Isha Upanishad

[3]

Chapter V: The Interpretation of Vedanta.

[word] - word(s) omitted by the author or lost through damage to the manuscript that are required by grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors

In an inquiry of this kind, so far as we have to use purely intellectual means—and I have not concealed my opinion that intellectual means are not sufficient and one has to trust largely the intuitions of a quiet and purified mind and the experiences of an illuminated and expanding soul,—but still, so far as we are to use purely intellectual means, the first, most important, most imperative must be a submissive acceptance of the text of the Sruti in its natural suggestion and in its simple and straightforward sense. To this submissiveness we ought to attach the greatest importance & to secure it think no labour or selfdiscipline wasted. It is the initial tapasya necessary before we are fit to approach the Sruti. Any temperamental rebellion, any

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emotional interference, any obstinacy of fixed mental association, any intellectual violation of the text seems to me to vitiate the work of the interpreter and deprive it, even when otherwise noble and brilliant, of some of its value. It is for this reason that the mind, that restless lake of sanskaras, preferences, prejudices, prejudgments, habitual opinions, intellectual & temperamental likes & dislikes, ought to be entirely silent in this matter; its role is to be submissive and receptive, detached, without passion; passivity, not activity, should be its state, na kinchid api chintayet. For the Sruti carries with it, in its very words, a certain prakash, a certain illumination. The mind ought to wait for that illumination and receiving it, should not because it is contrary to our expectation or our desire, labour to reject or alter what has been seen. Our pitfalls are many. One man has an active, vital & energetic temperament; he is tempted to read into Sruti the praise of action, to slur over anything that savours of quietism. Another is temperamentally quietistic; any command enjoining action as a means towards perfection his heart, his nerves cannot endure, he must get rid of it, belittle it, put it aside on whatever pretext. This is the interference of temperamental preference with the text of the Sruti. A man is attached to a particular thinker or teacher, enamoured of a definite view of life & God. Any contradiction of that thinker, teacher or view irritates his heart & cannot be borne, even though the contradiction seems to stand there plainly on the face of sacred writ; the mind at once obeying the heart sets about proving to itself that the words do not mean what they seem to mean. This is the interference of emotional preference. Or else the mind has always been accustomed to a particular philosophy, mode of thinking, idea of religion or dogma. Whatever contradicts these notions, strikes our fixed mental idea as necessarily wrong. Surely, it says, the philosophy, the thought, the dogma to which I am accustomed must be the thought of the Scriptures; there cannot, in the nature of things, be anything in them inconsistent with what I believe; for what I believe is true and the Scriptures are repositories of truth. So begins the interference which arises from association & fixed opinions. There is, finally, the intervention

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of the intellect when a speculative philosopher with a theory or a scholar reaching out after novelty or conscious of an opening for scholastic ingenuities, meddles powerfully with the plain drift of the text. All these interferences, however brilliantly they may be managed, are injuries to the truth of Veda; they diminish its universality and limit its appeal. It is for others to judge whether I have myself been able to avoid all of them,—especially the intellectual interference to which my temperament is most open, but I have had certainly the will to avoid it if not the power, the intention if not its successful performance.

I do not mean, however, that the received or dictionary sense of the word has to be always accepted. In dealing with these ancient writings such a scholastical puritanism would be less dangerous indeed than the licence of the philosophic commentators, but would still be seriously limiting. But in departing from the dictionary sense one must not depart from the native and etymological sense of the word; one ought to abide within its clear grammatical connotation as in a hedge of defence against one's own intellectual self-will and any superstructure of special sense or association must be consistent with that connotation and with the general usage of the Upanishads or of the Veda on which they rest. I have myself suggested that the scope of dhanam in the first verse of the Isha exceeds the contracted idea of material wealth and embraces all sorts of possessions; eno in the last verse still keeps to me its etymological association and is different from papa; the word vayunani meaning no doubt actions or activities, has been supposed by me to keep a colour of its proper etymological sense "phenomena" and to denote universal activities and not solely the individual or human; but none of these suggestions in the least meddle with the grammatical connotation, the etymological force or even the dictionary meaning of the words used; only a deeper or more delicate shade of meaning is made to appear than can ordinarily be perceived by a careless or superficial reader. A more serious doubt may arise when I suggest special associations for drishtaye and satya in the [fifteenth] verse. It will be seen however that in neither case do I depart from the basic meaning of the

