Vedānta

VEDĀNTA. - One of the six orthodox philosophical systems and perhaps the most important, because it still numbers millions of followers among the educated classes of India. It is founded on the Upaniṣad (v.), the speculative part of the Veda, and is usually associated with another system of a theological character, the Mīmāṃsā or "Inquiry," which is based instead on the ritual part.

The connection between the two systems, limited to their common belonging to Vedic literature, is therefore indicated by their titles: Pūrva-mīmāṃsā or "first inquiry," given to the theological doctrine, and Uttara-m. or "further inquiry," given to the V. or end of the Veda. Mention has been made of the contradictions existing among the Upaniṣad, which represent a philosophy in formation with all the luxuriance of a plant not yet pruned. But such a philosophy could not be touched; it was considered revelation. Badarāyaṇa, a philosopher who lived between 200 and 450 A.D., of whom nothing is known except his name, succeeded in bringing order to the conflicting Upaniṣadic theories. But the 555 aphorisms (sūtra) of his systematic treatise, entitled Brahma-sūtra, are, because of their extreme concision, so enigmatic that they have allowed commentators, centuries apart, to give two different interpretations of the Brahma-sūtra: the pantheistic one of Śāṅkara (ca. 800 A.D.) and the theistic one of Rāmānuja (d. 22 Jan. 1138 A.D.) and of other epigones of his.

To settle the most serious conflicts between his interpretation, the text of Bādarāyaṇa and the Upaniṣad, Śāṅkara, a formidable dialectician, constructed on the basis of the sūtra two philosophical systems: one empirical, exoteric, for coarse minds, the other metaphysical, esoteric, for the few capable of understanding it. He called the first aparā vidyā, "lower knowledge," and the second parā vidyā, "higher knowledge," which he brought to triumph over empiricism, and whose substance is, in brief, this. The varied and manifold world, the plurality of souls, their destiny in the afterlife, are for Śāṅkara an illusion (māyā), because in reality only the Brahmān (God) exists, who is not the personified demiurge susceptible of adoration, but the Unknowable, to whom one accedes only by means of anubhava, "intuition." This makes man a partaker of the divine essence at the very instant in which he recognizes: "I am the Brahmān." From that moment he is jīvanmukta, "liberated in life." He has no desires or passions because he has attained supreme fulfillment, and he truly loves his neighbor as himself, recognizing himself in him. He lives in the world and in its illusion, but without being deceived by it, and at death he does not transmigrate but enters into Brahmān (v.), "like a river into the sea." Moreover, the transmigration of souls or sam-sāra, through the effect of karman (v.), is a conception that belongs to the aparā vidyā; from the esoteric point of view it is merely a metaphysical truth, expressed in allegorical form to make it accessible to empirical knowledge. Everything is illusion except the Ātman, the self, the I that identifies itself with the Brahmān, with which the human soul shares the attributes of omnipotence, eternity and omnipresence, although these divine qualities are latent "like fire in wood," until liberation (wakṣa) makes them manifest. This, in nuce, is the idealistic monism disseminated by Śāṅkara in his Brahmasutrabhāṣya (commentary on the Brahmāsūtra). The work, held in great esteem by the majority of Indian pandit, has a scholastic character, and the distinction between the two vidyā is rather artificial, despite Deussen's admiration for this expedient.

Ferdinando Belloni Filippi