Synthesis of Yoga in the Upanishads

Part One

Vedas and Upanishads

If the Veda gave us the first types and figures of man, Nature and God and of the powers of the universe as seen and formed by an imaged spiritual intuition and psychological and yogic experience, the Upanishads broke through the Vedic forms, symbols and images, without entirely 'abandoning them and revealed in unique kind of poetry the ultimate and unsurpassable truths of self and God and man and the world and its principles and powers in their most essential, their profoundest and most intimate and their most ample reality. Between the Vedas and the Upanishads was a period 6 of development of Brahamanas and Aranyakas, which have value for the clues that they furnish to the inner truths of the Vedas; but we need not enter into them, since they fall outside our scope. As a matter of fact, Brahamanas were centered on the ritualistic aspect of the Vedas, and it is only in the Upanishads that we find a renewal of Vedic yoga, and the synthesis of the Vedic yoga became the starting-point for a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge. The Upanishads draw together in great harmony all that had been seen and experienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternal throughout the earlier great and fruitful period of yogic seeking. If the Veda is world's first yet extant record of yoga, Upanishads are the first yogic interpretation, elucidation and development of the yoga contained in the Veda. In the Upanishads, the intuitive mind

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and intimate psychological experiences of Vedic seers pass into a supreme culmination in which the Spirit, as is said in a phrase in Kathopanishad, discloses its very own body, reveals the very word of its self-expression. The Upanishads are estimated to be the supreme work of the Indian mind, a large flood of spiritual revelation, inspiration and intuition of a direct and profound character.

The secret of the Vedic yoga becomes manifest increasingly in the Upanishads, and if yoga developed more massively in India than elsewhere, it is because the Rishis of the Upanishads made a fresh effort, not by intellectual or philosophical thought but by the renewal of Vedic methods of yoga, and they not only confirm, by methodical verification, the truths of the Vedic yoga, but by becoming Vedanta, a book of culmination of Vedic knowledge in a higher degree than the Vedas. The Upanishadic knowledge is Jnāna, — not a mere thinking and considering by the intelligence, — but a seeing of truths with a soul and a total living in it with the power of inner being, a spiritual seizing by a kind of identification with the object of knowledge. It was by an integral knowing of self, it was by living in and attaining knowledge by identity that the Vedantic sages confirmed and restated the truths of a transcendent Being or Existence, Brahman; and they have left with us in the Upanishads a fresh record of their yoga and stated that the self in us is one with the universal self of all things and that this self is transcendental Brahman. The records of their yoga give us evidence that they had held, felt and lived in the inmost truths of all things in the universe and the inmost truths of man's inner and outer existence by the light of one ^d unified vision. The Upanishads have therefore been regarded as epic-hymns of self-knowledge and world

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knowledge and God-knowledge. The utterances of the Upanishads contain the vision of oneness and self in a universal divine being, and they are couched in expressions that have great revealing power and suggestive thought colour

Significance of the Age of the Upanishads

It is instructive to observe that while both, India and ancient Greece, had had in their ancient times their respective ages of mysteries during which ancient systems of yoga 1ere developed, the historical curve of development, however took different turns. The age of the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in Greece was followed by a gradual development through Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato into an age of intellectual efflorescence; in India, the age of Vedic Mysteries was followed, after considerable loss of the yogic knowledge during an intermediate period, by a fresh renewal of yogic quest that aimed at intuitive and revelatory knowledge of the ultimate reality through yogic methods, the evidence of which we find in the pages of the Upanishads. The period of intellectual efflorescence came much later in India. In the meantime, Upanishads regained the yogic wealth of Vedic knowledge and made the spiritual base of Indian culture into a firm foundation. We find in the Upanishads, in brief glimpses, the picture of that extraordinary stir and movement of spiritual enquiry and passion for the highest knowledge. We witness in this picture the scenes of the world, — the sages sitting in the groves ready to test and teach the seeker. We notice princes and learned Brahmins and great learned nobles going about in search knowledge; we find the king's son in his chariot, and the illegitimate of the servant-girl, seeking any man

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who might carry in himself the thought of light and a word of revelation. We meet great personalities like Janaka; we encounter Ajatashatru with his subtle mind, and Raikwa the cart-driver. We meet Yajnavalkya, calm and ironic, who takes into himself both worldly possession and spiritual riches, and who casts away at last all his wealth behind to wander forth as a homeless ascetic. We are astonished with the story of Krishna, son of Devaki, who heard a single word of Rishi Ghora and knew at once the Eternal. Visions of the ashramas are restored to us in these pages, and we see the courts of the kings who were also spiritual discoverers and thinkers, and the great sacrificial assemblies where the sages met and compared their intuitions. It is in the pages of the Upanishads that we see how the soul of India was born, and how Indian culture came to place yoga as the highest discipline of knowledge.

