Jnaneshwar was essentially a Yogi-Poet and not a philosopher or metaphysician dealing with abstruse problems of creation. His expression is that of a mystic who uses the poetic language of symbols and metaphors while giving form to his ideas and concepts. He piles simile upon simile, example upon example to make a certain point of deeper import, the technique being in the nature of an address to a devout gathering. But this is a technique which a strict logician will not accept. According to him any serious discourse ought to be carried out in a rigorous manner. However, the poetic method has its own convincing validity, particularly when several shades of meaning can emerge from the intuition it bears. Jnaneshwar was not a darshanakar, a founder of a school of mystical thought; he had not formulated any system of causes—the first and the subsequent pragmatic or natural causes of things and happenings. We must also remember that he wrote his work only at the age of fifteen when he must have just studied and acquired the traditional lore that had come down to him as a part of the mediaeval upbringing. His father Vitthalpant himself was a man of deep learning and must have seen that his children were taught scriptural and yogic literature in its proper context necessary for a truer wholesome religious life. The Brahminical rituals and their strict observations must have moulded his outlook, coming as these did from the seats of learning at Paithan and Kashi. Apart from adherence to routinised customs and practices, it was also the age when the intellectual spirituality was primarily dominated by the Adwaita Philosophy of Shankara; indeed, we may well take that Jnaneshwar had come under its full sway and in these matters did not exercise his own judgement. The dialectical persuasiveness of the powerful Acharya—who had vigorously defended and propagated the Vedantic knowledge against the Buddhist doctrine—had held in grip the religious society for several centuries.
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The earlier cult of Yajnic sacrifices, sacrifices not too infrequently made to dubious gods,—the pre-Buddhistic over-burdened Karma-kanda approach,—had already served a great purpose and the deeper questing urge was yearning for another breath of life. Vedicism had to halt, to make its transformed appearance later on. In the meanwhile, it made room for another adventure of spirituality. But, apparently, this spirituality posited only the frightening bareness of a nihilistic retreat, dismissing all that was Brahminical. Nonetheless, it turned out to be yet another, and perhaps necessary, extension of the wide-ranging spirit to tackle the problem of phenomenality by first denying it completely.
The Buddha saw this world filled with sorrow or duhkha with human craving that is trishna as its cause; but then he also proclaimed that this sorrow can be removed and the way to remove it is by following the Eightfold Path of Righteousness. The entire issue thus reduces to the release from the universal Law of Action or Karma which could be accomplished by extinguishing the fire of desire and finally disappearing into the utter state of Nirvanic Non-Self. But then the ferry-boat,—to use the Mahayana image,—that takes one to the Shore of Silence, away from this shore of ignorance and craving and death, does not do the return trip; consequently, whatever gets left behind remains in the same state of suffering. In fact, this ‘behind’ remains totally dismissed—as in the Vedantic argument in which we cannot know ignorance while we are in ignorance and no more there exists ignorance, and its world, when we have the knowledge of Reality. Everything gets extinguished in Accomplishment of the Transcendental Wisdom, prajna-paramita. But trying and strenuous is the path, hard and painful and full of danger. The quest of the goal itself becomes a trap. “Difficult to be attained through Awakening is the Perfect Transcendental Wisdom,” says the disciple. The Teacher answers: “That is the reason why no one ever attains it through Awakening.” The effort itself is the limitation. Howsoever puzzling or Zen-like the statement be, the notion of this-ness or, for that matter even of that-ness, ought no more haunt the serious seeker. “Hence Buddhism denies,” in the words of Zimmer, “the force and validity of everything that can be known.” In the final analysis, which derives a
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certain spiritual support also, there is “neither the realm of life and death nor that of release. Moreover there is no Buddhism and no boat, since there are neither shores nor waters between. There is no boat, and there is no boatman,—no Buddha. The great paradox of Buddhism, therefore, is that no Buddha has ever come into existence to enlighten the world with Buddhist teachings.” (Philosophies of India) Powerful metaphysics it indeed is.
Such extreme negations of whatever is, phenomenal or essential, is the boldest step taken by the Enlightened. Occult-spiritually, this is an experience of paramount importance in which the last vestiges of superficial personality that we fondly cherish and value in our life get eliminated. It is only when this knotted individuality is dissolved that there can be the leap into the utter Blank where all manifestation characterised by pain and misery and death ceases to be. This is the faultless solution offered to get out of the composite and sorrowful existence driven by desire and bound by Karma as it is. For that reason the compassionate Buddha himself had refused to enter into Nirvana while the world behind lay suffering. He proposed to take man to a state of pure and perfect non-egoistic selfless transcendence. However, in it there is a shortcoming of a serious nature: its empty spaces do not become available to establish the manifestation’s true primaevality. In it the world disappears altogether.
But then, paradoxically, under the ascetic and life-abnegating sway of Buddhism flourished great kingdoms and orders, tranquil art and literature and exact reason and occult sciences. The path of Non-Existence led to an intense state of existentiality. Negation asserted itself vehemently in a million ways of expression. However, this activity of the Monk must be considered to be entirely different from the dynamism of the ancient Rishi who had posited and promoted positive values in life, the life which is a rich and fruitful field for performing works to claim celestial felicities. One shows the door of escape, the other opens out the possibility of a happy fulfillment. In one there is total immergence and disappearance, in the other the life of immortality in the splendour of the gods.
