Wednesday, 20 February 2013

The dynamic view of nature
attained a high degree of clarity with the Jains. The dialectic logic developed
by the Jain philosophers was later on condemned by Sankaracharya as “an
unsettling style of reasoning”. It was, indeed, unsettling for the rigid orthodox
logic which set up an imaginary absolute standard. Once the abso­luteness of
the standard of truth is disputed, the whole airy structure of doctrines and
dogmas, reared upon that foundation, necessarily collapses.

The Jain philosophers maintained
that contradictory attributes, such as being and non-being, could belong to one
and the same thing. They subjected the conceptions of absoluteness, unity and
eternity to their “unsettling style of reasoning”. The result was rejection of
the doc­trine of the Brahman. The disruptive effect of their views and methods
of reasoning can be judged from the charge Shaukaracharya brought against them:
“If you maintain that the heavenly world and final release exist or do not
exist, and are eternal or non-eternal, the absence of all determinate
knowledge, which is implied in such statements, will result in nobody's acting
for the purpose of gaining the heavenly world and final release.”

The Jains also believed in Soul;
but they conceived it as a constantly changing entity-something very different
from the orthodox “simple and immortal” divine spark in man. They thought that
soul was composed of an infinite number of particles - “soul-atoms” - which was
constantly increasing and decreasing. That, in their opinion, did not affect
the permanence of the soul; for a thing can be permanent and non-permanent at
the same time. For example, although the water is constantly flowing, the
stream of water is always there. The ontological, counterpart of this logic is
obvious: The phenomenal world is permanent and real with all its continual
changes and transitoriness.

In the antique period, as well as
in the middle-ages, Indian society never quite reached a level of evolution
where the power and position of the priesthood could be successfully disputed
by a new social class which, by its Very nature, would be the standard-bearer
of scientific thought and thus lay down the foundation of philosophy.

The distinctive feature of Indian
speculation, com­mon to all schools, including even those materialist and quasi-materialist
ones, some records of which have come down in history, is the anxiety to find
release from the bondage of the life in this world. This morbid conception of
life originated in the chaotic and depressing conditions resulting from the
disintegration of the antique social order. The picture of social conditions
towards the close of the Epic Era, as depicted in the Mahabharata, is anything
but bright. Such conditions were sure to beget pessimism as well as revolt. Legends,
recorded in the Mahabharata, testify to the rise of the forces of revolt which
sometimes were too powerful for the weakened Kshattriya ruling class. But that
was an elemental movement, rather actuated by despair than inspired by the ideal
of a new social order.

Pessimism was the prevailing
spirit. All the schools of Indian speculation bear the stamp. All look upon
nature as a source of bondage; the freedom was not to be had by bursting the
bondage, that is, by conquering, nature, but by the easier, imaginary way of
running away from the “evil”. The idea of conquering the external nature never
entered Indian speculation. Therefore, it could not ever attain the level of
real philosophy. Self mortification is not the conquest of nature. It is to
block all the ways of knowing external causes. It means plung­ing into the dark
ocean- of blissful ignorance.

Self-mortification, however, had
no place in the pri­mitive Vedic religion which, like all natural religions,
was "materialistic" in the vulgar sense of the term. Pessi­mism,
begotten in the chaotic and miserable conditions of the disintegration of the
tribal society, was seized upon by the priestly ruling class as the opportunity
for expound­ing the pernicious doctrine of renunciation and self-mor­tification
which became such an effective weapon in the struggle for maintaining their
dominating position. Life ­is full of miseries, because the desires of man can
never be' satisfied. Control the desires, you will be free from the evils of
nature, and all misery will cease. Eternal bliss will be yours. The triumph of
this "spiritualist" view of life reflected a tremendous social
reaction which, in its turn, deeply affected speculative thought for a long
time to come. Even revolutionary Buddhism could not fully live down that
corrupting tradition of a previous social reaction, and was eventually vitiated
by the poison. The triumph of the doctrine of self-mortification as the way out
of the miseries of life represented the defeat of the ­forces of
dissatisfaction with, and revolt against, the esta­blished order of things.