Principal Upanishads

The number of Upanishads has grown over a long stretch of time, and there are books which contain two hundred and fifty Upanishads. The number of principal Upanishads is, however, limited to twelve. These Upanishads are also valued the most, since they reflected more closely the yoga of the Veda. These Upanishads are Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, Chhāndogya Upanishad, Taittirīya Upanishad, Aitareya Upanishad, Kausītaki Upanishad, Kena Upanishad, Katha Upanishad, Īśa Upanishad, Mundaka Upanishad, Praśna Upanishad, Māndūkya Upanishad, and Svetāśvatara Upanishad. The one common subject of all these Upanishads is brahma-vidyā, the highest object of yogic knowledge, namely, Brahman, but each Upanishad approaches this subject with a particular angle and enters into the kingdom

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of brahma-vidya by its own gates, follows its own path or detour, aims at its own point of arrival. If we take, for instance the Īśa Upanishad, we find that it is concerned with the whole problem of the world and life and works and the human destiny in their relation to the supreme truth of the Brahman. It is a brief Upanishad and contains only eighteen verses, but the sweep of this Upanishad is vast and it scans most of the fundamental problems of Life with great swiftness, and the transitional steps between the verses are omitted with the result that one can see transitions crossed over as a giant would cross over intermediate steps to reach the other distant step. The idea of the supreme Self and its becoming, as also, the idea of the supreme Lord and His working are developed so as to answer those fundamental problem of life which look like locks that require some key for their solution. The oneness of all existences is its dominating note. The goal of the Upanishad is the same as that pursued by all the principal Upanishads; that goal is the winning of me state of Immortality, but it is more specific about the relations of the divine, all-ruling and all-possessing Brahman, to the world and to the human consciousness; it is also specifically concerned with the means of passing out of our present state of divided self, ignorance and suffering into the unity, the truth, the true knowledge, integral knowledge and divine beatitude. The Upanishad closes with the aspiration towards the supreme felicity.

The Kena Upanishad is also concerned with the state of Immortality, it is also concerned with Ignorance and Knowledge with the relationship between the divine consciousness and the world and human consciousness. Like the Īśa Upanishad, the Kena Upanishad also closes with the definition of Brahman as the Delight and the injunction to

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adore and pursue That as the Delight. But in contrast to Īśa Upanishad, the Kena focuses on a more restricted problem, and starts with a more precise and narrow enquiry. The special subject of the Kena is restricted to the relation of mind-consciousness to Brahman-consciousness. The question that is asked is: What are mental instruments? What is this mental life which uses the mental instruments of senses and speech and others? Is mind the last witness, the supreme and final power? And the Upanishad replies that there is a greater existence behind, just as the mind and its instruments are behind the life-force and its workings, and just as these latter are behind the material world. Just as Matter does not know Mind, but Mind knows Matter, even so, the Mind does not know That which is behind it, but That knows Mind. The supreme problem and aim for the mental being is how to rise beyond the mind and its instruments and how to attain to the Brahman. The Kena concentrates on this all-important problem of human existence.

Again, the Katha Upanishad aims at the knowledge of Immortality and enjoyment of Immortality, but it focuses on the psychological complex of man and on the cause of death and not only on what happens after the death but the entire complexity of all that is immortal which needs to be known in order that immortality is realized. It points out that the supreme reality, which is immortal is seated in the deepest cave of the heart as the Purusha which is not larger than the thumb of a man and that one has to know from the very close the Jiva, the individual Soul, who is the eater of sweetness, and it is also the self within our being that is lord of what was and what shall be. That immortal, the supreme Self is also Aditi,7 is the imperishable mother of the gods. Finally, that supreme self is the One Eternal and the transient, the

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One consciousness in many conscious beings, and the seeker who is calm and strong beholds Him in his self as in a mirror, and his is eternal peace in a highest felicity which none can point to nor define it.

The Mundaka Upanishad distinguishes between the lower knowledge and the higher knowledge and dwells on the problem of how one can enter into higher knowledge. It is in that context that those contents of higher knowledge are expounded in which the Supreme becomes known as the reality which is immutable and yet generator of manifold becomings. That Supreme is not only beyond life and mind but also beyond the immutable. The relationship between the mutable and the immutable is described as two birds that cling to one common tree and how the one that eats and is mobile, is bewildered but having seen the other one as the Lord becomes liberated from sorrow. It emphasizes the importance of the truths for the attainment of integral knowledge (samyag jnāna).