The spell of Buddhism on the collective life had to end and in that task we witness the greatness of Shankara. “Philosophy is the self-expression,” writes Radhakrishnan, “ of the growing spirit of mankind, and the philosophers are its voice. Great thinkers appear in all great ages, and are as much the creatures as the creators of their era. Their genius lies in the power to seize the opportunity of the hour and give voice to the inarticulate yearnings that have been for long struggling in the hearts of men of expression. A creative thinker of the first rank, Shankara entered into the philosophic inheritance of his age, and reinterpreted it with special reference to its needs. Though Hindu thought had practically triumphed over Buddhism, the latter had instilled its secret strength into the people. The shadow of distrust which Buddhism threw over cherished beliefs did not completely vanish... It was a critical period in the history of the Hindu nation, when there was a general sense of weariness with the wrangling sects. The age needed a religious genius who was unwilling to break with the past and yet open to the good influences of the new creeds, one who could stretch the old moulds without breaking them and synthesise the warring sects on a broad basis of truth, which would have room for all men of all grades of intelligence and culture. Shankara ... announced his Adwaita Vedanta as offering a common basis for religious unity.” (Indian Philosophy, Vol. 2, pp. 466-67)
We may well ignore the rhapsodical element in Radhakrishnan’s assessment of the work of the great Adwaitin, but it did prevail in our consciousness for more than a thousand years. But what was the real nature of his contribution “to all men of all grades of intelligence and culture”? While it dismissed Nihilism with a new system of powerful and impeccable spiritual dialectics, sharp and keen in its logical exactness, it succeeded only in asserting the reality of another negation in the exclusiveness of the passive Brahman. It robbed the dynamic Absolute of its legitimate existence in activity. “Do the souls inhere in Brahman or Brahman in the souls? Every attempt to bring Brahman into connection with the world of becoming ends in failure.” Ultimately the world itself becomes an illusion which gets dispelled only in the reality of the static Eternal. Therefore, according to this Theory of Brahman, there is no possibility of any real becoming, no
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prospect for enlightened life here; in fact, our only concern ought to be to get out of this illusory world by the practice of the Yoga of Self-Knowledge.
Shankara had taken the Shruti, the Revelation of the ancient Rishis, as the basis for his formulations in the context of his own spiritual realisation, of the blank featureless actionless Absolute. He saw only that and discounted what is around as fleeting and false and mundane. Effectively, he threw away God from this world. He saw everything in the scriptures only from this point of view and interpreted these accordingly. The haunting problem of the ultimate reality, “of the unreal there is no being and of the real there is no non-being”
(The Gita: 2.16)
he chose to tackle in his own way. Finally he arrived at the unreality of this changing world in contrast to the immutable unchanging reality which alone exists. In the words of Radhakrishnan: “The world is said to be unreal since it is sublated by true knowledge... The objects of the world are changeable. They never are, but always become. Nothing that changes is real, which is eternal transcendent being... In this sense the changing world is not real... The realisation of the Atman is the final end (avasan) of all worldly activities, which is not reached so long as the world as world persists... The relation of being and non-being is one of exclusion, of contradiction, and the former tries to overcome non-being, negate it by transforming into being. This is the aim of the process of becoming presided over by Ishwara, who is ever active in pushing non-being out of existence and bringing forward an eternal procession of existence out of it; but, at the logical level, it is an impossible feat to force non-being into the equivalence of being... Brahman alone is pure being, possessing whatever there is of reality in all things, without their limitations or elements of non-being. Whatever is different from it is unreal. The nature of samsara is always to become what it is not, to transform itself by transcending itself.” (Indian Philosophy, Vol. 2, pp. 563-64)
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The Shankarite upshot of all this excessively fine argumentation is: “The world neither is nor is not, and so its nature is indescribable, tattvanyatvabhyam anirvachaniya.” Indeed, it goes even a step farther, lending a kind of illusiveness to Ishwara, to the personal aspect of the Eternal. This extreme position lands the Adwaitin into a difficult situation when he comes to the three Purushas described in the fifteenth chapter of the Gita.
Take a brief example of the verse hinting at the nature of Jiva, the individual soul: “It is an eternal portion of Me that becomes the Jiva in the world of living creatures and cultivates the subjective powers of Prakriti, mind and the five senses.”
(The Gita: 15.7)
Sri Aurobindo, while commenting on the phrase “an eternal portion of Me,” writes: “This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn undying power of the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva... But in truth it is something greater than its present appearance... And when this soul arises above all ignorant limitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its humanity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incomplete significance.” (Essays on the Gita, SABCL, Vol. 13, pp. 430-31)
The difficulty of the Adwaitic philosophy lies in the apparent contradiction of the partless having parts, in the division of the Indivisible. Radhakrishnan himself points out that Shankara “is not faithful to the intention of the author of the Gita when he says that amsa, or part, indicates an imaginary or apparent part only.” (Indian philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 549) Certainly then, à la Shankara, there are no future prospects available to the soul which according to him is a fiction.
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But it is not only here that he is going contrary to the sense of the Shruti; he does not recognise the implications of the image of the two birds found in the Veda as well as in the Upanishads, the vivid metaphor of the Soul and the Oversoul connecting in an organic way the individual and the cosmic in their works here. In the process, he also dismisses the Puranic experience of Nara and Narayana, of Man and God. No doubt the world is full of falsehood, but is certainly not false and there is a chance for it,—because the amsa, the Immortal in the Mortal of the Veda, is present here.