The discontent with things as
they are is the condi­tion for their change. The replacement of discontent by
resignation, of revolt by indifference, means stagnation of social energy. All
striving for material progress ceases, and ideological evolution is
correspondingly affected. The triumph of the reactionary priesthood in the
class struggle of remote antiquity determined the peculiar feature of Indian
speculative thought. The triumph of reaction, in its turn, was possible because
there had not yet arisen a class which could lead Indian society out of the
crisis resulting from the downfall of the tribal social order. In course of
time, the relation of classes changed. More or less disruptive schools of
speculation flourished. But they all bore, in a greater or lesser degree, the
distinctive stamp which signified a very slow process of social evolution, and
the consequent continuation of sacerdotal supremacy.

The urges of life compel man to
take up the endless struggle with nature. In course of this struggle, man
penetrates deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the Universe, and
progressively these mysteries cease to be mysterious. Primitive empiricism
gives birth to philosophy; philosophy is the mother of science, and finally
science enthrones the venerable mother as the "science of sciences".
The taboo on the joy of life, the perverse pre­judice against the natural urges
of life, emasculates man. It holds him back from the mission, given to him by
his very being. Consequently, it precludes a free spiritual evolution. Man
creates science and philosophy; when the conditions of his social existence set
limits to his human existence, his thoughts are naturally distorted. Indian
speculation presents such a picture of distorted thought.

Therefore, the rationalist,
materialist and naturalist teachings of Kanad, Kapila, Brihaspati, Gautama,
Mahabir, and others were ultimately buried under the ruins of the Buddhist
revolution. Brahma­nical reaction, reasserting itself in the scholasti­cism of
Sankaracharya, choked all spiritual pro­gress so successfully that a
renaissance of the ancient liberating thought was delayed until it was too
late. The Hindu ruling classes were so exhausted by the delirium of having overwhelmed
a mighty revolution that the country became an easy prey to foreign invaders.
General prostration and stagnation, on the other hand, precluded the rise of
new social forces corresponding to those which rescued Europe
from the darkness of the pious and spiri­tual middle-ages.

Whatever record exists about the
various schools of philosophical thought in ancient India, bears testimony to the fact
that dissatisfaction with the Vedic Natural Reli­gion gave rise to speculations
about the origin of the world, which inevitably developed tendencies to explain
the world in physical terms. In India
also, physics preceded metaphysics. Much of the really philosophical thought of
ancient India
has unfortunately been lost. But from the fragmentary evidence recorded, that forgotten
chapter of the spiritual history of India can be reconstructed. As
everywhere, originally, in India
also philosophy was materialism. The materialistic outcome of the speculations
of the rebels against the Vedic Natural Religion, contained in the three
systems of philosophy proper, namely, Vaisheshik, Sankhya and Nyaya, provided the
inspiration for the greatest event in the history of ancient India - the
Buddhist Revolution. The spiritual development of India during nearly a thousand years,
be­ginning from the seventh century B.C., was very largely dominated by
materialist and rationalist tendencies. It is highly doubtful whether the
Vedanta system was formu­lated before the end of that Golden Age of Indian
history. Internal evidence dearly proves the opposite case. The main purpose
with which Vedantist pantheism was deve­loped was to combat the materialist
systems of Kanad and Kapila as well as the revolutionary doctrines of Buddhism
.and the unsettling logic of the Jains. That being the case, it is permissible
to maintain that in ancient India,
until the fall of Buddhism, philosophy was largely materialistic. Even as late
as the fourth century A.D., in the period of triumphant Hindu restoration under
the Gupta dynasty, the Chinese traveller Fa Hien found in India no less than
"ninety-six heretical sects, all of whom admitted the reality of world y
phenomena."

Sankaracharya constructed his
rigidly logical, but philosophically ambiguous system of monism for combating
Buddhist idealism. But the real enemy he had to contend with was the
materialist traditions of the pre-Buddhist philosophy. His works are full of
long polemics against materialist and naturalist doctrines, so much so that
the fragments, profusely quoted by him, can serve as a reliable foundation for
reconstructing the latter.