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words, sight for drishti, truth for satya. It will be seen also, as I proceed in my larger task, that I have good Vedic warrant for supposing these special senses to be applied sometimes & indeed often to sight and to Truth in the Sruti and that they agree with the whole drift & logical development of this & other Upanishads.

For the fixing of the actual sense of separate words in Sruti is not the only condition of the interpretation nor is the acceptance of their natural sense the only standard for the interpreter. A great value, indeed an immense value must be attached, in my opinion, to the rhythm & structure and the logical connection with each other in thought of the separate clauses & shlokas. The language of the Upanishads is largely regarded by the modern readers as sublime and poetical indeed, full of imagery & suggestion, but not to be too much insisted on, not always to be pressed as having a definite meaning but often allowed to pass vaguely as rather reaching out at truths than accurately expressing them. My experience forbids me to assent to this view, in itself very natural and superficially reasonable. I have been forced to believe in the plenary inspiration of the Upanishads in word as well as in thought; I have been continually obliged to see that the expressions they use are the inevitable expression for the thought that has to be conveyed, and even when using poetical language the Rishis use it with a definite purpose, not vaguely reaching out at truth, but keeping before their vision a clear and firm thought or experience which they clearly & firmly express. No interpretation would impress me with a sense of satisfaction which did not give its clear & due weight to each word or account for the choice of one word over another where the choice is unusual. In accordance with this fullness of inspiration is the perfection of the chhandas, the rhythm & structure of verse & sentence which corresponds felicitously with the rhythm & structure of the thought. I may instance for this importance of the rhythm & structure of sentence such a juxtaposition as jagatyam jagat in the first verse; while the remarkable development & balance, supremely wedded to the thought, of the six verses about Vidya & Avidya may stand as

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an example of the importance of rhythm & structure of both sentence & verse. The jagatyam jagat of the first verse already alluded to, is a striking instance of the perfect & pregnant use of language, but there are numerous other examples such as the powerful collocation of kavir manishi paribhuh swayambhur in one of the most noble & profound of the revelatory shlokas, the [eighth]. It is easy for a careless translator or interpreter to accept kavir & manishi loosely as words with the same essential meaning used a little tautologically for a rhetorical effect. In reality, they differ widely in sense, are used in this passage with great correctness and pregnancy and on a right understanding of them depends our right understanding of the whole system of philosophy developed in the Isha. Much depends on whether we take the hiranmaya patra of the [fifteenth] shloka as mere vague poetical rhetoric or an image used with a definite intention and a lucid idea. But almost every step in the Isha will give us examples.

Even an observation of formal metre as an element of the rhythm is of some importance to the Vedantic interpreter. The writers of the Upanishads handle their metres, whether Anushtup or Tristubh, not entirely in the manner of the Vedic Rishis, but very largely on Vedic principles. They permit themselves to avoid elision even in the middle of a pada, eg vidyancha avidyancha, and always avoid it between the different padas; their principle is to keep not only the two lines of the shloka but all its four parts separate and not to run them into each other by sandhi. This peculiarity disappears in the manuscript & printed copies where the post-Vedic sandhi is observed usually though not with absolute consistency. But the disregard of Vedic practice is ruinous to the rhythm and sweetness of the verse, for it disregards the first conditions of the Vedic appeal to the ear. What for instance can be more clumsy than the junction of the padas in the seventh shloka, with its heavy obstruction & jar as of a carriage wheel jolting momentarily over a sudden obstacle,

yasmin sarvani bhutanyatmaivabhud vijanatah

or what can be more rhythmical, sweet & harmonious than the

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same verse properly written & read with an observation of the pause between the padas

yasmin sarvani bhutani atmaivabhud vijanatah?