Jnaneshwar had grown in this milieu of Brahminical Adwaitism and generally accepted its formulations. Indeed, he is interpreting the Gita in the Shankarite way in which there is no place for a personal God, in which there cannot be parts of the Partless. Not that this is his position throughout; but in the discourse whenever metaphysical issues pop up, he happens to lean more towards the prevalent ideas and concepts of his age. In Jnaneshwari he says that he is following the great Acharya while presenting his commentary on the Gita. We witness this at a number of places, even to the extent that the Mayavadin’s symbols and analogies keep on coming at regular intervals. Very frequently we are given the examples of the famous snake-and-rope, experience in a dream in which everything appears real, the mother-of-pearl, the mirage, the children of a barren woman, the pot and the sky held by it and yet not getting limited by it, and so on. Through all these what is hammered into us is that the reality of the world is unreal, mithya.
But the remarkable thing is that the spiritual quality of Jnaneshwar’s poetry never suffers. There is always the inspired freshness and genuineness of word-value and sound-value with the rhythm faultlessly bearing them in the breath of the spirit. This authenticity is so powerful, and ever so appealing, the breath of the spirit so satisfying, that its own sense tends to ignore the sense and substance of a philosophical discourse that has the ring of a doubtful conclusion. There are always very profound utterances true to the yogic intuition and invaluable are the insights these bring to us. For the purpose of our immediate discussion, however, we shall keep aside
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the aspect of poetry and focus the attention only on a few issues of thought. It is necessary that the vastness of a spiritual experience, particularly as we experience in the Gita, does not get confined to a specific sectarian or logical-metaphysical formulation. The Scripture far exceeds the Adwaitic Doctrine of the Quiescent Eternal, the Revelation far transcends the Argument of Knowledge, brahmavada, which is but one of many systems to describe the ultimate Reality. We may take here Jnaneshwar’s relevant commentary which inevitably makes this world an unredeemable product of ignorance, avidya, and see some of its implications.
The question of the Individual and the Eternal, the Personal and the Transpersonal, is of fundamental importance in the metaphysics of this creation. If the formless featureless uncreated and uncreating Absolute were the only reality, then what we term becoming, having names and forms and qualities, with all these thousand aspects, would lose its substantiality and everything would appear as a shadow floating in a shadowy place. This appearance would be due to the mysterious working of Maya, the power of illusory formation, this Maya itself being indescribable. Naturally, therefore, it would be illogical to speak of the Lord of the Universe, Ishwara, who would have no locus standi here, or for that matter anywhere else, as there is no real universe to lord over. By dismissing the saguna-aspect, the Divine with qualities, the Presence with name and form and the will to be, to enjoy manifestation, the phenomenal world or becoming would become an inferior product under the sway of the all-powerful Nature or Prakriti, she casting her illusory spell over everything.
And yet there has to be a way to get out of this Mayic play of ignorance and attain oneness with the One who alone is. The first step is to be free from the bewilderment of this all-powerful lower Nature who is the moulder of the mortal’s lot, who has made this world full of falsehood, distortion, egoistic assertions, infatuation, attachment, lust, jealousy, the dark hankering for possession, the cause of suffering and pain. “Throw away desire,” says the Gita, “conquer the fault of attachment, overcome the dual sense of happiness and sorrow,
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and other dualities, and abide always in the primal Self, adhyatmanitya.” This is a verse which stipulates certain rules in the manner of practical guidance in the sadhana of the seeker of the Truth and is of direct concern for his progress; without it the real journey cannot begin. Only when all ties of phenomenality are unstrung is the Enduring reached and from it then there is no return; that is the true abode of rest, padamavyam tat.
Jnaneshwar goes into a kind of poetic rapture while enumerating these yogic prerequisites in any spiritual discipline: “At the end of the rainy season the dark clouds take leave of the sky; in that manner, with the arrival of knowledge, disappear from the spiritual seeker arrogant self-regard and foolishness and infatuation. Relatives avoid him who is cruel or is without fame or fortune or wealth, without good manners; so does one of merit remain away from all that disfigures and taints and distorts, that which causes disturbance. A banana plant topples when heavy with the weight of its own fruits; likewise, with the gaining of the powers of the self, vanish one by one all actions bearing their consequences. The sense of duality, of opposition, doubt and doubleness of intent or regard stay no more with him,—like the birds that fly away from a tree which has caught fire. The wild grass that sprouts vigorously in the soil of disunion and dissension does not grow in the nature of such a man. From him go away, along with ignorance, his haughtiness and pride and conceit of the bodily existence,—as does the night depart with the rising of the sun. With the declining of the life-spirit the way the body suddenly abandons the Jiva, so is by him discarded duality... Winning a kingdom in a dream or seeing our own death in it assumes no meaning when we get up; precisely in that manner the pairs of opposites, like pleasure and pain, stay not with the awakened. A serpent can never attack an eagle and therefore merit and demerit that flow from duality dare not approach him... The sun pours on the earth its own essence, in the nature of rain, and takes back the water using the network of its rays; in precisely such a way does one gather everything back in the illusionless sight of knowledge that which appears scattered here, in twelve different directions, because of self-delusion, atmabhranti. The stream of the Ganges plunges into the sea and attains oneness with it, so does he
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whose power of discrimination of the essential from the phenomenal becomes established in the Self. Indeed, because of the self-sameness everywhere, there can remain no wish with such a person to reach anything else.”