The following can be reconstructed as the summary of the
"atheism and materialism" that ankaracharya combated, from
fragmentary evidences contained in his own works:

Religious doctrines are all meaningless
words. Their foundation is the idea of God whose very existence can­not be
proved. The God is the Creator, but he has no origin. If it is admitted that
there must be a Creator and ruler of the world, then, there arises the
question: Who created the Creator? Whence did he come? The Creator is said to
be without beginning and without end; without any limit. But after all, he is a
Creator, which implies a personality on his part. The God is, indeed,
considered to be the Creator. But a person cannot be without begin­ning and end
and other limits. If the God is limited, then, is it not possible that there
may exist a power over and above him? The God is believed to be all-powerful
and, all-pervading. But these attributes of the God cease to be what they are
believed to be, as soon as they are imagined by man. Thus, the essence of the
God, the Creator, disappears. Then, it is taught that desire is the cause of
creation. From this, it follows that God himself is not free from desire.
Further, if the Universe is created by the Will of God, then, God himself must
have the feeling of want; for, wish grows out of want. The feeling of want
destroys omnipotence, omniscience and all other superhuman attributes ascribed
to the God.

What has come down to us as the most
authoritative and representative Hindu philosophy, was the creation of
Sankaracharya. He was the ideologist of the Brahmanical reaction and
patriarchal sacerdotal society which were re- established on the ruins of the
Buddhist revolution. But all Sankaracharya's efforts for liquidating the
traditions of the really philosophical thoughts of ancient India were a
failure. This very important fact of the spiritual history of India is not realised. Yet, it is
obvious from a critical study of Sankaracharya's work. He failed to meet the
materialists on their ground. He could not refute their arguments. He had to
fall back on the authority of the Scriptures, the repudiation of which had been
the starting point of all philosophical thought in ancient India. Of all
the great ancient rationalists, Kapila alone had admitted scriptural testimony
as evidence. But that was only a formal concession. While declaring that the
existence of God could not be proved, because there was no evidence, Kapila
does not take scriptural testimony into account. Even the Vedanta Sutras
themselves do not accept the Scriptures as answering all the questions raised
by those dissatisfied with the dogmas of natural religion. "Not having
found the highest bliss in the Vedas, Sandi­lya studied the Sastras."[1]
The latter contain primitive rationalism which rejects the childish faith of
the Vedic religion.

So highly developed and powerful
were the materialist and naturalist schools combated by Sankaracharya, that,
whenever he tried to refute their arguments logical­ly, he was driven to take
up an essentially materialistic position. His pantheistic monism is inverted
materialism. The Mayavad is a shame-faced recognition of the reality of the
external world. It is only by degenerating into a dogmatic system of theology,
which tries to reconcile even ­the gods of the Vedic natural religion with the
metaphy­sical conception of Brahman that Sankaracharya's system apparently
escapes the glorious fate common to all sys­tems of consistent pantheism. The fate
is to corroborate the materialist view from the opposite direction.

Sankaracharya begins his
commentary of the Vedanta. Sutras with the assumption, that it is a matter not
requir­ing any proof that the object and the subject are opposed to each other as
much as darkness and the light are, and therefore cal not be identical.
Starting from this absolute dualistic conception, his monotheism could be
established' only by the absurd sophistry of the doctrine of Maya. In order to
establish the "reality" of an existence, which is simply assumed, and
which, by its very nature, as well as ­admittedly, cannot be proved, the
perceptible and prov­able existence is declared to be an illusion. The Brah­man
is associated with a certain power called Avidya
­which is the cause of all the appearances of the world. This power cannot be
called "Being", for Being is only Brahman. But immediately it is also
admitted that it cannot be called "non-being"; for, at any rate, it
produces the appearance of this world. It is in fact a principle of illusion:
the undeniable cause owing to which there seems to exist a material world. Maya
thus constitutes the Upadhana, the
material cause of the world. It be­longs to the Brahman, as a Sakti. The material cause of the world
is Brahman in so far as it is associated with Maya.

