy, and the para¬ phernalia of a worship so sensuous and degrading, and the question was naturally raised, Have these forms of devotion and these oft-recurring ceremonies any mean¬ ing, or are they absurdities to be exploded or cast over¬ board ? The belief in the current creed and current forms of worship was too strong even in the most thoughtful minds to admit of a general leaning toward the latter of these alternatives ; and so the conviction

THE SOURCES OF IIIFTDU PHILOSOPHY. 21

gained ground that there was some occult meaning in the system of faith and devotion so apparently at vari¬ ance with both reason and common-sense. What is this occult meaning ? This was the question which philoso¬ phy proposed for discussion and solution. And no wonder that far-fetched analogies, fanciful etymologies, phonetic resemblances, incongruous reasonings, and extraordinary flights of the imagination were resorted to for the purpose of extracting a meaning out of what was really meaningless ! But the spirit of generaliza¬ tion was not pressed into service in vain, for in a very short time the gods and goddesses adored, the forms of worship resorted to, and the cumbrous ritual reduced to practice, were all unified into a primal substance spiritual on the whole, but spoken of at times as mate¬ rial or quasi-material. But an age of wavering faith cannot develop the spirit of unshackled speculation ; and so the disquisitions under notice are characterized by an unsteadiness, a vacillation, a flexibility, and an inconsistency fitted to render them enigmatical, incon¬ clusive, and even puerile and absurd.

A word about the commentary of Sankar seems de¬ sirable here. That profound thinker, who flourished during the latter part of the seventh and the earlier part of the eighth century, falls evidently into the mis¬ take into which modern philosophers fall when engaged in deciphering the contents of hoary documents, such as those under notice. He carries to the comparatively simple times of the Upanishads the well-conducted and abstruse controversies of an era of thought and specu¬ lation ten times more progressive. And therefore he may justly be accused of importing meaning into the text, rather than bringing meaning out of it, or rather of torturing out of the passages, plain or obscure, a sense

HIHDU PHILOSOPHY.

fitted to bolster up his own foregone conclusions. But his acute exegetic dissertations are of great use, if not in elucidating the contents of these treatises, at least in exploding a notion which is now gaining ground in and out of India, especially among people who have a theory to advocate. The notion is that the form of religion inculcated in the Upanishads is a pure and sub¬ lime theism. It may suit the convenience of the theo¬ rists of the day to see nothing but a rational system of theism in these venerable documents ; but it is impor¬ tant to note that the learned Pandits of Sankar Acharya’s time saw in them forms of religion very different indeed from such a system. Some, with the great Sankar at their head, found pantheism in them, while those with whom that redoubtable controversialist was engaged in ceaseless discussion, saw in them nothing but the nihilism to which they had been brought by the atheistic speculations of Buddha. The position of the theorists, who represent the teaching of the JJpanishads as thoroughly theistic, is similar to that of the transcendentalists who pretend to find pantheism in the teaching of our Lord, in spite of its obvious drift and the concurrent testimony of the Church from its foun¬ dation up to the present time.