(Jnaneshwari: 15.300)
See, the sky is present everywhere. And it does not desire to go anywhere else to some beyond. We cannot say that it travels from one village to another village.
To continue: “On the hillock of fire no life can sprout; in that way in the mind of the seeker no disturbing movement can spring up... The full moon does not lack any phase to make its roundness complete; so is he who has become free of want and desire and attachment... The speck of dust gets blown off by the wind and likewise the objects of sense remain not with him who has offered himself in the sacrifice of knowledge, the brightly kindled jnanagni; gold is poured into gold, hemi hem. Such is that place, padamavyayam tat, which cannot be particularised, nor can it be envisioned or cognised by the faculty of our senses.”
This is a straightforward stipulation of universal yogic preconditions which ought to be strictly followed to make a beginning on the spiritual path. Naturally, therefore, there cannot be any dispute about Jnaneshwar’s commentary on the fifth shloka of this chapter. But when he comes to the next verse, pragmatically Upanishadic with the force of the Mantra, asserting the greatness of the Abode of the Supreme, parama dhama, we at once notice the Shankarite interpretation entering into the description. That place, that Abode of the Supreme, says the text, the sun illumines not, nor the moon, nor the fire, but is itself the luminous light of the eternal Being.
(The Gita: 15.6)
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In Jnaneshwari we have:
That which is seen with the bright flame of the lamp, or which is illumined by the moon in the night, or which the sun makes radiant,—all that seeing is after all not its seeing, nor is seeing it, but only the appearance of the universe, concealing that itself behind it. The immediate view of whatever is consequently turns out to be only a formation, a perception of the percipient and not the true reality behind the perceived. When the sense of the pearl-shell becomes less and less insistent, more and more starts appearing true the silver form; when we forget the fact of the rope, the illusion of the snake riding on it assumes a convincingness in our minds. In that way, the moon and the sun and the great bright objects shine here brilliantly, deriving their splendour from the one who is the piled mass, the heap of light, tejorashi, who illumines all that is formed. When that shines the sun and the moon fade away, even as on all objects they cast only the shadow of that Brilliance. Perhaps just in such a manner can we speak of them as its organic parts, the aspects, the limbs of its indivisible body, the waves on the surface of the ocean.
The beating of the kettledrum heard in a dream falls silent on waking; the mirage disappears with the coming of the evening. So is, tells the Teacher of the Gita, my house of dwelling, nijadhama, that place where vanish all hallucinatory perceptions, where exists no nescience. Having reached it, there can be no return to this ignorant life; for, the streams when they merge into the sea go not there whence they came. The salt image of a female elephant, kunjari, when put in the salt water dissolves and can never recover her lost shape; or the flames that have climbed to the sky cannot come back; or else, as does water evaporate and disappear when poured on a piece of red-hot iron, so do they return not who reach my Abode. For them there is no coming back to resume the worldly rounds. In this way, and that is the only way, and purely in the merit of knowledge, those who come to me cease from the cycles of life:
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(Jnaneshwari: 15.307-20)
Such is the excellence of that Abode of the Supreme, param dham. There is no fall into the ordinary mundane existence when that faultless and incomparable excellence is reached. One becomes one with the Godhead. But, at this point, a question of great occult significance may be raised,—vis-à-vis the very existence of the individual who is going to have such a relationship with the indivisible Godhead, with the relationless partless Absolute. In this union does the individual lose his individuality, or does he still exist in oneness with the single One? Does he remain distinct or does he get obliterated in the Eternal? Also, for the Eternal, is there that sameness throughout or are there differences? Does God see himself to be different from his creation?—devesi bhinna ki abhinna? (Jnaneshwari: 15.322) If they have been always distinct from each other, then it would be absurd to speak of oneness. On the other hand, if they are sempiternally identical, this talk of attainment and union becomes meaningless. Union with whom when all is one?
Jnaneshwar resolves the dilemma by first asserting the validity of both, that they are distinct as well as not distinct. In fact, according to him, this perplexing situation bearing a self-negating character is not at all present in any true spiritual awareness; it is a projection of
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our ignorance on the unseverable reality of the One. This separateness or this division is an appearance and it has really no foundation to stand upon. In knowledge distinctions totally disappear. It is only by the power of Maya that prevail these manynesses which have no substantiality of their own. When knowledge gets limited only to the bodily existence, then it loses its trueness and there is the ignorant sense of separation from the Indivisible. The distinctionless Self accepts the authority of Prakriti and conducts itself according to her wishes and her moods and methods; it is her commerce which is really witnessed in this entire hubbub and turmoil. It cannot be said that there is a square or a circular piece of sky, though the sky takes the shape of the container in which it is confined; otherwise its repose is always in the limitless which has no confining or defining boundaries or forms.
Such is the uncompromising position of the Adwaitic philosophy, holding firmly to the concept that duality is entirely due to ignorance and that, with the arrival of the dawn of knowledge, no divisions can arise in the Indivisible. Perhaps we cannot even speak that One is all or is in all or all is in One.