The Māndukya Upanishad is extremely brief consisting of twelve verses but extremely important on account of its precise distinctions between different levels of consciousness, and the corresponding objects of these states of consciousness. The four states that it describes are the states of wakefulness, dream, sleep and that which is the highest, — the state of awareness of the Self in its single existence, in Whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is calm, who is Good, who is the One than Whom there is no other, who is the Self, and who is the object of knowledge.

The Taittirīya Upanishad enters into brahma-vidya by describing the process of teaching and learning, and through an illustration of the process of meditation and tapasya by

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which the highest Self is known, successively as Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind, and Bliss which is conscious and self-existent. It also describes the different states of being in the individual corresponding to the universal principles of the One Being that is Bliss. The Upanishad defines the Brahman as the Truth, Knowledge, Infinity (satyam, jnanam, anantam), and it defines the result of the knowledge of the Brahman in the secrecy, in the cave of being, in the supreme ether as the enjoyment of all its highest aspirations by the soul of the individual in the attainment of its highest self-existence. To know the conditions and possess the Brahman purely and perfectly is the infinite privilege of the eternal Wisdom.

The Chhāndogya Upanishad is a work on the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; the spirit, the methods, the formula are given. Its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolized in the AUM, the sacred syllable of the Veda. It therefore aims at providing the knowledge not only of the pure state of the universal existence, but of that existence in all its parts, the waking world and the dream self and the sleeping, the manifest, the half-manifest, and hidden, Bhur loka, Bhuvar, Swar, — the right means to win all of them, enjoy all of them, transcend all of them.

Finally, we may refer to the Brhadāranyaka Upanishad which is the profoundest of the Upanishads; it is subtle and extraordinarily rich in rare philosophical suggestions and delicate psychology; its ideas are formulated in a highly figurative and symbolic language, which is for us an obscuring veil. The very first part of the Upanishad is a description of the Horse of the ashwamedha, and it sets the key to the Upanishad. The Horse-sacrifice, ashwamedha, is

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the symbol of a great spiritual advance, an evolutionary movement, starting from the dominion of apparently material forces reaching out to a higher spiritual freedom. This horse is not an ordinary horse, it is the Horse of the Worlds, representing universal Life-Force, which is to be offered in surrender as a sacrifice to the highest in order that the immortality may be attained. A special point of importance in this Upanishad is not only elaborate description of all planes of existence and of the knowledge of the Self and the knowledge of sweetness of immortality (madhu vidyā), it also contains descriptions of the way in which the discussions were held in the assemblies of the seekers of knowledge and yogins of the time of the Upanishads. These debates show that they did not contain intellectual arguments but their questions and answers were related to the exchange of yogic knowledge that was attained by different participants by virtue of experiences of different levels of consciousness and realization.

The highest experience that we find described in the Vedas and the Upanishads culminates in the Upanishadic or Vedantic terms as the experience of 'Sadbrahman’, Existence pure, indefinable, infinite, absolute. It is the experience of the fundamental Reality discovered by experience that transcends the senses and sense-mind; it transcends the plane of the mental thought; it is the experience that transcends the forms that are seen and caught by our sense-experience; it transcends even the Ideas or universal Forms which are caught by the Pure Reason; it transcends even our intuitions of Space and Time which our Pure Reason inevitably conceives as the conditions in which our experiences of the phenomenal world are arranged and organized.

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But that experience, verified again and again by the Rishis of the Vedas and the Upanishads over a long stretch of time, separated from each other — both in space and time __ can also be glimpsed often in the beginning in the phenomenon of self-awareness or behind it, where something immovable and immutable can be vaguely perceived or imagined in regard to what we are, beyond all life and death, beyond all change and formation and action. There is something in our self-awareness in which a door swings open suddenly or can be opened by practice of the methods of yoga described in the Vedas and the Upanishads, and which have been further developed and confirmed over millennia, and the splendour of the truth beyond is caught; and if we have the strength and firmness in the practice of yogic methods, it is affirmed, we can make a starting-point for another play on consciousness than that of the sense-mind and intellectual reasoning, for the play of Intuition.