This doctrine obviously
contradicts the conception of Brahman as a unitary and absolute existence. Brah­man
is destitute of all qualities; it is devoid of all attri­butes-thought,
activity etc. Yet, Maya is assumed to be its Sakti. Moreover, Maya is conceived
as an existence parallel to Brahman. The idea of "association" presup­poses
two entities; similarly, that of belonging. Since it is admitted that Brahman
may be regarded as the material cause of the world, it cannot be an immaterial
entity. Two qualitatively different things can never stand in re­lation of
causality. On the other hand, if the position of Brahman is not compromised by
placing it in a relation of causality with the material world, then, the latter
must he granted an independent existence. Whatever may be its cause, the
Brahman cannot be its origin. San­karacharya gets out of this difficulty by
falling back on religion. He argues: "If it be objected that on the
Vedanta doctrine there is no room for a moving power, as in consequence of the
oneness of Brahman no motion can take place, we reply such objections by
pointing to the -fact of the Lord being fictitiously connected with Maya."
This sort of argument carries little conviction to those who do not start from
the fundamental dogma of religion. To begin with, the material world is
dismissed as an illu­sion. The "real" existence has nothing to do
with it. Then, the question about the moving forces of the phenomenal world is
answered by asserting dogmatically that the metaphysical entity Brahman becomes
a personal God and maintains a fictitious connection for causing the phe­nomenal
world. All these curious devices and grossly fal­lacious arguments were adopted
to combat materialistic monism.

The unreality of the phenomenal
world is the funda­mental dogma of the Vedanta system. But in order to refute
the idealistic school
of Buddhism,
Sankaracharya himself rejected the very dogma. The Buddhist idealists held that
cognition was exclusively an internal process; not that it had no connection
with the external object, but that it was self-contained; the external objects
existed only in their relation to the mind. The substantial resi­due of objects
is atoms, the rest being form; but the atom cannot be conceived by mind.

In combatting this doctrine,
Sankaracharya writes: "The non-existence of external things cannot be main­tained,
because we are conscious of external things. Why should we pay attention to a
man who affirms that no such thing exists?" Why should we, then, take
Sankaracharya seriously when he talks of Maya? He proceeds: "That the
outward thing exists apart from consciousness, has necessarily to be accepted
on the ground of the nature of consciousness, Nobody, when perceiv­ing a post
or a wall, is conscious of his per­ception only; but all men are conscious of
posts and walls as objects of their perceptions. Even those who contest the
existence of external things, bear witness to their existence when they say
that, what is an internal object of cognition appears like something external.
No one says that Vishnumitra appears like the son of a barren mother. If we
accept the truth as it is given to our con­sciousness, we must admit that the
objects of perception appear to us as something external. Because, the distinc­tion
of thing and idea is given in consciousness; the in­variable concomitance of
idea and thing has to be consi­dered as proving only that the thing constitutes
the means of ideas, not that the two are identical. It cannot be asserted in
any way that the idea, apart from the thing, is the object of our
consciousness; for, it is absurd to speak of a thing as the object of its own
activity. The variety of mental impressions is caused altogether by the variety
of external things perceived. This apparent world whose existence is guaranteed
by all the means of knowledge cannot be denied."

Here, Sankaracharya is combating
his whole philo­sophy. Once the issues are joined on the philosophical ground,
the triumph inevitably goes to materialism. When Sankaracharya himself had to
expound the above purely materialistic theory of cognition, it is evident how
powerful was the current of materialist thought which in­fluenced the spiritual
life of ancient India
for nearly a thousand years, until the downfall of Buddhism.

The rise and fall of materialism
in ancient India ap­proximately
coincided with the same events in Greece·. The period of spiritual
darkness following thereupon was brought to a close in Europe
by the reassertion of materialist and rationalist thoughts on the strength of
the achievements of modern science. That did not happen in India. Consequently, the spiritual
heritage of India
still remains to be rescued from her cultural ruins. What pre­vented India from following the same course of
spiritual development as Europe, after having
done that, up to­ only several hundred years ago, from the remotest days of
human history?