But then such a position leaves many issues unanswered. The necessity of God’s Vibhutis doing his works here, or he himself taking birth from age to age as incarnate divinity to establish righteousness and destroy the dark agents who cause the decline of the Dharma, the identity with the golden Purusha chanted triumphantly by the Upanishad in the assertion of so’hamsmi, the Puranic relationship of Nara-Narayana, or the two famous birds dwelling on the same tree as we see them in the ancient Shrutis, or else the vivid parable of Kutsa-Indra so convincingly presented by the Vedic Rishi showing the oneness-with-a-difference in the manifestive splendour of the higher Nature, Para Prakriti—all these remain totally unrecognised. Jnaneshwar himself, in a certain sense, speaks of duality in non-duality that is needed for relationship. There has to be Arjuna-ness for the being of Krishna to have a friend “in party and banquet” and a warrior doing his will on the battlefield. Asks Krishna to Arjuna in Jnaneshwari: “How do I embrace you?” Indeed, if there were not to be this two-ness, who is going to embrace whom? But then exclaims the Friend:
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“To enjoy your friendship, let me for a moment create this duality; otherwise this happiness, this delight, I will miss.” Otherwise the play will become impossible. Jnaneshwar, however, adds that it is only a thin veil thrown with a specific intent. (Jnaneshwari: 6.114) A certain difference between God and Man, as if for the purposes of a joyous relationship, is thus accepted. But this is a relationship of “the sky in the sky”, gagani gagan laya jaye. (Jnaneshwari: 6.310)
What this means is that Jnaneshwar is not exactly working out a comprehensive thesis or disposition of spiritual philosophy, but is only offering comments apropos of each shloka in the immediate context. This also he is doing in the light of the tradition which he has inherited. It is in this tradition that we should see his discussion of the Triple Purusha of the Gita. Here we may also mention en passant that Maharashtra produced great Yogis or devotee poets, but has given no Shankara or Sayana or Ramanuja or Madhva or Vallabha bringing with him the originality and power of intellectual penetration which we find with remarkable abundance in the Southern spirit.
Apropos of the Jiva in a world of birth and death, the problem of Brahman being without a second haunted the Adwaitic metaphysicians over the long and weary centuries after Shankara. It can be well summarised in the language of Radhakrishnan as follows: “Badarayana says that the soul is jna, which Shankara interprets as intelligence, while Ramanuja takes it as an intelligent knower. Vallabha agrees with Shankara, while Keshava thinks that the soul is both intelligence and knower. The individual soul is an agent (karta). Birth and death refer to the body and not the soul, which has no beginning. It is eternal. The Jivatman is said to be anu, of the size of the atom. Ramanuja, Madhva, Keshva, Nimbarka, Vallabha and Srikantha accept this view. Shankara is of the opinion that the soul is all-pervading or vibhu, though it is considered to be atomic in the worldly condition. Badarayana holds that Brahman is in the individual soul, though the nature of Brahman is not touched by the character of the soul. As the Jiva and Brahman are different as the light of the sun from the sun, and as when the light is covered by clouds the sun is not affected,
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even so, when the Jiva is subject to pain, Brahman is not. The embodied self acts and enjoys, acquires merit and demerit, and is affected by pleasure and pain, while the highest self has an opposite nature and is free from all evil. The statements ‘That art thou’ and ‘This Atman is Brahman’ attempt to show that the two, Brahman and Atman, God and man, are in reality one. If Brahman be the cause of everything, it must be the cause of the individual soul as well. The absolute divine essence is present in all its manifestations. Every individual shares in the spirit of God. It is not clear, from Badarayna’s account, in what exact manner the individual is related to Brahman, as a part (amsa) or reflection (abhasa) of the universal self... The passage saying that the Jiva is a part (amsa) of the highest reality is taken by Shankara to mean ‘a part as it were’ (amsa iva). Since Brahman, who is not composed of parts, cannot have parts in the literal sense, Bhaskara and Vallabha assert that the Jiva is a part of the Lord because there is difference as well as identity between them. Ramanuja, Nimbarka, Baladeva and Srikantha think that the Jiva is a real part of Brahman... The view that the Jiva is both different and not different from the supreme, even as a serpent is both different and not different from its folds, is refuted. Ramanuja, however... disputes the view that matter is only a different posture of Brahman and not different from it... both Jiva and matter are parts of Brahman... There is strong support for the view that Badarayna looks upon the difference between Brahman and the individual soul as ultimate, i.e. something which persists even when the soul is released.” (Indian Philosophy, Vol.2, pp. 439-40)
Keeping this background in mind let us in a rapid way see Jnaneshwar’s interpretation of the relevant verses from the fifteenth chapter of the Gita.
