Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels. And I have been asking myself: Are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar (Sanskrit being closely related to Greek.)? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?
“Upanishad” means something like “hidden connections,” “secret teaching,” or “esoteric doctrine,” literally, “a sitting at (the feet of the teacher).” Although part of the Vedas, the Upanishads tend to take a dim, if diplomatic, view of what went before. “Of what use,” asks the Svetashvatara Upanishad, “is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?” By a strict definition, there are around 108 Upanishads, but the first dozen are the most important. Some of these mukhya (major) Upanishads are in prose, others are in verse.
Although the philosophy and poetry are retained, the content of the Upanishads is very diverse. The Upanishads fit into the Vedic tradition and, like older layers of the Vedas, may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachings, historical narratives, and the like. At their best and most original, they take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.
For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad (which is the oldest Upanishad, dating from around or before the sixth century BCE.), the sage Yajnavalya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalya with “namaste.” In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru (teacher) of Yajnavalya—engages in debate with his son, Svetaketu.
Yajnavalya, Uddalaka, and Svetaketu are among the first philosophers in recorded history.
This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to reach “at the truth behind the truth” (satyasya satyam).
The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God.) or panentheism (all is in God.), with God hidden in nature “even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made.” God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us in Atman.
The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha).
These ideas are neatly encapsulated in this passage from the Mundaka Upanishad:
As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace and their name and form disappear, even so the wise become free from name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness. In truth who knows God becomes God.
The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of Parmenides (d. c. 400 BCE), who, in his poem, On Nature, contrasted the way of truth to the way of opinion. Through a chain of strict à priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the way of ppinion), the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity, which he called “the One.”
These verses from the Katha Upanishad could credibly have been penned by Parmenides:
Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but one. Who sees variety and not unity wanders on from death to death.
To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his student and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments, including Achilles and the Tortoise, designed to undermine ordinary assumptions about motion, space, time, and plurality.
Just as Plato (d. 348 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (“No one ever steps twice into the same river.”) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the forms.
Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. The philosopher, says Socrates, who is soon to drink of the hemlock, aims at truth, but his body is constantly deceiving and distracting him:
The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with needs, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense….
Absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate the soul from the body. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death and can be said to be almost dead.
This idea of the soul being waylaid by the body is also found in the Maitri Upanishad, which, remarkably, was written at around the same time as the Phaedo:
The human soul rules the body; but the immortal spiritual soul is pure like a drop of water on a lotus leaf. The soul is under the power of the three constituents and conditions of nature and thus it falls into confusion. Because of this confusion the soul cannot become conscious of the God who dwells within and whose power gives us power to work.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates, having established its immortality, compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. Whereas the chariot of a god has two tame horses, that of a mortal has one tame horse and one unruly one, which is the cause of much hardship for the charioteer.
This passage from the Katha Upanishad appears almost to be elucidating Plato’s chariot allegory:
Know the Atman as the Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed it the reins. The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense. He who has not right understanding, and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.
For more than two millennia, Western philosophers have been poring over Plato’s elusive form of the good. Plato himself devised three interconnected allegories (the sun, line, and cave) merely to point at it. But I can tell you what it is in just one word: Brahman.
Plato even has a theory of reincarnation, leading us to suppose that he must, in a previous life, have been a Brahmin.
References
"Even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made": Svetashvatara Upanishad. Trans. Juan Mascaró.
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