Kena and Other Upanishads

God and Immortality

Chapter I: The Upanishad

The Upanishads stand out from the dim background of Vedic antiquity like stupendous rock cathedrals of thought hewn out of the ancient hills by a race of giant builders the secret of whose inspiration and strength has passed away with them into the Supreme. They are at once Scripture, philosophy and seer-poetry; for even those of them that dispense with the metrical form, are prose poems of a rhythmically mystic thought. But whether as Scripture, philosophical theosophy or literature, there is nothing like them in ancient, mediaeval or modern, in Occidental or Oriental, in Egyptian, Chaldean, Semitic or Mongolian creation; they are unique in style, structure and motive, entirely sui generis. After them there were philosophic poems, aphorisms, verse and prose treatises in great number, Sutras, Karikas, Gitas, their intellectual children; but these are a human progeny very different in type from their immortal ancestors. Pseudo-Upanishads there have been in plenty, a hundred or more of them; some have arrived at a passable aping of the more external features of the type, but always betray themselves by the pseudo-style, the artificial falsetto, the rasping creak of the machine; others are pastiches; others are fakes. The great Upanishads stand out always serene, grand, inimitable with their puissant and living breath, with that phrase which goes rolling out a thousand echoes, with that faultless spontaneous sureness of the inevitable expression, with that packed yet easy compression of wide and rich wisdom into a few revelatory syllables by which they justify their claim to be the divine word. Neither this inspiration nor this technique has been renewed or repeated in later human achievement.

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And if we look for their secret, we shall find it best expressed in the old expression of them as the impersonal shabdabrahman. They are that is to say, the accents of the divine Gnosis,—a revelatory word direct and impersonal from the very heart of a divine and almost superconscious self-vision. All supreme utterance which is the inspired word and not merely speech of the mind, does thus come from a source beyond the human person through whom it is uttered; still it comes except in rare moments through the personal thought, coloured by it, a little altered in the transit, to some extent coloured by the intellect or the temperament. But these seers seem to have possessed the secret of the rapt passivity in which is heard faultlessly the supreme word; they speak the language of the sons of Immortality. Its truth is entirely revelatory, entirely intuitive; its speech altogether a living breath of inspiration; its art sovereignly a spontaneous and unwilled discerning of perfection.

The plan and structure of their thought corresponds; it has a perfection of supra-intellectual cohesion in its effortless welling of sound and thought, a system of natural and unsystematic correspondences. There is no such logical development, explicitly or implicitly satisfying the demands of the intellect, such as we find in other philosophical thought or the best architectonic poetry; but there is at the same time a supreme logic, only it is the logic of existence expressing itself self-luminously rather than of thought carefully finding out its own truth. It is the logic of the Himalayas or of a causeway of giants, not the painful and meticulous construction effected with labour by our later intellectual humanity. There is in the whole a unity of vision; the Upanishad itself rather than a human mind sees with a single glance, hears the word that is the natural body of the truth it has seen, perceives and listens again, and still again, till all has been seen and heard: this is not the unity of the intellect carefully weaving together its connections of thought, choosing, rejecting, pruning to get terseness, developing to get fullness. And yet there is a perfect coherence; for every successive movement takes up the echoes of the old and throws out new echoes which are taken up in their turn. A wave of seeing rises and ends to rise into

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another wave and so on till the final fall and natural ceasing of the whole sea of thought on its shore. Perhaps the development of a great and profound strain of music is the nearest thing we have to this ancient poetry of pure intuitive thought. This at least is the method of the metrical Upanishads; and even the others approximate to it, though more pliant in their make.

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