There are other antique peculiarities, the use of two short matras as the equivalent of one long syllable, the occasional introduction of one or more excessive feet into a pada, resembling the use of the Alexandrine in English dramatic verse, the optional quantity of the vowel before a conjunct consonant of which the second element is a liquid, especially the semivowels y or v, and,—although this is more doubtful,—the Vedic use of these semivowels optionally as actual vowels which turns a dissyllable frequently into a trisyllable—a freedom possible only in a living language appealing to an ear tuned to the flexibility of living & daily intonations. It is possible that we have an example of this use in vidyancha avidyancha, but although it would introduce a very beautiful and delicate poetical effect, we cannot speak with certainty. These minutiae are not merely interesting to the literary critic and the philologist. Their importance will appear when we find that Max Muller would almost tempt us, for the sake of regularity of metre, to eject the important, if not indispensable yathatathyato, which gives such profundity, so many reverberations of meaning to the closing thought in the majestic [eighth] shloka, kavir manishi paribhuh swayambhur, yathatathyato'rthan vyadadhach chhaswatibhyah samabhyah; or that Shankara's desperate dealings with the line, from his point of view almost unmanageable,

vinashena mrityum tirtwa sambhutyamritam asnute

his forcing of vinasha to mean sambhava and reading of tirtwa asambhutya are negatived by the metre & rhythm of the verse no less than by the rhythm & structure of the thought throughout these six crucial verses.

The ordinary view of the Upanishads ignores another equally important, if not more important characteristic, the closeness of their logical structure, the intimate subjective linking of clause with clause, the logical stride from shloka to shloka, the profound relations of passage to passage. The usual treatment

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of these works seems to go on the assumption that this high logical strenuousness does not exist. They might often be loose collections of ill connected speculations, haphazard & illogical structures, for all the importance that is given to this element of their divine inspiration. I shall try to show how mighty are the architectonics of thought in the Isha, how movement leads on to movement, how intimately, for instance, the closing invocations to Surya & Agni are related to the whole thought-structure and how perfectly they develop from what precedes. The importance of the logical relation in the interpretation will be manifest, if I mistake not, at every step of our progress.¹

[I have spoken so far of the intellectual tests that we can employ. Before I pass from this subject, it may be well to insert a word of explanation, of self-defence, almost of apology. Among the intellectual interpreters of Sruti, Shankara towers like an unreachable giant above his fellows. As a philosopher, as a metaphysician, as a powerful logician & victorious disputant his greatness can hardly be measured. For a thousand years and more he has stood in the heavens of Indian thought, his head far away in the altitudes of Adwaita, his feet firmly planted on the lifeless remnants of crushed systems and broken philosophies, the wreckage of his logical conquests, his mouth like Trishira's swallowing up the world, lokan grasantam, annihilating it in the white flame of the Mayavada, his shadow covering our intellects & stunting the efforts of all who have dared to think originally & dispute his conclusions. Not Madhwa, not even Ramanuja can prevail against this colossal shadow. Yet I have ventured throughout to differ from this king of commentators—almost even to ignore this great & invincible disputant. If I have done so, it is because I think the decree of our liberty has already been pronounced by another giant of thought. When the great Vivekananda, potent seedsower of the future, in answer to the objection of the Pundits, "But Shankara does not say that," replied simply but finally, "No, but I, Vivekananda, say it," he pronounced the decree of liberation not only for himself but for

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all of us from the yoke, the golden but heavy yoke, of the mighty Dravidian. For this was Vivekananda's mission to smite away all obstacles, however great & venerable, & open the path to the resurgence of Indian originality & the direct confrontation of the soul of man with the living Truth. He was our deliverer not only from ignorance & weakness, but from the systems of knowledge that would limit us and impose a premature finality.

In truth,]