Jnaneshwar calls the Upanishadic Brahman That Thing, te vastu, thus giving to it a certain happy substantiality which has the merit of bringing closer to us its form and figure. But immediately he slips into Adwaita Vedanta and takes away all its defining qualities, relegating it to the featureless impersonal Alone. If such is that Reality then our main concern should be to get out of this phenomenality and live
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elsewhere, unperplexed, without any activity, without any issue troubling us there. It is in that direction that all approaches should orient themselves. Company with the saints, practice of yoga-yajña, detachment from things of bondage, devotional service at the feet of the Guru, and doing righteous work are some of the means by which is removed the endless hold of me-ness and ignorance that mislead and pervert our life. Man’s happiness lies in recognising this and in following the path undeterred. There is no way of seeing the sun in the night; but with the sunrise we come to know the sun by the rays of the sun itself. The knowledge of the Eternal brings illumination by which the Eternal reveals itself to us in that respect. We generally remain tied to our corporeal state and, at the most, follow ritualistic prescriptions in an exclusive dogmatic way, thinking that we will get the fruits of heaven; but what always lies in store is only misery. However, the Gita’s Teacher does not quite disown or condemn even this defective thinking and this behaviour of ours; he avows that he is the Originator of everything, including this nescience of ours. The cloud covers the sun but actually it is the same sun which, by its illumination, shows the contours of the cloud. All our attempts to know the Brahman are simply governed by our faulty sense of cognition. By speaking about it our hesitant speech only indicates what really is ungraspable. Peroration over the Attributed is only a way to tell of the sheer Unattributable. The Scripture attempted to speak of the Eternal but, in doing so, it shot out into a thousand branches of the tree of knowledge. It proclaimed the Great Principle, Mahasiddhanta, but it got totally baffled while describing its threefold status of purity, trishuddhi, as Jnaneshwar says. The breeze carries away the fragrance of the flower and disappears with it in the sky; so do all utterances even as they approach the Ineffable. Expression gets lost. Once this happens the very notion of duality also disappears and what remains is only the Adwaitic One. With the dawning of knowledge no darkness is left behind, nor flame nor soot nor snuff when camphor is set ablaze. That conception which had given rise to nescience also vanishes. As a matter of fact there is no scope for ignorance then. The two-ness of Nara and Narayana, of Man and God, in its essentiality exists no more. We need two lips to talk, but the speech is one; we need two legs to walk, but the act of walking is one,—dohi
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vothi ek bolane, dohi charani ek chalane. What is experienced is the indivisible Brahman, the featureless qualityless Undefinable, without any activity. Yet, tells the Teacher, though attributeless, it has a form which can only be inferentially cognised in terms of qualities; it can be addressed by a thousand names, though it is nameless. In that sense we may cognise that which has actually no determinative character. Skimming of butter from butter-milk, removing the dross from molten gold, pushing aside the moss to collect pure water on the bank of a river, or else dispelling the cloud to get a clear vision of the sky, sifting of grain from the husk,—these are just indicative of the fact that, after describing it in so many ways, what remains behind is only the Indescribable. But, being beyond our understanding, it transcends all categorisation. There is only the relationless Absolute or the utter Unmanifest.
With this preparatory background Jnaneshwar comes to the following famous verses of the fifteenth chapter of the Gita describing in its own metaphorical language the triple status of the Supreme in poises of the individual, the cosmic, and the transcendental.
(The Gita: 15.16-17)
There are two Purushas (spiritual beings) in this world, the immutable (and impersonal) and the mutable (and personal); the mutable is all these existences, the Kutastha (the high-seated consciousness of the Brahmic status) is called the immutable.
But other than these two is that highest spirit called the supreme Self, who enters the three worlds and upbears them, the imperishable Lord.
(The Message of the Gita, pp. 218-219)
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Jnaneshwar talks about these three Purushas in great detail but in a very intimate homely way. In this city of life, samsara-patana, there dwell just two persons and, being inhabitants of the same city, they know each other well. They live in it together, as do day and night in the same sky. One of them is a blind and lame and stupid fellow, whereas the other is of strong build. There is a third one also but he is aloof from them and lives elsewhere; when he arrives he draws into himself everything, including this city. The one who exists everywhere, right from the Great Principle or Mahattatva down to the humblest blade of grass, who has name and form, is tied by the three Gunas and sees eigthfold differentiation of Prakriti, who is under delusion in this transient world, he the cultivator of this field with its thirty-six constituents, who is asleep and in the dream sees all relations, father, mother, child, or friend, and feels happy in their company, or otherwise miserable,—he is the Mutable or Kshara Purusha. He looks at his own reflection in a well full of water and gets excited about it; in this state he experiences duality and ignorantly adheres to it. In the world of living creatures, jiva jagat, he is called so, Kshara, because of imposition of its attributes on him. When the water in the well dries up, there is no more that reflection and with it also disappear all impositions.
On the other hand, the Immutable or Akshara Purusha stands unconcerned about every relation, of nescience as well as senscience. He does not see differences and does not get, like a silent witness, entangled in knowledge or ignorance. Like the moon devoid of phases on the Amavasya or no-moon night, is he unknown or unseen. His condition is that of a dried-up sea without a wave, without shape or form. Wakefulness has gone out but the dream-condition has not yet arrived; illusory perception has declined but the knowledge of the Self is still far away. In such unknowingness as he stays, he is called Akshara. The fruit on the tree has ripened and the seed is ready to turn into a tree,—such is, as the Vedanta says, this seed-state, bija-bhava. From it springs up the jungle of ideas and concepts and notions in this living world of the Jiva. All ascriptions and attributive features have disappeared in the unmanifest state of deep slumber, ghana
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ajnana or sushupti, which is just next to the state of the attainment of the Brahman, brahma prapti. In it meet the two states of wakefulness and dream, jagrita and swapna.