Intuition and Reason

Intuition 8 is not a process of getting truth by happy conjecture; it is a spark of a deeper layer of our consciousness which can be perceived as the incorrigible ground of those concepts which operate in and behind mental operations. It is intuition that impels the Pure Reason to formulate concepts of infinity and eternity, even though in our ordinary experience we do not find anything corresponding to them. In the history of philosophy, we see the conceptual formulations of intuitions in terms of God, Immortality and Heaven. The rationalistic tradition has, through ontological argument, underlined the necessity of utilizing the concepts of eternity and infinity although, when analyzed, they have been declared to be odd. The empiricists

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feel justified in denying any real meaning to these concepts, since they are declared to be un verifiable in experience; nonetheless their appeal to experience is limited and only sense-experience and concepts which are tied up with sense experience are admitted, and there is a refusal to consider the possibility of any experience which goes beyond sense experience and sense-bound Reason. But what the empiricists deny and what the rationalists are obliged to recognize as incorrigible and therefore true, can be found verifiable in the experiences which begin to develop through the play of Intuition, These experiences can be verified by systematic application of the methods of yoga. But even when the play of intuition is not recognized, it is always latent, according to the yogic view of consciousness, and secretly it is at work, and it is found that Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and the concepts it has generated are constantly perceived or used inevitably, even though they may be contradicted by the analysis of reason or by the experiences that we have in our normal boundaries of consciousness.

The synthesis of yoga that we can notice in the Vedas and Upanishads is not arrived at by intellectual speculation where integrality and synthesis are distant goals and achievable at a higher level of consciousness where unity consciousness is more natural and spontaneous. Moreover, we notice that the yogic experiences described in the Vedas and the Upanishads seem to speak of gradation even in supra-intellectual consciousness, and thus we begin to appreciate the symbol of the sun that is used to indicate the highest possible grade of consciousness where even the spotlights of intuitions are united (raśmīn samūha), so as to constitute an integral supramental state in which the Object

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of Knowledge is seen in all its integrality.

The Veda has presented this integral vision through a beautiful metaphor, where Vishnu's eye is described as extended over the whole sky. The Veda makes a distinction between higher light (jyotir uttaram) and the highest light (jyotir uttamam),9 and we can see how integrality is spontaneous and natural in the highest light, just as in the sun all the rays of light get combined and synthesized. In terms of yogic achievement, the Rishis of the Vedas and the Upanishads can be regarded as those who had succeeded in attaining the highest integral consciousness, and it is in recognition of this yoga-siddhi that the Indian tradition has looked upon the Vedas and the Upanishads as most authoritative texts of reference. The authority of the Vedas and the Upanishads is not the authority of theological dogma but the authority of knowledge that is always verifiable by fresh yogic experiment and confirmation. It is in this sense that the Vedas and the Upanishads have been ranked as shruti, — as a record of authoritative experiences of yogic sight and yogic hearing, drsti and śruti, which have been regarded as special faculties of consciousness that characterize the highest supramental knowledge.

Indian Yoga and Spirit of Synthesis

As we examine the history of yoga in India, we are struck by this lofty and integral vision that we find described in the Vedas and the Upanishads, the most ancient texts on Yogic Knowledge which are available to humanity. In the subsequent development of the Indian yoga this integrality and unity-consciousness which we find gradually broken down, and the yogic systems in the subsequent periods become more and more specialized. These specializations

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have the merit in terms of increasing subtlety and intensity in their methods and in their specialized achievements, but the original integrality is greatly missed. In fact, we find that during the period intervening between the Vedas and the Upanishads, the tendency towards specialization had already set in, and it was that tendency which was responsible for the division between karmakānda, which came to be described in great detail in the Brāhamanas, and jnānakānda, which came to be developed in its beginnings in Aryanakas and which culminated in the Upanishads. Fortunately, in the early Upanishads, the Vedic integral system of yoga was recaptured, and the synthesis of yoga of the Upanishads based itself on integral yoga of the Veda, even though the Upanishads, rightly called Vedanta, brought out clearly the Vedic emphasis and integration of the paths of knowledge, action and devotion; and they also added as a kind of culmination of the Vedic luminous clarities in sharper and clearer terms, and clarified with particular emphasis, the different paths of knowledge and also the synthesis of these paths.

Nevertheless, there is an emphasis in the Upanishads increasing steadily as time goes on into an overemphasis on the liberation of the individual, eclipsing the ideal of the attainment of collective harmony. As a result, there came about increasing overemphasis on the individual's rejection of the lower cosmic life. This note increases, and it swells in due course of time into the rejection of all cosmic life whatever, and that becomes finally in India almost the one dominant and all-challenging cry.