In ancient Greece, philosophy
was created by the class of merchant princes, whose social position was
antagonis­tic to the power and privilege of the priesthood. In ancient India, the
trading class never attained such a posi­tion in society. Self-sufficient
village economy prevented the growth of trade on a national scale. The small
surplus product of the village artisan was exchanged in local markets.
Practically, the entire surplus agricultural pro­duce went for the payment of
taxes. It is recorded that 'during the centuries immediately preceding the
Christ­ian era, commodities such as precious stones, spices and silk, were
exported from southern India to Greece and Rome. But the maritime trade was
carried on by the Javans (Greeks),
who arc reported to have crowded the markets of southern Indian ports, and even
been em­ployed as soldiers by the Dravidian kings. Later on, the carrying-trade
on the same route passed on to the hand of the Arabs. Foreign trade over-land,
developed after the foundation of the BactrianKingdom,
also was mostly car­ried on by the Javans.
Some trade in large volume, how­ever, appears to have grown in the south, which
fact ex:-, 'plains the establishment and persistence of Hinayan Buddhism (the
original philosophical form) in those parts. In the Brahmanical society of the
north, development of trade was discouraged. In the earlier Brahmanical laws -
of Manu and Kautilya - the trader does not figure as one of the main social
classes. In this connection, it will he instructive to cite what Havell
discovers as the cause of the spiritual superiority of Indo-Aryan culture.

"They (Vedas) represent the culture
of a race of war­riior-poets and philosophers who despised the arts of com­merce
and lived mostly by agriculture, with one hand on the sword and the other on
the plough. They built no temples, but worshipped nature-spirits with simple sacrificial
rites … … Toe Aegean, Babylonian and Dravidian cultures were essentially
mercantile civilizations with a more limited spiritual outlook, though in the
nature of things, they were more concerned with the happiness which lies in
material possessions than in spiritual thoughts.”[2]

When the more civilised
Dravidians were subjugated -by the pastoral Aryans, the latter imposed upon the
for­mer, social Jaws which checked the growth of the trading class, and
consequently of free thought. As regards "the happiness of material
possessions", the beef-eating and soma-drinking Vedic priests were not
averse to it. But in order to maintain themselves in the position of power and
privilege, they could not let the masses participate in that happiness. Hence
the "spiritual superiority" of the Indo-Aryan culture. The concern
for the happiness of material possessions, not in the vulgar sense as was the case
with the Vedic Rishis, but in the wide sense of con­quering the forces of
nature for the benefit of humanity, is the impulse to philosophic thought.
Since the "spiri­tually superior" Indo-Aryan culture of the Vedic era
did not feel this concern, philosophy remained unknown until the rise of the
more progressive class of traders could not be altogether checked by priestly
domination.

Buddhism is usually interpreted
as the revolt of the Kshattriyas against Brahmanism. To some extent, it was so;
but the mercantile class also entered into the social background of the
revolution. For example, according to Hiuen Tsang, the famous University at the
great Nalanda Monastery was founded by the munificence "of five-hundred
merchants who were disciples of Buddha." The merchants must have attained
some social importance under the Buddhist kings. Upon the restoration of Brahma­nism,
under the Guptas, they were again subjected to eco­nomic limitations and social
discriminations.

The codes of Manu, compiled in
the fourth century A.D., placed the merchants under all sorts of disadvan­tages.
It was from that time, that sea voyage came to be counted as one of the causes
of "impurity". The mission­ary work of Asoka had promoted the habit
of travelling over sea. Indian traders had been visiting the MalayanIslands
and China.
The resu1t must have been a widening of vision which found its reflection in
the Hinayan (philosophic) school of Buddhism which for a long time resisted Brahmanic
reaction in southern India.
Sea voyage prohibited by Manu because it encouraged heretical views. In the
absence of a mercantile class, as an independent and powerful social force,
Indian speculative thought could not become philosophy, in the correct sense.
And the absence itself was the product of .the given social relations. Land was
held by the Kshattriyas and the Brahmins - classes which, by their very social
being, were hostile to trade. In order to be so powerful as to dispute the
ideological monopoly of the priesthood, the freethinking merchants must grow
out of the rich landed aristocracy. But in India, the latter was closely associated
with the Brahmins. That relation was esta­blished in consequence of the ruinous
civil war recorded in the Mahabharata. The Kshattriyas were so seriously weakened
that they had to re-admit the supremacy of the Brahmins. This pecu1iar complex
of social relations determined the specific form of Indian thought, and explains
why materialism practically disappeared, after it had flourished so well in an earlier
period.