These two states, of waking and dream, arising out of the perversions produced by the illusory power of Maya, get dissolved in the state of deep sleep; but in the knowledge of the supreme Self that state of sleep itself disappears,—in the way fire ceases to exist after using the fuel completely. What remains behind in that perceptionless condition is then That Thing only, te vastu, entirely different from these two states. If these are Kshara and Akshara Purushas belonging to the City of Life, samsara-patana, then the third, independent of and beyond them, is the Transcendental Being or the Best Person, Uttama Purusha. He is distinct from these two in the manner fire is distinct from tinder wood.
At the time of Pralaya or the Great Cosmic Deluge no trace of Jagrita, Swapna, and Sleep exists; in its fiery splendour, pralaya-teja, day and night disappear—and stays behind neither monism nor duality, neither the sense of companionlessness nor of companionship, ekepana na duje. Nothing remains and what stays is only the Unmanifest. It is that, so to say, where speechlessness is the speech, and perceptionlessness is the perception, and eventlessness is the event; That Thing, te vastu, is that wherein even the experience of He am I, so’hamasmi, is no more present; of it, therefore, whatever comes should be taken as its form. Such is the form of the Formless without attributes.
He is illumination but there are no objects there to be illumined; there is nothing there to be lorded by him, the Lord; there, in the wideness of that space, he is the only wideness occupying it completely; he is the melodious to listen to melody, nade aikijata nadu, and the flavour to taste flavour, and joy to enjoy; he is the fullness of the fully perfect, and retreat and rest for the restful; of brilliance he is the brightness, and a vaster nothing into which sinks this nothing. Greater than greatness he is that greatness; he devours the devourer and, more than these several manys, innumerable he is:
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(Jnaneshwari: 15.546-550)
He is yet the one who supports appearance without actually becoming so; of gold an ornament is made but that does not mean that, because of it, it suffers diminution. He becomes the world but, when the world is dissolved, he does not get dissolved with it. He is a companion to himself, jayache sangade jayasi, and there is indeed nothing else that he can be compared with. He is superior to Kshara and Akshara and is the one single reality proclaimed in the world of the Veda as Purushottama.
Such in great poetic style is the exposition in Jnaneshwari about the Gita’s Theory of the Triple Purusha. But it is unfortunate that the author has opted to remain in the company of the powerful Monist philosopher. To speak of the Supreme as one who illumines himself is perfectly Adwaitic, but to say that he is illumination sans objects to be illumined, prakashyevina prakasha, is to follow Shankara, denying the possibility of a manifestation in the Transcendent and dismissing it, if there is elsewhere any manifestation, simply as an illusion. This situation arises primarily because of accepting the passive Brahman as the sole reality in which there is no scope for activity. It is a complete non-recognition of the dynamic Absolute. The same difficulty is encountered regarding the eternal portion of the Supreme that becomes the Jiva in the world of living creatures, the indivisible Brahman dividing itself into parts, mama iva amsa sanatanah. This Debate of Monism, Adwaitavada, takes great pains to reconcile with Scriptural statements a particular and perfectly valid experience of the relationless attributeless inconceivable One. According to it its relationship with the phenomenality of this existence, of this world of birth and death, Jivaloka or Samsara is, so to say, via the mysterious working of Maya.
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Which simply means that this Shankarite Monism does not admit the possibility of real individualisation and, of course with it, of universalisation. In it the Eternal’s triple poise of the individual, the cosmic, and the transcendental, or Soul, Spirit, God, does not exist. There is no scope in it for the World-Power or Para Prakriti carrying out her multifold activities in the Will of the supreme Being who would, according to this experience, be only another appearance. That there can be very legitimate and meaningful differentiation in the One has no locus standi in it. While this Monism rightly posits the Absolute above all relation and non-relation, it wrongly denies to it the opportunity of having both. It makes Brahman a contentless void.
But if from Reality a real creation has to issue out then, to participate in that creation, there has to be an individual being living by virtue of the universal being which in turn becomes meaningful by virtue of the individual being. “This means that cosmos and individual are manifestations of a transcendent Self who is indivisible being although he seems to be divided or distributed; but he is not really divided or distributed but indivisibly present everywhere.”—asserts Sri Aurobindo. (The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 18. p. 372) Apropos of these issues he writes in a letter as follows:
The word Jiva has two meanings in the Sanskritic tongues—“living creatures” and the spirit individualised and upholding the living being in its evolution from birth to birth. In the latter sense the full term is Jivatman—the Atman, spirit or eternal self of the living being. It is spoken of figuratively by the Gita as “an eternal portion of the Divine”... the multiple Divine is an eternal reality antecedent to the creation here. An elaborate description of the Jivatma would be: “the multiple Divine manifested here as the individualised self or spirit of the created being.” The Jivatma in its essence does not change or evolve, its essence stands above the personal evolution; within the evolution itself it is represented by the evolving psychic being which supports all the rest of the nature.
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The Adwaita Vedanta (Monism) declares that the Jiva has no real existence, as the Divine is indivisible. Another school attributes a real but not an independent existence to the Jiva—it is, they say, one in essence, different in manifestation, and as the manifestation is real, eternal and not an illusion, it cannot be called unreal. The dualistic schools affirm the Jiva as an independent category or stand on the triplicity of God, soul and Nature.
(Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 266)
In another letter he writes:
Purusha in Prakriti is the Kshara Purusha—standing back from it is the Akshara Purusha. The psychic being evolves, so it is not the immutable. The psychic being is especially the soul of the individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in evolution.