In the earlier Vedic synthesis, the liberation of the individual is regarded as a means towards a great cosmic victory, — swarājya as an indispensable step towards

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sāmrājya.10 The Vedic yoga also declares that there has to come about the eventual conquest of heaven and earth by the superconscient Truth and Bliss, and when we study the accounts of the victories such as those of Angirasa Rishis and Ribhus, we find that those who had achieved the victory in the past are the conscious helpers of their yet battling posterity. The Upanishads have provided to humanity with great clarity, plenitude and noble catholicity the integral vision of the Brahman, and therefore, we find in the Upanishads the door of escape from any overemphasis in its own statement of the truth. As the Kena Upanishad points out, the man who knows and possesses the supreme Brahman as the transcendent Beatitude becomes a centre of that delight to which all his fellows shall come as to a well from which they can draw the divine waters." This is the clue that is needed for preserving the connection with the universe. The one reason which supremely justifies that the connection is not the desire of personal earthly joy but the compassion that impels help to all creatures, who are still bound. Again, as in the Kena Upanishad, the highest good is not restricted to the lesser victories of the Gods, of Agni, Vayu and Indra, but extends to go beyond towards the discovery of the supreme victory of the Brahman, who is not merely immobile, but who is also beyond immobility, and who stands always behind the struggle and victory of the gods, the cosmic forces and beings; Indra must discover that Brahman that stands behind all victories, lesser or supreme. And the greatest helpfulness that one can render for the supreme victory of the Brahman is to be a human centre of the Light, the Glory, the Bliss, the Strength and the knowledge of the Divine Existence through whom it shall communicate itself lavishly to other men and attract by its

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magnet of delight their souls to that which is the Highest. Such is the message that one can read in all the principal Upanishads, even though that message began to break down, with the rise of specialized systems of yoga in due course of time. But the spirit of the Upanishads, the spirit of its synthesis has never been lost, even though eclipsed. In all the subsequent Vedantic systems of yoga, we find the spirit of synthesis, even though increasing specialization and some kind of exclusivism are evidently witnessed.

Upanishads confirm Vedic Yoga

As we study the yoga of the Veda and enter into the yoga of the Upanishads, we feel struck by the rigour of the spirit of yoga that was manifest in the quest of the Rishis of the Veda as also of the Rishis of the Upanishads. The yogic knowledge of the Veda was expressed in symbols and figures which were taken largely from the rituals of sacrifice, and yet the yogic quest was not allowed to be limited or constrained by the limitations of religion. The Vedic Rishis were close observers of the psychology of the subconscient, the conscient and the superconscient, and their quest was not allowed to be thwarted by the forces and powers of the inconscient, subconscient and the human-conscient which is the upward wave of ignorance which gropes for knowledge and which normally remains confined to the operations of senses, nervous mentality, feelings, emotions and intellectual understanding and discrimination, dhī. Their quest was not limited by beliefs and practices handed over to them by their forefathers, pūrvebhih, but they were keen to examine and confirm and arrive at new discoveries and new knowledge. Discovery of the new was so much underlined that the Veda was not allowed to be a closed book, but Vedic tradition

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maintained that the Vedas are endless, anantāh vedāh. In a Vedic hymn a Rishi prays to Agni:

"Found for those who from age to age speak the word that is new, the word that is a discovery of knowledge, O Fire, their glorious treasure...." yugeyuge vidathyam grnadbhyah agne rayim yaśasam dhehi navyasim.¹²

The Vedic yoga affirms, and this is confirmed and reiterated by the yoga of the Upanishads, that the truths of the physical and supraphysical realities can be best grasped, known and possessed by us through faculties which lie above the ranges of physical senses and rational intelligence. Again, it is affirmed by the Vedic Rishis and confirmed by the Rishis of the Upanishads that these faculties can be developed by pursuit of assured methods resulting from the principles, powers and processes that govern the experiences and realizations of the highest possible objects of knowledge. We also see that the Rishis were able to make such an impact upon the Indian culture that in its later periods the seekers and practitioners of science, philosophy, poetry, religion and other disciplines came to accept that they could meet or fulfill their goals only when they could open up to higher supra-intellectual faculties, powers and realizations.

The Rishis of the Upanishads could not accept the view that the Vedas were ceremonial and ritualistic in their essential character, and even though the Brahamanas had underlined that the Vedas were karmakānda, body of rituals of sacrificial works, the Rishis of the Upanishads revisited the Vedas with fresh and bold enquiry, and by the development of illumined experiences through the cultivation and development of the intuitive and revelatory faculties of knowledge by identity, they confirmed the Vedic

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methods of yoga and even developed them further so as to bring out the deeper subtleties of the knowledge of the world of the individual in the universe and the individual's fulfillment in the Transcendental Reality and Immortality.

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