(Ibid., p. 291)
The integral Brahman holding the quiescent and the kinetic in its manifestive fold, and yet transcending them, is a spiritual experience which comes in a very definitive way from the assertion that Brahman itself enters, directly or indirectly, into this progressive material creation. If Matter is such a testing ground then its denial can throw a strange shadow of illusion on the ethereal Spirit’s substantiality itself making it devoid of any contents, as much as the exclusive admission of the Spirit can make the world of Matter illusory. Shankara’s theory threw the universe of commonsense perception out of the window of the house in which we live, that house itself being an appearance produced by the magic of Maya. However, it does not tell us as to who he is, if there is one, occupying this house, experiencing this unreality or, for that matter, experiencing the atomic Brahman when the illusion is gone. In fact, such a self-existent Brahman without the power to be in existence cannot be of any concern to us. But, along with the undeniable truth of the creative Maya, there is also accompanying it the truth of Para Prakriti, the higher executive Nature, sufficiently well indicated by the Gita’s phrase ‘by my Nature’, svam prakrtim,
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which for the purposes of cosmic manifestation has become the Jiva. But then in Jnaneshwari we do not see the integralism of a completer and truer Adwaita philosophy and therefore what we get is, as far as metaphysics is concerned, only the Shankarite interpretation of a great and revelatory synthesis which otherwise the Scripture is. Its quick traditionalist view, even while it sings in sweet melodious strains the song of intense devotion, has no room for an unfolding divinity in the earthly life. But perhaps this spiritual vision was meant for another millennium.
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(Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, pp. 250-306)
In the Indian system these [the three fundamentals of the present manifestation] are Ishwara, Shakti and Jiva, or else Sachchidananda, Maya and Jiva. But in our system which seeks to go beyond the present manifestation, these could very well be taken for granted and... the three highest, supermind and overmind might be called the three Supernals. (p. 250)
Jivatma individual self, an individual centre of the universe, Atman individualised is Jivatman... psychic being a conscious form of the soul growing in the evolution. (p. 267)
The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming. The eternal Being in its superior nature, Para Prakriti, is at once One and Many; but the eternal multiplicity of the Divine when it stands behind the created existence, sarva-bhutani, appears as (or as we say, becomes) the Jiva, para prakrtir jivabhuta. In the psychic... there are two aspects, the psychic existence or soul behind and in front the form of individuality it takes in its evolution in Nature. (p. 268)
According to the Adwaita of the Mayavadins this Jivatman, like the Ishwara himself, is simply an appearance of the Brahman in illusory Maya. There is no Ishwara, Lord of the world, because there is no world—except in Maya; so too there is no Jivatman, only the Paramatman illusorily perceived as an individual self by the lower (illusory) consciousness in Maya. Those, on the other hand, who wish to unite with the Ishwara, regard or experience the Jiva either as a separate being dependent on Ishwara or as something one in essence with him, yet different, but this difference like the essential oneness is eternal—and there are also other ideas of the Jivatman and its relation to the Divine or Supreme. (p. 271)
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It [each Jivatman] is one, yet different [from other Jivatmans]. The Gita puts it that the Jiva is an amsah sanatanah of the One. It can also be spoken of one among many centres of the Universal Being and Consciousness... (p. 280)
Purusha in Prakriti is the Kshara Purusha—standing back from it is the Akshara Purusha. The psychic being evolves, so it is not the immutable. The psychic being is especially the soul of the individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in evolution. (p. 291)
The psychic being is described in the Upanishads as no bigger than the size of one’s thumb! (p. 306)
We have a very similar philosophy of negativism in the Chinese tradition of Wu Wei. Spontaneity or the naturalness of experience is a way of living that has to be attained by a kind of strenuous effort which is not really a contradiction in terms. Lao Tse explains: “There exists an absolute Reality, without beginning and without end, which we can’t understand and which, therefore, to us resembles Nothing.” It is the Indian analogue of neti neti, not-this not-that, and stands still in the face of the sheer Ineffable. No positive conception of this Nothing is possible.
The moment we postulate such an exclusive Nothing we land into the Adwaitic difficulty of reconciling this phenomenal world with that sole Reality without contents in it.
“Tao is there in what you see, but Tao is not what you see.”—tells us the sage. Between these two seeings there is an unbridgeable gap and we have no clue as to how this gap has arisen. This is also the dilemma of the mysterious appearance of Maya which makes
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this world itself an appearance. As a natural consequence of it death, like life, also becomes illusory. When there is no death, then there is no scope for pain and suffering which also become fictitious. There is no issue and we stand on the verge of extinguishment in the total Nothing. Everything ceases to be and the entire purpose of this appearance, by whatever method it might have arrived here, becomes meaningless, a strange creation which has no issue and no solution even to invoke the indescribable Nothing. There is then no Tao, no divinity, no Divine Will, no Divine Grace. By a strange process we land into the most frightening kind of a desert in which even that perception has no perceiver. If this is so there is nothing much to choose between Mayavada and Nihilism.
Yet there is a certain occult necessity for such an experience. To be such a Nothing is to fully open out spaces for the dwelling of the Divine in its full manifestive glory in the Delight of Existence. If with life death were also an illusion then both get dissolved in that Nothing, making room for God’s immortality in God’s way. That was the culmination of Savitri’s Yoga, in Sri Aurobindo's epic, in the conquest of God who had become Death in the twilight world of this enormous Void of Consciousness.
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